Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume IX: Modern Jews and Their Musical Agendas (VOL. IX) [1 ed.] 0195086171, 9780195086171

Table of contents :
Contents
Symposium: Modern Jews and Their Musical Agendas
On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life
Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village
Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture
New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews
The Eretz Israeli Song and the Jewish National Fund
Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style
Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session
Essays
Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust
Education for Jewish Girls in the East: A Portrait of the Galata School in Istanbul, 1879-1912
Back into the Lion's Jaws: A Note on Jewish Return Migration to Nazi Germany (1933-1938)
Review Essays
The Former Soviet Union and Its Jews
Judaism and Jewishness
The Case of the Kovno Ghetto
Book Reviews
Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide
Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (comps. and eds.), Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege
Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933-1943
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust
Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L.K. Smith: Minister of Hate
Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion and Antisemitism
Avraham Margaliot, Bein hazalah leovdan: 'iyunim betoladot yehudei germaniyah 1932-1938 (Between Rescue and Destruction: The History of German Jewry 1932-1938)
Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust 1941-1943
Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary
Shulamit Volkov, Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert
Samuel Willenberg, Surviving Treblinka
Robert Wistrich (ed.), Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary World
History and Social Sciences
Michel Abitbol, The Jews of North Africa During the Second World War
Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun and Doris Bensimon, Juifs d'Algérie hier et aujourd'hui: Mémoires et identités
Mordechai Altshuler, The Jews of the Eastern Caucasus: The History of the "Mountain Jews" from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century
Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry Since the Second World War: Population and Social Structure
Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia
Esther Benbassa, Un Grand Rabbin Sepharade en politique 1892-1923
Annie Benveniste, Le Bosphore à la Roquette: La Communauté Judéo- Espagnole à Paris (1914-1940)
Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry
Stephen Brook, The Club: The Jews of Modern Britain
Werner J. Cahnman, German Jewry: Its History and Sociology
Steven M. Cohen, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival?
M. Herbert Danzger, Returning to Tradition: The Contemporary Revival of Orthodox Judaism
Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir 1938-1947
Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S.M. Dubnov
Daniel J. Elazar, The Other Jews: The Sephardim Today
Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History
Robert E. Fierstien, A Different Spirit: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1886-1902
Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna 1918-1938
Peter Freimark and Arno Herzig (eds.), Die Hamburger Juden in der Emanzipationsphase (1780-1870)
Judith Freidlander, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France Since 1968
Evyatar Friesel, Atlas of Modern Jewish History
Calvin Goldscheider and Jacob Neusner (eds.), Social Foundations of Judaism
David M. Gordis and Yoav Ben-Horin (eds.), Jewish Identity in America
Stefan Kanfer, A Summer World: The Attempt to Build a Jewish Eden in the Catskills, From the Days of the Ghetto to the Rise and Decline of the Borscht Belt
Yosef Kaplan and Menahem Stern (eds.), Hitbolelut utemiyah: hemshekhiyut utemurot betarbut ha'amim uveyisrael (Acculturation and Assimilation: Continuity and Change in the Culture of Israel and the Nations)
Viktor Kozlov, The Peoples of the Soviet Union
Hagit Lavsky, Beterem pur'anut: darkam vihudam shel ziyonei germaniyah, 1918-1932 (Before Catastrophe: The Distinctive Path of German Zionism
Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917: The Paradox of Survival
Charles S. Liebman, Deceptive Images
Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli and American Experiences
V.D. Lipman, A History of the Jews in Britain Since 1858
Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.), American Pluralism and the Jewish Community
Alfred D. Low, Soviet Jewry and Soviet Policy
Michael A. Meyer, Jewish Identity in the Modern World
George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of World Wars
Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in American City, 1880-1935
Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority
Shimon Redlich, Tehiyah 'al tenai: hava'ad hayehudi haanti-fashisti hasoviyeti, 'aliyato usheki'ato (The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Antifascist Committee in the Soviet Union 1941-1948)
Monika Richarz (ed.), Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries
Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860-1925
Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture 1888-1988
Erwin A. Schmidl, Juden in der k. (u.) k. Armee 1788-1918
Julius H. Schoeps (ed.), Juden als träger bürgerlicher Kultur in Deutschland
Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America: The Publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia
Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History
Erhard R. Wiehn (ed.), Juden in der Soziologie
Language, Literature and the Arts
Glenda Abramson (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Jewish Culture: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Harold Bloom, The Book of J
Joseph Cohen, Voices of Israel
Felix Dreizin, Studies in Judaism: The Russian Soul and the Jew
Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish
Vivian B. Mann (ed.), Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy
Leonard Prager, Yiddish Culture in Britain: A Guide
Shalom Sabar, Ketubbah: Jewish Marriage Contracts of the Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum and Klau Library
Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill
Religion, Thought and Education
Jerold S. Auerbach, Rabbis and Lawyers: The Journey from Torah to Constitution
Shimeon Brisman, A History and Guide to Judaic Encyclopedias and Lexicons
Shaye J.D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein (eds.), The State of Jewish Studies
Robert G. Goldy, The Emergence of Jewish Theology in America
Robert Gordis, The Dynamics of Judaism: A Study in Jewish Law
Mendel Piekarz, Hasidut polin bein shetei hamilhamot ubegezeirot 5700-5705 ("Hashoa") (Ideological Trends of Hasidism in Poland During the Interwar Period and the Holocaust)
Jonathan Sacks, Arguments for the Sake of Heaven: Emerging Trends in Traditional Judaism
Eliezer Schweid, Toladot hehagut hayehudit bameah ha'esrim (A History of Jewish Thought in the Twentieth Century)
Kenneth Seeskind, Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age
Efraim Shmueli, Seven Jewish Cultures: A Reinterpretation of Jewish History and Thought
Zionism, Israel and the Middle East
Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict
Bernard Avishai, A New Israel: Democracy in Crisis, 1973-1988
Aaron Herman, Nazism, the Jews and American Zionism 1935-1948
Uri Bialer, Between East and West: Israel's Foreign Policy Orientation 1948-1956
Marcia Drezon-Tepler, Interest Groups and Political Change in Israel
Sam Lehman-Wilzig, Stiff-Necked People, Bottle-Necked System: The Evolution and Roots of Israeli Public Protest 1949-1986
Charles S. Liebman (ed.), Religious and Secular: Conflict and Accommodation Between Jews in Israel
William Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds.), Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences
Peter Y. Medding, The Founding of Israeli Democracy 1948-1967
Ritchie Ovendale, Britain, The United States, and the End of the Palestine Mandate 1942-1948
Anita Shapira (ed.), Ha'apalah: measef letoladot hahazalah, haberihah, haha'apalah usheerit hapeleitah (Ha'apalah: Studies in the History of Illegal Immigration into Palestine 1934-1948)
Sasson Sofer, Begin: An Anatomy of Leadership
Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations
Contents for Volume X
Note on Editorial Policy

Citation preview

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

The publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry has been made possible through the generous assistance of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Philanthropic Fund, Seattle, Washington

THE AVRAHAM HARMAN INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY JEWRY THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

MODERN JEWS AND THEIR MUSICAL AGENDAS STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY AN ANNUAL

IX

1993

Edited by Ezra Mendelsohn

Published for the Institute by OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS New York • Oxford

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-508617-1 ISSN 0740-8625 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number; 84-649196

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

Editors Jonathan Frankel Peter Y. Medding Ezra Mendelsohn Institute Editorial Board Michel Abitbol, Mordechai Altshuler, Haim Avni, David Bankier, Yehuda Bauer, Moshe Davis, Sergio DellaPergola, Sidra Ezrahi, Allon Gal, Moshe Goodman, Yisrael Gutman, Menahem Kaufman, Israel Kolatt, Hagit Lavsky, Eli Lederhendler, Pnina Morag-Talmon, Dalia Ofer, U. O. Schmelz, Gideon Shimoni, Geoffrey Wigoder Managing Editors Laurie E. Fialkoff Hannah Levinsky-Koevary Book Review Editor David Rechter International Advisory and Review Board Chimen Abramsky (University College, London); Abraham Ascher (City University of New York); Arnold Band (University of California, Los Angeles); Doris Bensimon (Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle); Bernard Blumenkrantz (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Lucjan Dobroszycki (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research); Solomon Encel (University of New South Wales); Henry Feingold (City University of New York); Martin Gilbert (Oxford University); Zvi Gitelman (University of Michigan); S. Julius Gould (University of Nottingham); Paula Hyman (Yale University); Lionel Kochan (University of Warwick); David Landes (Harvard University); Seymour Martin Lipset (George Mason University); HeinzDietrich Lowe (Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat, Freiburg); Michael Meyer (Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati); Alan Mintz (Brandeis University); George Mosse (University of Wisconsin); Gerard Nahon (Centre Universitaire d'Etudes Juives, Paris); F. Raphael (Universite des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg); Jehuda Reinharz (Brandeis University); Monika Richarz (Germania Judaica, Kolner Bibliothek zur Geschichte des deutschen Judentums); Joseph Rothschild (Columbia University); Ismar Schorsch (Jewish Theological Seminary of America); Michael Walzer (Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton); Bernard Wasserstein (Brandeis University); Ruth Wisse (Harvard University).

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

Vol. VI of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, which appeared in 1990, attempted to demonstrate that the study of modern Jewish history and society can be enriched by a consideration of a variety of visual images, serving in a way as "new texts." The present volume makes a similar point with regard to music. Most of the essays published here deal with what the book's title calls Jewish "musical agendas"— music's place in the process of Jewish integration and assimilation into the modern European society of the cultured bourgeoisie, and the role assigned to music in forging a new Jewish Israeli national identity, in promoting the Zionist cause, in maintaining a separate Sephardic identity, and in preserving traditional Jewish life. Several essays also have as their subject the remarkable degree of Jewish penetration of "high" European musical life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As is always the case in symposia of this kind, much has been left out. I can only hope that there is enough here to whet the appetite and to convince our readers, unused as they may be to such esoteric fare, that musicologists, no less than art historians, have something unique to contribute to the field of modern Jewish studies. I wish to thank Professor Jehoash Hirshberg of the Department of Musicology at The Hebrew University for his invaluable help in planning this book. As always, and this time more than ever, given the unusual character of the volume and the difficulties we encountered in putting it together, my greatest debt is to the dedicated and talented staff of our journal—to the managing editor, Laurie Fialkoff, and to Hannah Levinsky-Koevary, who has served as managing editor (while Laurie was on maternity leave) and as book review editor. David Rechter, our book review editor for the last several years, has left us. I want to record here the editors' gratitude to him for his splendid work. The editors of this journal are also grateful to Oxford University Press for its continued support and to Samuel Stroum of Seattle, Washington, whose generous financial help makes possible the publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry. EM.

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Symposium Modern Jews and Their Musical Agendas Ezra Mendelsohn, On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life 3

Philip V. Bohlman, Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

17

Judit Frigyesi, Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

40

Edwin Seroussi, New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews

61

Natan Shahar, The Eretz Israeli Song and the Jewish National Fund

78

Jehoash Hirshberg, Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style

92

Lionel Wolberger, Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

110

Essays Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

139

Esther Benbassa, Education for Jewish Girls in the East: A Portrait of the Galata School in Istanbul, 1879-1912

163

Doron Niederland, Back into the Lion's Jaws: A Note on Jewish Return Migration to Nazi Germany (1933-1938)

174

Review Essays John D. Klier, The Former Soviet Union and Its Jews

183

Contents

x

Stephen Sharot, Judaism and Jewishness

188

A. Zvie Bar-On, The Case of the Kovno Ghetto

203

Book Reviews (arranged by subject)

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (comps. and eds.), Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege SHMUEL KRAKOWSKI

211

Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933-1943 MARCUS ARKIN

214

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust DAVID BIALE

216

Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L.K. Smith: Minister of Hate EARL RAAB

219

Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion and Antisemitism JONATHAN FRANKEL

221

Avraham Margaliot, Bein hazalah leovdan: 'iyunim betoladot yehudei germaniyah 1932-1938 (Between Rescue and Destruction: The History of German Jewry 1932-1938) AVRAHAM BARKAI

223

Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust 19411943 MEIR MICHAELIS

225

Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary A. ZVIE BAR-ON

203

Shulamit Volkov, Jiidisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert DONALD L. NIEWYK

227

Samuel Willenberg, Surviving Treblinka DAVID SILBERKLANG

229

Robert Wistrich (ed.), Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary World LEONARD DINNERSTEIN

233

Xi

Contents

History and Social Sciences Michel Abitbol, The Jews of North Africa During the Second World War NORMAN A. STILLMAN 235 Joelle Allouche-Benayoun and Doris Bensimon, Juifs d'Algerie hier et aujourd'hui: Memoires et identites NORMAN A. STILLMAN

236

Mordechai Altshuler, The Jews of the Eastern Caucasus: The History of the "Mountain Jews" from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century B. PINCHUK

237

Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry Since the Second World War: Population and Social Structure JOHN D. KLIER

183

Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia SHAUL STAMPFER 238 Esther Benbassa, Un Grand Rabbin Sepharade en politique 1892-1923 Zvi ZOHAR

240

Annie Benveniste, Le Bosphore a la Roquette: La Communaute JudeoEspagnole a Paris (1914-1940) DORIS BENSIMON

242

Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry SANDER L. GILMAN 243 Stephen Brook, The Club: The Jews of Modern Britain DAVID CESARANI 245 Werner J. Cahnman, German Jewry: Its History and Sociology MENAHEM KAUFMAN

248

Steven M. Cohen, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival? STEPHEN SHAROT 188 M. Herbert Danzger, Returning to Tradition: The Contemporary Revival of Orthodox Judaism STEPHEN SHAROT

188

Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir 1938-1947 LLOYD P. GARTNER

249

Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S.M. Dubnov ALEXANDER ORBACH

250

xii

Contents

Daniel J. Elazar, The Other Jews: The Sephardim Today MICHAEL M. LASKIER

252

Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History 1656-1945 BILL WILLIAMS

256

Robert E. Fierstien, A Different Seminary, 1886-1902 JEFFREY S. GUROCK

259

Spirit: The Jewish Theological

Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna 1918-1938 DAVID RECHTER

260

Peter Freimark and Arno Herzig (eds.), Die Hamburger Juden in der Emanzipationsphase (1780-1870) HELGA KROHN

262

Judith Freidlander, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France Since 1968 PIERRE BIRNBAUM

264

Evyatar Friesel, Atlas of Modern Jewish History PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI

265

Calvin Goldscheider and Jacob Neusner (eds.), Social Foundations of Judaism STEPHEN SHAROT

188

David M. Gordis and Yoav Ben-Horin (eds.), Jewish Identity in America CHARLES S. LIEBMAN

267

Stefan Kanfer, A Summer World: The Attempt to Build a Jewish Eden in the Catskills, From the Days of the Ghetto to the Rise and Decline of the Borscht Belt JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT

269

Yosef Kaplan and Menahem Stern (eds.), Hitbolelut utemiyah: hemshekhiyut utemurot betarbut ha'amim uveyisrael (Acculturation and Assimilation: Continuity and Change in the Culture of Israel and the Nations) TODD M. ENDELMAN

271

Viktor Kozlov, The Peoples of the Soviet Union JOHN D. KLIER

183

Hagit Lavsky, Beterem pur'anut: darkam vihudam shel ziyonei germaniyah, 1918—1932 (Before Catastrophe: The Distinctive Path of German Zionism AVRAHAM BARKAI

273

Contents

xiii

Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917: The Paradox of Survival JOHN D. KLIER

183

Charles S. Liebman, Deceptive Images STEPHEN SHAROT

188

Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli and American Experiences STEPHEN SHAROT

188

V.D. Lipman, A History of the Jews in Britain Since 1858 J.M. WINTER

275

Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.), American Pluralism and the Jewish Community STEPHEN SHAROT

188

Alfred D. Low, Soviet Jewry and Soviet Policy YAACOV Ro'i

275

Michael A. Meyer, Jewish Identity in the Modern World YOSEF GORNY

277

George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of World Wars SAUL FRIEDLANDER

279

Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in American City, 1880-1935 ROBERT D. CROSS

280

Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority JOHN D. KLIER

183

Shimon Redlich, Tehiyah 'al tenai: hava'ad hayehudi haanti-fashisti hasoviyeti, 'aliyato ushekiato (The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Antifascist Committee in the Soviet Union 1941-1948) SAMUEL D. KASSOW

282

Monika Richarz (ed.), Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries DONALD L. NIEWYK

284

Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 18601925 JACOB M. LANDAU

285

xiv

Contents

Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture 18881988 DEBORAH DASH MOORE

287

Erwin A. Schmidl, Juden in der k. (u.) k. Armee 1788-1918 WILLIAM O. MCCAGG, JR.

288

Julius H. Schoeps (ed.), Juden als trdger burgerlicher Kultur in Deutschland THOMAS S. HAMEROW

289

Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America: The Publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia LLOYD P. GARTNER

291

Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History EZRA MENDELSOHN

293

Erhard R. Wiehn (ed.), Juden in der Soziologie JULIUS CARLEBACH

294

Language, Literature and the Arts Glenda Abramson (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Jewish Culture: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present EZRA MENDELSOHN

298

Harold Bloom, The Book of J BERNARD ZELECHOW

300

Joseph Cohen, Voices of Israel RISA DOMB

303

Felix Dreizin, Studies in Judaism: The Russian Soul and the Jew SHIMON MARKISH

305

Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish HUGH DENMAN

306

Vivian B. Mann (ed.), Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy MIRIAM TOAFF DELLAPERGOLA and SERGIO DELLAPERGOLA

309

Leonard Prager, Yiddish Culture in Britain: A Guide AVRAHAM GREENBAUM

311

Shalom Sabar, Ketubbah: Jewish Marriage Contracts of the Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum and Klau Library RICHARD 1. COHEN

312

Contents

xv

Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill BRYAN CHEYETTE

314

Religion, Thought and Education Jerold S. Auerbach, Rabbis and Lawyers: The Journey from Torah to Constitution DAVID A. HOLLINGER

317

Shimeon Brisman, A History and Guide to Judaic Encyclopedias and Lexicons SHAUL STAMPFER

319

Shaye J.D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein (eds.), The State of Jewish Studies STUART A. COHEN

320

Robert G. Goldy, The Emergence of Jewish Theology in America DAVID SINGER

322

Robert Gordis, The Dynamics of Judaism: A Study in Jewish Law

SHMUEL SHILO

324

Mendel Piekarz, Hasidut polin bein shetei hamilhamot ubegezeirot 5700-5705 ("Hashoa") (Ideological Trends of Hasidism in Poland During the Interwar Period and the Holocaust) GERSHON C. BACON

327

Jonathan Sacks, Arguments for the Sake of Heaven: Emerging Trends in Traditional Judaism LAWRENCE GROSSMAN

329

Eliezer Schweid, Toladot hehagut hayehudit bameah ha'esrim (A History of Jewish Thought in the Twentieth Century) SHUBERT SPERO

331

Kenneth Seeskind, Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age BERNARD ZELECHOW

333

Efraim Shmueli, Seven Jewish Cultures: A Reinterpretation of Jewish History and Thought ROBERT CHAZAN

336

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict ERIK COHEN

339

xvi

Contents

Bernard Avishai, A New Israel: Democracy in Crisis, 1973-1988 BARUCH KIMMERLING

340

Aaron Herman, Nazism, the Jews and American Zionism 1935-1948 HENRY L. FEINGOLD

343

Uri Bialer, Between East and West: Israel's Foreign Policy Orientation 1948-1956 J.C. HUREWITZ

345

Marcia Drezon-Tepler, Interest Groups and Political Change in Israel IRA SHARKANSKY

347

Sam Lehman-Wilzig, Stiff-Necked People, Bottle-Necked System: The Evolution and Roots of Israeli Public Protest 1949-1986 GADI WOLFSFELD

349

Charles S. Liebman (ed.), Religious and Secular: Conflict and Accommodation Between Jews in Israel HARVEY E. GOLDBERG

351

William Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds.), Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences JOSEPH HELLER

354

Peter Y. Medding, The Founding of Israeli Democracy 1948-1967 VERNON BOGDANOR

357

Ritchie Ovendale, Britain, The United States, and the End of the Palestine Mandate 1942-1948 ILAN PAPPE

359

Anita Shapira (ed.), Ha'apalah: measef letoladot hahazalah, haberihah, haha'apalah usheerit hapeleitah (Ha'apalah: Studies in the History of Illegal Immigration into Palestine 1934-1948) ZEEV TZAHOR

362

Sasson Sofer, Begin: An Anatomy of Leadership MICHAEL KEREN

364

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

367

Contents for Volume X

378

Note on Editorial Policy

379

Symposium

Modern Jews and Their Musical Agendas

This page intentionally left blank

On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life Ezra Mendelsohn (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1596) Shylock the Jew is portrayed as a man who despises music, or at least the music of the Christians. Thus he declaims to his daughter Jessica: What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica; Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum, And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife . . . . . . stop my house's ears, I mean my casements. Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter my sober house. (Act II, v)

On the other hand Jessica, who betrays her father, is wooed through music; it is to her that Lorenzo speaks these famous lines: The man that hath no music in himself Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, strategems and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night And his affections dark as Erebus. (Act V, i)

If The Merchant of Venice presents the most famous negative stereotype of the Jew in English literature, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) is perhaps that literature's most famous philosemitic novel. In this work we encounter a professional musician of great distinction whose highminded pursuit of truth in art is contrasted to the shallow dilletantism of the English upper classes. The name of this cosmopolitan gentleman is Professor Klesmer (klezmer is the Yiddish word for musician), and it has been suggested that he is modeled on the celebrated Russian pianist of Jewish origin, Anton Rubinstein. 1 Eliot's decision to present her readers with a distinguished musician of Jewish I wish to thank my colleagues Roger Kamien, Milly Heyd and David Heyd for taking the time to read this article and for making valuable suggestions. 3

4

Ezra Mendelsohn

origin may indicate her desire to combat the old Jewish stereotype so effectively propagated by Shakespeare. But it also reflects a new reality. By the time her "Jewish novel" was published Professor Klesmer had numerous real-life counterparts—Jewish or partly Jewish musicians who were greatly enriching the musical life of Europe. One certain indication of the remarkable Jewish "penetration" of high European musical culture in mid-nineteenth century Europe was the considerable, and often not very favorable, attention it produced among non-Jewish musicians. It is significant that one of the most famous (or notorious) nineteenth-century diatribes against the presence of Jews in European culture in general was Richard Wagner's anonymous tract of 1850, Das Judentum in der Musik, which was re-published under his name in 1869.2 Yet another, rather similar attack appeared in Paris in 1859 in a curious book by Franz Liszt titled Des Bohemiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (The Gypsies and their Music in Hungary). Scholars have raised the possibility that parts of this book, including the material on the role of Jews in music (emphasizing, as did Wagner, the inability of Jews to be truly creative artists), were written not by Liszt himself but by his Polish mistress Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein.3 Whoever wrote it, this book as well calls attention to the fact that, by the 1850s and 1860s European musical life could hardly be imagined without the presence of numerous men (and a very few women) of Jewish origin. The author remarks that Jews are active in and have achieved something in all fields of European culture, but "en musique surtout"—"above all in music." Indeed, we are told that the very success of the musical enterprise in the contemporary world owes much to their activities, for they are among its most energetic and talented propagandists.4 Such statements could hardly have been made at that time regarding the Jewish role in painting or even in literature. The tale of European Jewry's integration into high European culture cannot be told without emphasizing the special role that music played in that process. Wagner and Liszt were probably unaware of the fact that, in Italy at least, some Jews had been prominent in general musical life as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The phenomenon they noted and deplored—the penetration of Jews into the modern secular musical world of Central and Western Europe— probably began around the time of Mozart, toward the end of the eighteenth century. A recent book by a Mozart scholar has pointed to the great composer's ties with the Arnstein and Wetzlar banking families in Vienna, who were among his patrons.5 "We can say categorically," he writes, "that Mozart counted numerous Jews among his friends and acquaintances."6 Artistically speaking, Mozart's most significant Jewish acquaintance was his celebrated librettist, his collaborator in his three greatest Italian operas, Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte, born in 1749, was an Italian Jew by birth whose family had converted to Christianity when he was a young man. Da Ponte recounts in his memoirs how he first encountered Mozart "at the house of Baron Wetzlar, his [Mozart's] great admirer and friend . . ."7 Writing about this important event, one biographer of Mozart noted rather snidely that Wetzlar had invited "a fellow member of the tribe" to meet the composer.8 During Mozart's time there were hardly any prominent Jewish musicians (one

On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life

5

exception was the English tenor John Braham, born in 1774, whose mistress was the great Mozartian prima donna Nancy Storace and who sang in the first London production of La Clemenza di Tito).9 The first figures to achieve great fame were born in the 1790s—most notably Giacomo Meyerbeer, born near Berlin in 1791, Ignaz Moscheles (Prague, 1794), and Fromental Halevy (Paris, 1799). Meyerbeer was a child prodigy, and his appearances in Berlin at the very beginning of the nineteenth century attracted attention not only because of his pianistic talent but because of his exotic religious origins.10 Soon enough, however, the appearance of Jews in the concert halls and among the leading composers of the day ceased to be a novelty. One could, with relative ease, compile a list of at least sixty or seventy names of Jews or of people of Jewish origin, born before 1840, who attained a degree of fame in the musical world. 11 Such a list would include people engaged in all aspects of musical life—composers, virtuosi, conductors, impressarios, patrons, publishers, critics, teachers, musicologists, editors of musical journals and even piano manufacturers. Few among the composers are performed with any regularity today but a number were highly regarded in their own times. The dominant figure was, of course, Felix-Mendelssohn-Bartholdi (born in Hamburg, 1809), but there were also Meyerbeer, Halevy, Jacques Offenbach (born in Koln, 1819) and Karl Goldmark (Keszthely, Hungary, 1830), who were all once names to conjure with. Among the conductors were Ferdinand Hiller (Frankfurt, 1811), a pupil of Mozart's student Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who in 1843 replaced his close friend Mendelssohn as the conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra; Hermann Levi (Giessen, 1839), a close associate of Wagner; Leopold Damrosch (Posen, 1832), patriarch of the Damrosch family musical dynasty and, towards the end of his life, conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York; and Friedrich Gernsheim (Worms, 1839), a conductor in Rotterdam and Berlin. Adolf Marx (Halle, 1795) was one of the most famous musicologists of his time and the editor of an important journal of music. Among the most important music publishers of nineteenth-century Europe were the firms of Schlesinger in Berlin and Paris (founded by Adolph Schlesinger, born in Sulz, Silesia in 1769) and Rozsavolgyi (co-founded by Gyula Rozsavolgyi, born in Budapest in 1822). And there were many notable Jewish teachers—among them Joseph Bohm (Budapest, 1795), professor of violin at the conservatory at Vienna; Jacob Grim (Budapest, 1837), teacher of violin in Vienna; Julius Schulhoff (Prague, 1825), professor of piano at Dresden and Berlin; Julius Epstein (Zagreb, 1832) and Julius Fischhof (Boskovice, Moravia, 1804), both professors of piano at Vienna. But the greatest mark made by men of Jewish origin in the mid-nineteenth century European musical scene was undoubtedly as performers (many of whom, as was common in those days, doubled as composers). There seem to have been relatively few singers of Jewish origin—an obvious exception being the great cantor Salomon Sulzer (Hohenems, Austria, 1804), who also performed secular music. As is still the case, musicians of Jewish origin specialized in violin and piano. Among the best known performers were Anton Rubinstein (Vykhvatinetz, Southern Russia, 1829), Joseph Joachim (Kittsee, Hungary, 1831), Ferdinand David (Hamburg, 1810), Henryk Wieniawski (Lublin, 1835), and Sigismond Thalberg (near Geneva, 1812),12

6

Ezra Mendelsohn

followed by a host of lesser lights, including some famous horn players (the Lewy family) and even a harp virtuoso (Elias Parish-Alvars, born in 1808 in Teignmouth, England). It is instructive to discover that many eminent Jewish musicians of the first half of the nineteenth century, far from rebelling against their parents in their cultural preferences and choice of career, were actually introduced to European high musical culture by their families. A case in point is Felix Mendelssohn, whose family had ties with the Bach musical tradition (his great aunt, Sarah Levy, collected Bach manuscripts and in 1823 gave Felix the manuscript of Bach's St. Matthew Passion).13 Mendelssohn's father, the banker Abraham, held musical soirees in his home in Berlin—indeed, " . . . the wealthy father was able to assemble a small orchestra selected from the court-band . . ,"14 Meyerbeer's no less wealthy parents, the Beers, presided over a famous salon in Berlin in which music was featured.15 Moscheles' father was a lover of music, 16 and Anton Rubinstein's first piano teacher was his mother.17 Jacob Bohm, the celebrated teacher of violin, was taught by his father,18 and the mother of the Wieniawski brothers was the sister of the pianist Eduard Wolff and a pianist herself, who undertook the early musical education of her sons.19 Hermann Levi's mother was an amateur pianist,20 and both of Friedrich Gernsheim's parents played instruments. 21 Even if the parents were not musicians, and even if they could not afford to preside over musical salons, they often did everything they could in order to develop their children's musical gifts. Thus Joachim was sent by his parents to the best violin teacher in Budapest some time after the family's arrival there in 183322, and Ferdinand Miller's father looked after his son's early musical education, a fact the musician recalled with gratitude when he wrote his memoirs.23 Sometimes such parental dedication went too far, as perhaps in the case of the famous violinist and violin professor Leopold Auer (born in Veszprem, Hungary in 1845) who was dragged around the country by his father as a child prodigy.24 It is clear, therefore, that the dramatic and seemingly sudden appearance on the scene of eminent Jewish musicians had been facilitated by the previous generation or generations' strong attraction to and support of this particular branch of European culture; by its conviction, it may be concluded, that of all the high European arts music held out the greatest prospects for successful acculturation and integration into European society. Most prominent early and mid-nineteenth century Jewish musicians came from French and German-speaking countries (included in the latter category are Bohemia-Moravia and Hungary, where most Jews still spoke German.)25 Some of them played a role in the spread of high European musical culture from this core region to Eastern Europe and the New World. Musical life in the Baltic region was enriched by the presence of Ferdinand David and his quartet in Dorpat during the years 1829-1835.26 Auer became a great violin teacher in St. Petersburg. In the United States, Leopold Damrosch was instrumental in bringing German opera to New York; and Da Ponte, who also emigrated to the New World, performed a similar function for Italian opera.27 Tours of Jewish virtuosi in America, such as those undertaken by Henri Herz and Eduard Remenyi in the 1840s, and by the East Europeans Anton Rubinstein and Henryk Wieniawski in 1872, were also important

On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life

7

in bringing European classical music to that country.28 Jewish musicians from Central Europe were hired to introduce advanced European music to the backwater of newly independent Rumania. 29 England—no backwater but not noted in the midnineteenth century for its own creative musicians—made much of Moscheles and much more of Mendelssohn, who achieved tremendous popularity.30 If French, Germans and Hungarians predominated among the European musicians of Jewish origin, we should not overlook the emergence of such figures in the much less hospitable environment of Eastern Europe. The achievements of the Rubinstein brothers in organizing Russian musical life are well known—Anton established the first conservatory of music in St. Petersburg in 1861, while his brother Nicholas headed the first conservatory in Moscow.31 In Russian Poland, too, they were extremely active early on—as virtuosi (the Wieniawski brothers), conductors (Adam Minchejmer [Munchheimer], born in Warsaw in 1830, conductor of the Warsaw opera) and (minor) composers.32 It would be difficult to prove that there was anything particularly "Jewish" about the music made, performed and propagated by these musicians. Many of them wrote major works on Jewish (usually Old Testament) subjects; Mendelssohn, for instance, wrote the oratorio Elijah and set psalms to music. Halevy's most famous opera was La Juive, and Goldmark's The Queen of Sheba, while Rubinstein wrote an opera about the Maccabees and Hiller an oratorio called The Destruction of Jerusalem. But then many non-Jewish musicians wrote on such themes. And while Joachim composed a piece called Hebrew Melodies, based on Byron, which one observer believes to be " . . . a work tinged with all the melancholy of an oppressed race,"33 the most famous of all secular settings of Jewish liturgical music—Max Bruch's KolNidre—was done by a non-Jew. Anton Rubinstein may have used, now and then, a Jewish folksong motif in his work, but so did non-Jewish composers such as Modest Mussorgsky.34 Nor did the musicians of Jewish origin display anything resembling a common front on matters of musical taste. It has been suggested, plausibly enough, that Mendelssohn preferred the classical tradition to the new romanticism that seemed to go hand in hand with Catholicism and antisemitism.35 But not all musicians of Jewish origin followed his example. Some were anti-Wagnerian, but Wagner had many Jewish allies (the most important of whom was the above-mentioned Hermann Levi). Can anything be said to have characterized them as a group? It is often claimed that Jewish musicians possessed a certain "internationalism" that distinguished them and their work from their presumably more "national" non-Jewish colleagues. Thus W. E. Mosse, pointing to the fact that Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer spent much of their time abroad, believes that they were "European" rather than "German" composers.36 Similarly, the musicologist Gerald Abraham remarks of the music of Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Anton Rubinstein that "it is Jewish in that it belongs to no particular country."37 There is an obvious though not inevitable connection between such assertions and the claims of Wagner and Liszt and many others who believed that the distinguishing mark of the Jewish musician was his rootlessness, lack of cultural authenticity, and therefore inability to be truly creative.38 While the vexed problem of Jewish creativity will not be dealt with here, it should

8

Ezra Mendelsohn

be said that Jews had no monopoly on mediocrity; if Meyerbeer and Halevy are rarely performed today, the same holds true for Louis Spohr and Hummel, celebrated composers in their time. It is certainly true that Jews were cosmopolitan figures, but which prominent musicians of that time were not? Handel and Haydn, no less than Mendelssohn, made great careers abroad. It is true that Jews were attracted by and identified with the international aspect of music, but it is also the case that some Jewish composers of this period achieved fame by writing music precisely on the most national of themes and in the "national mode." Among the most distinguished of all Hungarian composers who wrote what was then considered to be "authentic" national Hungarian music—meaning in the "Gypsy" style— was the Jew Mark Rozavolgyi (Rosenthal), born in Balassagyarmat in 1787.39 One of the pioneers of Serbian national music, of all things, was a Jew—Josif Slezinger (born in Sambor, 1794). Joachim wrote a well-known violin concerto "in the Hungarian manner," and the famous violin virtuoso of Jewish origin Eduard Remenyi (Hoffmann, born in Miskolc, 1830), wrote Hungarian dance music. Composers of Jewish origin in Poland (Leopold Lewandowski, for example, and Henryk Wieniawski) wrote mazurkas and other varieties of Polish national music.40 Anton Rubinstein wrote an opera called Dmitri Donskoi, based on the life of the heroic Russian prince who defeated the Tatars in the late fourteenth century. Julius Sulzer, a son of the great cantor, actually composed a national Rumanian opera.41 Whether these composers succeeded in their efforts to produce "authentic" national music, and whether or not their national operas were truly "national," is a matter of opinion. The point is that, for all their internationalism, they also believed themselves to be and were at least to a degree accepted as an integral part of the local national musical culture. It is obvious that the use of the much-abused term "assimilationist" is justified in describing the Jewish musicians mentioned here. If they were not assimilationists, than who were? Many were in fact converts, either by their parents' choice (as in the cases of Mendelssohn and the Rubinsteins) or their own (as was true of Joachim, Marx and Hiller). Those who did not convert—Meyerbeer, for example—were hailed by their fellow Jews for their brave decision to remain "faithful" to Judaism.42 But even these "loyal" Israelites were usually far removed from specifically Jewish concerns. The celebrated cantor of Vienna, Salomon Sulzer, deploring the fact that hardly any Jewish composers were willing to write music for the synagogue, complained that the leading Jewish composers of his day were entirely alienated from Judaism.43 It is characteristic that some of these musicians hardly ever refer to their Jewish origins in their writings, as though this was something either of no consequence, which is hard to believe, or, much more likely, something to be concealed.44 Matters were not that simple, however. For one thing, these musicians, no matter how assimilated, were well aware of the persistence of antisemitism. As Meyerbeer put it in a letter to Heinrich Heine written in 1839, " . . . not even baptism can grow back the foreskin of which we were robbed on the eighth day of life. Those who, on the eighth day, do not bleed to death from this operation shall continue to bleed an entire lifetime, even after death."45 Some, at least, were not afraid to protest in the strongest terms against this form of prejudice that had invaded even the highminded

On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life

9

world of music. Joachim, for example, resigned his position in Hanover when the Jewish violinist Jacob Griin was victimized by antisemitism at the court.46 Ferdinand Hiller, also a convert, fiercely defended Jews against the attacks of Wagner and Liszt and wrote warmly of the Jews as a "race" (Geschlechf) that had produced such noble figures as Moses, Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn.47 Anton Rubinstein, who left the Pale of Settlement as a child but who suffered from the antisemitism of his Russian colleagues, was apparently a member of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews.48 Above and beyond this "involvement" in Jewish affairs, it is likely that there was some sort of unspoken but nonetheless real feeling of communality of fate that served, upon occasion, to bind these musicians together. Particularly striking is the circle of Jews (and Jewish converts) centered around the towering figure of Mendelssohn. Leon Botstein has written that this pious Lutheran, who almost never mentioned his Jewish origins, " . . . took special interest in colleagues who were Jews with whom he felt particularly comfortable, such as Moscheles and later Joachim . . ,"49 Indeed, Mendelssohn wrote of the thirteen-year-old Joachim in 1844 that he "is one of my best and dearest friends and one of the most interesting people I have met for a long time."50 He was close not only to the Moscheles family (he served as godfather to Moscheles' son) but also to Hiller, who revered him. 51 Another close friend of Mendelssohn's was Ferdinand David, who played in Mendelssohn's Gewandhaus orchestra in Leipzig and taught at the Leipzig conservatory established by Mendelssohn, where Moscheles and Hiller were also employed.52 And yet another was the musicologist Adolf Marx, whom he recommended for a professorship in Berlin.53 When Anton Rubinstein came to the West from Russia, he was befriended by the Mendelssohn family.54 And when Mendelssohn came to Vienna the local professor of piano, Joseph Fischhof, served as his most notable advocate. As the famous critic Eduard Hanslick put it, "Fischhof dedicated himself with admirable zeal to making Mendelssohn known and appreciated in Vienna, at a time when the composer of St. Paul was quite unknown to our musical circles."55 Similarly, Joachim in his old age did much to encourage the career of the young Arthur Rubinstein.56 It was also common for aspiring Jewish instrumentalists to study with Jewish teachers. When Mendelssohn's family sought a teacher for young Felix they turned to Moscheles, who gave him piano lessons.57 Leopold Auer, who established himself as the leading violin teacher in St. Petersburg (at the conservatory established by Anton Rubinstein, where Henryk Wieniawski also taught), became the teacher of a remarkable number of great Jewish violin virtuosi, including Efrem Zimbalist, Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz, and Tascha Seidel. He even went so far as to intervene with the Russian authorities so as to enable the families of some of his Jewish pupils to reside in a city normally forbidden to Jews.58 Auer himself had been a pupil of Joachim in Hanover, while Joachim had been the pupil both of Ferdinand David and of another eminent Jewish violinist, Joseph Bohm (who was also the teacher of Remenyi).59 When the Viennese musical figure Ignaz Brull (born in Moravia in 1846) came to Vienna from the provinces he studied piano with Julius Epstein, later the teacher of Gustav Mahler.60 The famous Hungarian Jewish violinist and violin teacher Carl Flesch (born 1873) was a student of Jacob Griin's in

10

Ezra Mendelsohn

Vienna (Griin was a distant relative of his).61 Another pupil of Griin's was the Rumanian violinist Arnold Rose (Rosenbaum, born in Jassy, 1863).62 And one could go on and on. Writing in a different time and place, the American music critic and composer Virgil Thomson complained of a "Jewish mafia that passed the jobs around among themselves."63 Accusations of this sort, even if made in the spirit of objectivity, are difficult to prove. The fact that musicians of Jewish origin in mid-nineteenth century Europe befriended each other, studied with one another, and recommended each other for positions obviously derived at least in part from the presence of so many eminent Jewish musicians at the time. And yet a degree of Jewish "networking" does seem to have existed, a perfectly natural and understandable phenomenon, both from the psychological point of view and in light of the hostility these Jews and Christians of Jewish origin sometimes encountered among gentile musicians. It has already been noted that music, above all other arts, was seen by many nineteenth-century Jewish families as a key to successful integration into European culture and society. Beginning very early on, the acculturating European Jewish bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie—advocates of Haskalah and hoping for full emancipation—viewed music lessons for the children as a necessity. In Imperial Germany, by the later part of the nineteenth century, "piano lessons were taken for granted" in bourgeois Jewish homes.64 The violinist Carl Flesch writes that in his Hungarian Jewish family "the study of a musical instrument . . . was considered obligatory."65 Arthur Rubinstein's well-to-do and polonized family acquired a piano for their Lodz apartment and insisted that the children take lessons.66 If the family could not afford a piano the violin was the next choice for, as Auer tells us, "of all instruments the violin was the most easily obtainable by the poor . . ,"67 A remarkable example of this general phenomenon was the Wittgenstein banking family of Vienna, which cherished its connections with the traditions of Mendelssohn and Joachim; in Ludwig Wittgenstein's childhood home there were, according to one report, no less than seven pianos.68 What made music so attractive? There may be no point in searching for specifically "Jewish" answers to this question. Perhaps music is simply a more accessible form of cultural activity than art, and therefore attracts more practitioners. "As the gentiles go," runs the old Yiddish saying, "so go the Jews," and if the preferred art form among gentiles was music, so it became for upwardly mobile Jews who were aping gentile tastes. Moreover, it is probably the case that there was a greater demand for professional musicians than for artists or writers in European society. Nonetheless, there may be other factors at work here as well. For example, it should be kept in mind that a career in art could really mean only one thing—that of a painter or sculptor—while music offered, besides composing, the highly attractive positions of conductor and performer. If there is something to the accusation that Jews had difficulty in being truly creative—at least in this early stage of their integration into European society—then music offered them the alternative careers of interpreting the works of others, at which they obviously excelled. It might also be relevant that while Jewish tradition was hostile to some forms of painting and sculpture no such taboos fell upon music, which had always played a great role in Jewish life. Another article in this collection points to the rich Jewish musical

On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life

11

tradition out of which the (once) famous composer Karl Goldmark emerged.69 Goldmark's father was in fact a cantor in his Hungarian town, as were the fathers of Jacques Offenbach and Fromental Halevy (and the fathers of two important later Jewish composers, Kurt Weill and Irving Berlin).70 According to the musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky, Sergei Koussevitzky's father was a Russian klezmer.71 If the choice of a career in painting or even an appreciation for the plastic arts represented a sharp break with tradition for most Jews (even for those who no longer paid much attention to tradition), the love of music, and the practice of music, albeit now avowedly secular, did not. This may help explain why prominent Jewish musicians appeared on the scene one or two generations before prominent Jewish artists. It is possible, too, that the language of music, the international language par excellence, is especially accessible and therefore especially attractive to people at the margins of society. The Japanese-American conductor Seiji Ozawa is quoted in a 1991 interview as saying that "the impact of classical music ... is without boundaries, it is classless, stateless, and essential."72 Indeed, it is striking today how many members of American minority groups, blacks and now orientals, have become prominent in the high musical culture (much more so, it seems, than in the high artistic culture) of their country. Like the Jews of mid-nineteenth century Europe, they are especially successful as performers, not as composers. The very universalism of music may have lent it special meaning for Jews wishing to build the kind of society in which differences among men would cease to be an impediment to social solidarity and individual success. Leon Botstein makes this point in his interesting essay on the work of Mendelssohn, in which he writes that this distinguished composer regarded " . . . the power of music as a peaceful instrument of human solidarity and love of God and nature . . ."73 Ferdinand Hiller, for one, certainly regarded the international character of music as one of its most attractive qualities. Reacting to the accusations of Wagner and Liszt, he remarks that if Meyerbeer learned from the Italians, so did Mozart.74 Mozart was, of course, revered by all, but for Jewish musicians this great figure may have possessed special significance as the embodiment of a universalist musical tradition that was of great moral significance, taking no notice of petty national or religious differences among men.75 It is hardly necessary to say that the idea of music as a power for good, whose practitioners would contribute to the building of a new world free of prejudice and hatred, was not always borne out in reality. The world of music, and some of its leading figures, were far from being free of anti-Jewish feeling. Even the much beloved Felix Mendelssohn encountered antisemitism, as is shown in the famous case of his failure to be appointed head of the Berlin Singakamedie (it was said that an organization dedicated to the singing of church music could hardly be presided over by a Jew, even a converted one).76 In Russia, Anton Rubinstein was attacked as being too "German" and too "Jewish" by such advocates of the new national Russian music as Mikhail Glinka, Mily Balakirev, and Modest Mussorgsky.77 One of his opponents called the Russian Musical Society, which Rubinstein had founded in 1859, a "Yid Musikverein" and his conservatory "some kind of piano synagogue."78 The poor man is quoted as having said that "In my country I am a Yid, in Germany a Russian, in England Herr Rubinstein—everywhere foreign."79 Sim-

12

Ezra Mendelsohn

ilarly, Chopin wrote mockingly of a concert to be given by a certain violinist named Herz in which national Polish music would be played: At the close of the concert Herz will play his own Variations on Polish airs. Poor Polish airs! You do not in the least suspect how you will be interlarded with 'majufes,' and that the title of 'Polish music' is only given you to entice the public.80

It might be added, in parenthesis, that in this respect the world of art was no different from the world of music. Jewish artists, when they eventually appeared on the scene, were similarly attacked. Pissarro, the only important Jewish figure among the Impressionists, encountered the antisemitism of his fellow artists (in particular of Degas) during the Dreyfus affair and, like many Jewish musicians before him, was accused of derivativeness.81 And it often happened that Jewish artists who dared to depict Jesus were villified—as happened in the case of the German painter Max Liebermann in the 1870s and the New York-born English sculptor Jacob Epstein in the interwar period.82 And yet there is another side to this story. After all, Europe, including even the Russian empire, did open its gates, to a very great degree, to talented musicians of Jewish origin, who performed and conducted everywhere, were supported by royalty and were hired at the most important conservatories. The careers of the people mentioned here were success stories. Therefore, at least to some extent, the Jewish faith in music as a means to break down Jewish-gentile barriers was justified. The belief in the power of music to defeat all prejudice was, of course, naive, but not entirely without substance. After all, it was thanks in large measure to music that Jews, whether converted or not, were revealed to European society as people capable of making a great contribution to European culture. Thus Eduard Hanslick, accused by his adversary Richard Wagner of being a Jew, denied it but added that he would be pleased to be identified with the likes of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer.83 And if Wagner, Liszt and Chopin resented the activities of Jewish musicians, they also gladly worked and performed with them.84 So should the cup be seen as half full or half empty? One thing is certain—Felix Mendelssohn's vision was not fulfilled, nor were the ideals of his grandfather Moses, whom Ferdinand Hiller celebrated as the prophet of the coming age when Jews would be fully integrated into German society.85 The fate of Europe's musicians of Jewish origin of the midnineteenth century is thus emblematic of the fate of the movements of enlightenment and emancipation in general—great success and no less profound failure. Liszt, or whoever wrote Liszt's book, disparaged Jewish efforts to compose European music but highly praised the Viennese cantor Sulzer, whose music as performed in his Temple, in contrast to the imitative and artificial music of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, represented the authentic Jewish spirit.86 Such sentiments could only have been regarded as incomprehensible and ludicrous by the secular Jewish musicians of the time. While Sulzer and other great hazanim were laboring to produce a new liturgical style that would suit the needs of modern Judaism, the Mendelssohns, Meyerbeers, Joachims and Rubinsteins sought—by means of the universalism and international language of music—to achieve full integration into European culture. The antisemitism they encountered never convinced them that there was a viaible alternative to their assimilationist program. Much later, when

On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life

13

modern secular Jewish nationalism emerged, a third Jewish musical agenda appeared that called for the creation of a new national Jewish musical style. These three distinct but to some extent overlapping Jewish musical agendas of the modern era are still very much with us today. Taken together, they indicate some of the ways in which music in its many forms has intersected with trends in modern Jewish history and society.

Notes 1. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot. A Biography, (London: 1969), 490. 2. See Jacob Katz, The Darker Side of Genius. Richard Wagner's Anti-Semitism, (Hanover and London: 1986), 33-46. 3. On the authorship problem see Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, vol. 2, The Weimar Years 1848-1861, (London: 1989), 380-389, especially 389, n. 59. This book was translated into German in 1861 (Die Zigeuner und ihre Musik in Ungarn, [Pesth: 1861]) and eventually into English as The Gypsy in Music, 2 vols., trans. Edwin Evans, (London: 1926). 4. Franz Liszt, Des Bohemiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (Paris: 1859), p. 37. 5. Volkmar Braunbehrens, Mozart in Vienna 1781-1791, trans. Timothy Bell (New York: 1989), 65-69. On the role of the Wetzlars in Mozart's life see Klaus Edel, Karl Abraham Wetzlar Freiherr von Plankenstern 1715(16)-1799 (Vienna: 1975), 74-5. Raymund Wetzlar was the godfather of one of Mozart's sons and a subscriber to several of Mozart's concerts. On the Arnstein family's salon and its role in Viennese musical life during Mozart's time see Alice M. Hanson, Musical Life in Biedermeir Vienna (Cambridge: 1985), 114-115. 6. Braunbehrens, 67. See also H. L. Robbins Landon, Mozart's Last Year. 1791 (n. p.: 1988), 102. According to this authority Mozart was connected with the Jews of Prague— where, as is well known, he was particularly successful. 7. Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's Librettist, trans. L. A. Sheppard (London: 1929), 127. 8. Mozart's biographer Hermann Abert, quoted in Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Mozart (New York: 1982), 216. 9. On Braham (originally Abraham) see Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History 1656-1945 (Bloomington: 1990), 46, and William Mann, The Operas of Mozart (New York: 1977), 570, 575. 10. Heinz Becker (ed.), Giacomo Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel und Tagebucher, vol. 1 (Berlin: 1960), 46. 11. See, for example, the names listed in the article "Musicians," Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 12, 679-715, and the important comments in the preceding article "Music" by Hanoch Avenary, 639-640. I have also seen two German publications that list musicians of Jewish and "non-Aryan" origin; Judenthum und Musik mit dem A B C jiidischer und nichtarischer Musikbeflissener, begriindet von H. Bruckner und L. M. Rock (Munich: 1938), and Theo. Stengel and Herbert Gerigk (eds.), Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, (Berlin: 1943). There is also the book by Gdal Saleski, Famous Musicians of Jewish Origin, (New York: 1949), which includes a few far-fetched claims. 12. The Jewish origins of Thalberg, a great piano virtuoso, are rather obscure—but he is listed in the Encyclopedia Judaica. 13. R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn's Musical Education (Cambridge: 1983), 3, 10-11. 14. Eduard Devrient, My Recollections of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdi, and his Letters to Me, trans. Natalia MacFarron (New York: 1972), 6. 15. Becker, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel und Tagebucher, vol. 1, 36-37.

14

Ezra Mendelsohn

16. Life ofMoscheles, with Selections from his Diaries and Correspondence, by his Wife, adapted from the original German by A. D. Colendge, vol. 1 (London: 1873), 1-11. 17. Catherine Drinker Bowen, "Free Artist." The Story of Anton and Nicholas Rubinstein (New York: 1939), 17. 18. Nicolas Slonimsky (ed.), Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 7th edition, (New York: 1984), 289. 19. Jozef Reiss, Henryk Wieniawski (Warsaw: 1931), 7-8. 20. Josef Stern, "Hermann Levi und seine judische Welt," Zeitschrift fur die Geschichte derJuden, 1, no. 1 (1970), 18. 21. Karl Holl, Friedrich Gernsheim (Leipzig: 1928), 5. 22. Andreas Moser, Joseph Joachim. Ein Lebensbild, vol. 1 (Berlin: 1908), 5. 23. Ferdinand Hiller, Kunstlerleben (Koln: 1880), 1-2. Also see Reinhold Sietz (ed.), Aus Ferdinand Hitters Briefwechsel (1826-1861) (Koln: 1958), 1. 24. Leopold Auer, My Long Life in Music (London: 1924), 21. For a case of parental opposition to the son's musical career, see George Martin, The Damrosch Dynasty: America's First Family of Music (Boston: 1983), 21. 25. For a survey of Jews in French musical life see Jonathan I. Helfand, "Jews and Music in Nineteenth Century France," Journal of Jewish Music and Liturgy, 8 (1985-1986), 48-52. 26. Elmar Arro, "Ferdinand David und das Liphart-Quartett in Dorpat 1829-35," Baltische Monatshefte, 1 (1935), 19-30. 27. Sheila Hodges, Lorenzo Da Ponte. The Life and Times of Mozart's Librettist (New York: 1985), 213ff; Walter Damrosch, My Musical Life (New York: 1930), 56. 28. Catherine Drinker Bowen, "Music comes to America," Atlantic Monthly, 163 (1939), 591-602; Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York and London: 1983), 215-216. 29. Joseph Sulzer, Ernstes und Heiteres aus den Erinnerungen eines Wiener Philharmonikers (Vienna and Leipzig: 1910), 2. Sulzer, a cellist, was the son of the great cantor Salomon Sulzer. On Julius Sulzer, another son, Hofkapellmeister of Prince Carol of Rumania, see Hanoch Avenary, Kantor Salomon Sulzer und seine Zeit. Eine Dokumentation (Sigmaringin: 1985), 133, 159. 30. See the useful survey by Erik Levi, "The German-Jewish Contribution to Musical Life in Britain," in Werner Mosse, et al., (eds.), Second Chance. Two Centuries of Germanspeaking Jews in the United Kingdom (Tubingen: 1991), 275-277 . Moscheles was instrumental in introducing Beethoven to English audiences. 31. Bowen, "Free Artist"; Robert C. Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism, and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music (Ann Arbor: 1981). 32. Leon Tadeusz Blaszczyk, Dyrygenci polscy i obcy w Polsce dzialajqcy w XIX i XX w. (Cracow: 1964), and especially Marian Fuks, Muzyka ocalona. Judaica polskie (Warsaw: 1989). 33. J. A. Fuller Maitland, Joseph Joachim, (London and New York: 1905), 59. 34. L. Barenboim, Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein, vol. 1, (Leningrad: 1957) 23; Boris Schwarz, "Mussorgsky's Interest in Judaism," in Malcolm Hamrick Brown (ed.), Mussorgsky. In Memoriam 1881-1981 (Ann Arbor: 1982), 89ff. 35. Leon Botstein, Judentum und Modernitat (Vienna and Koln: 1991), 50-51. 36. W. E. Mosse, The German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820-1935 (Oxford: 1989), 309. 37. Gerald Abraham, Slavonic and Romantic Music. Essays and Studies (London: 1968), 99. 38. Heine, no antisemite and no musicologist, also seems to have agreed with this point of view, at least to a degree. See his remarks on Mendelssohn's liturgical music, which he compares unfavorably to Rossini's Stabat Mater, as cited in S. S. Prawer, Heine's Jewish Comedy (Oxford: 1983), 314-319. 39. See Judit Frigyesi's article, "Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture" in this volume, 43-44. 40. Fuks, Muzyka ocalona, 92-94; Blaszczyk, Dyrygenci polscy, 163-164. According to the latter source Lewandowski was known as the "Polish Strauss." 41. Avenary, Kantor Solomon Sulzer, 133.

On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life

15

42. Adolph Kohut, "Giacomo Meyerbeer und das Judenthum," Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, 55, no. 36 (4 September 1891), 427-429; Stern, "Hermann Levi." 43. Avenary, Kantor Solomon Sulzer, 129. 44. See, for example, the memoirs of the Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti, With Strings Attached. Reminiscences and Reflections (New York: 1967); Leopold Auer, My Long Life; and Siegfried Ochs, Geschehenes, Gesehenes, (Leipzig and Zurich: 1922). Karl Goldmark, in his Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, (Vienna: 1922), does mention the fact that his father was a cantor, but no more than that. Szigeti, Goldmark and Auer were all born in Hungary. 45. Quoted in Heinz and Gudrun Becker, Giacomo Meyerbeer. A Life in Letters (London: 1989), 82. For the original see Becker (ed.), Giacomo Meyerbeer, vol. 3 (Berlin: 1975), 196. 46. Moser, Joseph Joachim, vol. 2 (Berlin: 1910), 124-128. 47. Ferdinand Hiller, Erinnerungsblatter (Koln: 1884), 51-55. 48. S. Melnik, Anton i Nikolai Rubinshteiny (Jerusalem: 1990), 90-91. 49. Leon Botstein, "The Aesthetics of Assimilation and Affirmation: Reconstructing the Career of Felix Mendelssohn," in Todd, Mendelssohn and His World, (Princeton: 1991), 21. On Mendelssohn's Jewishness, see also Devrient, My Recollections, 57. 50. G. Seldon-Goth (ed.), Felix Mendelssohn: Letters, (New York: 1972) 333. 51. Ferdinand Hiller, Mendelssohn. Letters and Recollections, trans M. E. von Glehn, (London: 1874, rpt. New York: 1972). 52. Devrient, My Recollections, 238. Hiller, Mendelssohn. Letters and Recollections, 171; Julius Eckardt, Ferdinand David und die Familie Mendelssohn-Bartholdi (Leipzig: 1888). 53. Adolf Bernhard Marx, Erinnerungen. Aus meinem Leben, vol. 2 (Berlin: 1865), llOff. Devrient in My Recollections says that "He [Felix] suggested Marx, and through his warm advocacy obtained for his friend a social status." (p. 98). 54. Bowen, Free Artist, 62. 55. Quoted in Todd, Mendelssohn and His World, 281. 56. Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years (New York: 1973), 41. 57. Life ofMoscheles, 97. 58. Auer, My Long Life in Music, 320ff. See also Boris Schwarz, Great Masters of the Violin (New York: 1983), 421ff. 59. Ibid, 268. 60. Hermine Schwarz, Ignaz Briill und sein Freundeskreis (Vienna, etc.: 1922) 16. 61. Schwarz, Great Masters, p. 321. Carl Flesch, The Memoirs of Carl Flesch, trans. Hans Keller (London: 1957), 17ff. 62. Flesch, The Memoirs, 50-52. 63. Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader (Boston: 1981), 549. 64. Quoted in Marion A, Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class. Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford: 1991) 121. 65. Flesch, The Memoirs, 7 . Flesch came from Moson, a little town in Hungary. 66. Rubinstein, My Young Years, 13. 67. Auer, My Long Life, 21. 68. Brian McGuiness, Wittgenstein. A Life. Young Ludwig 1889-1921 (London: 1988), 19. 69. See Philip V. Bohlman's article "Musical Life in the Central European Village" in this volume, 20-21. 70. The statement that Halevy's father was a cantor appears in Helfand, "Jews and Music in Nineteenth Century France." It is not mentioned by Leon Halevy in his F. Halevy. Sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: 1863). 71. Nicolas Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch. A Life Story (New York: 1988), 96. 72. Seiji Ozawa, quoted in The Economist, 10-16 August 1991, 80. Compare the remarks of the American (and Jewish) artist Man Ray: "It would be wonderful to do paintings like music, that are abstract, that would be immediately accepted, understood by all nations." Quoted in Neil Baldwin, Man Ray (London: 1988), 9. 73. Botstein, "The Aesthetics of Assimilation and Affirmation," 35-6.

16

Ezra Mendelsohn

74. Hiller, Erinnerungsbldtter, 53. 75. See, for example, Alexander L. Ringer's comments on Kurt WeilPs love of Mozart in his article "Kleinkunst and Kuchenlied in the Socio-Musical World of Kurt Weill," in Essays on a New Orpheus. Kurt Weill, ed. Kim Kowalke (New Haven and London: 1986), 37-38. The author tells us that Weill especially loved The Magic Flute (47-48). So did Mendelssohn—Hiller writes that "of all Mozart's works, I think that Zauberflote was the one he [Mendelssohn] liked best." See Hiller, Mendelssohn. Letters and Recollections, 33. 76. The source relating Mendelssohn's failure to be appointed is Devrient, My Recollections, 150. See also Wm. A. Little, "Mendelssohn and the Berlin Singakademie" The Composer at the Crossroads," in Todd (ed.), Mendelssohn, 65-85. Little has some doubts as to whether antisemitism was a central factor in this affair. 77. Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism and Personal Rivalry, 65ff. 78. Ibid., 92. 79. Barenboim, Anton Grigorevich Rubinshtein, vol. 2, 252. 80. Quoted from a letter of 1831 (?) in Frederick Niecks, Frederick Chopin, vol. 1 (New York: 1973), 183. Majufes, more correctly Mayofes (Ma yafit) is a well-known Jewish Sabbath song. The word also refers to the practice, prevalent in Poland, of humiliating Jews by compelling them to sing this song in the presence of the Polish lord. See A. Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Liturgy and its Development (New York: 1967), 153. 81. On Pissarro and antisemitism see Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision (New York: 1989) 149, and Ralph Shikes and Paula Harper, Pissarro: His Life and Work (New York: 1980), 317. 82. On Liebermann see the article by Irit Rogoff, "Max Liebermann and the Painting of the Public Sphere," in Ezra Mendelsohn (ed.), Art and its Uses. The Visual Image and Modern Jewish Society. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 6 (New York: 1990), 103-105. On Epstein see his memoirs, Let There be Sculpture. An Autobiography (London: 1940), 119ff, 286ff. 83. Eduard Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben, vol. 2 (Berlin: 1911), 10. The Nazis agreed with their musical idol in regarding Hanslick as Jewish and banned his books. See Henry Pleasants Ill's foreward to Hanslick, Vienna's Golden Years of Music 1850-1900, trans. Henry Pleasants HI (London: 1951), xv. 84. On Wagner's well-known close association with many Jews, see Katz, The Darker Side of Genius, 20-32. 85. Hiller, Kiinstlerleben, 285ff. 86. Liszt, Des bohemiens, 46-47.

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village Philip V. Bohlman (UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO)

Taking a tip from Kummerly and Frey's Strassen-Atlas Deutschland-Europa (1982), with its bright yellow emphasis on sehenswerte One (sites worth seeing), one enters Sulzburg in the southwestern part of the German state of Baden-Wiirttemberg expecting to find a village that is both picturesque and rich in history. The village, whose population today consists of only a few thousand, has a fairly unpretentious location, straddling a small stream as it falls from the Hochschwarzwald into the flood plain of the Rhine. There are no signs leading to the "sites worth seeing," though the flow of traffic through the village pulls one first through the town gate— a quaint medieval portal now looking rather baroque—along the one main street suitable for motorized traffic, briefly across the stream to the chapel of St. Cyriac, a Carolingian monastery church from the early Middle Ages, and then back to the main thoroughfare, which leads up through a valley to Bad Sulzburg, which at 1414 meters is the eventual goal of most who pass this way. Few who follow the atlas's recommendation are probably aware that Sulzburg was once a Jewish village, in the sense that its financial and cultural life benefited from, and even depended on, a high population of Jews—probably more than a third of the total in the favorable times that characterized much of the nineteenth century and a significant proportion even in the difficult years prior to legal emancipation, when Jews were alternatively granted and then deprived of such legal rights as the ability to own property.1 The Jewish history of Sulzburg, at the very least the history of how the village had been transformed into a judische Landgemeinde, began in the fifteenth century. All Jews were expelled from nearby Freiburg, at the western boundary of Vorderosterreich, in 1424, and they were forbidden to live in An original version of this article was delivered as a paper on May 16, 1990 in the lecture series of the Faculty Committee for Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. I am particularly grateful to Gregory Barz and Deborah Strauss for their assistance in preparing the oral version, particularly their live performances of the music that appears as printed examples in the present article, and to Zanvel Klein and Josef Stern for their response to the earlier version. Without the generous assistance of Otto Holzapfel, who has located and documented the sources of Jewish folk music in Deutsches Volksliedarchiv in Freiburg, this study would have been impossible. I gratefully acknowledge the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which generously funded fieldwork for this study during 1990-1991.

17

18

Philip V. Bohlman

this bastion of Catholicism until the mid-nineteenth century. Barred from Freiburg, they settled in a ring of villages around the city, some Jewish in character and some not, a pattern that characterized Jewish settlement in the central Black Forest until the mid-nineteenth century.2 Sulzburg had a long history of prosperity as a village in which mineral deposits from the high ranges of the Black Forest could be gathered, processed and distributed to the larger market towns of the Upper Rhine, notably Miillheim, Freiburg, Mulhouse and Basel. The village also bordered on the vineyards and fertile fields of the Markgraflerland, which provided a diverse financial foundation for its economy.3 It thus depended on connections to markets not only in present-day Germany but also in Switzerland and France. Sulzburg prospered, though what can be reckoned of its Jewish history suggests that such prosperity took the form of stability with a Jewish population that remained relatively constant, not suffering onslaughts of pogrom and persecution and maintaining its sizable presence until the twentieth century. The Jewish population of Sulzburg had become so much a part of the village that even the wave of destruction initiated by Kristallnacht did not erase the Jewish presence. The synagogue and several other buildings used for community purposes still stand. All have new owners, though, even those taken over by the city and restored as Gedenkstatten, or memorials. The Gasthaus zum wilden Mann still fronts the main thoroughfare, though it is now known as the Pizzeria zum wilden Mann—hardly a hint that this was once a Jewish tavern and restaurant. The large Jewish cemetery, almost hidden on a hillside about a kilometer upstream, survives and was apparently spared from the sort of desecration that most other Jewish cemeteries endured. In recent years, the Campingplatz that largely surrounds the cemetery offers an added measure of protection, at the very least against young German skinheads who reserve their desecrating acts for more isolated Jewish cemeteries. The most plausible explanation for the relative lack of destruction in Sulzburg is that the Jewish buildings were so tightly integrated into the village that any sort of conflagration would have spread to adjoining buildings. Moreover, Jewish homes and business establishments that were not destroyed became convenient residences for non-Jewish neighbors in the late 1930s and 1940s. This does not quite as conveniently explain why the cemetery would escape the treatment meted out to many other Jewish cemeteries, but the fact that it did survive strengthens the historical image of a Jewish village whose residents maintained a cultural and religious life that was separate and distinctive, yet still part of the whole. To destroy that Jewish life would in some measure destroy the entire village. The Sulzburg synagogue stands on a side street, flanked by the rushing waters of the stream that first defined the village. Other Jewish institutions—not just homes, but the ritual bath and school—have new occupants and functions, and either await the attention of regional historians and archeologists or have benefited from the face-lift that proceeded apace with memorial status. The synagogue has stood quietly during most of the past fifty years, although during the 1980s, financial assistance from city coffers and anonymous sources—the usual explanation is "a wealthy former Sulzburger"—have enabled volunteers to restore structural damage

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

19

resulting from neglect. Inside, however, the synagogue is empty: no Torah scrolls, no bimah, not even benches for those who might wish to pray. And there is also no Jewish music in Sulzburg today. Sulzburg is emblematic of the dilemma that underlies the study of rural Jewish culture in Central Europe, as it fits into neither the pre-Enlightenment nor the postEnlightenment phases of German-Jewish historiography.4 The Enlightenment and Emancipation did affect the history of the Jewish village, but at a distance; there were other factors also at work. The rural culture of German and Austrian Jews and of Jewish communities in the border regions in which Jews spoke Germanic dialects had a historical impetus of its own, and the musical life that was a part of that rural culture had its own internal dynamic. The music of each village assumed the character of its specific community; considered as a whole, the musical landscape of Jewish villages exhibits vast and complex differences that result from infinite variation and finely shaped dialects, both musical and linguistic. How does one hear the music of Sulzburg today—or of Mattersdorf or Otterstadt or the myriad other Jewish villages of Central Europe? Where are the voices of this rich and varied music history? How can one rediscover the meaning of the synagogue's music for the Jewish residents of Sulzburg? Did a local band or Jewish "orchestra" celebrate Jewish weddings in the Gasthaus zum wilden Mann? At the end of the twentieth century, one wonders: Does the silence of Sulzburg, its immutable muteness, symbolize the ultimate closure of a unique form of musical life? This article and future research cannot simply aim to make those voices come alive again, since the music of the Central European Jewish village does not lend itself to historicism in the same way as the revival of the Yiddish folk song in Europe.5 At best, these voices may perhaps be heard from a distance and experienced as constituents of the life of the rural community and its unique presence in German-Jewish music history. What follows, then, is an investigation of the background and structure of this musical life, based on evidence from the music, ethnography and memory of the Jewish village. It is hoped that the musical life we might someday be able to experience a bit more intimately might also allow us to reestablish some of the larger issues of Jewish life in the village, since music can be treated as both an entree into the daily endeavors and concerns of its residents and as a powerful means of encoding the past. The concept "musical life" is deliberately employed toward this end because of the numerous metaphorical levels that it includes. By listening to the voices in the village's musical life, we also witness metaphors for social structure and patterns of identity, and for the unique qualities that came to define the Jewish village of Central Europe. By listening carefully—even in the seemingly silent synagogue of Sulzburg—we may be able to understand a way of life that no longer exists.

"Non-Identity" of the Central European Jewish Village In the historiography of modern German-Jewish culture, the Jewish village in Central Europe has hardly existed. Whereas the shtetl has asserted its presence in the

20

Philip V. Bohlman

study of East European Jewish culture, providing the most common theme and representing a now classic model for the study of Jewish community structure and its representation in popular culture, the Central European Jewish village has remained largely unstudied.6 In the German-Jewish historiography that has developed during the past two decades, especially in Germany itself, the Jewish village retains this non-identity. There exists no single term such as "shtetl," and indeed it would be inappropriate to apply this term to the Central European village, on linguistic— not to mention historical—grounds.7 Definitions and discussions of Central European Jewish villages revolve around what they were not or the reasons for their presumed abandonment. According to such historiographic models, villages were alternatives to urban centers that were not always prepared to tolerate Jewish communities. Whenever the threat to urban Jews subsided, according to this model, they returned to their preferred residence in the city. German-Jewish historiography constructs another problematic non-identity on the basis of the fact that the German economic structure did not allow Jews to own land, thus making it possible for them to be merchants or traders only. In such a structure, a "Jewish" village has no place, since as many as one-third of the population could not presumably function as merchants and traders. Such a model clearly makes no allowance for a Jewish community structure that is fully integrated into the life of the village and does not allow for a truly Jewish musical life taking shape under these historical conditions. The pattern that is cited most often to account for Jewish life in the village is therefore one of Jews trying to get out of the village and move to the city, and there to take advantage of all the educational, professional and economic advantages that an urban German- and Austrian-Jewish society made possible. Ample population statistics bear out this general pattern of migration, but these are selective statistics from the late nineteenth century, the first period during which such figures are available.8 Contemporaneous statistics interpreted from within the village show contrasting patterns, including survival of the integrity of village life in many cases.9 As Jews diminished in number in the village, they increased in number in the Gymnasien and universities, those urban institutions that allowed the small-town migrant the opportunity to enter into urban professions. Among those occupations for which villagers turned to the city was, of course, music, and we can observe a similar historiography of urbanization woven into the biographies of Gustav Mahler and Karl Goldmark. The latter spent most of his childhood in Deutschkreutz, one of the Siebengemeinden (seven Jewish villages) of eastern Austria (then part of Hungary). To clarify what is meant by a historiography that treats the Jewish village as the place from which anyone with reasonable ambitions necessarily has to flee, one need but read the standard article about Karl Goldmark's childhood in the encyclopedic Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Karl Goldmark grew up, the son of simple Hungarian-Jewish parents, in an extended family of 21 (or 24) siblings. Financial difficulties and local limitations prohibited an orderly education. After his parents moved to Deutschkreutz, a town near Odenburg [today Sopron], in 1834, the [four-year-old] boy discovered the phenomenon of musical sounds with half-filled wine glasses at a wedding. In 1841 he had his first and certainly

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

21

very primitive studies in violin with a choral singer who was a farmer. Village dance music provided him with his first musical impressions. In 1841 his father sent him to the music academy of Odenburg and in 1844 to Vienna.10

Absent from this account is the fact that Goldmark's father was the hazan (cantor) in Deutschkreutz and that he was surrounded by Jewish music and a fairly complex musical life not only in Deutschkreutz but in neighboring Jewish villages and in Sopron.11 The diverse activities and the widespread success of Jewish musicians in the cities of Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also reproduced the images of a cultural identity striving to be urban. Jewish popular music, for example, resituated the East European village in Central Europe by means of parodies, satires and cabaret traditions that made fun of traditional Jewish religious life. 12 Jewish broadside ballads, certainly a form of "tradition-invention" that had the import of historiography within Jewish culture itself by the beginning of the twentieth century, employed the topos of the city as really no more than an amalgam of Jewish villages. In such folk songs, we see the village as a cultural form resisting urbanization, but eventually yielding and being absorbed by it. In his broadside, "Das judische Weidlingau," composed in fin-de-siecle Vienna, the popular satirist Hanns Bartl ridiculed the presumed backwardness of the village in this manner: jtidisches Weidlingau, . . . ein Ort hier inmitten vtin Wien—"the Jewish Weidlingau ... a village in the middle of Vienna" (see Fig. 1). Competing with the historiographic model of urbanization is the portrayal of the Jewish village as a place of refuge during periods when Jewish life in the city was threatened. According to this model, village communities formed when those situated in a city lost the protection of a friendly court or when the blame for causing a plague or the murder of children was placed on Jewish burghers. Jewish villages evolved in clusters around cities and offered some form of protection against the tribulations inherent in an urban existence, however preferable it might otherwise be. The musical traditions of the village, then, were imported and mixed up in the village, and were arguably even foreign to the internal structure of rural life. The historiographic models of the Jewish village in Central Europe are by no means isolated phenomena, but rather products of specific moments in European intellectual history. Rural life played an essential role in the myth-making of nineteenth-century folklore and, likewise, of folk-music research. The literate traditions of the synagogue, the patterns of change and transition among rural Jews, the possibilities of a multilingual and multimusical society, all these were anathema to the folkloric image of a pristine rural society. It is hardly surprising, then, that the first attempts to study German-Jewish folklore and folk music per se turned to Eastern Europe, with its folk songs in an appropriate language (Jiidischdeutsch) and its musical life appropriately sheltered from the onslaught of modernity.13 The collection and publication of Jewish folk songs in German and Austria in the twentieth century followed this pattern by reproducing them in printed form in anthologies and providing arrangements of Yiddish songs for German student groups or singing societies.14 During the post-Holocaust era, yet another form of factoring the cultural life of the Central Europe village out of Jewish history

Fig. 1

22

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

23

emerged, that of relegating the village to processes of victimization.15 It would be unfair, however, to imply that this last model did not have a basic validity, since of all the forms of Jewish community in Central Europe, the village was the one utterly obliterated by the Holocaust. The current discussion is not meant to refute or even redress these models. It seeks rather to refine them, offering a corrective that places musical life in a position of evidence to show that the village sought to maintain—indeed by necessity had to maintain—a social structure from within the Jewish community that grew for religious and socioeconomic reasons. Not just a haven in the worst of times, not just a life to escape in the best of times, the village also provided one of the most consistent venues for the continuation of traditional customs, institutions and the music that placed these at the center of Jewish life in the village. The village depended on certain institutions that we would regard as indispensable: the synagogue, the ritual bath, the school, the ritual butcher. These created the nonnegotiable core of community life and situated certain musical practices in that life. The village (as it is discussed here) also had nonessential institutions: shops and business enterprises; Gasthauser and taverns, where entertainment took place; dance halls; bands that played instrumental folk music or orchestras that performed light-classical music. These nonessential institutions not only carved a more substantial niche for Jews in community life, they also provided conduits for culture contact and exchange. Indeed, Jewish musical life was inseparable from the musical life of the entire village. A complex identity came from within the Jewish community and had an impact on the entire culture of the village, and this complex identity challenges us to rethink the more customary "non-identity" that so many villages acquire as they disappear into the larger historical models. This is not to suggest that Jewish life in Central Europe was somehow anchored by the village, that somehow the institutions of the village were the quintessence of community structure. In fact, the relation with the urban community is a fairly persistent phenomenon even prior to the various moments of profound change in German-Jewish history, notably the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The movement between village and city, however, was two way, with each direction depending on the other for both religious identity and the material goods that undergirded these in the daily lives of the Jewish community, whether rural or urban. Music frequently accompanied this two-way movement as an essential participant in the religious life of the community and as an accompaniment to widely varying exchanges that followed the movement of individuals. Dialect is one of the most

Verse 1: Es gibt einen Ort hier inmitten viin Wien: Do ziegt es uns poilische Jiiden gern hin, De Goim soll'n lob'n sech, wos eb'n for se' paBt, Mer Juden sog'n trotzdem: Wie haBt? Dos Jiiden Weidlingau. Source: Osterreichisches Volksliedwerk, Vienna Copy from Deutsches Volksliedarchiv, Freiburg

24

Philip V. Bohlrnan

obvious examples of the measures of musical exchange; more complex and widespread examples are the dissemination of ballad or cantonal repertories. The Jewish village, therefore, was not a fixed structure but rather exhibited a degree of flexibility necessary to maintain traditions and allow for change. The music of the Jewish village, as an item of exchange both malleable and clearly signifying identity, illuminates the paths along which these exchanges passed and thus helps us to formulate the essential role of the village in Central European Jewish history.

A Tale of Three Villages While exchange assumed many forms in the Jewish village of Central Europe, the term serves here to designate a cultural process that resulted from the interaction between Jews and others in the village. In part, the notion defines more precisely just what is meant by a "Jewish village": neither an isolated settlement nor a cluster of a few families living largely apart from non-Jewish society, nor a social structure in which Jews were such a minority that they were forced to live a relatively isolated life or else integrate certain non-Jewish customs into their own culture. Certain factors encouraged exchange, for example, a Jewish neighborhood adjoining the local business center (the Marktplatz) or even the castle of a ruling family or monastery in a rural area.16 The Jewish neighborhood gained something from this proximity, and the non-Jewish institutions and populations similarly benefited. Music was one of the items of exchange that the Jewish neighborhood had to offer, particularly in the form of venues for music-making, such as taverns and dance halls.17 The parties involved in exchange were usually local—the ruling family and the proprietor of a tavern or dance hall—and the exchange of cultural goods took place at the local level. The patterns of exchange in a city were quite different, with many more parties involved. To some degree, then, the community structure had to be small enough that the benefits of cultural exchange were direct and tangible. A settlement that was too small or a city that was too large would not afford these conditions. The village, viewed in relation to these patterns of cultural exchange, offered practical advantages; in this sense, "village" can refer to several administrative forms of rural settlement. Such a designation reflects as well the traditional form of reference used by Jewish communities themselves, for example, the reference to Mattersburg in Burgenland as "Mattersdorf."18 Cultural and musical exchange took different forms in different Jewish villages, and it is important to recognize the range of these forms in order to avoid any suggestion of overgeneralization. The exact nature of any cultural exchange, of course, depends on the conditions and goods involved, the motivations and material. What follows is a description of three distinct patterns of exchange, drawn from three villages in different parts of Central Europe whose cultures and histories differed considerably. The descriptions are necessarily schematic, though they might gradually acquire more substance as the nature of the Jewish village is examined more intensively and more evidence is uncovered regarding the kinds of music produced there. This tale of three villages—or village types—begins with Otterstadt, a small

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

25

village in the southeastern part of the western German state of Rheinland-Pfalz. Otterstadt has no Jewish community today, and there is very little evidence to suggest that it ever had a Jewish community for long periods of time or that there was a Jewish community in the modern era. Otterstadt acquires its importance as a village type because it lies about three kilometers north of the cathedral town of Speyer, one of the seats along the Rhine of the Holy Roman Empire. The Jewish history of Speyer is extensive, paralleling that of the various politico-religious leaders ruling from the city.19 Otterstadt, the first village downstream from Speyer, served as one village within the constellation of small towns to which Jews fled when a community was untenable in Speyer. Otterstadt offered the community a chance not only to reestablish its physical presence, but to continue its patterns of trade and political service to the empire along its essential cultural artery, the Rhine river. As a Jewish community, Otterstadt is inseparable from the Jewish community of Speyer—-not to mention other river communities, such as that only a few more kilometers downstream in another imperial seat, Worms. Otterstadt also served as a transit point along a route of cultural exchange between Jewish communities, and references to its Jewish inhabitants result from accounts of the village's functioning in this manner. Once the Speyer Jewish community—which might conceivably be treated in its earlier history as little more than a village—solidified around a new synagogue in the 1830s and 1840s, all evidence to suggest a Jewish presence in Otterstadt disappears. The nineteenth century brought with it new patterns of exchange that redirected the Jewish histories of Speyer and Otterstadt. That a village such as Otterstadt ceased to have a Jewish community is less at issue than the considerable role the village played in offering alternative historical paths in the Jewish history of the Palatinate. One might interpret the pattern of exchange in the case of Otterstadt as a response to political tension in Speyer that was resolved by the village. It would be more difficult to reduce the exchange between a second village type, represented by Sulzburg and its neighbors, to the same resolution of political tension; indeed, the extended history of the Jewish presence in Sulzburg indicates an inner stability that Otterstadt never maintained. Sulzburg's prosperity depended not so much on a client relation with a political-economic center as on its environment and its ability to use the advantageous resources of its favorable location. Although it relied on exchange with nearby larger cities, it maintained control over the products and conditions of exchange. Furthermore, if things were going badly for Jews in Freiburg or Strasbourg, the merchants of Sulzburg could strengthen their relations with the Jews of Basel in Switzerland or Mulhouse in France. Even the music that can be traced to Sulzburg or nearby towns suggests particularly strong patterns of exchange with Switzerland, with dialect words reflecting Swiss inflections combined with western Yiddish as well as with the Alemannisch of the Upper Rhine (see Fig. 2).20 For the Jewish villages along the current Austrian and Hungarian border in the province of Burgenland, exchange not only takes on more complex forms but borrows from specifically Jewish religious uses and functions to generate itself, at least in part, from within the village itself. These villages, the so-called sheva kehilot, or Siebengemeinden (seven communities), or, alternatively, the Heilige

26

Philip V. Bohlman

Fig. 2 Verse 2: Scheinele, s'isch wohr, s'isch wohr, an dir isch niks zu tadle. E barje bisch du in der kuch, schaffe tuusch di ganzi wuch, du bisch e tischtig madle, du bisch e tischtig madle Scheinele, s'isch wohr, scheinele, s'isch wohr, isch zieh disch alli andri vor, Scheinele, s'isch wohr! Singer: Rose-Maier-Mayer. Location: Mullheim, Baden-Wurttemberg. Fieldworker: Florence Guggenheim (Zurich). Recorded: 1959. Transcription: G. Groger. Source: Deutsches Volksliedarchiv, Freiburg

Gemeinden (holy communities), form a semicircular cluster around the Hungarian city of Sopron, which juts into present-day Austria.21 Essential for an understanding of the growth of this cluster of Jewish villages is the importance of the area to the Esterhazy court and the sociohistorical milieu of Franz Joseph Haydn; the small city of Eisenstadt, home to Haydn during his early career, was the largest of the Siebengemeinden. Politically, these Jewish villages formed because the Esterhazy family looked favorably on the Jews at the end of the seventeenth century, when Jews were expelled from Sopron. In terms of culture, the villages lie at a crossroads between Austria, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia. Burgenland is the one province of Austria in which "otherness" is normative22: it contains not only a large Jewish population, but large Protestant, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian and Roma settlements.23 Although many forces made the area propitious for Jewish settlement, the villages themselves came to generate an internal form of exchange. From a religious standpoint, the Siebengemeinden constituted the largest center for Talmud study in

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

27

Central Europe. The area therefore attracted Jews from hundreds of miles around and served as a base for the dissemination of Jewish knowledge and religious practices. Exchange was such that the villages were arguably becoming "more Jewish" in the modern era. Education, language, customs, religious practices, all experienced the pull of a centripetal force in the Siebengemeinden. The villages themselves transformed the multifarious traditions brought to them by generations of students into new traditions that were widely disseminated. And in this case the village structure was essential to this variant of the exchange process, for unlike the urban ghetto, which swelled when new waves of outsiders moved to the city, the Siebengemeinden remained villages, catalysts in the creation of Jewish "Kultur" and history in Central Europe. New forms of Jewish cultural expression were emerging here in the early decades of the twentieth century, with music notable among them.

Moments and Venues for Jewish Music in the Village Much of the evidence for music-making in the Jewish village survives in the travel accounts of nineteenth-century scholars and writers who retreated to the village to experience and recapture a "disappearing Jewish world." Relatively few were trained musical ethnographers and even fewer had an understanding that music in oral tradition could represent the culture of the Jewish village. With the exception of the folklorist Max Grunwald, no scholar during the nineteenth and early twentieth century went to the village in search of Jewish music. 24 But these visitors experienced music, a great deal in fact, and their accounts bear witness to the importance of the musical life in the village. Such travel accounts were not, of course, concerned with definitions of what was or was not Jewish music; they were not particularly burdened with questions of definition of any kind. Rather, they remarked upon the omnipresence and centrality of music-making and the role music played in articulating the specifically Jewish aspects of village life. Music-making attracted their attention and gave them a moment to capture in their writings, transforming these into invaluable musical ethnographies. Such travel accounts contain a recognition that music distinguished the Jewishness of the village, making music a measure of the village itself. Stated simply, the performance of Jewish music occurred at moments and venues that expressed the central issues of difference between Jews and gentiles in the village. Jewish music was not only that which was produced specifically for Jewish holidays or festivities, but it also established the conditions of otherness within the village. This was true not only of those religious musical customs that formed around daily prayer, weekly services and annual holidays, but also the Christian myths of otherness that took as their point of departure those performative moments during which the Jewish community was either most impenetrable—e.g., the Passover seder—or else celebrated itself in full view of the non-Jewish residents, for example during a wedding. If a diverse body of nonspecialist literature is relied on here to make this rather bald claim for Jewish music and difference, it is because patterns emerge from the literature to suggest a typology embracing what can be defined as "differences": the moments and settings for Jewish music occupy a continuum, with difference most

28

Philip V. Bohlman

extreme and unequivocal at one end and consciously minimized, if not eliminated, at the other. It follows that the venues in which gentiles would have no reason to participate because of their contrast!ve musical customs form the first extreme, which consist of the musical life of the home, the synagogue and community institutions. At the other extreme are those musical activities that involve widespread village participation, Jewish and gentile. In fact, many of these musical practices are secular, taking place at moments when religion need not raise issues of difference. For example, as in other Alsatian villages of the nineteenth century, the village of Wintzenheim had a professional Jewish singer functioning as night watchman, but we know from Daniel Stauben's account that this watchman joined other Jewish professionals in public observance of the folk customs of the region. During the night, he passed through the village singing Vierzeiler (lit. quatrains, but a genre of German folk song), such as the following in the local Alsatian dialect: Horiche was ich eich wett sole, Die Clock hett zwelfi gschloie, Bewohre Fiir and Liecht, Dos ons olle Gott behiet. Listen to what I say to you, The bells toll midnight, Take care with fire and light, That God cares for all of us.25 Exchange and interaction repeatedly emerge as markers of difference, revealing that there are numerous ways in which basic patterns of difference can emerge and develop. In the Siebengemeinden, for example, music and difference characterized the practices and transformations stimulated by institutions such as the Talmud academies or daily encounters in the synagogue or along the streets of the Jewish neighborhoods. Public celebrations—holidays, festivals, the visits of dignitaries— might provide cause for Jewish musicians to perform for the entire village. Instrumental ensembles played a visible role in distinguishing the secular musical life of the villages of Burgenland. The first evidence of Jewish secular musicians appears in the Hungarian tax records of the early eighteenth century, when accounts of tax payments by individuals with the professional title musicus appear on the same rolls as religious musical specialists.26 The instrumentalists in more recent documents— klezmorim accompanying wedding processions on the Judengasse in Eisenstadt, for example27—further show the extensive presence of Jewish secular music. Had we only these photographs, however, we might imagine that there was no exchange, that Jewish instrumentalists played only for Jewish festivities. The non-Jewish residents of rural Burgenland, in contrast, remember that Jewish instrumentalists performed for non-Jewish festivities and in non-Jewish settings; the light-classical "Salonorchester" of Kobersdorf, for instance, provided yet another form of musicmaking in this village of the Siebengemeinden as well as throughout much of Burgenland and western Hungary (see Fig. 3). And yet the presence of this orchestra did not eliminate the possibility that a Roma band played frequently at the Jewish

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

29

Fig. 3 Salonorchester—Kobersdorff, Burgenland, Austria, 1932-1933. Source: Heimatmuseum, Kobersdorf, Austria. Courtesy of the Museum's director, Karl Pogatscher

tavern across from the castle of Kobersdorf. Musical difference itself, therefore, was a component of exchange and cultural negotiation. Just why should music articulate issues of difference so trenchantly? And why does it also provide a common ground for villagers with different religious backgrounds? To answer these fundamentally ethnomusicological questions, let us sketch four areas in which "Jewish" music is important in its ability to mark and convey difference. First of all, music is rarely separate from Jewish religious customs, whether in the performance of fundamental texts—the Bible, for instance— or in the many contexts of ritual. This may be so obvious that it does not often provide cause for further reflection, but it is an important factor to consider here because it reveals a trajectory of difference that originates in Jewish custom, as opposed to the imposition of stereotypes from the outside. The musical components of recitation and prayer differ on many different levels, just as cantonal traditions consistently mark distinctive historical paths.28 Second, music encodes language differences, not just the Hebrew of religious study in the Siebengemeinden, but the western Yiddish-Swiss-Alemannisch mixtures that might be found in the Upper Rhine or Alsace. The vocal music of a Jewish village, when considered as a whole, might well be trilingual, if not quadrilingual: Hebrew; a Jewish dialect of German; the regional dialect of German; and High German. These differences, to mention a third issue, bear witness to the role of history in channeling the distinctiveness of Jewish musical traditions in each village. Finally, music becomes a metaphor for Jewish metaphors that have as their referents something outside the village and the experiences of the villagers.

30

Philip V. Bohlman

Fig. 4 Informant: Feiwel Grossmann. Transcription: Salomon Mendelsohn. Source: Max Grunwald, Mattersdorf (Jahrbuchfiirjiidische 469.

Volkskunde) (1924/1925), 468-

Music records the different levels of history, that specific to the Jewish residents or that expressing a political history of national significance, to describe just the extreme cases. For instance, the First World War had a devastating effect on the villagers of the Siebengemeinden, as is apparent in the song collected in the town of Mattersdorf by Solomon Mendelsohn soon after the war (see Fig. 4). This song, though understood by the Mattersdorfer Jewish community as event-specific, nonetheless belongs to a topos of German folk song that was widespread among Jewish communities, a topos in which death overtakes family members or community members one by one until only a single individual is left.29 The text of the song, using a technique common to many folk songs, chronicles the death and disappearance of those constituting the village's Jewish residents. The histories to which music bore witness were specific and general, and Jewish song, both secular and sacred, acquired the potential to historicize and specify the past of the village. Images of village life and their relation to other Jewish social community structures assume musical form, undergirded by music's power to reproduce the past through performance. The confrontation with modernity increasingly became one of these images. Particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, for instance, the images of Jewish settlement in Palestine or of the conditions of urban life in the city appear in folksong lyrics, symbolizing a sense of Jewishness that was not simply limited to the daily life and practices of the village. Music became, in fact, a bridge to a different sense of Jewishness itself.

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

31

Musical Specialists To maintain the complex forms in which music articulated difference and indeed the diverse musical life of the village itself, musical specialists were necessary. Accounts of the musical life in the Jewish village, whether studies of synagogal and community records,30 travel ethnographies from the nineteenth century31 or folkloristic descriptions of the twentieth century,32 are remarkable for the degree in which the musical specialists of the village capture the attention of the outside observer. The musical specialists acquire toponyms in records beginning in the early nineteenth century,33 and those who bear such musical labels attract the attention of chroniclers because of their diverse activities and material measures of their importance to the community, i.e., the salaries they command. The presence of musical specialists serves as evidence not only of the complexity of musical life in the village but also of the extent to which the Jewish community itself generated and responded to the conditions of its own music-making. Neither traditional religious music nor traditional folk music conformed to genres or repertories that all residents shared. Musical specialists were necessary to serve as the negotiators during exchange—for example, when a hazan acted as the arbiter over which styles of synagogal and cantorial tradition would be allowed and which eschewed. Musical specialists were also necessary because of the rapid change that often characterized musical life. The high degree of musical specialization, therefore, became one of the chief differences between the Jewish and the Christian village. In the latter, stability and only gradual change characterized traditional musical life; while in the former, ongoing and sometimes jarring change spawned a musical life that was responsive and inclusive. The musical specialists in the village again form a continuum stretching from musical repertoires that represented extreme difference to those symbolic of relatively leveled differences. The primary specialist in the religious musical life of the village was, of course, the hazan. When compared to other community specialists, hazanim were relatively mobile, coming often from outside the village and negotiating at times for salaries that would prevent them from accepting other posts.34 Furthermore, they enjoyed a wide prestige. The hazan of the Alsatian village Wintzenheim in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, was the only Jewish resident who spoke French as his exclusive vernacular language—which did not transform him into an outsider in the village, but rather elevated him to the status of the local intellectual, further serving him well in his position as teacher in the Jewish school.35 The hazan also bore responsibility for religious music education in the village, training singers for choruses in the synagogue and for ancillary service at weddings and in the enactment of folk dramas during holidays.36 The village hazan, therefore, contributed to the reproduction of musical life in much the same way as did the hazan in a large urban synagogue, although the village tradition relied more extensively on oral transmission.37 Secular musical specialists also abounded in the village. References to these suggest both a diverse terminology and a complex range of functions. In his extensive studies of Jewish instrumental music in Central Europe, Walter Salmen has

32

Philip V. Bohlman

identified several different names for such musicians, including letzim in the region of the Main and Rhine rivers in western Germany,38 and he has further noted that instrumental musicians performed at dances of all kinds, including those held in buildings identified by Salmen as Jewish dance halls.39 These instrumental musicians were sufficiently organized in Alsace that they are simply referred to as the "orchestra" at village events, and their diverse instrumentation and repertory proves that this was an apt label.40 The instrumental ensembles and various orchestras of eastern Austria and western Hungary, still active in the early twentieth century, engaged in musical exchange between genres and ethnic repertories, and were thus emblematic of the presence of cultural diversity among the Jewish communities. Musical exchange was, in fact, most extensive within the repertories of rural Jewish instrumental music, transforming the performers of these repertories into active agents of musical and cultural change.

Musical Repertories Although the musical repertories of the Jewish village have been touched upon at numerous points in this essay, it has not yet been specified just what kinds of music—styles, genres, themes, forms, contexts—one would hear in the village. It has been necessary to postpone this central musical issue until now in order to make one point particularly clear: there was a great deal of music in the village, with a surprisingly large number of repertories cohabiting in even the smallest Jewish village. The abundance of musical sounds was, quite simply, enormous. One must remember first that the many different venues specified within the religious polity of the village had their own musical repertories. Certain groups of songs and musical practices belonged to the life of the home; others accompanied daily prayer; still others took place only in the synagogue, and there they were the exclusive purview of that institution's specialists. Each holiday and each rite of passage specified musical repertories; and both the individual and the community could claim a body of songs that specified some quality of uniqueness. A contrasting corpus of repertories surely accrued to those activities that were neither specifically religious nor Jewish. In other words, Jewish villages were in contact with the folk-music repertories of their gentile neighbors, including those that celebrated the harvest, national holidays or even Christmas. From what evidence modern ethnomusicologists can muster, the oral Germanic ballad tradition was transmitted in the Jewish village as well, thus locating the folk life of the village in a larger singing tradition that stretched from Western to Eastern Europe, wherever, that is, German dialect Sprachinseln (linguistic islands) were found. The ballad tradition offers a particularly powerful case in point for understanding the exchange between the Jewish village and a common Germanic culture. German ballads constitute a tradition employing Hochdeutsch (High German) only.41 As early as 1600, however, Jewish versions of German ballads appear in printed versions that employ Hebrew characters. The ballad, Schloss in Osterreich ("Castle in Austria"), DVIdr. (Deutsche Volkslieder) 24, printed probably in Worms or in one of the nearby Jewish villages on the Rhine, is the first example of this exchange between Jewish

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

33

and non-Jewish traditions, in this case an absorption of the German ballad into a literate Jewish tradition.42 This interaction characterized the relation between Jewish and non-Jewish communities throughout Europe, demonstrating the way in which folk-music traditions—specifically Germanic folk-music traditions— provided a common musical corpus linking Jewish communities at village and urban levels. Jewish symbols in the ballad "Die schone Jttdin" ("The Beautiful Jewish Girl"), DVldr. 158 (see Fig. 6) reveal that it had a place no less in Jewish villages than in gentile villages, albeit the meanings of the symbols in the variants of the ballad were probably very distinctive.43 Jewish repertories grew, too, because of the changing history of folk music and the attraction of European art music. The mid-nineteenth-century folk-music revival—stimulated by the collecting and philology of Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, and Ludwig Erk—influenced the growth of singing societies in Jewish, as well as gentile, villages. These societies accumulated their own anthologies, classicizing folk music by the late nineteenth century. Again, there appears to be no dearth of Jewish folk-song anthologies, and Zionists and Jewish club members alike sang to celebrate their sense of community and shared purpose. Jewish Moritaten, Bankellieder andfliegende Blatter—in other words, broadsides such as the song in Fig. 1—proliferated at the end of the last century, commodifying rural musical repertories and juxtaposing them with urban Jewish musics. Contact with musical repertories outside the village accorded particular importance to European art music, establishing its position in the community as a link both to the city and to the cultures of romanticism and nationalism. In the political economy of nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe, musical professions— conservatory teaching or orchestral positions, teaching and research opportunities in musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology—were generally open to Jews. But music education often began in the village, with musicians commencing their intensive musical study with a local teacher and only later, if their career seemed promising enough, transferring to a conservatory in the city. The careers of Karl Goldmark and Salomon Sulzer, though demonstrating different musical paths from the village to the city, share a similar trajectory. Thus, European art music did enter the village and play a role in its musical life, but the culture of the Jewish village also mediated the ways in which the village used art music and encouraged its residents to employ such repertories. Observing the diverse musical repertories that cohabited in the village, one notices that their coexistence depended on fluidity and change, or again, it can be argued, exchange. This is not to suggest that, were we able to walk through Sulzburg or Mattersdorf one hundred years ago, we would hear the sounds of a different musical repertory emanating from each house along the streets in the Jewish neighborhoods. This musical coexistence was not simply a matter of juxtaposition, but rather of patterns that reflected different communities and the varied forces of change, both inside and outside the village—contact with Alemannisch, French, and Swiss cultures in the case of Sulzburg; interaction with the ethnic and religious diversity of Burgenland in the case of Mattersdorf. Thus, we would probably experience quite different repertories in Sulzburg and Mattersdorf or any of the hundreds of other Jewish villages in Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth

34

Philip V. Bohlman

century. The musical life of each would bear witness to a distinctive pattern of musical exchange.

Tradition and Change: Music and the Dialectic of Village Music Histories The abundance of musics in the Jewish village reveals the possibility of a virtually limitless number of music histories, each responsive to the competing pulls of tradition—which anchored some aspects of musical life—and change, which influenced other aspects. Tradition and change, engendered in different ways by a village's response to its own Jewish polity, interacted in the village in such a way as to form a historical dialectic—actually many historical dialectics—in the many Jewish villages of Central Europe. Recognizing this dialectical historical impetus suggests possible ways of rethinking the prevailing interpretation of the modern-era village as no more than a vestige of the past. Music is perhaps only one form of evidence, but it has considerable value in the formulation of new historical attitudes because its repertories exhibit so clearly the aspects of both tradition and change, as well as their interaction. This interaction appears in an example of music from an Alsatian village that is unequivocally traditional. The niggun and so-called "Chuppe-Lied" (see fig. 5) was first collected at a wedding in 1832, probably in the village of Mosbach. Not only were the two pieces placed in their traditional social and religious contexts, but oral accounts of their circulation point out that the niggun, the instrumental part, was often heard at Purim and that the tune of the song bears similarities to a student song known as "Das Jahr ist gut, braun Bier ist geraten" ("It's a Good Year, It's a Good Time to Drink Dark Beer").44 The Chupa-Lied as a genre was apparently well known in Alsatian Jewish villages, for it comprised the only musical example to which Daniel Stauben gave a name in his visit to Wintzenheim in the 1850s, describing further the familiarity of the Jewish residents with the genre of which it was a part.45 The transcriptions in Figs. 5a and 5b were transmitted through oral and written tradition; these versions come from the Elsass-Lothringische Gesang and Musikzeitung and the Strassburger Israelitische Wochenschrift, both in editions from 1907 and deposited as transcriptions in the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv in Freiburg. The history of these very traditional Alsatian wedding pieces itself demonstrates exchange at various levels: between oral and written tradition; between specific holidays and rites of passage; and among different musical specialists in the community. Even more complex exchange attends the history of the previously mentioned ballad "Die schone Jiidin," (DVldr. 158), which may be deliberately contrasted with the traditional nature of the Alsatian wedding music. "Die schone Jiidin" contains a narrative that is about Jewish tradition, although it circulated in many different oral and written traditions. Oral variants still exist, and the song was current in both Jewish and gentile communities in Central and Eastern Europe. The ballad first appears in European folk-song anthologies with Arnim and Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn.46 It took its place in the German folk-music revival of the nineteenth

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

35

Fig. 5a Source: Transcription in Deutsches Volksliedarchiv, Freiburg

Fig. 5b Source: Transcription in Deutsches Volksliedarchiv, Freiburg

century, so that various settings for solo voice or chorus exist in the countless anthologies of this revival. The variant offered here (see Fig. 6) was found in the manuscripts that were part of Achim von Arnim's estate, dated 1806. Whether or not this variant is the one Arnim collected—Des Knaben Wunderhorn, of course, lacks musical notation—it is one of the first versions of the ballad to find its way to written tradition. Music functioned as an important component of exchange in many ways for the Jewish village of Central Europe. It empowered the village to interact with the varied segments of German or Austrian society and to exert the unique presence of Jewish culture in Alsatian and Hungarian border regions. It established links with the city and the institutions of Jewish society that grew in the urban center during the socioeconomic and political emancipation of the modern era. It could at once embody change and resist change within the village itself. In the processes of exchange, then, music provided a complex means of internal and external negotiation while continuing to symbolize the particularity of Jewish identities and traditions. Viewed in this way, music acquired the capacity to strengthen Jewish life and symbolize the particular patterns of change through which rural Jewish culture passed in Central Europe. On the one hand, it could encode symbols that did not

36

Philip V. Bohlman

Fig. 6 Source: Transcription in Deutsches Volksliedarchiv, Freiburg

change, that were nonnegotiable or immutable during exchange. On the other hand, music situated tradition itself in a particular place and within a particular community structure, namely that of the Jewish village. Despite the profound changes rendered by the modern era, the musical life of the Jewish village retained its integrity, and it continued to extend meaning to rural Jewish life in Central Europe in distinctive ways. Jewish music symbolized the willingness of Jewish villages to maintain the folk traditions of the past while incorporating changes in artistic and religious traditions imported from outside the village. It follows from this that alternatives to the usual models of abandonment, escape, and victimization did in fact form in the village, with these finding voices in the musical life of the village. This musical life provides one of the most powerful and trenchant ways in which to view the Jewish response to modernity, a response issuing assertively from, of all places, the Jewish village.

Notes 1. Population figures for Jews in Sulzburg, and for that matter other Jewish villages, are generally unavailable prior to the nineteenth century, and those statistics that are available mention only land-holding or property-owning Jews to whom certain privileges have been extended through a Schutzbrief, the document granting protection to Jews in exchange for taxes, goods or other service. In one of the first censuses listing Jews in Sulzburg, 229 from a total population of 937 identified themselves as "mosaisch" (Stadtarchiv Sulzburg, Akten XV, 4). The population of Jews probably reached its high point in 1864, when 416 Sulzburgers identified themselves as Jews; see Joachim Hahn, Erinnerungen und Zeugnisse jiidischer Geschichte in Baden-Wurttemberg (Stuttgart: 1988), 154. 2. A Jewish community officially reappeared in Freiburg only in 1863, when the first synagogue since the early fifteenth century was dedicated. For a study of the interaction of Jewish villages with Catholic (and later, Jesuit) Freiburg, particularly during the cultural struggles of the Reformation period, see R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: 1988).

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

37

3. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jewish Sulzburgers played visible roles as wine, grain and textile merchants. Their integration into the village economy, then, took on the special character of the village's unique position in the economy of the region. See Hahn, Erinnerungen undZeugnisse jiidischer Geschichte, 156 and Ludwig David Kahn, Die Geschichte der Juden von Sulzburg (Mullheim: 1969). 4. Arno Herzig, "Zur Problematik deutsch-judischer Geschichtsschreibung," Menora 1 (Munich: 1990), 209-234. 5. It has become traditional to commemorate and celebrate Jewish culture in modern Germany and Austria with concerts of Yiddish folk songs. This skewed historicism is particularly ironic when juxtaposed with village culture. A concert of Yiddish folk songs even accompanied an exhibit of photographs of the Sulzburg cemetery in the autumn of 1990. I offer this example not to criticize it, but rather to illustrate the extent to which the musical life of the Jewish village has disappeared from modern historiography, only to be recaptured by modern historicism. 6. See, for example, Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Das Schtetl: Die untergegangene Welt der osteuropaischen Juden, trans. Hans Richard (Munich: 1991). This is a translation of Life Is with People: The Jewish Little-Town of Eastern Europe (Madison, Conn.: 1952). 7. "Shtetl" is a diminutive form for Stadt, "city," meaning therefore "little city." This diminutive form is widely characteristic of eastern dialects of Yiddish, as well as of Bavarian and Austrian dialects. Applying the term to Sulzburg or Otterstadt would result in a nonsensical neologism. From the standpoint of dialect, the term would be more appropriate as a designation for Mattersdorf or any of the other villages among the Siebengemeinden of eastern Austria. In fact, the form has no currency. 8. See, for example, Elfie Labsch-Benz, Die judische Gemeinde Nonnenweier: Jtidisches Leben und Brauchtum in einer badischen Landgemeinde zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg: 1981); Gerhard Baumgartner, Geschichte der judischen Gemeinde zu Schlaining (Stadtschlaining: 1988); and Gert Tschogl, "Geschichte der Juden in Oberwart," in Identitat und Lebenswelt: Ethnische, religiose und kulturelle Vielfalt im Burgenland, ed. Gerhard Baumgartner, Eva Miiller, and Rainer Miinz (Eisenstadt: 1989), 116-127. 9. See, for example, Moritz Markbreiter, Beitrage zur Geschichte der judischen Gemeinde Eisenstadt (Vienna: 1908); and Bernhard Wachstein, Urkunden und Akten zur Geschichte der Juden in Eisenstadt und den Sibengemeinden (Vienna: 1926). 10. William Pfannkuch, "Goldmark, Karl," in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 5, ed. Friedrich Blume (Kassel: 1956), cols. 481-485. 11. One of the first music presses in eastern Austria and western Hungary operated during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and one of the most important Talmud academies thrived in Deutschkreutz in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sopron, which was close enough to Deutschkreutz that Goldmark could walk to his music studies, was a Komitatstadt, or administrative center, of the Habsburg Empire, and it had a flourishing musical life in the nineteenth century. The implication, then, that Goldmark's early music education was the result of contact with farmers and wedding revelries and that his first violin study was "certainly very primitive" is totally erroneous. 12. Philip V. Bohlman, "Die Volksmusik und die Verstadterung der deutsch-jiidischen Gemeinde in den Jahrzehnten vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg," Jahrbuch fiir Volksliedforschung 34 (Berlin: 1989), 25-40. 13. See, as probably the first comprehensive effort of this type, Gustav Hermann Dalman's Jiidischdeutsche Volkslieder aus Galizien und Russland (Leipzig: 1888). 14. Philip V. Bohlman, "The Land Where Two Streams Flow": Music in the GermanJewish Community of Israel (Urbana: 1989), 47-78. 15. See, for example, Paul Assail, Juden in Elsass (Elster: 1984). 16. This pattern characterizes the Jewish villages of eastern Austria and western Hungary, both the Siebengemeinden and the numerous others, in an overwhelming number of cases. When Jewish neighborhoods formed near monasteries, as in Frauenkirchen, Austria (one of

38

Philip V. Bohiman

the Siebengemeinden), it was because these monasteries were administratively most powerful in the village or region. 17. Walter Salmen, ". . . Derm die Fidel macht das Fest": Jiidische Musikanten und Tdnzer vom 13. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck: 1991). 18. Max Grunwald, Mattersdorf (single edition of Jahrbuch fur jtidische Volkskunde) (Vienna: 1924-1925), 402-563; and Fritz P. Hodik, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Mattersdorfer Judengemein.de im 18. und in der ersten Hdlfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Eisenstadt: 1975). Dorf translates best as "village," Burg best as "castle," though the latter refers to a city with some sort of fortification, hence suggesting also the translation as "fortress." Mattersdorf/Mattersburg provides a case in point for what could be called a "precise ambivalence"—administratively distinct because of the Burg yet still a Dorf for the Jewish community. I further argue for the appropriateness of the term "village" because it does not denote an administrative form or legal status (such as "Marktgemeinde" or "Freistadt" in eastern Austria), but rather results from the terminology with which a community names itself. 19. Karl Heinz Debus, et al., Geschichte der Juden in Speyer (Speyer: 1981). 20. The exact mixture of dialects and their inflections, however, would be impossible to prove. This version of the song was transcribed from a performance by a former resident of Mullheim, which is near Sulzburg. The singer, however, had lived in Switzerland since the Second World War. Still, the ability of the song to absorb different dialects is itself a form of documenting different levels of exchange. 21. Hugo Gold, Gedenkbuch der untergegangenen Judengemeinden des Burgenlandes (Tel-Aviv: 1970) and August Ernst, Geschichte des Burgenlandes (Vienna: 1987). 22. See Ernst, Geschichte des Burgenlandes. 23. Burgenland became a part of Austria only in 1921, with Eisenstadt as its capital. The Siebengemeinden are part of northern Burgenland, but central and southern Burgenland also had important Jewish villages, such as Stadtschlaining. The former border between Austria and Hungary cuts through several of these Jewish villages, and some, such as Kobersdorf, actually straddle the border, with the synagogue and Jewish social institutions on the Hungarian side (in contact with the castle of the Hungarian ruling family) and the cemetery on the Austrian side. 24. Grunwald founded the Gesellschaft fur Jiidische Volkskunde (Society for Jewish Folklore), edited its journal and conducted fieldwork in the traditions of the early twentieth century that sought to establish a philological history for the genres of folklore and folk song collected in rural areas. He, too, was not attempting to locate Jewish music in the village, but he frequently documented it in his Jahrbuch fur Jiidische Volkskunde (see, e.g., Grunwald, Mattersdorf). 25. Daniel Stauben, Eine Reise zu den Juden aufdem Lande, trans. Alain Claude Sulzer (Augsburg: 1986), 40. Translation of Scenes de la vie juive en Alsace (Paris: 1860). 26. Sopron (Hungary) Municipal Archive, 1734 tax records (Komitatstadt Odenburg). 27. Rachel Salamander (ed.) Die Jiidische Welt von Gestern 1860-1938: Text- und BildZeugnisse aus Mitteleuropa (Vienna: 1990), 93. 28. The collections and treatises of Central European cantors long argued for the unique preservation of musical traditions from Eretz Israel in the era prior to the destruction of the Second Temple. This historiographic tradition culminated with A. Z. Idelsohn, who employed the methodology of comparative musicology to demonstrate the marginal survival of an ancient Jewish melos in the synagogues of southern and southwestern Germany (cf. A. Z. Idelsohn, Die traditionellen Gesange der siiddeutschen Juden, vol. 7, Hebraischorientalischer Melodienschatz [Leipzig: 1932], vi). 29. The best-known example of this topos is "Zehn Briider waren wir gewesen" ("We Were Once Ten Brothers") which entered the repertories of concentration camp inmates during the Holocaust. A discussion of different variants of the song and its distinctive presence in European Jewish repertories appears in Otto Holzapfel and Philip V. Bohiman, Folk Songs of the German- and Yiddish-Speaking Jews (Madison: forthcoming). 30. Wachstein, Urkunden und Akten zur Geschichte der Juden.

Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village

39

31. Stauben, Eine Reise zu den Juden. 32. Grunwald, Mattersdorf. 33. Sopron Municipal Archive 1734 and Wachstein, Urkunden undAkten zur Geschichte der Juden. 34. Wachstein, ibid. 35. Stauben, Eine Reise zu den Juden, 49, 60—61. 36. Ibid., 58. 37. Jewish villages contributed their share of hazanim to urban cantonal traditions. The most notable case of this form of musical education is Salomon Sulzer, who grew up in rural western Austria (his family came from Sulz in the province of Vorarlberg) before establishing his career as the leading nineteenth-century hazan and composer in the Viennese synagogue tradition. See Hanoch Avenary, Kantor Salomon Sulzer und seine Zeit: Eine Dokumentation (Sigmaringen: 1985). 38. Walter Salmen, "Judische Musikanten in Osterreich: Materialien zur Geschichte einer Disharmonie," in die Volksmusik der ethnischen Gruppen in Osterreich, ed. Ursula Hemetek and Rudolf Pietsch (Vienna: forthcoming). 39. Salmen, ". . . Denn die Fidel macht das Fest." 40. The label "orchestra" (Orchester) designated an ensemble larger than a band, as in a klezmer band, for which one would use the German Kapelle. This distinction reveals a further level of specialization at community events, for example, during the celebration of a wedding, for which a separate ensemble was needed to accompany the wedding party as it moved through the village. The term klezmer appears relatively late in the descriptions of Central European villages, and it seems that it had more currency in East Central Europe, for example in Czechoslovakia and Galicia (see Verena Dohrn, Reise nach Galizien: Grenzlandschaften des alten Europa [Frankfurt: 1991]). 41. Other ballad traditions, for example the English-language Child ballad tradition, employ not only dialects but are characterized by extensive variation resulting from local inflections and regional folk epistemology. 42. Holzapfel and Bohlman, Folk Songs of the German- and Yiddish-Speaking Jews. 43. Cf. S. M. Ginsburg and P. S. Marek, Evreiskie narodnye pesni v Rossii (St. Petersburg: 1901); and Philip V. Bohlman, "Die Vorstellung vom Judentum in der 'Schonen Jiidin'," in Deutsche Balladen mit ihren Melodien 9, ed. Jiirgen Dittmar (Freiburg: 1992). 44. This is perhaps also an indirect reference to Purim, rather than the Christian religious season of Fasching, which occurs during the same time and during which dark beers are traditionally drunk. I should not wish to exaggerate the possibility of such a connection, only to point out that it might have provided the point in the texts of the traditions at which interaction occurred. 45. See Stauben, Eine Reise zu den Juden, 47. 46. Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (Munich: 1980 [1806/08]).

Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian

Musical Culture Judit Frigyesi (PRINCETON UNIVERSITY)

Hungarian Jews not only form an integral part of the Hungarian people; they are an inalienable element without which Hungarian existence cannot be understood. . . . In Hungarian culture, a unique relationship was created [between Jews and Hungarians]: the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia represented Hungarian bourgeois culture in general. This bourgeois culture—symbolized by names such as Endre Ady and Bela Bartok . . . deeply influenced Hungarian culture at large. It is fair to say that without the achievements of these assimilated Jews, Hungarian culture, and with it Hungarian existence today would be unimaginable. . . . Everyone who is a supporter of this culture is also a bit Jewish.1

In the spring of 1990, an article by Gyorgy Domokos entitled "Minority and Dictatorship" appeared in the Hungarian daily paper Nepszabadsdg.2 It struck a clearly antisemitic tone, the author claiming that Hungarian Jews in the postwar era were engaged in a struggle for dictatorial power over their fellow Hungarians. The publication of Domokos's article caused much anxiety among Hungarian Jews; it was widely interpreted abroad as illustrative of the growing ethnic intolerance in the post-Communist East European countries. The broader context of this article, however, did not receive such extensive coverage, although it was no less significant. "Minority and Dictatorship" was one of several dozen articles on the Jewish question in Hungary, written both by Jews and non-Jews, and published as a series in the same newspaper. The great majority of these articles were pro-Jewish, and they explained in detail—often with remarkable insight—the nature of the "symbiosis" of the Hungarian and Jewish intelligentsia. Ivan Vitanyi's article, quoted above, was part of this series. A different version of this article was presented at the conference "Jewish Intellectual Life in Hungary Between the Two Wars," held in Budapest in April 1992. I would like to thank several scholars who helped me with their support and advice, especially Geza Komoraczy, Miklos Szabolcsi, Gyorgy Kroo and Melinda Berlasz. I am also greatly indebted to the editor of this volume for his suggestions at all levels in the course of my writing this article.

40

Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

41

In his defense of Hungarian Jews the non-Jewish Vitanyi, together with many others, argues that Jews were a key factor in the creation of the Hungarian bourgeoisie and that their achievements are part and parcel of modern Hungarian society and consciousness. In fact, Hungarian bourgeois culture is, to some extent, Jewish. This is much more than what German Jews, let alone German non-Jews, have ever claimed with respect to the role of the Jews in modern Germany. But was the situation in Hungary so different from that of contemporary Germany? Was there ever a real Hungarian-Jewish symbiosis? If Hungarian bourgeois culture is really somewhat Jewish, why do most Hungarians maintain that the Jewish character is alien to the Hungarian? And why is it that the unity of a Hungarian-Jewish bourgeoisie has to be emphasized again and again, almost always in the context of antisemitism—even some eighty years after the supposed symbiosis took place? There is no simple answer to these questions. The basic contradiction of Hungarian Jewish assimilation cannot be overlooked: Jews claim and are claimed to be inseparable from the Hungarian bourgeoisie, but in crucial moments of history they are abandoned by the non-Jewish population and viewed as aliens. It is hard to speak of a successful symbiosis in the face of the historical fact that, on the whole, the Hungarian population did virtually nothing to prevent the deportation and massacre of Hungarian Jewry. Moreover, the Holocaust cannot be explained away as an unfortunate but essentially irrelevant episode in Hungarian history. Indifference toward Jewish existence—and antisemitism, which still exists—are no accidents.3 Seen in this light, a Hungarian-Jewish "symbiosis" appears to be a grandiose and beautiful illusion similar to the one cherished by assimilated German Jews until the moment of their destruction. For the outsider, the Hungarian situation may seem to parallel the sad history of Jewish assimilation in other countries. In the name of culture and progress, Jews voluntarily suppressed themselves as an ethnic group; in return society rejected them, reducing them once again to an ethnic category. Despite similarities with this pattern, the experience of Hungarian Jewry was unique in two important respects. First, in Hungarian bourgeois culture, distinct Jewish elements were maintained even throughout the course of assimilation. Second, there developed, if not a total symbiosis, at least a strong cooperation and sense of unity between the Jewish and Hungarian bourgeoisies. How, then, did this unity manifest itself in Hungary's modern musical life? It is well known that Jews played a prominent role in the performance, criticism and composition of art music in modern Hungary, and a great percentage of the supportive audience of this culture was also Jewish. During the twentieth century, Hungarian performers, many of them Jewish, became universally known for their excellence and were important in creating the international music scene of our time. It is thus reasonable to ask whether music had a particular meaning for the assimilated Jews and whether modern Hungarian musical culture could be said to be "Jewish" in any sense. Answers to both of these questions would appear to be positive: the alliance between Jews and Hungarians was particularly strong in music, and at least in the sphere of performance, the Jewish presence became a pronounced one for reasons connected both to the historical and artistic-ideological context in which modern Hungarian music emerged.4

42

Judit Frigyesi

Historical Context for the Alliance of Jews and Hungarians in Music During the classical and romantic eras, secular art music was not central to Hungarian culture. Indeed, music was not nearly as important as literature, especially poetry. The poets of previous centuries—Mihaly Vitez Csokonai, Daniel Berzsenyi, Sandor Petofi, Janos Arany, and Mihaly Vorosmarty—created a poetic tradition that was seen as truly "national" and at the same time as having high artistic value. In contrast, the works of such nineteenth-century composers as Ferenc Erkel and even Franz Liszt did not spark the same sense of national pride.5 The situation of Hungarian art music became even more depressing as the century progressed. The split between serious and light music became almost complete, with the place of "Hungarianness" fixed in the lighter genres of the concert repertoire—in the suites or, at best, in the lighter movements of a symphony.6 The most popular Hungarian genres were not even these but rather the operetta or the light opera, in which audiences could revel in productions of pompous historicism, complete with lavish decors and costumes and a superficial folklorism that accorded to aristocratic tastes.7 The young Bela Bartok, who came to Budapest at the turn of the century with great expectations, found nothing stimulating in this so-called "national style." His letters are full of complaints: "Today I heard a piece [by] Odon Farkas . . . Well, it was horrible. And such stuff is performed by the 'Philharmonics!' . . . This so-called 'Hungarian' concert was a real disaster. . . ."8 Similarly, the historian Kernel Abranyi concluded his book on the history of Hungarian romantic music on a pessimistic note, seeing no hope for a real Hungarian style on the eve of the new century.9 But outside the walls of the Academy of Music and the Opera House, in pubs and restaurants, at the banquets of the aristocracy and at national festivals, Hungarian music was flourishing. Except for a narrow circle of the bourgeoisie, no one shared the pessimistic view of the Bartoks and Abranyis; on the contrary, Hungarian music was hailed and thought to be at its peak. This, however, was a different kind of Hungarian music—the so-called "Gypsy music,"10 a popular style widely known in both urban and rural areas. The core of this style consisted of monophonic strophic songs, called magyar notdk ("Hungarian tunes").11 Mostly composed in the nineteenth century by minor Hungarian composers, these songs were in turn arranged by Gypsy bands. Everybody in Hungary knew a number of magyar notdk; for example, in an Austrian prison toward the end of the century, Hungarian soldiers were found to know more than seventy of them.12 Mor Jokai, a famous Hungarian novelist, referred to about 450 Hungarian tunes in his works and was supposedly able to sing many of them even at the age of seventy-five.13 From a historical perspective, Gypsy music is doubly important; first, because it was a force expressing and shaping national identity whose acceptance or rejection affected the future of Hungarian art music; and second, because it was Hungary's paramount assimilating musical style. Gypsy music was not just "popular" music that a serious Hungarian composer could reject with a shrug of the shoulders. It was the heir to verbunkos, a type of instrumental dance music that had been elevated to the rank of national music during the nineteenth century. 14 Through magyar nota, Gypsy music was connected with folk song, and through verbunkos, it partook of a

Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

43

national heritage of folk, art and popular music. In a sense, it really did constitute a "national style," one that reached all segments of society. Without verbunkos and Gypsy music, Hungarian romanticism is unimaginable. The sad-faced lad, sitting and drinking among a company of friends in a pub where Gypsy violin music is being played, virtually personified one side of the Hungarian soul. The other side was to be found in the wildly dancing, intoxicated young man, who represented the vigor, passion and strength of "the Hungarian." These two aspects of the Hungarian soul were matched respectively by the "slow" and the "fast" pieces of Gypsy music. Though both these images of "national character" were stereotypes, they were taken seriously, since they symbolized feelings that were deeply individual and communal. The dark passion and exuberant joy of the drinking-dancing Toldi, the eponymous hero in Janos Arany's epic poem, is genuine and sincere, with the author depicting an almost childish simplicity coupled with frightening strength and determinedness. In this and in many other instances, verbunkos, Gypsy music and the images associated with them were not limited to popular culture but saturated the highest forms of art, including the poems of Csokonai, Arany and Vorosmarty and, of course, virtually all romantic symphonic works. Yet the glory of verbunkos was diminished by the inherent contradictions of the ideology it served, such that its intoxicating power was also seen in a negative light almost at the moment it became popular. For Arany, the portrayal of Toldi would not have been complete without a dancing-drinking scene—but in The Gypsies of Nagyida, another of his poems, he caricatured the verbunkos mania. By the early twentieth century, Gypsy music became a political force; it nourished the Hungarians' ethnic snobbery, and even racism. It was thought to express the eternal essence of the Hungarian character, and to be an embodiment of the Hungarian's "weeping-rejoicing Asian soul." The force of the Hungarian race was seen to manifest itself in the popularity of Gypsy music: through their love for this music, the poor of the smallest cottages were united with the aristocracy of the grandest residences. No one, not even foreigners, could resist its power—a proof of Hungarian superiority.15 Paradoxically, the performers of this genuinely Hungarian music were mostly "foreigners"—Germans, Jews and especially Gypsies. Just as ironic, they did not gain any respect for their ethnicity by playing verbunkos, but rather were seen as excellent performers of the very music they were not supposed to understand. For, as foreigners, they were incapable, by definition, of truly grasping Gypsy music— now claimed to be the exclusive property of the Hungarian soul.16 No one in the nineteenth century was entirely free of these prejudices. In his above-mentioned book, Abranyi—an enlightened and serious music historian— ranked Janos Lavotta as first among the verbunkos composers because he was the only "pure Hungarian, from an ancient noble family." He was an exception, Abranyi explained, because the nobility for the most part let the "sly Gypsy race . . . exploit all important Hungarian musical achievements for its own benefit."17 The struggles of Mark Rozsavolgyi, a Jewish violinist and composer in the verbunkos style, were characteristic. At a time when he was celebrated by the whole country, Rozsavolgyi was denied permission to settle in Budapest, and when he

44

Judit Frigyesi

decided to stay there anyway was repeatedly ordered to relocate. For the authorities, Rozsavolgyi was no more than a suspect wandering Jewish fiddler who was unable to earn a living in the proper way.18 Abranyi himself had met Rozsavolgyi and cherished his memory, but when devoting several pages of detailed and very favorable criticism to Rozsavolgyi's art, he never once mentioned the musician's Jewish origin.19 Already existing contradictions became exacerbated by the end of the nineteenth century, when Gypsy music became firmly established as the music par excellence of the gentry and, consequently, a symbol of Hungarian nationalism. Love of Gypsy music became a prerequisite of Hungarianness. The role this music played in Hungarian nationalism was symptomatic of the contradictions or, as Istvan Bibo put it, the "mendacious character" of Hungarian assimilation. In Bibo's words: Assimilation in Hungary—just as everything else in the past century—was confused, loaded with tawdry slogans and contradictions precisely because there did not exist a coherent framework of ideology and social conceptions to which it would have been possible to assimilate at all. For that reason, the Hungarian nationalities assimilated to what was superficial and ornamental, instead of to a common moral and spiritual behavior. . . . The most serious symptom of this confusion was that, since the Hungarians at large had no coherent profile as a society, the measure of assimilation was sought in the domain of the spontaneous, in the instinct, namely, in Hungarian temperament, lifestyle, musicality, articulation of speech. ... In this way, the masses who assimilate or desire to assimilate could only be the losers, for they would hardly be able to reproduce temperament and gesture, which are at any rate entirely unnecessary to reproduce.20

Today it is hard to imagine the intensity of the struggle between modern and conservative forces, the agony of young Hungarian composers in their search for modernity. For them, the question was what kind of sources a Hungarian composer could rely upon. The popular tradition of verbunkos and Gypsy music was in the service of a nationalistic propaganda that no enlightened person could afford to dismiss as irrelevant. (Moreover, the musical characteristics of Gypsy music— extreme rubato, rhapsodic changes of tempo and mood—had already lost the appeal they had once had for composers of the romantic era.) Alternatively, there was the romantic symphonic tradition, certainly a more dignified source but musically conservative, somewhat shallow and not at all free of nationalistic overtones.21 These musical styles were incontestably Hungarian, yet they represented a dead end; no roads led from them toward new music. They focused essentially on the past; their strength came from their historical glory, and they were loaded with political associations that opposed modernism. Yet against these Hungarian styles stood Western art music—the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner— in short, German music. To raise the question of new Hungarian music was tantamount to making a choice between what was Hungarian but unsatisfying musically and politically unacceptable, and what was of high artistic value but German—that is, the music of the political and cultural oppressor of Hungary. It was in this historical atmosphere that musicians of the new generation took a decisive step toward redefining the meaning of Hungarianness. They regarded the

Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

45

Beethovenian and Brahmsian tradition not as German music, but as a quasi-neutral, international tradition, something beyond ethnicity. Of course, this was not a new thought in the history of European art. The Hungarians, however, carried it further than their contemporaries in Vienna, Berlin and Paris because their very existence and future depended on it. The neutrality of "high art," its being free from national and ethnic implications, was the token of a healthy cultural life in the chauvinist atmosphere of Hungary. This was the only possible conceptual framework in which art music could be justly valued. This attitude was neither easily nor quickly adopted, nor was it ever stated as a manifesto. Everyone concerned with the issue of new Hungarian music struggled with the question of how to delineate the outlines of a musical tradition relevant to modern Hungarian culture. At the turn of the century, there were probably very few who had a vision of what a healthy Hungarian music life should be. At times both Bartok and Kodaly made remarks about the German character of the Hungarian musical scene, expressing their confusion, anger and helplessness.22 But finally both of them, along with the rest of the Hungarian intelligentsia, accepted Western art music as an integral part of Hungarian culture. To conceive of art music in this manner is natural today, as it has been in Hungary since the 1920s. But it must be remembered that the turn of the century was an era of fierce cultural nationalism in many countries: the Russian musical scene was characterized by bitter fights between "German" and "national" schools, and French caricatures of German art were abundant. The culmination of nationalistic propaganda in Hungarian music life was marked in 1902, when the Sunday issue of a daily paper demanded the closing of the Academy of Music because it was "too German."23 Interestingly, it was in this same year that a senior member of the Academy's administration criticized the young Bartok for the lack of Hungarianness in his style, suggesting that he weave the melody of the Rakoczi march into his new piece.24 Many of the new generation thus broke with Hungarian romanticism, including the more sophisticated symphonic tradition. They refused to define modern Hungarianness in historical terms that would embrace only the achievements of the romantic era. It was clearly impossible to cleanse new Hungarian music from all stylistic elements of verbunkos, although Bartok at a certain point almost made this decision.25 What matters is that the new generation of musicians—with Bartok in the forefront since 1906—did not consider verbunkos, Gypsy music and the romantic symphonic tradition the only or even the most important source of new Hungarian music. These decisions laid the foundation for a modern Hungarian music culture, and within it the alliance of Jews and Hungarians. It was obvious that any meaningful cooperation could only develop on this basis; the Jews' devotion to a verbunkoscentered musical life would have been doomed to fail at the start. But it would be misleading to assume that the pioneers of this new conception were Jews, or even that such decisions were easier for Jews to make. Gypsy music had long been cherished by certain strata of Jewish society. There is reason to believe, for example, that the repertoire of Hungarian klezmorim included as well Gypsy music, which was played at traditional Jewish weddings.26 Also, as previously noted, Jews

46

Judit Frigyesi

participated in the popular music cultures both as composers and performers. Even in the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish violinists often started their careers as leaders of Gypsy bands (as, for instance, Lipot Feher, who later became a celebrated violinist at the Habsburg court and who subsequently toured throughout Europe and America), and among the composers of magyar notd there were many Jews, including Laszlo Anyos, Zsigmond Bodrogi, Naci Sas, Bela Hegyi, Erno Lanyi and Miksa Lengyel. More important, however, is that there was little difference between Jews and non-Jews in the political meaning of their rejection of Gypsy music. It was no easier for Jews to oppose the nationalist mainstream than it was for non-Jews. After all, this musical choice could provoke further accusations of their being cosmopolitan and rootless. Nonetheless, the new Hungarian music life was extremely appealing for the Jews, since it did not allow for nationalistic or racial considerations. To engage in ethnic issues in the performance of, say, Beethoven would have been utterly meaningless for both Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarians. The art music repertoire was neither Jewish nor Hungarian but a neutral territory where Jews had no reason to feel less at home than Hungarians. This is not to say that all Jews with musical talent now turned to the art music tradition. Much Jewish musical activity remained in the popular domain, although it now focused typically on the lighter genres of an international rather than a specifically national repertoire—light opera, ballet and especially the operetta. Alongside Karoly (Karl) Goldmark, a large group of less known Jewish composers (e.g., Szidor Bator, Izor Beldi, Jozsef Bokor, Aladar Renyi, Adolf Szikla, Albert Szirmai, Jozsef Konti, Leo Kern and Kalman Imre) devoted much of their output to the operetta, though some of them (Renyi, for instance) also composed in the more serious genres. The operetta was virtually dominated by Jews, with not only the composers but a large portion of the performers and the audience being Jewish. Not that the operetta had no nationalistic overtones. But its musical style (closer to Western art music than to Hungarian popular and folk music) and its performing context (theater versus the pub of Gypsy music) created a cultural context that rendered its nationalistic allusions far more acceptable for many Jews than the inherent nationalist association of Gypsy music. As opposed to Gypsy music, which as a whole was considered to be the ancient and inherent musical expression of the Hungarian nobility, the operetta belonged essentially to a cosmopolitan, petitbourgeois milieu. It is impossible to measure whether the number of Jews within the art music scene was proportionately higher than might have been expected. Art music always attracts fewer people than popular forms of music, and even though such statistics obviously do not exist, it is likely that more Jews at the turn of the century listened to Gypsy music or operettas than to string quartets. It must also be kept in mind that literature is a more easily accessible domain than music. Especially in the Hungarian context, where literature already had a strong tradition, it was only natural that the intelligentsia—Jews and non-Jews alike—gravitated more toward literature than music. It is undeniable, however, that by the turn of the century Jews had assumed a prominent role in Hungarian art music as creators, performers, listeners and pa-

Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

47

trons. In 1929, the Hungarian Jewish Encyclopaedia provided information about more than four hundred Hungarian Jewish musicians who were at the time important in national or international musical life.27 This number, of course, does not account for all the Hungarian Jews active in art music; listed in the encyclopaedia were only those who were considered to be "famous" in the 1920s, and among these were only a few women and even fewer patrons of music. As a result, it is impossible to know just how many Jews were members of orchestras, music teachers, concert organizers or active patrons of art music. Clearly, it was more than a few hundred. Jews played a major role in influencing the new generation of musicians and the public. Among them there were internationally known composers, conductors, opera singers and performers of all instruments.28 What is important, however, is not simply that Jews were actively involved in Hungarian art music but the fact that they were largely responsible for the creation of the musical environment in which the new Hungarian musical culture emerged. One example is Emil Lichtenberg, whose performances of Bach's cantatas and passions are remembered even today by people who heard them. Especially large numbers of Jews took part in music education at all levels. Several important teachers of the Academy of Music were Jewish; one of the most influential music schools in Budapest was established by a Jew, Erno Fodor, and employed several Jewish instructors.29 The most important music publishing houses were run by Jews,30 and many of the first historians and critics of music were also Jewish.31 To understand to what extent Jews, as a receptive audience, influenced Hungarian musical life, it is telling to recall the musical environment of Hungary's most significant modern composer, Bela Bartok. When Bartok came to Budapest in 1899, he expected to encounter there a truly modern Christian Hungarian bourgeoisie. He soon realized, however, that the bourgeoisie in Budapest, as everywhere else in Hungary, included a large number of Germans and Jews. Bartok's immediate reaction, expressed in a letter to his mother, was that of annoyance expressed in antisemitic stereotypes: Professor Thoman invited me for that night. . . . There I again played the Liszt sonata and had dinner; it was a large Jewish gathering, among them some ugly Jewish women with crooked noses who, on top of that, jabbered away in German . . . You ask who the Lukacs are? Jews and rich people; that is all I know, nothing more. . . . The Silberbergs are also Jewish and rich. Mrs. Suranyi is also Jewish and rich. . . . And Izidor Singer (?) is probably a Jew and rich. Thus I owe my whole existence to Jews.32

Always a committed artist, Bartok later became known as well for his uncompromising stand against all varieties of chauvinism and antisemitism. What is most important to note here, however, is not the development of Bartok's personality but the reasons for his youthful antisemitism. Clearly it reflected his frustration with his social environment; he could not come to terms with the fact that Hungary seemed unable to develop its "own" bourgeoisie from the "pure" Hungarian Christian members of the peasantry and former nobility. In the nationalistic atmosphere of the turn of the century, Bartok reacted as did most young Hungarians, feeling the presence of Germans and Jews to be an intrusion in Hungarian life. It took Bartok years to

48

Judit Frigyesi

accept the fact that this mixed group was the only stratum of Hungarian society that supported the ideas of modern art, democracy and the modernization of Hungary.33 It must also have been irritating that many of those from whom Bartok learned the most, who supported him morally and financially and who performed and listened to his music were Jewish (though it is not quite true that he owed his "whole existence" to Jews).34 Bartok's most attentive teachers at the Academy of Music, Istvan Thoman and Victor Herzfeld, were Jewish (Herzfeld being a German Jew), and his three stage pieces were based on texts by the Jewish writers Bela Balazs and Menyhert Lengyel. In fact, Balazs wrote Bluebeard's Castle and The Wooden Prince especially for Bartok in order to provide him with suitable raw material for a large composition, with the hope of attracting a greater audience for his works. Bartok's first supportive audience was not the concert-going public but rather the Jewish salons of Budapest. Perhaps the most stimulating of these were the gatherings at the home of Emma Gruber. Emma Gruber, nee Emma Sandor (Schlesinger), who later became the wife of Zoltan Kodaly, was an exceptionally well-educated and inspiring woman, a composer and proficient pianist. Among the guests at her home were well-known musicians and professors of the Academy, alongside music students, accomplished musicians and composers who often tried out their upcoming concert programs or introduced new compositions. Mrs. Gruber not only listened to and criticized Bartok's new pieces but immediately learned and performed them. She was perhaps the only musician at the time who recognized Bartok's talent while being able to provide intelligent criticism of his compositions. This was precisely the kind of support Bartok needed so much in his youthful years: What an idea that I am not on good terms even with Mrs. Gruber! On the contrary, if with anybody, then with her, that is, it is only with her that I am really on good terms. She is my sole "friend," who wants the best for me in every respect. . . . Mrs. Gardony also wants the best for me and she always would help me, but basically I am a stranger to her, while with Mrs. Gruber this is not so.35 Until now, this discussion has focused on the historical context of a modern Hungarian musical life. Clearly, the idea that pieces of art defy national categorization originated in Romanticism. In spite of all their interest in national values, the Romantics believed in the idea that art expresses something universal: real art need be bound by no communal limitations. Similarly, for all their eagerness to create Hungarian music and musical life, the more enlightened members of the Hungarian bourgeoisie shared this view and, moreover, endowed it with a meaning that pertained to the specific Hungarian social situation. For reasons explained above, this ideology became the cornerstone of an artistic ethic in Hungary and a new environment in which Jews could participate freely. It would seem, then, that Hungarian music attracted Jews not because of its Jewish character but, on the contrary, because of its ethnic neutrality: this culture was "Jewish" only in the sense that many Jews were involved in its creation. However, as shall be seen, there was also a distinct and fundamentally Jewish element in the aesthetic conception of Hungarian art music, one that was at the same time instrumental in the formation of Hungarian cultural ideology at large.

Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

49

The "Jewishness" of Hungarian Bourgeois Musical Life Among the most important elements in the formation of the aesthetic conception of Hungarian art music is the development of a performing tradition concentrated in Budapest. This was the work of a number of remarkable musicians and music critics, and the results bear the impress of the vigorous minds and devoted spirits that went into its creation. Hungarian musicians, as well as their contemporaries in Hungarian literature, did not consider art to be entertaining or ornamental. Nor did they see it solely as a means of expressing emotions and ideas. Music's power went beyond that. It was able to reveal "truth," that is, the deepest meaning of human existence. This revelation, however, could come only through the greatest pieces of music, created by geniuses, and only if their works were interpreted with absolute perfection. The basis of interpretation was the musical score which, in contrast to the preceding centuries, assumed new significance. No longer simply notation, it now became the revelation of the composer's genius, an object that in itself contained the secrets of art. Nothing in this thought was new, nor was it specifically Jewish or Hungarian. The focal points of this ideology were inherited from Romanticism and can be traced back to Goethe and Herder, manifesting themselves particularly in the music of Beethoven. In the specific Hungarian context, these notions became imbued with new meaning and were carried through with extreme devotion. A case in point is the teaching method of the composer and teacher Leo Weiner. Born in 1885, a younger contemporary of Bartok and Kodaly, Weiner was a composer and teacher of music theory and performance who nurtured several generations of Hungarian musicians and was perhaps the most influential figure in the creation of a Hungarian performing tradition.36 Weiner was immersed in music and lived only for it; besides music nothing really mattered. In Weinerian terms, music meant the great tradition of European art music with Beethoven at its center. Although broad, his musical world was limited, with a large part of the traditional repertoire falling entirely outside of its scope. Weiner did not like opera (except for Bizet's Carmen), and he did not understand modern music—not even Bartok's compositions after the First String Quartet. He was convinced that what he considered the core repertoire contained all the potentialities of music. That is, every shade of expression and all stages of spirituality could be found in the scores of the great masters—one had only to learn to read, understand and rightly interpret them. Rather than teaching a body of knowledge, Weiner transmitted an attitude in his continuous search for the deepest musical message hidden in the score, a search for "artistic truth." He did not teach in the traditional sense of the word but was rather constantly looking for the right interpretation. When he wanted something to be played in a certain way, for example, he would sit down at the piano in front of his students and try out a passage over and again until he was satisfied with what he heard. He could work on a few measures for half an hour, and his students considered it a great achievement if they finished the exposition of a movement by the end

50

Judit Frigyesi

of the class. No shades of the performance went unnoticed, nothing was secondary, not even the slightest nuance. Technique, however, was not what mattered. Weiner criticized any manifestation of virtuosity that was not subservient to the essence of a piece. He would call violinists to the piano to demonstrate a given section, maintaining that musical understanding was what created the right technique.37 For Weiner, performance meant the realization of an original text, the score. Performing music was not a career but a devotion to the discovery of the inner meaning behind this text. There was no place for personal interpretations: what one felt was irrelevant, since only the idea of the composer mattered. To be a musician was tantamount to feeling the intrinsic idea of a musical piece, the idea of the composer. Although this "idea" was impossible to verbalize or define in exact terms, Weiner was convinced that it existed. That is, he knew in his mind what was the perfect performance of any given piece. A story is told that a student once found Weiner in a restaurant a few minutes before the start of a concert featuring an international celebrity. Surprised, he asked Weiner whether he planned to attend. "Well," responded Weiner, "there are two possibilities. Either the fellow plays the piece the way I think it should be played, and then why go. Or else he plays it differently, and then it is going to be wrong."38 Weiner did not go to hear even his own students; he was not interested in the "finished product." For him, rehearsal was not the preparation for a show but rather part of the search for the perfect realization of a musical thought. A piece could not be "learned" once and for all. It had to be created again with each performance; and thus the life of a musician was an eternal journey in the search for the musicalspiritual message embedded in the text, as expressed through constant study and playing. Weiner was indifferent toward success, title and career—he could study with anyone and felt compelled to teach everyone. For Weiner, the world was limited to an area of a few square miles in the center of Budapest, bounded on one side by the Academy of Music and on the other by his home. He never married, almost never traveled. He refused to leave Hungary or even Budapest, was indifferent to politics and understood nothing of the political developments that directly threatened his life with the onset of the Second World War. The German occupation found Weiner totally perplexed; he was either unable or unwilling to focus on anything besides music. Denes Koromzay, a former member of the Hungarian String Quartet, has told the following story: After living in Holland for several years, he returned to Budapest in 1947 and paid a visit to his teacher. In the meantime Europe had experienced a war, Budapest was in ruins, millions of Jews had been massacred and Weiner himself had only escaped by chance. But when Weiner opened the door, the first thing he asked Koromzay was how he would solve a performance problem in the transition in Mozart's A Major String Quartet.39 Several of Weiner's students saw an almost religious devotion in Weiner's love for music. Bela Ambrozy, for instance, wrote the following: He believed in music almost as in God . . . whose law is unalterable and irrevocable. A God who can raise and cast down, who can reward and punish, whose law is to follow

Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

51

and in whose spirit to create ... is an eternal joy even if reached through self-torment and self-reproach . . . Weiner's artistic belief excluded any kind of compromise. For him, music was the absolute truth, with which one cannot bargain. He turned toward music with self-tormenting submission, and he was a merciless judge of himself and of his students.40

Weiner rarely if ever mentioned his Jewish background. Very little is known about his early life, and it is likely that he had little if any Jewish education.41 Nonetheless, there are astonishing similarities between Weiner's world view and that of pious East European Jews, the difference being that his life revolved around neither the Torah nor the Talmud but rather the compositions of the great masters. These similarities are significant enough to be noted in some detail, since they illuminate some of the specifically "Jewish" aspects of his approach—even if he himself was unaware of them. In Orthodox Judaism, religious devotion is expressed first and foremost by the realization of the sacred text through chanting and studying. The perfect articulation and study of the Torah and the Talmud does not exist for its own sake but is meant to convey a spiritual message whose attainment is the purpose of life. The study of the Torah can never be finished. The aim is not simply to know but to reach and maintain a state of religious spirituality, by means of a constant search for truth as it reveals itself in the text. Because of this, learning is not a tool but a way of life. No one seeking knowledge can be denied it; each person can be taught to uncover something of the essence. In Judaism, one may find the same circular thought that Weiner taught in connection with the feeling of the performer: praying and learning can only be done with devotion and with inner feeling, yet this feeling is not arbitrary, it is not anything that "comes from inside," but is rather a religious feeling already internalized, a spirit developed through learning. Similarly, the narrowness of Weiner's life and that of an Orthodox Jew derives from the principle that the real world is to be sought not in the appearance or manifestations of material life but rather in spiritual thought. Everything outside this realm is irrelevant; nothing that comes from without can alter or obliterate it. Thus, even events as momentous as the Holocaust are hardly noticed. In this sense, Weiner functioned much like the great tzaddik who, with his disciples, danced and sang his way to the crematorium in a total spiritual trance. For both men, "life was elsewhere, not in this world."42 Weiner's preoccupation with minute detail also has its parallels in Judaism. He immersed himself in detail not for pedagogical reasons but because every little section had a life of its own, an essence that had to be brought to life if one was honest about one's search for musical truth. This attitude is in accordance with the Jewish conception of learning in which no detail of the Torah or the Talmud is unimportant. Among the East European Jews, this general idea of learning is transmitted as well in the domain of music. Chemjo Vinaver described the same devotion to detail among the Karlin hassidim and in the work of the legendary Jewish composer of nigunim, the Old Modzhitzer. After Vinaver transcribed some of his melodies with the help of the Modzhitzer's son, he was led to the rabbi's room—so that the Modzhitzer could judge for himself if the pieces were transcribed "with precision, including all their fine points." As the aged Rebbe listened to Vinaver, he

52

Judit Frigyesi

paid attention to all little details, "watching carefully lest a tinge would be missing of all the 'sighs' and 'moans' that he ever composed."43 Weiner, for his part, was known for his utmost sensitivity to what Europeans call agogik, that is, the finest nuances of musical articulation. The Weinerian conception of art described above was central to the aesthetic of modern Hungarian music. His belief in the mystical power of music and in the musician's mission to serve without compromise was wholeheartedly embraced by the Jewish circles of modern Hungarian musical life. It is expressed, for instance, in the pedagogical ideals of Margit Varro, a famous piano teacher of the Fodor school, the first woman professor of the Academy of Music and of various music schools in the United States, and an intimate friend of Weiner. In her words: Actually, every intense musical experience of a higher order is mystical in nature. This is illustrated by the unmistakable similarity between musical experiences and mystical experience; the first is withdrawal from all disturbing environmental impressions, and a tendency to seek isolation in the depth of one's own inner being. . . . This act of closing oneself off from the outside world makes possible a state of calm and inner readiness conducive to the greatest possible concentration. The total dedication of attention and of all one's spiritual forces to the religious or aesthetic experience at hand leads in turn to self-identification with that which is evoked by that experience. In music, it is the ideal world of the great masters with which one identifies oneself; or, in general, one seeks to become one and enter into a mystic union with something higher.44

Given the absence of documentation, Weiner's knowledge of and attitude toward Orthodox Judaism must remain a matter of speculation, and in this regard little is known about the many Jewish musicians who believed in the same ideals. It is clear, however, that not only for Weiner, but for many Hungarian bourgeois Jews, real "Jewishness" was primarily a particular attitude rather than an ethnic quality. Such a stance may seem to be nothing more than self-surrender in the name of art and civilization. Gershom Scholem would surely have criticized it as showing "the readiness of many Jews to invent a theory to justify the sacrifice of their Jewish existence"—a statement he applied to assimilated German Jews.45 Indeed, if we can believe Margarete Susman, the German Jews by and large accepted that "the vocation of Israel as a people is not self-realization, but self-surrender for the sake of a higher, transhistorical goal. . . . The original meaning of the Jewish idea is the absorption of this people by other peoples."46 But the Hungarian theory of assimilation was different. It was perhaps best verbalized by Bence Szabolcsi, who was the founder of Hungarian musicology and thus an active and influential member of Hungarian musical life, and at the same time someone with a deep interest in the fate of the Hungarian Jews.47 His father, Miksa Szabolcsi, was a prominent member of the Jewish bourgeoisie, active in the creation of a coherent ideology for modern Hungarian Jewry: His famous weekly Egyenl'bseg (Equality) was a model of how Jewish identity could be expressed in assimilation. The elder Szabolcsi's ideas greatly influenced and were sometimes further developed by his musicologist son. As did many of the assimilated Jews in Hungary, they believed that the center of Judaism was represented by the prophetic tradition, that is, by the conviction that truth and morality are superior to the idea of nation. In Bence Szabolcsi's words:

Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

S3

The prophets are the living morality of the Jewish organism. If we consider the greatest among them we have to say that they were the uncompromising conscience of mankind even to the point of suicide. . . . There was no other nation—and there could have been no other—that was able to draw to such an extent the consequences of an uncompromising human self-conscience, even when it meant political suicide. ... It was suicide, but that suicide brought at the same time the survival, the immortality and eternity of Judaism, the tragic self-annihilation in the name of what is eternal. [It is only through Judaism that] the essence, the most important and maybe only vocation of the human organism is maintained, which is to bring such consciousness to life . . ,"48

In contrast to Susman's view of Jewish self-sacrifice in the service of some ambiguous "higher, transhistorical goal," Szabolcsi called for a decidedly Jewish form of sacrifice—or "suicide"—a consistent, uncompromising quest for morality. It is in this way that Jews remain Jews, the "consciousness of mankind."49 Szabolcsi's idea that the prophetic tradition expresses the essence of Judaism was shared by many of the assimilated Jews in Hungary. For instance, Bela Tabor's conception that the ancient and most significant heritage of the Jews is essentially a monumental and yet unfulfilled moral task amounts to the same idea.50 That there was something Jewish in this ideal (even though it was not only Jewish) occurred as well to some outside of Jewish circles. The Hungarian poet Endre Ady saw clearly as early as 1905 that his fight for Hungary's modernization could be carried out only with the help of the "restless people of Aaron."51 Ady not only recognized the Jewish prophet in himself, but attested (in his poetry) to his alliance with those who "are proudly condemned [or "castigated"] and "eternally alarmed."52 Thus, Jews and non-Jews of the radical intelligentsia were united to form a new "consciousness of Hungary." Szabolcsi's image of "the prophet as the uncompromising conscience of mankind even to the point of suicide . . ." is a paradigm of modern Hungarian radicalism: there is simply no poet, writer, composer, journalist or even humorist who did not believe in this mission and who did not consider himself in some way to be a "prophet." The missionary objective of the Hungarian bourgeois artist should not be equated with a political program. Although Hungarian bourgeois artists often shared a clearly pronounced political platform, it was not necessarily the political ideal that united them. Their commitment was to an ideal of morality and value, and they abhorred superficiality, compromise or anything that avoided what was essential. Of course, not all members of the radical bourgeoisie were equally devoted, talented or strong, and in any case, the prophetic attitude did not suit everyone's temperament. But they all believed that it was their responsibility to live up to high standards, to remain faithful to the "truth" in their own domain. And this in itself was a political stand, since in the nationalist atmosphere of the early twentieth century most of what was proclaimed to have value was in fact superficial and based on appearances. This is the context in which seemingly apolitical art pieces took on political meaning and became threatening to the social establishment. Bartok, for instance, was a shy person, unable to involve himself actively in public affairs. Nevertheless, he came to be seen as the symbol of a political attitude in Hungary, not because of the extramusical connotations of his pieces but because of his seriousness and

54

Judit Frigyesi

uncompromisingly modern style. Bartok came to represent a different ideology, one that claimed the right of novel, "Western" ideas to be an inherent part of national culture. In and of itself, this modernity had a political significance—a circumstance immediately understood by his audience and critics, who saw in Bartok's work the musical manifestation of a new human attitude, a common desire for change in the prevailing rules of social order.53 In sum, there were three different though interrelated elements of a conception of art that was characteristic of Hungarian modernism in general and expressed in a specific way in Hungarian musical life. First was an uncompromising commitment to artistic perfection, the notion that art's essence could be revealed only through the eternal quest for truth. (It is likely that only in Hungary was the priority of the learning process—"the path to perfection"—asserted in such an extreme manner that it took precedence over the concert performance, even though communication of the artistic message to the society would seem to be the artist's main goal.) Second was the quasi-sacralization of the score, the belief that the artistic message could be attained only through the study of the written text. And third (an idea that followed naturally from the first two), art's real essence was beyond what could be defined by context, whether national, social or historical. The connection among these elements was self-evident: the belief in the eternal value of music as revealing some human essence could not be reconciled with the idea of "functional" or "national" music. If artistic truth existed, it could not be conditional. The paradox of the Hungarian's self-identification with this ideology was that the values that appeared at its core were meaningful in and of themselves, independent of national and ethnic considerations, yet could also—and were—invested with deep ethnic meaning. It is precisely at the moment when one seemed to be speaking about the universal truth of art that it was linked to an ethnic ideology, the prophetic tradition of Judaism. Could it be said, then, that the character of Hungarian musical life was "somewhat Jewish?" It may well be, but such a statement would be perhaps more confusing than illuminating. There can be no doubt that the ideals of the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia influenced considerably Hungarian intellectual life, or at least reinforced certain tendencies. Nevertheless, to consider this cultural milieu as belonging to any ethnicity would defy its very raison d'etre for many of those who participated in it. Modern bourgeois musical life was appealing for both the enlightened Jews and non-Jewish Hungarians precisely because, while it was possible to note within it national-ethnic roots, it was not necessary to acknowledge them. Those members of the assimilated Jewry who sought to escape their Jewish heritage, regarding it as "the past," felt comfortable participating in the musical life because there they could forget about their Jewishness. It must be remembered that, for radical intellectuals in general, this artistic life was the only possible escape from the horrors of the twentieth century—an escape into a world free of ethnic, nationalist and racist hatred. At the same time, there was another stratum of the Hungarian Jewish intelligentsia for whom the connection between modern artistic and Jewish philosophy was essential. In their view, the modern artistic ideology was a natural continuation of the Jewish tradition. In the way that ethnic neutrality was essential to the first

Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

55

group, the acknowledgment of a "Jewish connection" was the raison d'etre of the second group. What mattered for them was not whether Hungarian musical life could be considered Jewish but that they themselves were able to remain Jews by participating in it. There were probably many among the assimilated Jews somewhere between the two groups who felt this connection even while never speaking openly about it. And then there were others, such as Bence Szabolcsi or Bela Tabor, who had no doubt about the Jewish character of modern artistic life, even though they struggled with a proper scholarly explanation for it throughout their lives. To a far greater extent than might have been expected, the "prophetic ideal" extolled by Szabolcsi served as a model for bourgeois Hungarian Jewry. However, precisely because it was an ideal and not a pragmatic formulation of Jewishness, it failed to provide a sturdy underpinning for Hungarian Jewish ethnic identity. Even today, Hungarian Jews suffer from confusion and a sense of failure and isolation. In part, this is because the prophetic ideal presented Judaism as an attitude, a mentality that lacked any clearly defined objective. Excluded from the ideal were all those manifestations of Judaism that involved material and ethnic culture, even though these were just as relevant and honest. While the problems caused by the lack of an ethnically conceived Jewishness cannot be minimized, it must be said that in the domain of bourgeois life and culture there was a real alliance between Jews and Hungarians. In this alliance the Jews were partners, creators and leaders—not at all inferior to their Christian Hungarian contemporaries. The spiritual ideal of the Hungarian-Jewish bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century survived its creators; it did not disappear with Ady, Bartok and Weiner but has remained an important ingredient of the Hungarian consciousness to this day. Even if their personalities and styles may be different, central figures of modern Hungarian music lack nothing of the intensity of the Weinerian approach. It is enough to think of such personalities, Jews and non-Jews, as the composer Gyorgy Kurtag, the pianist Zoltan Kocsis, the conductor Albert Simon or, among the composers of the younger generation, Zoltan Jeney and Gyula Csapo. Jews, who are still a vital force in this culture, feel as they did sixty years ago that this "secularly spiritual" life is fully theirs. And while it is hard to predict how lasting such a situation will be, this generation can repeat what Bence Szabolcsi once wrote to his contemporaries: "I do not know whether there is a Hungarian Jewry and whether there will be one in the future, but it is certain that Hungarians Jews have existed. There are many among us who saw them in front of our own eyes . . ,"54

Notes 1. Ivan Vitanyi, "Nemzeten beliil vagy kivul?" ("Within the Nation or Outside of It?"), Nepszabadsdg, 3 March 1990. Emphasis is by Vitanyi. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Hungarian in this article are mine. 2. Gyorgy V. Domokos, "A kisebbseg es a zsarnoksag" ("Minority and Dictatorship"), ibid., 29 April 1990. 3. Hungarian antisemitism is the topic of a number of recently published articles, many of them based on interviews and sociological research in Hungary. To understand how strong

56

Judit Frigyesi

the old stereotypes and prejudices continue to be, see Laszlo Frick, "Jo Ist6czy el-e meg?" ("Is Good Ist6czy Still Alive?") Mult es Jov'o", 1, no. 1 (1989), 15-22. 4. A personal note is called for here. I was both an eyewitness to and participant in Hungarian musical life in the 1960s and 1970s. Together with Vitanyi and many others, I believe that the modern Hungarian musical and intellectual culture has been traditionally symbolized by the names of such leading figures as Ady and Bartok. Because these ideas are so deeply felt, it is possible that some of my arguments and conclusions here are founded on subjective judgments, certain arguments being either suppressed subconsciously or else embraced, depending on my own sense of what we—Hungarian musicians and intellectuals—experienced and believed. 5. Liszt's music was generally regarded as German, except for his pieces in the more entertaining genres, the rhapsodies, for example. As Bartok wrote in 1905: "I must say that Bach, Beethoven, Shubert and Wagner have written such quantities of distinctive and characteristic music that all the music of France, Italy and the Slavs combined is nothing by comparison! Of all other composers, Liszt comes closest to the Big Four, but he seldom wrote Hungarian music." Letter to Irmy Jurkovics, Paris, 15 August 1905, in Bela Bartok Letters, ed. Jdnos Demeny, trans. Peter Balaban and Istvan Farkas (New York: 1971), 50. 6. See Tibor Tallian, "'Urn 1900 nachweisbar: Skizze zu einem Gruppenbild mit Musikern," Studia Musicologica 24 (1982), 497-503. 7. See, for instance, Janos Seprodi's criticism of Jeno Hubay's operas in his "Hubay Jeno," Ethnographia (1902), 198. Quoted in Zoltan Horvath, Magyar szdzadfordulo. A mdsodik reformnemzedek tortenete, 1886-1914 (Turn-of-the-Century Hungary: The History of the Second Reform Generation, 1886-1914) (Budapest: 1961), 220. 8. Letter from Bela Bartok to his mother, Budapest, 11-12 March 1903, in Bartok Bela csalddi levelei (Family Letters of Bela Bartok), ed. Bela Bartok, Jr. (Budapest: 1981), 93. By changing two letters in the wordfilharmonikusok ("philharmonics"), Bartok created a humorous non-word, fiilharmonikdsok, that might be translated as "ear-accordion-players." The piece in question is the composition entitled Hangulatok [Moods] by the Jewish composer Odon Farkas. See Bela Bartok Jr., Apam eletenek kronikdja (Chronicle of My Father's Life) (Budapest: 1981), 52. The last sentence is quoted from another letter and refers to a festive Hungarian concert celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Philharmonic Society. Bartok to his mother, Budapest, 11 May 1903, in Bartok csalddi levelei, 100. 9. Kornel Abranyi, Magyar zene a 19-ik szdzadban (Hungarian Music in the 19th Century) (Budapest: 1900), 554. 10. Because of the specific historical context, the term "Gypsy" has been used in this article rather than the more appropriate and currently used term "Roma." 11. These songs are referred to by different names in the English-language literature; in Hungary they are presently called simply magyar notdk ("Hungarian tunes"), as opposed to the term "folk song," which is understood normally as the oral tradition of the peasants. At the turn of the century, the term "folk song" had no such specific meaning (see, for example, the writings of Bertalan Fabo). In scholarly works today, magyar notdk are also referred to as nepies mlidalok, "folk-like art songs." 12. Bence Szabolcsi, A XIX. szdzad magyar romantikus zeneje (Hungarian Romantic Music in the 19th Century) (Budapest: 1951), 140. 13. Ibid., 140. 14. Much has been written about the style and development of the verbunkos, its influence on nineteenth-century symphonic style (on Mosonyi, Liszt, Erkel, etc.), on Gypsy music and on nineteenth-century popular songs. The best essay on the verbunkos is still Szabolcsi in ibid. See also idem, A magyar zenetortenet kezikonyve, ed. Ferenc Bonis (Budapest: 1947, rpt. 1979), which appeared in an English translation as A Concise History of Hungarian Music (Budapest: 1964); Balint Sarosi, Gypsy Music (Budapest: 1975); Laszlo Dobszay, Magyar zenetortenet (A History of Hungarian Music), (Budapest: 1975); Geza Papp (ed.), Hungarian Dances, 1784-1810, Vol. 7, Musicalia Danubiana (Budapest: 1986); and Abranyi, Magyar zene. 15. The issue of the status of verbunkos and Gypsy music at the turn of the century is so

Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

57

complex that it can hardly be summarized without substantial generalizations. Both verbunkos and Gypsy music had developed various village and urban branches, which were very different in their musical style and conceptionalization. Not all of these musical styles were associated with the ideology I describe here. Moreover, while Gypsies were the primary professional musicians in Hungary from the nineteenth century, not all of the music they played was considered "Gypsy music." The term appears here as it is commonly used in Hungary, that is, not as a designation of all types of music played by Gypsies but as the name of a particular urban restaurant repertoire and style that became the main popular music in Hungary in the nineteenth century. For further detail on the Hungarian attitude toward Gypsy music, see Judit Frigyesi, "Bela Bartok and the Concept of Nation and Volk in Hungary" (Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, New Orleans, 1987). 16. According to popular opinion, Hungarians are not suited for playing musical instruments; this is an activity for "inferior creatures." There was no historical basis to claim that instrument playing was antithetical to the nature of the Hungarian, and the prominence of Gypsy musicians in the performance of popular music does not predate the nineteenth century. Yet this belief became so deeply ingrained in Hungarian consciousness that historians, presumably with the best intentions, took any reference to violinists—even in centuries-old documents—as proof of the presence of Gypsies in Hungary. See Sarosi, Gypsy music, ch. 4. The contradictions of the reception of Gypsy music and its performers are analyzed in Szabolcsi, A XIX. szdzad magyar romantikus zeneje. 17. Abranyi, Magyar zene, 24, 126. 18. See Zoltan Reti, Rozsavolgyi Mark (Budapest: 1975), 40-41. 19. Abranyi, Magyar zene, 105. 20. Translated text from Istvan Bibo's article, "Zsidokerdes Magyarorszagon 1944 utan" ("The Jewish Question in Hungary After 1944"), in Zsidokerdes, asszimilacio, antiszemitizmus. Tanulmdnyok a zsidokerdesM a huszadik szdzadi Magyarorszagon. (The Jewish Question, Assimilation and Antisemitism: Essays on the Jewish Question in TwentiethCentury Hungary), ed. Peter Hanak (Budapest: 1984), 233-234. 21. The nationalist spirit of the Hungarian romantic symphony was manifest in its relationship to the verbunkos style and in its heroic-nationalist titles and programs. The same is true for much of the piano repertoire and even more for nineteenth-century operas, which almost without exception had Hungarian national themes for their plots. See Szabolcsi, A xix. szdzad magyar romantikus zeneje. 22. See Zoltan Kodaly, "Confession. A Lecture Given to the Nyugat Circle of Friends (1932)," in his The Selected Writings of Zoltan Kodaly (London: 1974), 210. See also Kodaly's letter to Emma Gruber, Charlottenburg, 22 December 1906, in Kodaly Zoltan levelei, ed. Dezso Legany (Budapest: 1982), 29-30. See also Bartok's letter to Irmy Jurkovics, 1905, in Bartok Letters, 50. 23. See also Bartok's letter to his mother, Budapest, 12 November 1902, in Bartok csalddi levelei, 74-75. 24. Bartok wrote to his mother on 16 October 1902, When I registered for the composition class, the secretary told me, well, you'd better write some music now. I cited my symphony. He said okay, but why don't you write— he said—something Hungarian. I began to laugh. Then he said, that's how you all are. When we tell you to write something Hungarian you all begin to laugh. Then the director came by and drew my attention to Arany's "Rodostro." He said, you could write something on that and weave in the tune of the Rakoczy march—well, thank you very much! (Bartok csalddi levelei, 70). The secretary was Geza Moravcsik, a senior administrator at the Academy of Music, and the director was the composer Odon Mihalovich. Bartok refers here to his Symphony in E flat, DD 68. Rodosto was a town in Turkey where Ferenc Rakoczy lived in exile after the defeat of his revolution.

58

Judit Frigyesi

25. In his youthful enthusiasm, Bartok sometimes used verbunkos-style themes to represent negative or grotesque ideas, while the pure and simple folk song was always conceived as positive. See, for instance, the musical emblems of his main characters in The Wooden Prince. 26. There is very little evidence concerning the instrumental music of the Hungarian Jews of the villages, although it is clear they had such a tradition. On the basis of material received from my informants, we can assume that, apart from a generally known Jewish repertoire, various styles of Hungarian instrumental folk music, as well as a broader international dance repertoire, was known among the Jews. 27. Zsido Lexikon, ed. Peter Ujvari (Budapest: 1929). 28. Composers included Sandor Jemnitz, Pal Arma (Imre Weisshaus), Pal Kadosa, Gyorgy Kosa, Antal Molnar, Aladar Rado, Bela Reinitz, Albert Siklos and Leo Weiner. Among the conductors were Antal Dorati, Antal Fleischer, Vilmos Komor, Emil Lichtenberg, Jeno (Eugene) Ormandi, Frigyes (Fritz) Reiner, Frigyes Sandor, Gyorgy (George) Solti and Gyorgy (George) Szell. The group of violinists included Jelly Aranyi, Jozsef Bloch, Endre Gertler, Stefi Geyer, Rezso Kemeny, Jozsef Szigeti and Zoltan Szekely. Among the pianists were Ivan Engel, Annie Fischer, Geza Frid, Lajos Hernadi, Agi Jambor, Pal Kadosa, Gyorgy Sandor, Istvan Thoman, Imre Ungar, Tivadar Szanto and Margit Varro. Also worthy of mention were the cellists Pal Hiitter, David Popper and Adolf Schiffer, and the opera singers Gitta Alpar, Oszkar Kalman and Mihaly Szekely. 29. Some of the important teachers were Victor Herzfeld, Pal Kadosa, Imre Keszi, Albert Siklos, Leo Weiner, Lajos Hernadi, Istvan Thoman, Imre Ungar, Tivadar Szanto, Margit Varro, Paula Braun and DezsiS Rados. 30. Rozsavolgyi, Kalman Nador, Ferenc Bard, and Zipser and Konig were well-known music publishing houses. 31. Among the music historians and critics were Izor Beldi, Bertalan Fabo, Geza Falk, Gyula Fodor, Sandor Jemnitz, Lajos Karpath, Jozsef Keszler, Karoly Kristof, Erno Lanyi, Akos Laszlo, Antal Molnar, Geza Molnar and Bence Szabolcsi. 32. Bartok to his mother, Budapest, 26-30 October and 5 October 1901, Bartok csaladi levelei, 48-49, 47. A few months later, after accepting a new student, Bartok noted with relief: "At last I have a Christian student" (to his mother, Budapest, after 24 March 1902, ibid., 60. See also the letter to his mother written on 19 April 1901, ibid., 40). 33. Bartok's formative years in this regard are analyzed in Judit Frigyesi, "Bela Bartok and Hungarian Nationalism: The Development of Bartok's Social and Political Ideas at the Turn of the Century (1899-1903)," (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1989), ch. 1. 34. On Bartok's relationship with Jews, see Sandor Scheiber, "A magyar zsidosag szellemi elete a szazadfordulotol. Kitekintessel Bartok Belara," Folklor es targytortenet (Folklore und Motivgeschichte) (Budapest: 1977), vol. 2, 206-218. 35. Bartok to his mother, Budapest, 1 June 1903, Bartok csaladi levelei, 103. 36. Weiner was appointed chamber music teacher of the Academy of Music in 1918 and taught there until his retirement in 1957, whereupon he continued to give lessons and conduct rehearsals in his home until his death in 1960. Weiner's contribution has always been overshadowed by those of Bartok and Kodaly and neither his compositional output nor his teaching have received sufficient scholarly attention. Yet it is generally agreed that if there exists a Hungarian school of performance, it is primarily because of Weiner's several decades of teaching. Much anecdotal material about Weiner can be found in the memorial volume Emlekeink Weiner Leorol, ed. Melinda Berlasz (Budapest: 1985). I would like to thank her for reading this article and sharing her ideas with me. 37. Ivan Waldbauer told me that Weiner used to say to his students: "Szervesen jdtssza!," which means something like "play it organically!" Also see Andras Mihaly's recollection in Emlekeink, 150. 38. This anecdote circulates in several versions. See, for instance, ibid., 146. Another musician, Peter Solymos, remembered that when he and other students invited Weiner to

Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

59

listen to their concert, the professor said, "I know the piece and I know you, too, so why should I go?" Ibid., 185. 39. I heard this story from Koromzay; it also appears in ibid., 123-124. 40. Bela Ambrozy in ibid., 16. 41. So far my efforts to document Weiner's possible experiences with Judaism have been unsuccessful. Weiner's students do not remember him talking about the issue. In all likelihood, as noted, he grew up in an assimilated Jewish household; for a while he even went by the name of Vandor. 42. I heard the story about the tzaddik from the cantor Jeno Roth in Budapest, 1977. 43. Chemjo Vinaver, Anthology of Hassidic Music, ed. Eliyahu Schleifer (Jerusalem: 1985), 148-149. On the music of the Karlin hasidim, see ibid., 34-37. 44. Margit Varro, "Imponderable Elements of Musicality," The Musical Quarterly (1940), reprinted in A Teacher in Two Worlds: Margit Varro, ed. Mariann Abraham (Budapest: 1991), 380. 45. Gershom Scholem, "Jews and Germans," in his On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: 1976), 89. 46. Quoted in ibid., 89. 47. Bence Szabolcsi (1899-1973) started his career in the 1920s, continuing the work of the first generation of Hungarian music historians, his older contemporaries Antal Molnar, Ervin Major and Aladar Toth. Szabolcsi's activity related to two domains: with Ervin Major, he can be considered the founder of scholarly study of the history of Hungarian art music, and he was primarily responsible for creating an establishment for musicology in Hungary. Szabolcsi edited the first Hungarian music dictionary (together with Ervin Major in 19261929 and with Aladar Toth in 1930-1931), the journals Zenei Szemle (Musical Observer), and Studia Musicologica, established the Department of Musicology in 1951 (with Denes Bartha and Zoltan Kodaly) and the Bartok Archive in 1961 (from which the present Hungarian Institute for Musicology developed). As a result of his work, Hungarian musicology gained an international reputation and became a respected field within the Hungarian scholarly world. He wrote numerous books and articles on a variety of topics of general and Hungarian music history. I am greatly indebted to Gyorgy Kroo for letting me read his unpublished book on the life and work of Bence Szabolcsi, which provided a valuable account of Szabolcsi's background and ideas concerning the Hungarian-Jewish question. 48. Szabolcsi conceptualized these ideas while translating Simon Dubnov's History of the Jews into Hungarian. In translating Dubnov, he added some of his own thoughts to the original text. These additions were first identified by Gyorgy Kroo, who published his findings in his article "Szabolcsi Bence (Szellemi arckepvazlat a harmincas evekb'o1 1930) ("Bence Szabolcsi [A Cultural Portrait Sketch from the 1930s]") Mult es Jov'o, (1989) 2, 3139. Excerpts of Szabolcsi's text as published by Kroo served as the basis for my translation. 49. Szabolcsi's statement helps clarify why many Hungarian Jews did not support Zionism. Szabolcsi considered the Jews of Palestine inferior in their Jewishness to the Jews of the diaspora: "For those segments of the Jews who seek their human dignity, freedom and a positive attitude toward life, Palestine is the only solution, the only place of rescue now and perhaps for a long time. But the other—perhaps smaller but perhaps also better—part of the Jews can only fulfill its most important duty in the service of humanity in the diaspora." Letter from 1935, quoted in Kroo, "Szabolcsi Bence," 37-38. 50. Bela Tabor, A zsidosag ket utja (The two roads of Judaism) (Budapest: 1939, rpt. 1990), 34-35. This polemic—a search for a solution for Jewish identity within the context of modern Hungarian society—is one of several writings created in a similar vein during the 1930s. An excellent summary of Hungarian Jewish cultural history between the wars is the unpublished paper of Miklos Szabolcsi, "Valtozasok a zsido szellemi eletben 1935 koriil: magyar es zsido identitas-keresesek" ["Changes in Jewish Intellectual Life Around 1935: Searching for Hungarian and Jewish Identity"], presented at the conference "Jewish Intellectual Life in Hungary Between the Two Wars," Budapest 1992. 51. From an article by Endre Ady that appeared in Figyel'o, 1905; quoted in Sandor

60

Judit Frigyesi

Scheiber, "Idok kovaszai. Ady kommentar" ("The Ferments of Time: A Commentary on Ady") in his Folklor es targytortenet, vol. 2, 425. 52. In Hungarian, buszke karhozok and orok riasztgatok. The phrases are from Ady's poem A belyeges sereg (The Branded Host), in which Ady describes himself as first silently following, then proudly marching with the Jews. 53. Antal Molnar wrote about Bartok in 1917 after the first performance of The Wooden Prince: "There is a deep determination in the greatest minds of our time to work toward a reform of our corrupt bourgeois era, to replace with a new system this regime which corrupts humanity with . . . lies and misery. The genius . . . expresses the great pains and beautiful dreams of its era with compelling force." The quote appears in Janos Demeny, "Molnar Antal," Kortdrs 12, no. 1 (January 1968), 162. See also idem, '"Ejszakai esztetizalas'— Bevezeto Csath Geza zenei evadjaihoz" ("Talking Aesthetics at Night: An Introduction to the Musical Seasons of Geza Csath") Kortdrs 11, no. 4 (June 1967), 940-947; Janos Breuer (ed.), Zenei irdsok a Nyugatban (Musical Writings in the Nyugat [West]) (Budapest: 1978); and "Tributes, Recollections, Critiques," in Arion. Nemzetkozi koUbi almanach (Almanach International de Poesie), ed. Gyorgy Somlyo (Budapest: 1982). 54. Szabolcsi, letter from 1935, quoted in Kroo, "Szabolcsi Bence," 38.

New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews Edwin Seroussi (BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY)

The redefinition of meaning and content in a musical tradition exposed to radical new circumstances does not necessarily imply the extinction of its identity but rather its power to revitalize itself. In discussing the social and cultural transformations affecting the Sephardic Jews since the mid-nineteenth century, several authors have raised the likelihood of the eventual disappearance of vital portions of their musical traditions.1 As indicated in its title, this article takes an alternative point of view. The phrase "new directions" assumes a departure from established patterns of musical creativity and behavior, not necessarily confined to the renewal of musical materials (e.g., new melodies added to the repertory), but also including changes in music appreciation, aesthetic values, performance practices and the social functions of music. Such changes, however, may be seen as part of a dynamic process in which music rooted in traditional repertories continues to be one of the most salient features contributing to the maintenance of a worldwide Sephardic Jewish identity. Before embarking on an analysis of some of the new directions indicated in the title, it is important to clarify two basic terms. "Sephardic" refers to all of the Jewish communities of the Ottoman empire and North Africa that continue to use JudeoSpanish as their vernacular language, as well as to the "Spanish-Portuguese" communities established by conversos in Western Europe. And "music" denotes all the musical expressions of these communities, encompassing diverse styles that serve different social functions, both secular and religious. The period under scrutiny ranges from the mid-nineteenth century until today. This time span is characterized by the destabilization of sociopolitical frameworks under which Sephardic communities in various places had evolved since the expulsion from Spain. Among the historical processes that affected the contemporary musical culture of the Sephardim are the conquest of northern Morocco by Spain in 1861, the final phases in the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire (starting with the independence of Bulgaria in 1879 and ending with the defeat of Turkey in the First World War) and the creation of the state of Israel. As noted, these tumultuous events resulted in the displacement of most Sephardic Jews to new locations in Israel, the Americas, Western Europe and even sub-Saharan Africa. Three subjects have been chosen for the present discussion: transformations in 61

62

Edwin Seroussi

synagogal music; the emergence of folk music research with its effect on Sephardic "national" composers; and the internationalization of the Sephardic folksong repertory through the popular music industry. There is no attempt here to arrive at a systematic typology of the patterns of musical change within contemporary Sephardic culture. Rather, this study is a preliminary overview of different processes propelling the rich variety of Sephardic music in an era of turmoil.2

New Paths in Synagogal Music The Jewish liturgy basically consists of the public performance of a body of fixed texts. Each communal tradition delivers these texts with diverse modes of "musicality," ranging from intoned recitation and cantillation to fully embellished vocal styles (in the case of non-Orthodox communities, instrumental accompaniment is sometimes found). Precisely because of its lack of canonization, the musical component of the Jewish liturgy has often been an arena in which different social and individual ideologies have clashed. By observing different musical constellations created within the performance of a synagogal service, it is possible to extrapolate the views of a community on such nonmusical matters as its relation to non-Jewish culture or its internal social relations.3 As a result of social upheavals, liturgical music reforms were adopted by several Sephardic communities in Central and Southeastern Europe—Vienna, Sarajevo, Ruse (Bulgaria) and Bucharest—in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century.4 In these communities, liturgical music became an issue of contention between the older and younger generations. Members of the latter were raised in an urban milieu in which the practice of Western classical music (whether by passive listening or active performance) had become an integral component of their musical culture, whereas older members of the community remained attached to the traditional repertories of Turkish extraction. A second factor influencing the younger generation was the availability of an alternative model for the performance of liturgical music, the modernized services of Ashkenazic synagogues in Central Europe. The eventual solution of these musical (and not only musical) conflicts was usually a compromise that allowed for substantial changes in the manner of performing liturgical music while maintaining the traditional musical repertory of the group. This was usually done by transcribing traditional melodic materials of eastern Mediterranean origin and then reworking them according to Western standards (see Figs, la and Ib). In this way, polyphonic choral arrangements, harmonizations, the use of music notation and the employment of professional personnel from outside the community became customary in those Sephardic congregations that adopted musical reforms, mostly in the period up until and including the First World War. Subsequent developments in Sephardic liturgical music can be analyzed in a similar manner as the early attempts at reform. The ingathering of most Sephardic communities of the diaspora in Eretz Israel, starting in the pre-First World War period and continuing into the 1960s, produced new constellations of Sephardic liturgical music. The synagogue in Israel plays a different social role than in the

Fig. la "Yah shema' 'evyonekha." Traditional Sephardic melody for Yom Kippur. Transcription in L. Algazi, Liturgie sephardie (Paris: 1958), 111-112 (fragment).

Fig. 1b Arrangement of "Yah shema' 'evyonekha" for voice and organ, from the Sephardic community in Bucharest, printed in M. Cohen-Linaru, Tehillot Israel, vol. 2 (Paris: 1910), 58-59.

63

64

Edwin Seroussi

diaspora. In a foreign environment, the synagogue is a center for communal socialization of the Jewish minority, but in Israel—especially in urban centers—it is most often used exclusively as a place of worship funded by local religious councils. Shlomo Deshen argued in a 1966 symposium that, from being a voluntary association as in the diaspora, synagogues in Israel were transformed into a state-sponsored base for political activism, particularly in the case of "ethnic" synagogues.5 Over time, however, integration overruled ethnicity and ethnic synagogues became rather an endangered species, except for small development towns where homogeneous ethnic populations could still be found. Sephardic Jews did not, as a rule, concentrate in defined areas (the case of the Bulgarian Sephardim in Jaffa and the Saloniki Sephardim in the southern Tel-Aviv and Haifa harbors are exceptions and refer mostly to immigrants from the first generation), but rather tended to settle in large urban centers where "mixed Sephardic" synagogues attracted immigrants from all non-Ashkenazic backgrounds. In this way, the concept of "Sephardic" synagogues became tantamount to "non-Ashkenazic," and the unifying factor in such synagogues was the prayer book of the Sephardic-Oriental rite. In mixed synagogues, liturgical music inevitably became a controversial issue between groups from different geographical origins. Within this new context, the choice of music was dictated by two major factors: the background of the majority among the regular worshippers and the background of the cantor(s). One can point to two main musical "schools" in these mixed synagogues: the North African, or Andalusian; and the Jerusalemite.6 The latter, based on the Jerusalemite Sephardic tradition (itself an offshoot of the mainstream, old Ottoman traditions from Turkey and Syria) became in Israel the basis of a "pan-Sephardic" style that is enthusiastically learned and performed by cantors from the non-Sephardic Oriental communities.7 The Andalusian style predominates where the majority of the synagogue worshippers are Moroccans, the largest non-Ashkenazic ethnic group in Israel. Major trends in the Sephardic liturgical music of Israel have also influenced Sephardic communities in Western Europe and the Americas. The reliance of many of these communities on cantors from Israel has shaped their own liturgical music, a situation that points to an implicit recognition of Israel as a center for Sephardic liturgical music while also revealing the problems faced by most communities in training local musical personnel. In this context, one has also to recall the impact of technological factors in the unification of Sephardic liturgical music styles. Recordings that become available from commercial and private sources foster the rapid dissemination of musical materials from Israel throughout the Jewish world. Yet despite the processes of unification of styles, one can detect attempts in some Sephardic synagogues in Israel and abroad to maintain (and sometimes revive) local styles from old diaspora centers such as Istanbul, Izmir, Rhodes, Saloniki, Tetuan and Tangier, an effort that has been reinforced by a number of recorded collections of Sephardic liturgical music.8 In the face of the increasingly mixed identity of Sephardic synagogal music in Israel and the dependence of many diaspora communities on imported Israeli personnel or recorded materials, the striving for local identity in the remnants of some

New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews

65

of the oldest Sephardic communities is striking. The best example of the astonishing stability of a liturgical repertory under sharply changing social circumstances is found in the old Spanish-Portuguese communities of Amsterdam, London and New York. This phenomenon is even more noticeable if one considers that a majority of the members of these congregations are either Ashkenazic Jews (in the case of New York) or North African and Oriental Jews (in the case of Amsterdam and London). In these congregations, the use of the traditional local music repertory is tantamount to the very identity of the community as "Spanish-Portuguese." Hazanim "imported" from other communities (particularly from the circuit of the Spanish-Portuguese communities themselves or from other Sephardic centers in North Africa and the East) must comply strictly with the local musical tradition. The most extreme in this connection used to be the community of Amsterdam,9 whereas the London and New York communities found compromises, from the mid-nineteenth century, to suit their new constituencies—most often expressed in the adoption of traditional music to multipart choral arrangements. The liturgy at the Shearith Israel SpanishPortuguese congregation in New York, for example, even includes in its services choral works by outstanding Ashkenazic synagogal composers such as Salomon Sulzer and Louis Lewandowsky.10 The struggle for the survival of Sephardic liturgical music as a means for ensuring group identity has led in some cases to especially successful musical endeavors. One example is a birkat hamazon (grace after meals) melody arranged by one of the deans of Sephardic liturgical music in the United States, the Reverend Samuel Benaroya from the Bikur Holim community in Seattle. To resist the dominant American Jewish practice of singing this benediction with a series of tunes derived from the Western-Ashkenazic tradition, Benaroya adopted several traditional Sephardic melodies (one of them from the hymn "Yigdal") and Mozart's "March of the Janissaries," which in his opinion can substitute for the American-Ashkenazic tunes. 11 Here, musical resemblance to the dominant culture's practice was the path chosen to ensure Sephardic musical identity. In conclusion, since the end of the nineteenth century Sephardic liturgical music has developed in many directions as it has responded to new environmental conditions, while at the same time maintaining its distinctive identity. The three paths of change—reform following Western European influences, abandonment of regional styles in favor of universal unification and, as a reaction to the latter, intensification of stylistic diversity—are joined by a fourth phenomenon, preservation.

Preservation, Research and the "National" Sephardic Composer A tangential result of the exposure of Sephardic musicians to Western musical concepts and practices is the emergence of Sephardic "national" composers. The concept of a national school of music is characteristic of late nineteenth-century European art music and is closely connected to the emerging interest in folklore as an independent and legitimate subject of study. One of the goals of folklore research was the uncovering of the true "ethos" of each particular European nationality,

66

Edwin Seroussi

believed to be found in the expressive arts of the "gatekeepers of national culture"— the peasantry. The incorporation of folk-song materials into "art" music compositions was one of the ultimate consequences of this trend.12 The collection of traditional Sephardic music also began in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the motivation in many instances was a concern to modernize the synagogal services, some collections actually aimed at fixing the oral tradition in musical notation for the sake of preservation. Examples are the works by Emanuel Aguilar and David Aharon de Sola from the Spanish-Portuguese community in London and those of the Italian composer and violinist Federico Consolo (also called Yehiel Nahmany Sefardi) in Livorno.13 The authors of these early compilations of Sephardic liturgical music did not pretend to inspire the creation of new music; the ground was not yet ripe for the idea of composing new works based on traditional music for performance in the concert hall. The first truly "national" Sephardic scholar-composer was Alberto Hemsi.14 Hemsi was born in Magnessia (near Izmir) in 1898 and educated in the modern Jewish school of the Alliance Israelite Universelle. Because of his early exposure to Western music, his career differed sharply from those of late nineteenth-century Turkish Jewish composers such as Shem Tov (Santo) Chikiar, Misirli Ibrahim and Isak Varon, all of whom excelled in classic Ottoman music.15 At an early stage of his life, Hemsi was sent to study composition in Italy. Upon his return to Turkey in 1920, he became aware of the decline in the traditional music of his own family and started a systematic collection of Judeo-Spanish folk songs that continued throughout most of his life. His first informants were his own mother and aunt. In 1928, he moved to Alexandria, Egypt, where he served as musical director of the Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue until compelled to move to Paris in 1957, where he died in 1975. Convinced that the traditional Judeo-Spanish repertory could survive only if arranged to suit the standards of Western art music, Hemsi composed vocal and instrumental works based on materials from his own field collection. His bestknown work is a series of ten fascicles of arrangements of Judeo-Spanish folk songs for voice and piano entitled Coplas Sefardies, published in the period from 1932 to 1972. Hemsi expressed his approach to this composition as follows: I did not harmonize these melodies; I simply tried to recreate with them the traditional spirit of the people in the manner I thought was most favorable and appropriate to the song's mood. [This is] a rescuing work in a triple process: reproduction-reconstructionrecreation.16 Hemsi can be considered the most characteristic example of a Sephardic "national" composer, although his was not an isolated case. Other Sephardic composers of renown followed the same trend, although their "Sephardic" works represent smaller fractions of their overall output. One such composer of notice was Bulgarianborn Menahem Bensussan (1901-1970). His composition Seven Sephardic Folksongs for voice and piano, found in a manuscript copy, shows a compositional approach similar to that of Hemsi (see Fig. 2). 17 Sometimes the rediscovery of a Sephardic identity occurs at a relatively late stage in the composer's career and is accompanied by some unusual event. Such is the case with Italian-born composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968). A de-

Fig. 2 "El rey que muntscho madruga." Fragment from a traditional Judeo-Spanish romance, in an unpublished arrangement for voice and piano by M. Bensussan (n.d.).

67

68

Edwin Seroussi

Fig. 3a "Az yashir Moshe." Traditional Sephardic melody for the biblical song (Ex. 15: 119), transcription of two versions—for the Sabbath and daily morning prayers—in F. Consolo, Sefer Shirei Israel (Florence: 1892), 9.

scendant of an old Italian Sephardic family, he found at his grandfather's house in 1925 a "tiny little book of musical manuscripts of Hebrew melodies." The impact of this discovery was immediately projected in his Tre corali su melodie ebraiche for piano (1926), where the third movement is clearly based on the traditional Sephardic melody for the Sabbath morning singing of "Shirat hayam" from Exodus 15:1-19 (see Figs. 3a and 3b).18 The sense of urgency to preserve traditional musical materials facing oblivion became acute after the Second World War. It is revealing that the leadership of the world Sephardic community, now organized under the umbrella of the World Sephardic Federation with headquarters in London (later Geneva), set as one of its goals during the 1950s the publication of music anthologies. Three works were published under the auspices of the federation: Chants Sephardies, collected and notated by Leon Algazi (1958), Liturgie Sephardie, edited by Ovadia Camhy (1959), and the first volume of Chants Judeo-Espagnols, collected by Isaac Levy (1959). Camhy's preface to Chants Sephardies expresses concerns similar to those of Hemsi several years before. In his eyes, the deterioration of the tradition was the main justification for these music publishing endeavors: "The World Sephardic Federation, which is charged, among other goals, with preserving the spiritual,

New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews

69

cultural and artistic treasures of the great Sephardic Jewish family, saw . . . that some of these treasures were in danger of disappearing without a trace." The musical anthologies published by the federation were based on field recordings of informants from Greece, Bosnia, Bulgaria and Rumania living at that time in Paris and London. The content of each book differs: Chants Sephardies is a comprehensive collection including samples from all musical genres, religious and secular; Liturgie Sephardie is, as its name implies, an anthology of music for the synagogue arranged according to the yearly cycle of prayers and based on the versions transmitted by two informants from a single tradition—the cantors Eleazar Abinum and Joseph Papo from Sarajevo; and Chants Judeo-Espagnols is an attempt to cover the repertory of Sephardic folksongs from diverse local traditions. The man behind most of the musical projects of the World Sephardic Federation was another Sephardic musician of note, Leon Algazi. Born in Rumania in 1890, he studied with Abraham Zvi Idelsohn in Jerusalem and was active in France from his early youth as a researcher and composer of synagogal music. Algazi was also an important figure in the establishment of modernized services in the Paris synagogues.19 In his instrumental and vocal composition, he employed traditional Sephardic melodies, an example being his arrangements of Judeo-Spanish songs published by Editions Salabert in Paris. Vivo e scalpitante

Fig. 3b Quotation of "Az yashir Moshe" in the piano composition Tre corali su melodie ebraiche (1926) by M. Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

70

Edwin Seroussi

It is interesting that, while Sephardic intellectuals in Europe were either engaged in preserving the traditional music legacy for the generations to come or else arranging it in Western styles, composers of the pre-Second World War period who remained in the Balkan states and Turkey were creating new music within the Western European art music tradition. One of these composers was Isaac Sion of Saloniki, who was particularly involved with the production of music on biblical subjects for epic theatrical productions—usually staged by pro-Zionist organizations. His work Ester (1932), whose score survived the Holocaust, shows no traces of traditional Sephardic melodies.20

Facing the Mass Media: Sephardic Folk Songs as a Genre of Popular Music The invention of the gramophone and the radio revolutionized the transmission of folk music and altered the course of its production and listening around the world. In fact, the contemporary popular music industry emerged partly on the basis of folk-music genres. As with other musical traditions, Sephardic folk songs were affected by these developments. Radios and recordings introduced Sephardic Jews to a wide variety of new popular music genres and led to the commercial recording of their own music. Consequently, the Sephardic folk repertories underwent both a disruption and a regeneration. The results of this process, which led to a further diversification of musical genres within the Sephardic tradition, bear certain similarities to what has occurred in the field of Sephardic literature. Relevant to this discussion is the application to music of the distinctions proposed by lacob Hassan between "religious-patrimonial," "traditional" and "adopted" genres in Sephardic literature.21 Religious-patrimonial music includes the liturgical and other religious melodies that are found exclusively among the Sephardic Jews. Traditional music applies to the melodies of secular songs that were transmitted by oral tradition and whose origins, though unknown, reflect the added influence of Spanish and Ottoman traditional music. Adopted music refers to all melodies introduced to the Sephardic repertory following increased contact with the Western culture since the mid-nineteenth century. This last category embraces compositions in the Western art music tradition by Sephardic composers as well as popular tunes of recent extraction set to new Judeo-Spanish texts by Sephardic bards. This latter type of song was strongly influenced by recordings of French songs that were widely circulated among the Sephardic communities of Southeast Europe and Turkey as well as genres of North and South American origin that became popular in France during the 1910s and 1920s, such as the fox-trot and the Argentinian tango.22 Commercial recordings of Sephardic music, which include songs of all three categories—patrimonial, traditional and adopted—date from the very beginning of the recording industry in the Middle East (Turkey and Egypt). Subsequently, the American recording industry (particularly in New York) generated new products; and more recently, the focus has been mainly in Israel, Spain and the Americas.23 Commercial recordings brought about new approaches to music-making and perfor-

New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews

71

mance, including the professionalization of performers, short takes (up to three minutes in the old 78 r.p.m. records), the addition of instrumental accompaniments to previously unaccompanied traditional vocal genres, the composition of new songs, the need for profits and the resultant attentiveness of producers and artists to the demands of a wider audience. Although the study of early Sephardic discography is a desideratum, it is clear that the recordings of two Turkish-born artists, Haim Effendi (his real surname was Bekhor Mordechai) and Isaac Algazi, were the earliest truly popular Sephardic artists who gained wide publicity through commercial recordings for British and German labels such as Columbia, Odeon, Pathe and Favorite.24 Effendi, born in Edirne, seems to have recorded as early as 1911, while Algazi, born in Izmir, recorded in Istanbul during the 1920s. Their wide repertory included liturgical pieces, traditional Judeo-Spanish songs (including old romances) and new songs in Judeo-Spanish. Both artists also recorded songs in Turkish, a proof that their popularity extended beyond the limits of the Jewish public.25 The extent of the influences of Western popular music on traditional Sephardic communities can be gauged from the reactions of local musicians to the music heard at European-oriented dance halls. An outstanding example is found in the work by composer Gershon Sadik and lyricist Moshe Kazes from Saloniki. In their attempt to resist the overwhelming wave of foreign influence and still preserve their cultural identity, they set new, original Judeo-Spanish texts to French or American dance tunes, which they then played with a small ensemble of Oriental instruments (called f algi a la lured). The texts themselves are characterized by their juicy social satire of dance hall music and contemporary European manners.26 Other recordings were made by Sephardic artists who immigrated to the United States, such as Victoria Hazzan and Jack Mayesh, both of whom recorded for Metropolitan Phonograph Records. As with their predecessors in Turkey, their records appealed to a wide audience that included non-Jewish immigrants from Turkey and Greece. These recordings were sold and distributed at the Balkan Record Store in New York City. A particularly interesting parallel development was the growing interest in Sephardic songs by non-Jewish Spanish musicians and musicologists, following the path set by prominent Spanish intellectuals and politicians such as Angel Pulido and Americo Castro, who at the turn of the century had "rediscovered" the Spanish Jews and had claimed recognition for them as legitimate members of the historic Spanish nation.27 Another factor in the exposure of Spanish musicians to Sephardic music was their direct contact with the sources. Nominally deprived of its Jewish community since 1492, the Jewish presence in Spain was in fact constantly growing during the Franco era, particularly through the influx of Jews from Spanish Morocco. Efforts by government research institutions during this period resulted in important collections. One may mention the field expeditions by Manuel Manrique de Lara on behalf of the dean of the traditional romancero scholarship, Don Ramon Menendez Pidal, and the collections by Arcadio de Larrea Palaci'n in Spanish Morocco, which led to two voluminous publications: Romances de Tetudn (1952, two vols.) and Canciones rituales judeo-espanolas (1954).28 Starting in the 1960s, Spanish singers began to perform and record arrangements

72

Edwin Seroussi

of Sephardic songs either on the basis of music printed in anthologies, such as the ones by the World Sephardic Federation, or else collected by themselves from informants in Spain. Their treatment usually tended toward "elevation" of the songs to the status of art music, as in the recordings by Sara Noel and Victoria de los Angeles; others adopted a "medievalist" approach, exemplified by Montserrat Figueras. In the case of the distinguished folklorist Joaqufn Diaz, there is a unique combination of researcher, arranger and performer. Diaz contributed to the dissemination of the popularized Judeo-Spanish song in Spain more than any other singer. Notwithstanding the developments that took place in Turkey, Saloniki, the United States and Spain, the epicenter of transformation of the traditional Sephardic repertory—particularly Judeo-Spanish folk songs—into a truly contemporary popular music genre was eventually located in Israel. The first attempts in this direction were connected with the singer Brachah Zefira.29 Born to Yemenite parents and left orphaned as an infant, Zefira was raised in Jerusalem by several families of different ethnic origins. She thus absorbed the folk songs of diverse ethnic groups comprising the Jewish population of the city in the first two decades of the century. In addition to her Jerusalemite sources, Zefira also learned traditional Sephardic folk songs from the Turkish-born poet and singer Isaac Eliyahu Navon.30 The basic concept underlying Zefira's work was the elevation of folk songs (not only Sephardic) to the status of art music, so as to make them accessible to Western audiences. In order to realize her artistic aspirations, she performed and recorded folk songs, including Judeo-Spanish ones, in the 1930s accompanied by the pianist and composer Nahum Nardi. The Zefira-Nardi concerts rank among the first exposures of the JudeoSpanish repertory, arranged in a westernized medium, to the non-Sephardic population of the Jewish community in Palestine and to international Jewish and nonJewish audiences in Europe. Later on, the Judeo-Spanish songs of her repertory were rearranged and recorded with either piano or symphonic orchestral accompaniments, prepared by such distinguished Jewish composers in Palestine at that time as Paul Ben-Haim, Marc Lavry and Oedoen Partos. The establishment in 1955 of the Ladino section of Kol Israel, the state-sponsored radio station, under the direction of Sephardic collector and singer Isaac Levy, and the subsequent publication of his collections of Judeo-Spanish songs (from 1959 on) and liturgical music (from 1964 on), mark a turning point in the revival of the Sephardic music tradition in the Israeli and international popular music scene.31 Under Levy's auspices, Israeli composers of light music used transcriptions from his anthologies as raw material for new arrangements. Contributing as well to this process of popularization was the emergence of artists of Sephardic descent such as Yehoram Gaon and Avraham Perrera in Israel's increasingly internationalized music industry. The hit play Romancero Sephardi (1969) starring Yehoram Gaon was a landmark in the establishment of the Judeo-Spanish folk song as a distinctive genre in Israeli popular music, and Bustan Sepharadi (The Sephardic Garden), a musical with texts by Isaac Navon and melodies adapted from the Levy collection (which was also recorded for the Israeli television), added further impetus to this process in the early 1970s. The songs popularized by these productions became the core of the Judeo-Spanish repertory in Israel: one not at all different from that of Brachah Zefira in the 1930s.32

New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews

73

As noted, the aesthetic and technical constraints dictated by the popular music industry generated far-reaching transformations in this traditional music. Some of the processes of change—notably the shortening of extensive narrative romances into short lyric songs—are already apparent in the very early recordings of Haim Effendi.33 Similar processes occurred much later in some of the Israeli arrangements, which were sometimes characterized by lavish orchestral scores inspired by Broadway or European popular models. These scores often obscure the original melody and cause further cutting and disintegration of the texts. Another phenomenon in Israel is the blurring of distinctions between different Sephardic local styles and genres. For example, the word romanza or, more comically, romanceros (lit. "a corpus of romances" in Spanish plural form), became a synonym for any popular song in Judeo-Spanish, even though most of these do not belong to the romance genre. The popularized Judeo-Spanish songs from Israel brought this repertory to wide international attention. Reactions to the new product were mixed, but in general, the withdrawal from the distinctive stylistic qualities of the traditional Sephardic repertories became the focus of scholarly criticism.34 In recent years, alternative attempts to rework the same materials emerged, not only in Israel, but also in several corners of the Sephardic diaspora: Canada, France, Spain, Turkey, the United States and Venezuela. The aesthetic principles guiding these alternative approaches varied from that of preserving fidelity to the traditional sources (as with the group Gerineldo from Montreal or the recordings by Esther Rofe from Venezuela) to using soft arrangements such as acoustic guitar accompaniment that recalled the style of the American folksong revival of the 1960s or arrangements of Spanish folk songs (as with the Los pagaros sefardies group in Turkey, Joaquin Diaz in Spain or the Israeli singers, Haparvarim), to using more elaborated approaches based on elements drawn from Turkish, North African and medieval European music (as with the Boston-based ensemble, Voice of the Turtle).

Conclusion The deep social restructuring of the world Sephardic community in the contemporary period has led to new patterns in their expressive culture. Music, in its widest sense, has become a crucial factor in the forging of the present-day Sephardic identity in and outside Israel. At the outset of this article, the contemporary Sephardic community was depicted as an international musical network crisscrossing territorial and linguistic boundaries. Most Sephardim today live dispersed throughout the world either in small communities that are sometimes absorbed into the larger, mixed communities, or else are integrated within the Israeli society; and music appears to remain one of the last bonds connecting them. An insight on the role of music in maintaining Sephardic identity can be gained by comparing it with the present state of another powerful cultural tool that binds ethnic groups: language. Judeo-Spanish faces today a rapid erosion. It is maintained by the relentless efforts of scholars and enthusiasts both through the organization of courses and workshops and the publication of academic

74

Edwin Seroussi

and popular materials such as the quarterly Aki Yerushalayim published by the Ladino section of Kol Israel. In practice, however, Judeo-Spanish is no longer a fully functional language, except among members of the oldest generation who reside in small enclaves dispersed throughout the globe. Sephardic music, in contrast, still flourishes. In the synagogal framework, where traditional music remains thoroughly functional, one can hear young people singing ancestral tunes that have resisted the most radical social changes. New generations of cantors are trained, cassettes and notated materials are circulated. The innovation of the liturgical repertory and the gradual disappearance of stylistic nuances that in the past differentiated between each Sephardic community have not proved detrimental to the basic identity of the Sephardic liturgical repertory in Israel and abroad. Cantors follow the traditions of their forefathers while at the same time making the necessary adjustments as dictated by challenges posed by new social circumstances. The traditional Judeo-Spanish folk-song repertory has decreased; in some cases it has been mutilated. However, it has survived against all odds. Its collection by scholars in periods when it was still fresh in the memory of the Sephardim contributed significantly to its survival and revival. On the basis of archival material and with the support and interest of composers, performers and the popular music industry, new productions constantly appear in Israel, Europe and the Americas. Even if scholars knowledgeable of the original Sephardic folk songs perceive these new productions as a corruption of the tradition, they will eventually have to come to terms with this inevitable process of transformation. Another contemporary framework where Judeo-Spanish folksongs are still performed is within ethnic associations. In Israel, for example, children of Sephardic families maintain ties with their ethnic ancestry by joining organizations of immigrants and attending gatherings to listen or engage in folk singing. MABAT, an organization of immigrants from Tangier, even formed an ensemble that performs its repertory for the general Israeli public—including a full-staged traditional wedding. Similar phenomena occur in Sephardic communities of the diaspora.35 Prophecy usually has no room in scholarly endeavors. It seems likely, however, that if individuals a few hundred years from now still identify themselves as Sephardic Jews, their "identity kits" will inevitably include a sheaf of tunes for prayers and a number of Judeo-Spanish folk songs.

Notes 1. See for example, the remarks by Alberto Hemsi and Ovadia Camhy quoted below in this article. 2. For such a typology, see Amnon Shiloah and Eric Cohen, "The Dynamics of Change in Jewish Oriental Ethnic Music in Israel," Ethnomusicology 17, no. 2 (May 1983), 227252. 3. Interesting sociological insights on synagogal music were hinted at by Samuel C. Heilman in his Synagogue Life: A Study in Symbolic Interaction (Chicago: 1976), 211-214. 4. See Edwin Seroussi, "Zimrat kodesh be'idan shel temurot: reformot musikaliyot bevatei keneset sefaradiyim beostriyah ubearzot habalkan," Peamim 34 (1988), 84-109. For the

New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews

75

particular case of Vienna, see idem, "Schir Hakawod" and the Liturgical Music Reforms in the Sephardi Community in Vienna, ca. 1870-1925: A Study of Change in Religious Music (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1988). 5. See Shlomo Deshen, "Beit hakeneset ha'adati: defus shinui dati beyisrael," in Mizug galuyot: yemei 'iyun bauniversitah hd"ivrit birushalayim (Jerusalem: 1969). 6. See Uri Sharvit, "Diversity Within Unity: Stylistic Change and Ethnic Continuity in Israeli Religious Music," Asian Music 17, no. 2 (spring/summer 1986), 126-146. 7. For some insights on the "Sephardic-Jerusalemite" style, see Shiloah and Cohen, "Dynamics of Change," 235, 240-241; and Yehezkel Braun, '"lyunim bamelos hasefaradiyerushalmi," Pe'amim 19 (1984), 70-87. 8. For example, in the recorded collection by cantor Abraham Ben Haim, The Liturgical Legacy of the Sephardim (New York: 1982), versions from four regional traditions are presented. In Israel, the Institute for Jewish Music (Renanot) produces collections of regional styles of liturgical music from different Sephardic communities. 9. Attempts to change the traditional music of the liturgy were usually frowned upon or mocked by members of the Amsterdam community. Such was the case with some new compositions introduced by cantor Simon Duque in the 1940s (personal communication of Shimon Vega, formerly from Amsterdam and now a resident of Rishon Lezion, in an interview of 29 August 1991). 10. The communities of New York and London produced records in which these choral arrangements can be heard. See, for example, John Levy (ed.) Music of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue [in London], Folkways Records FR 8961; and Music of Congregation Shearith Israel in the City of New York, 3 vols. (no other data available). For the process of change in the liturgical music of the Spanish-Portuguese community in London, see Edwin Seroussi, "'Hamanginot ha'atikot': lekadmut hamusikah baliturgiyah hayehudit-sefaradit," Pe'amim 50 (winter 1992), 99-131. 11. Personal communication (1991) from Dr. Mark Kirschbaum from Seattle, who has been recording the Reverend Benaroya on behalf of the National Sound Archives in Jerusalem. 12. On the national schools of music in the nineteenth century, see Alfred Einstein, Music in the Romantic Era (New York: 1947). 13. See David Aharon de Sola and Emanuel Aguilar, The Ancient Melodies of the Liturgy of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews (London: 1857); and Federico Console, Sefer Shirei Yisrael: Libro dei canti d'Israele. Antichi canti liturgici del rito degli Ebrei Spagnoli (Firenze: 1892). This trend continued in the twentieth century; see for example Maurice CohenLinaru, Tehillot Israel, 2 vols. (Paris: 1910); Salomon Foy, Recueil des chantes Hebra'iques anciennes et modernes du rite Sefardi, dit Portugais en usage dans le Communaute de Bordeaux (Bordeaux: 1928) and the work by the hazan from Amsterdam (now in New York) Abraham Lopez Cardozo, Sephardic Songs of Praise, Tenu Shivha vegam Shira, According to the Spanish-Portuguese Tradition as Sung in the Synagogue and in the Home (New York: 1987). 14. On Hemsi, see Cancionero Sephardi, ed. Edwin Seroussi in collaboration with Paloma Diaz-Mas, Jose M. Pedrosa and Elena Romero (Jerusalem: forthcoming). 15. On the involvement of Jewish composers in Ottoman classical music, see Abraham Galante, "Les juifs dans la musique turque," Historie des juifs de Turquie, vol. 8 (Istanbul: 1985), 66-73; and Edwin Seroussi, "The Turkish Makam in the Musical Culture of the Ottoman Jews: Sources and Examples," Israel Studies in Musicology 5 (1990), 43-68. 16. Alberto Hemsi, in his introductory remarks to his Cancionero Sephardi. 17. These songs (JMA no. 3561 at the Jacob Michael Collection of Jewish Music at the National and University Library in Jerusalem), which to my knowledge are not mentioned in any previous work thus far, include: "Durme, durme," "Ondi vas djoyiha miya," "El rey que muntscho madruga," "Una ventana enfrenti di otra," "Enriva de la tu seja," "Alta, alta es la luna," and "Esta armada ke viene." A photostatic copy of this collection was acquired by Jacob Michael, probably from Bensussan himself (who lived in New York several years

76

Edwin Seroussi

before his death). My attempts to contact Mrs. Bensussan in 1986-1987 for further information on the work of her husband were fruitless. On Bensussan, see Vicky Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews: The History of a Dubious Symbiosis (New York: 1979), 68, 112, 227. 18. Castelnuovo-Tedesco refers to a notebook dating from 1862 that contains Sephardic melodies composed in three-part harmony by Bruto Seningaglia, his maternal grandfather. For this discovery and an analysis of the influence it had, see Harriet Mildred Rosen, The Influence of Judaic Liturgical Music in Selected Secular Works of Mario CastelnuovoTedesco and Darius Milhaud (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1991). Also see an autobiographical sketch released by the composer upon his immigration to the United States, "My Jewish Background," 24 May 1940, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (a copy can be found in the Jacob Michael Collection, JMB 818). Other compositions by CastelnuovoTedesco with traditional Sephardic materials are Le danse del Re David and his Second Violin Concerto of 1931, titled The Prophets. Castelnuovo-Tedesco later abandoned his attempts to use traditional materials in his compositions, pointing to the limitations of such an approach. In the above-cited article of 1940, he claimed, "The music I shall write will probably spring more from my own imagination . . . than from supposed historical documents . . ." 19. On the activities of Leon Algazi, see Israel Katz, Judeo-Spanish Traditional Ballads from Jerusalem, 2 vols. (New York: 1972), vol. 1, 107-114. 20. Other scores for the plays Saul y David (1932) and Los Macabeos (1933) were lost. I am thankful to Susana Weich-Shahak for the information on the work of Sion. On the influx of Western music on the Sephardic theatre in the Ottoman Empire, see Elena Romero, El teatro de los sefaradies orientates (Madrid: 1979), passim. 21. lacob M. Hassan, "Vision panoramica de la literature sefardi," in Hispania Judaica: Studies in the History, Language and Literature of the Jews of the Hispanic World, ed. Josep Sola-Sole, Samuel G. Armistead and Joseph H. Silverman, vol. 2 (Barcelona: 1982), 27-44, esp. 32. 22. The influence of twentieth-century popular music on the Judeo-Spanish tradition is discussed by Judith Cohen, "The Impact of Mass Media and Acculturation on the JudeoSpanish Song Tradition in Montreal," in World Music, Politics and Social Change, ed. S. Frith (Manchester, New York: 1989), 90-97; and Edwin Seroussi, "The Growth of the Judeo-Spanish Folksong Repertory in the 20th Century," in Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, division D, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: 1990), 173-180. Popular French chansons and Broadway hits entered the Sephardic synagogue in the North American environment. See Judith Cohen, "Musical Bridges: The Contrafact Tradition in Judeo-Spanish songs," in Cultural Marginality in the Western Mediterranean, ed. Frederick Gerson and Anthony Percival (Toronto: 1990), 121-127. 23. The Sephardic singer and collector Izet Bana from Istanbul has gathered an impressive collection of more than seventy commercial records of Sephardic music, which he shared with me during our meeting in Istanbul in 1990.I am indebted to him for communicating this list to me. 24. Samuel G. Armistead, Israel J. Katz and Joseph H. Silverman, "La antigua discograffa sefaradi y el romancero," La Coronica 9, no. 2 (1981), 138-144. I am indebeted to I. M. Hassan from Madrid for providing me a copy of a comprehensive list of old Sephardic records he compiled in collaboration with the authors of the aforementioned article. 25. On Algazi, see Edwin Seroussi, Mizimrat Qedem: The Life and Music of R. Isaac Algazi from Turkey (Jerusalem: 1989). 26. These texts were published in a series of chapbooks printed between 1924 and 1933. On Sadik and Kazes, see Seroussi, "Growth of the Judeo-Spanish Folksong Repertory," 175176. 27. One of the most enthusiastic Spanish figures in these circles was the composer Jose Subira. See his programmatic article, "El orientalismo hispanista del compositor Alberto Hemsi," printed at the introduction of Hemsi's Coplas sefardies, op. 7 (Alexandria: 1932). 28. Israel Katz, "Manuel Manrique de Lara and the Tunes of the Moroccan Sephardic Ballad Tradition: Some Insights into a Much-Needed Critical Edition," in El Romancero hoy:

New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews

77

Nuevas Fronteras. 20. Coloquio International, eds. Antonio Sanchez Romeraldo, Diego Catalan, and Samuel G. Armistead (Madrid: 1979), 75-87. 29. On Zefira and the Judeo-Spanish folksong see Gila Flam, Peulata hamusikalit shel Berakhah Zefira bishnot ha-30 veha-40 beerez yisrael, (Master's thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1982), particularly 70-110; Jehoash Hirshberg, "Berakhah Zefira vetahalikh hashinui bamusikah beyisrael," Pe'amim 19 (1984), 29-46. The entire Judeo-Spanish repertory available to Zefira was published in her book Kolot rabim (Givatayim/Ramat-Gan: 1979) under two rubrics: "Shirei 'am" ("Folk Songs"), which includes seven Judeo-Spanish melodies set to Hebrew text by Bialik, Frishman and other poets; and "Romansot ufizmonim bisfat ladino" ("Romances and Melodies in the Judeo-Spanish Language"), which includes twentyeight songs. 30. See Edwin Seroussi, "Mitugarma lirushalayim: terumato shel Yizhak Eliyahu Navon lazemer hayisraeli," Dukhan 13 (1991), 120-130. 31. Isaac Levy, Chants judeo-espagnoles, 4 vols. (London: 1959 [vol. 1]); (Jerusalem: 1970-1973 [vols. 2-4]); idem, Antologia de la Liturgia Judeo-Espanola, 10 vols. (Jerusalem: 1964-1980). The work of Levy is discussed by Katz, Judeo-Spanish Traditional Ballads, vol. 1, 114-120. 32. One can speak about an Israeli canon of popularized Judeo-Spanish songs, which includes, among others: "Tres hermanicas eran" (adapted to the Hebrew poem "Yefeh nof" by the medieval Spanish poet Yehuda Halevy); "Mama mia la mi querida" (set to Hebrew "Shuti sirati" by A. Halevy); "Arboles d'almendra"; "Durme durme mi linda doncella"; "En la mar hay una torre"; "Los bilbilicos cantan" (or "La rosa enflorece"), widely known as the Hebrew Sabbath song "Zur mishelo akhalnu"; "Cuando el Rey Nimrod"; "Morenica a mi me llaman" (translated as "Sheharhoret yikreuni"); "Arboles lloran por lluvias" (or "Ven y veras"); and "Llora querida llora" (translated as "Haketantanah hismikah"). These songs, many of which were already recorded at the beginning of this century in Istanbul and Saloniki (and later published by Idelsohn from extant sources as an appendix to the fourth volume of his Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies, can usually be heard on Israeli radio programs such as "Romancero Sepharadi." 33. Rina Benmayor, "Oral Narrative and the Comparative Method: The Judeo-Spanish Ballad Chapbooks of Yacob Abraham Yona," Romance Philology 31, no. 3 (February 1978), 501-521, particularly 515 and n. 27. 34. For such a criticism, see Israel Katz, "Stylized Performances of a Judeo-Spanish Traditional Ballad: La mujer enganada," in Studies in Jewish Folklore, ed. Frank Talmage (Cambridge, Mass.: 1980), 181-200. 35. For a study of the functions of music in a Sephardic community in the diaspora, see Judith Cohen, Judeo-Spanish Songs in the Sephardic Communities of Montreal and Toronto: Survival, Function and Change (Ph.D. diss., Universite de Montreal, 1988). Sometimes the last sign of life in a disappearing Sephardic community is a musical document. This was the case with the few individuals left in the old Sephardic community of Bucharest. See Gisela Suliteanu, "Situation de la musique populaire et de la liturgie synagogale chez les Juifs Sepharades de Bucarest," in The Sephardi and Oriental Heritage: Studies, ed. I. Ben-Ami (Jerusalem: 1982), 421-488.

tHE eRETZ iSRAELI sONG AND THEjEWISH

National Fund Natan Shahar (BEIT BERL COLLEGE)

Keren Kayemet Leyisrael, or the Jewish National Fund (JNF), was established by the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in December 1901 for the purpose of raising funds to purchase land in Palestine.1 Operating on the principle that even small sums eventually added up, the JNF introduced a number of fund-raising staples— the JNF stamp, the blue-and-white collection box and the Golden Book—that soon became commonplace throughout the Jewish world. Within a relatively short period of time a consensus emerged that contributing to the JNF was tantamount to redeeming Jewish land. Thanks to this consensus, the JNF was able to function freely in a wide range of communities, coordinating its efforts through a number of national bureaus staffed in the main by volunteers.2 Operating for the most part in an autonomous manner, these bureaus collected and transferred money to JNF headquarters, which was located for the first twenty years of its existence outside Palestine, first in Vienna, then in Cologne and then in the Hague. In 1922, the JNF relocated to Jerusalem; in the following year, Menahem Ussishkin took over as chairman. Over the years, JNF fund-raisers found themselves appealing to diverse audiences that ranged from schoolchildren, members of Zionist youth movements, women's circles and trade unions to synagogue-goers and participants in special Zionist gatherings. It also became clear that the Jewish settlement in Palestine (the Yishuv) differed from that of the diaspora, such that appropriate forms of appeals and promotional tools had to be tailored for each group of potential contributors.3 Thus in 1926, the Youth Section was set up in Jerusalem (superseding the Press Section) in order to enhance the efficiency of educational and indoctrination activity among diaspora youth movements. This department began to make use of the "Eretz Israeli (Land of Israel) song," then in its formative stage, as a promotional tool and instrument for Zionist indoctrination.4 The JNF's use of the Eretz Israeli song encompassed two main spheres of activity. The first was the production (including, in some instances, the commissioning) of songs, distribution of songbooks and other printed material, and participation in the production and marketing of phonograph records that featured Eretz Israeli songs. The second realm involved reshaping some of the Jewish holidays, festivals and 78

The Eretz Israeli Song and the Jewish National Fund

79

memorial days to conform with modern Zionist ideology. There was a certain amount of overlap in these activities, and the Youth Section was not always solely or even directly involved. In some cases, it operated through commercial firms (e.g., publishing houses) or else drew on the resources of social structures such as the local Zionist youth movements or Jewish schools. And at times, the initiative came from municipal institutions in the Yishuv who invited the JNF to take part in events marking Jewish festivals and holidays in which Eretz Israeli songs played a prominent role. The first song both written for the JNF and published with JNF assistance was "Shirat ha'emek," or "Song of the [ Jezre'el] Valley." The music was composed by the Yishuv's leading musical figure, Yoel Engel, with accompanying lyrics by Yehuda Kami. Written by the composer as a contribution to the JNF, it was only natural that "Shirat ha'emek" be incorporated into the literary collection Mcfanit, which was published by the Society of Writers and Literature in Eretz Israel to mark the "Writers, Artists and Intelligentsia Day for the JNF" held on Lag Ba'omer, 1926. Although the book's planners had not originally thought of publishing the music to the songs, not to do so in Engel's case would have been an affront. The music was duly included, a professional music copier preparing a block from the original manuscript. Several mistakes occurred in the copying process, but this did not delay the book's printing. All revenues were a contribution to the JNF, and thus the organization found itself the owner of its first musical property, which subsequently appeared in every JNF songbook. As the score indicates (see Fig. 1), "Shirat ha'emek" was written and arranged for two voices5; it was thus unsuited to the kind of group singing that constituted one of the sociomusical hallmarks of the Yishuv. The melody is strophic—that is, all five stanzas are sung to the same music. The melody is sung by the lower voice in measures 1 to 6, with the upper voice doubling at the octave (hoy bahur) in measures 2, 4 and 5. It is somewhat unclear which voice continues the melody after this point, since the voices are arranged in polyphonic texture (in measures 7 to 9) and in octave doubling of the melody (in measures 13 to 16).6 Also difficult for those singing the song are the many large intervals (fifths and octaves) in measures 1,2, 6, 7, 11, 13 and 15. Such intervals are characteristic of the epic Eretz Israeli song of this period. In 1927, the Hashomer Hazair youth movement in Poland decided to put out a "handsome songbook for use in the movement."7 Because of the high costs involved and the fact that many of the songs were in Hebrew, the assignment was given to the Palestine branch of the Jewish World Youth Federation (Brit Hanoar),8 which then turned to the Youth Section. The latter, which had been considering just such a project, responded positively to Brit Hanoar's request for joint sponsorship. In a letter sent to a group of musicians and poets, it was noted that "the quality Eretz Israeli song is capable of disseminating Zionist culture better than a speech, a pamphlet and the like."9 The songbook itself was described as: [a] collection of Eretz Israeli tunes that should include the finest pioneer songs from the Bilu period to our own day, the best songs of the Oriental [mizrahi] communities in the

80

Natan Shahar

Fig. 1 country and perhaps a few of the better-known Arab tunes, a selection of schoolchildren's songs and a selection of songs of diaspora youth.10

Approximately sixty songs were to be included in the book. Shlomo Rosovsky, considered a leading expert on Jewish music, was named first music editor and later sole editor of the project;11 one of his first acts was to ask youth leaders in Poland and Lithuania to send him a list of the most frequently sung Hebrew songs. Production of the songbook did not proceed smoothly, in part because of the conflicting priorities of Hashomer Hazair and the Youth Section. The former had in mind a simple, handy songbook that would consist largely of songs with Hebrew lyrics and melodies from various sources (mostly non-Jewish) that were popular in the movement. In a letter dated December 7, 1927, Hashomer leaders expressed concern that

The Eretz Israeli Song and the Jewish National Fund

81

it is precisely [the songbook's] polished form that decisively increases all the costs and that substantially reduces the possibilities for its extensive use throughout our movement. ... We cannot view this songbook as an ultrapolished literary enterprise, or even as a folkloristic-scientific collection demanding experts' work and great accuracy.12 The Youth Section, however, was committed to the idea of a quality product: It is inconceivable that an organization such as Hashomer Hazair . . . should publish all those songs unabashedly declared by the most important experts in Eretz Israel to be so much rubbish. . . . Most of the songs that parade in the diaspora as Zionist or Eretz Israeli songs are completely out of the question for an original Eretz Israeli Zionist songbook because the texts and music of virtually all of them are drawn from the gentiles or taken from cheap street ditties. ... If you receive ... an Eretz Israeli songbook of high quality and bearing the imprint of a well-known expert such as S. Y. Rosovsky . . . then you will be able to distribute something that is truly new and fresh, which will be suitable for both the youth organizations and for school and family ... not only [an] educational tool but also a sure source of income.13 In the end, the concern about costs was resolved when the JNF agreed to cover all expense. It was further agreed that the compilation, selection and arrangement of the songs would be done in Palestine, while everything relating to production— typesetting, preparation of the blocks, proofreading, printing, binding and distribution—would be handled in Poland.14 (Ussishkin later objected to these provisions, arguing that "material that is written in this country should be printed here, given the difficult economic situation,"15 but by this time the project was well on its way.) Finally, concerning the selection of material, Rosovsky proved amenable both to consulting with kibbutz members "who know [the most popular] songs and feel something for them" and to including a number of songs that were movement favorites "even if not of the first rank" in terms of musical quality.16 In his introduction to the finished work, Rosovsky addressed himself implicitly to the objections against using "music of the gentiles" and "cheap street ditties": The songbook ... is not an academic collection of songs meant only for scientific folklore studies. Nor is it a collection of Eretz Israeli songs only, that is, songs that were conceived and born in Eretz Israel. This book has a specific practical purpose: it will afford Jewish youth in the diaspora the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the Eretz Israeli song which, to a degree, reflects our pioneering spirit (in the broad sense of the term), and to gather from the Eretz Israeli song the secret of the movement that has driven us to build the land . . . All the Eretz Israeli songs do not constitute a single whole, and if many among us find nothing innovative in them—what is new is precisely that new spirit which the songs evoke, the spirit of the revivified pioneering Eretz Israel, the pathos of work and the spirited sounds of creativity.17 The songbook, named Mizimrat haarez ("Tunes of the Land") went on sale in April 1929. In many ways a flawed product—all of the proofreading had been done by nonexperts and it was riddled with errors, particularly in the musical transcriptions—it was nonetheless an immediate and enormous success.18 One reason was its broad scope and clearcut organization. The book consisted of sixtyone songs, twenty-eight wordless melodies and an appendix of fifteen songs and

82

Natan Shahar

melodies adapted by Rosovsky for chorus with piano accompaniment. Particularly noteworthy was its internal division, which served as a model for many future Eretz Israeli songbooks. The first section, "Longings forZion," contained thirteen songs, the majority from the Second Aliyah, as well as two "anthems" ("Hatikvah" and "Birkat 'am"). This was followed by "Building Eretz Israel," consisting of eighteen songs, mainly from the Third Aliyah. "Religious Folk Songs" consisted of lyrics taken from Jewish canonical sources that were adapted to melodies of traditional origin, most of which became part of the Second Aliyah repertoire. "Songs of the East" contained Yemenite songs plus "Arab Dance" and "Debka"; the dance theme became more explicit in the following section, "Dances of the Land," which consisted of twenty-four wordless tunes, many of Hasidic origin. Five songs from the Second Aliyah comprised the "Love Songs" section, and the book concluded with four children's songs.19 Not a single song in Mizimrat haarez mentioned the JNF or its activities. Nonetheless, the songbook quickly became a kind of calling card for the organization: known from the outset for its pioneering and fund-raising efforts, the JNF now assumed new importance as a Zionist educational institution capable of supplying material with wide popular appeal.20 About a year and a half after the publication of Mizimrat haarez, the JNF published a modest pamphlet produced by rotaprint (a process similar to multilith) that contained nineteen songs. Rosovsky once again served as compiler and editor, meticulously working out a transliteration into Latin letters that was printed below the music. Each song in Mishirei haarez ("Songs of the Land") was printed in its entirety with Hebrew lyrics, music and transliteration; music for piano accompaniment was included as well for many of them. The introduction, which was provided in four languages—Hebrew, English, French and German—placed special emphasis on the way music served as a link between diaspora Jews and the pioneers (haluzim)21 noting that "those who sing the same songs are spiritually united." Although unprepossessing in appearance, the songbook was immediately snapped up, as was a second edition that appeared in January 1932. By this time, it was already apparent that a song's inclusion in a JNF songbook was tantamount to its being granted national folk status. For some composers and lyricists, particularly those from the kibbutz movement (such as Shalom Postolsky, Levi Ben-Amitai and Mattiyahu Wiener-Shalem), Mishirei haarez marked their first appearance in print. Although it was originally intended for audiences overseas, several dozen local educators, youth leaders and cultural coordinators in towns, moshavot and kibbutzim also received copies. In this manner the songs soon became widely known throughout the Yishuv. The melodies in Mizimrat haarez and Mishirei haarez feature a number of characteristics common to Eretz Israeli songs. The first important characteristic is the motif of a shepherd, usually playing a flute and/or guarding the fields. Derived from the indigenous Palestinian culture, this pastoral motif underwent continuous development throughout this period.22 For instance, the words of "Mah yafim haleilot bikhna'an" ("How Beautiful are the Nights in Canaan"), written by Yitzhak Katzenelson to two different folk melodies, depict the clear, cool, quiet Canaan nights in

The Eretz Israeli Song and the Jewish National Fund

83

Fig. 2

which the wail of the jackal pierces the silence. The melody first evokes the trill of the flute in rapid progressions by seconds (Fig. 2). The second melody exhibits the same musical features, and here the rapid stepwise progressions are accentuated in several places by a fermata (see Fig. 3). In "Gilu hagalilim" ("Rejoice, Galileans") Katzenelson writes: "The sound of the flute rises from the dark of the night/ The guardian of the Galilee sounds his song . . . / The Galilee echoes with music, as does my heart/ My gun is at my side, and my Arabian horse." In "Ro'eh mehalel" ("A Shepherd Plays His Flute" by Yoel Engel and Yehiel Hailperin), more than half of the words consist of syllables ("li, li, li") that imitate the sound of the flute (Fig. 4). "Shirat haro'eh" ("The Song of the Shepherd") depicts the shepherd and his flock; in six of the sixteen measures, the sound of the flute is imitated (Fig. 5). A second feature of many Eretz Israeli songs was the augmented second, used to evoke a Middle Eastern sound. This device, which was popular in Romantic art music in the second half of the nineteenth century, occurs frequently in the maqam scales of Arabic music. In "El yivneh hagalil," ("God Will Build the Galilee") the augmented second appears in the very first measure and in three of the song's six measures (Fig. 6). This song, according to various references, was often sung continuously as an accompaniment to hora dancing.23 In "Shirat haro'eh" ("The Shepherd's Song") (Fig. 5), the series of descending seconds contains an augmented second, while in "Yad 'anugah" ("Tender Hand"), it occurs in almost every other measure and is followed by a fermata (Fig. 7). Epic intervals—the fifth, sixth, seventh, and octave—are quite prevalent in the Western musical tradition and also appear at times in the Eretz Israeli song, used

Largo tranquillo (M. M.

= 50-52)

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Tempo primo

Fig.5

Lento (M.M. = 69-72)

Fig. 6

84

The Eretz Israeli Song and the Jewish National Fund

85

Fig. 7

Fig. 8

primarily to express a call of encouragement or as emphasis on a certain element in the text. In "Beneh haluz" ("Build, Halutz!"), composed by Yoel Engel to lyrics by Avigdor Hameiri,24 measures 7 and 8 contain a slow descent by seconds toward the lowest note of the song, with the word zorevet ("burns") repeating three times in the course of this descent (Fig. 8). Immediately following is the octave interval accompanying the words ein davar ("never mind"), expressing encouragement and support. This call is repeated four more times, followed by the repetition of the cry haluz beneh ("pioneer, build!") accompanied by fourth, fifth, and sixth intervals doubled by the lower voice. In "Shirat ha'emek" (Fig. 1) the epic intervals occur in the very beginning of the song, which opens with a fifth, followed by an inversion of the interval in the second measure and then immediately by an octave. The success of Mishirei haarez and Mizimrat haarez attested to a great demand for Eretz Israeli songs in the diaspora. Although the JNF had initially entered the field of music publication on a limited scale, it rapidly found itself the world's largest publisher of Hebrew songs, with projects of varying scope and distribution. In March 1932, for example, the JNF produced a series of twelve "songs on postcards" edited by Menashe Rabinowitz (later Ravina), a prominent local musi-

86

Natan Shahar

cal figure.25 Appearing on the front side of each postcard was music, the Hebrew text with vowels and a transliteration, plus the tag line,"Songs of the Homeland [Mishirei hamoledet], dedicated to Jewish youth from the Jewish National Fund, Jerusalem." Two months after publication, almost the entire series of some 5,000 sets had been sold out.26 Buoyed by its success, JNF officials asked Rabinowitz to edit two additional series of ten postcards each, "Popular Tunes" and "Children's Songs." By the beginning of 1935, a total of five "songs on postcards" series had been published, consisting of fifty-two new songs.27 Another four series of postcards, compiled by Rabinowitz but printed in Poland28 met with far more limited success. In the late 1930s, the Joint Committee for Youth Affairs of the Zionist Executive, the Jewish National Fund and Keren Hayesod was established. In 1938, the Youth Affairs committee issued a new version of Mizimrat haarez, this time consisting of four pamphlets (compiled by Ravina and edited by Rosovsky) that were devoted to specific themes. In most cases a Hebrew transcription appeared below the music, although for some songs a transcription in Latin letters was provided. In 1944 the JNF issued yet another Mizimrat haarez pamphlet, this time consisting of only three songs with piano accompaniment. Three years later, Songs for Schools, with Music appeared, consisting of thirty songs compiled and edited by Daniel Sambursky, a composer who was also known for his community sing-alongs at Beit Brenner. By this time, no communication was possible with the beleaguered Jews of Europe. Thus, the JNF turned to the United States, beginning in 1942 to prepare material aimed at young American Jews. One of the most popular series was Classified Palestine Songs, a group of five pamphlets, "Camp Songs," "Songs of Valor and Heroism," "Children's Songs," "Nature Festivals" and "Shabbat, Pessach, Succoth," which were published in the period 1942 to 1947. Each pamphlet contained parallel Hebrew and English texts with a transliteration of the lyrics below the music. A different kind of JNF musical project was the music commissioned for "Project Galilee-Bound," a large-scale fund-raising campaign for land purchase in the Galilee, which was begun in the late 1930s. As with other JNF campaigns, Project Galilee-Bound was to feature meetings, rallies, assemblies, lectures, "ribbon days"29 and slogans. In addition, it was decided to commission a special song. Invitations were accordingly sent to five respected poets: Avraham Shlonsky, S. Shalom, Natan Alterman, Yaakov Cahan and Avigdor Hameiri.30 In his letter of invitation, Natan Bistritsky, the director of the Youth Section, set forth several specific requests. The theme of the song should be the Galilee, and the poem was to consist of three or four short stanzas. Moreover, the word "Galilee" (Galil) was to appear recurringly. The text should be easily translatable, and the basic themes were to be the splendor of the Galilee, anticipation of its redemption, and mention of the feats of heroism connected with the area in past and present times. Communication with the poets was hampered by the fact that they all lived in TelAviv, most without a phone. In the end, only one poet, S. Shalom, even responded to the invitation. His response, however, was a warm one:

The Eretz Israeli Song and the Jewish National Fund

87

Even though I never have written a poem "to order" . . . the Galilee, where I lived for a number of years and about which I have also written a book, courses so strongly in my blood that I thought to adapt an old theme of mine that should suit your wishes, particularly regarding the melodic composition; and I have the feeling that I was successful [in so doing] . . .31

S. Shalom's poem, "Ah, beneh hagalil" ("Brother, Build the Galilee") was given over to Rosovsky, who was serving at that time as a musical adviser in JNF headquarters.32 Asked to select a local composer to set the poem to music, he turned to Mordechai Zeira, noting in his formal request of January 23, 1939 that "the melody should be of an explicitly Eretz Israeli character, simple and popular. We want to have it sung by young people and all sectors of the nation. . . ,"33 At about the same time, the poet Emanuel Harussi was asked to prepare an "artistic promotional reception" to be presented at youth rallies under the title "Galilee-Bound."34 Harussi completed the assignment quickly; his pageant included readings, singing and acting, and concluded with all the participants singing "Ah Beneh Hagalil" in unison.35 The text, along with stage directions and suggestions for arranging the hall and the backdrops, was distributed in Eretz Israel and abroad. "Ah, beneh hagalil" was also translated into English, French and Yiddish for inclusion in a number of publications—the most popular form being a folded, foursheet folio that contained the lyrics, music and Latin transcription. A January 1939 memo to the JNF headquarters in Poland noted that "we are thinking about means to ensure the widespread dissemination of the song, which will be sung in every Jewish home during the campaign." Even the use of "phonograph records, if no technical delays prevent their production in Eretz Israel,"36 was considered. Yet "Ah, beneh hagalil" was not a success. Outside of material produced for the JNF campaign it appeared in only a few small-scale publications; it was even omitted from the pamphlet Galilee Celebrations (published in 1939 by the Joint Committee for Youth Affairs of the Zionist Executive, the JNF and Keren Hayesod). In retrospect, the song was probably doomed to failure from the outset. The problem began with Shalom's text: far from being "easily translatable," it was not easily understood even in the original Hebrew (the first line, for example, reads "In the dark, the din of years past glowing," with an obscure Hebrew word, ba'ayam, used for "glowing"). In addition, it had an uneven meter and lack of refrain, which caused Zeira to opt for a through-composed melody that shifted with each verse. The lack of any repetitive melodic or rhythmic structure made it both difficult to learn and unsuitable for communal singing. In a letter to another JNF official, even Bistritsky admitted that the song was a failure.37 Although fund-raising was the JNF's main activity, it also assumed a central role in the production and dissemination of Zionist educational material in the form of pamphlets and special programs. The rationale, as noted in the introduction to one of the Holidays and Festivals pamphlets was that the social gathering, the celebration—these are a great principle in educating youth and the nation toward the desired ideal; the melody, the song, the play, the parade, the backdrop—these have educated all the generations of revival. . . . [When] the JNF

88

Natan Shahar gives its faithful, wherever they are, programs for festivals and holidays and devotes them to the redemption of the land, it is not pushing itself into something alien but is fulfilling one of its direct tasks. It is providing material to its workers, who must each day add bricks to our buildings, [and it] places material in the hands of the generation that to a large degree has forsaken the national experience. . . ,38

A typical "Eretz Israel" program was one tied to a specific Jewish holiday—two of the most popular days being Tu Beshvat (which eventually became a national JNF tree-planting holiday) and Lag Ba'omer (traditionally marked by picnics and outdoor activities). Music, both vocal and instrumental, was a major component of such programs, serving as an instrumental accompaniment for dance sequences and a link between spoken or acted narrative. Eretz Israeli melodies were also incorporated into the program in the form of communal singing that promoted active audience involvement and group solidarity.39 The first pamphlet in the series Holidays and Festivals for Celebrations in General and for Lag Baomer in Particular appeared in 1928 in Hebrew and German editions. In addition to an explanation of Lag Ba'omer customs and a few related stories, the pamphlet consisted of four songs: "Song of [the Jezreel] Valley" and three songs more closely related to the holiday, "Bar Yohai," "Amar Rabbi Akiva" ("Rabbi Akiva Said") and "Veamartem ko lehai" ("And Say You Hurrah"). Holidays and Festivals eventually comprised dozens of pamphlets written over a ten-yearperiod in Hebrew, German, French, English and Spanish. Material was produced and distributed by the JNF and by the Teachers Council for the JNF (in most instances, the same people produced material for both organizations). The basic format for each pamphlet was a section of sayings and proverbs relating to the festival or historical event; its historical development; instructions for marking the event in school, community gatherings or youth groups; and in some cases, material for a play or pageant. Additional textual material was often supplemented not only by songs but with suggestions for dramatic staging, as for the song "Jerusalem, Jerusalem": As the curtain rises, a pioneer climbs Mount Scopus; on his shoulder he carries a parcel and in his hand a long staff. At the foot of the hill from afar: a panorama of Jerusalem at night from out of the darkness. The pioneer stands on the hill momentarily, looks around at the city below, and at that moment begins singing. The chorus responds, always with the last four lines, and when he reaches the last verse, Jerusalem becomes increasingly illuminated. The four last lines are repeated by the pioneer with the chorus.40 Written material was augmented in 1934 by several samples of phonograph records containing Eretz Israeli songs. These were sent to the JNF's national offices in Europe with an accompanying letter noting that experience has shown that we have no better means of indoctrination than that which forges concrete links with the Eretz Israel reality. One of the key means [in so doing] is Eretz Israeli songs, which speak to the heart of every Jew and which can affect all and all ages, as they [reflect] the joy and the agony bound up with the day-to-day work of reviving the land. . . . These disks were played at the 1934 exhibition in Tel-Aviv and were received enthusiastically by the large crowds. . . . The disks are light in

The Eretz Israeli Song and the Jewish National Fund

89

weight and easy to pack, and the Ahvah [factory] owners believe that they will not be subject to heavy customs duties . . . These disks are especially suitable for bazaars and exhibitions—to be heard and sold alike.41

Also included in the packet was a list of records produced by the Ahvah factory, including a recording of "Hatikvah" sung by the popular tenor Leo Stein. The records themselves were of poor technical quality.42 As a result, the JNF received relatively few orders from abroad, and since few people in the Yishuv owned record players, local demand was also virtually nonexistent. Thus, the whole matter of recorded songs was shelved for some ten years, until after the Second World War.43 Following the creation of the state of Israel, the JNF entered an era of reorganization. In some cases new governmental offices took over spheres of responsibility that had until then been handled by the JNF. The Ministry of Education and Culture, for example, took charge of the production of most educational material, including songbooks. Thus, except for material aimed for Jewish communities abroad (especially the United States), the JNF ceased its active involvement with the Eretz Israeli song—an involvement that had been, among other things, a financial godsend to many composers.44 With one exception, the JNF received barely a mention in any of the Eretz Israeli songs it helped to produce. The exception is a song called "Dunam po, dunam sham" ("A Dunam [quarter-acre] Here, a Dunam There"), written by Yehoshua Friedman to music by Menashe Ravina. In the words of the song, On the wall there hangs a box, The blue-and-white box— [And] every coin put into it Redeems the land . . .

Notes 1. For more information, see Y. Zimen, "Letoldot hakeren hakayemet," in Yovel haadamah, ed. Y. Zimen (Jerusalem: 1951), 10-12. 2. National offices were located mainly in Eastern Europe, e.g., in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Rumania. 3. Promotional activity was directed as well at individuals—particularly the affluent—in the hope of inducing them to make substantial contributions to the JNF either during their lifetimes or in their wills. 4. On the emergence of the Eretz Israeli song in this period, see Natan Shahar, Hashir haerez-yisraeli bashanim 1920-1950: heibetim soziomusikaliyim umusikaliyim (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 1990), 91-99. 5. The two voices could be either of an all men's choir or a mixed choir. 6. In all of its subsequent publications with musical notation, "Shirat ha'emek" appeared in this voice arrangement, although it was sometimes designated as a song for chorus. 7. Mordechai Bentov and Mordechai Ornstein to the Youth Section, 7 December 1927, Central Zionist Archives, Keren Kayemet Files (hereafter, CZA/KKL) 2466. It should be noted that Pinkasi (1920) had served until this time as the official songbook of the Hashomer Hazair movement in Poland. A new songbook was needed because dozens of new songs had been written in the intervening seven-year period.

90

Natan Shahar

8. Brit Hanoar was an umbrella organization that coordinated the joint affairs of Zionist youth movements (Hashomer Hazair, Gordonia, Hehalutz Hazair, Jung Judischer Wanderbund and Blau-Weiss) that were based mainly in Poland and in neighboring countries. 9. Letter of invitation from Natan Bistritsky to David Shorr, Shlomo Rosovsky, Yehoshua Rodinov, Pordheuss Ben-Isissi, Avraham Shlonsky, Avigdor Hameiri and Yehuda Kami, 14 November 1927, CZA/KKL 2476. 10. Proposal for songbook (probably written to Bistritsky), CZA/KKL 2473. 11. Originally the songbook was to have had Rosovsky as music editor and Shlonsky and Meiri as literary coeditors. It was later decided to drop Meiri from the staff. In February 1928, Shlonsky announced his resignation. In addition to being burdened with twice the work for the same pay, Shlonsky complained, his name was never mentioned in correspondence concerning the songbook, and his authority had been limited to being "an ordinary collector and collator, [rather than] an editor and judge [of what would be included]." For correspondence on the matter, see CZA/KKL 2462 and 2476. 12. Mordechai Ornstein and Yosef Elster to Bistritsky, 7 December 1927, CZA/KKL 2466. 13. Bistritsky to Ornstein and Elster, 10 January 1928, ibid. 14. Bistritsky to Meir Ya'ari (of the Brit Hanoar executive, Palestine), 26 January 1928, CZA/KKL 2461. 15. Menahem Ussishkin, quoted by Yehiel Hailperin in internal memo, 15 November 1928, CZA/KKL 2458. 16. Ya'ari to Rosovsky, 30 March 1928, CZA/KKL 2476. 17. Shlomo Rosovsky (ed.) Mizimrat haarez (Warsaw: 1928), introduction. 18. A second edition of Mizimrat haarez was published in French in 1935. 19. The musical significance of Mizimrat haarez is discussed below and in greater detail in Shahar, Hashir haerez-yisraeli, 93. 20. Numerous requests were received by the JNF both for specific songs (lyrics and music) and general information about Eretz Israeli songs. Composers and poets sent material with the request that it be included in JNF publications. Various organizations asked the JNF to give them rights to publish Eretz Israeli songs. Singers and dancers offered to appear on behalf of the JNF in return for a hefty percentage of future revenues, and educational institutions in Palestine and abroad sought advice regarding appropriate music for specific events. The voluminous correspondence on these and related matters is found, among other places, in CZA/KKL 2448, 2463, 3600, 4094, 4095, 4978, 4979, 6313 and 7377. 21. Shlomo Rosovsky (ed.) Mishirei haarez (Jerusalem: 1931) introduction. The haluz, or pioneer, had become by this time a central image in descriptions of the Zionist enterprise, and haluzim figured in a number of songs published around the beginning of the 1930s. See, for example, M. Narkis (Ed.), Hehaluzim (Jerusalem: 1925). For further description of the central role of the haluz, see S. N. Eisenstadt, et al. (eds.), Yisrael—hevrah mithavah (Jerusalem: 1972), 3. 22. See Itamar Even-Zohar, "Hazemihah vehahitgabshut shel tarbut' ivrit mekomit beerez yisrael 1882-1948" Cathedra 16 (Summer 1980), 165-206. 23. Yehudah Ya'ari, "Ha'aliyah hashirit: perakim mitokh ha'aliyah hashelishit," in Sefer ha'aliyah hashelishit, ed. Y. Erez (Tel-Aviv: 1964), 34-37. 24. The words were first published in the monthly journal Teatron veomanut, 4-5 (October 1925), 4. 25. The songs-on-postcards idea was not a new one. Two years earlier, twelve postcards with songs (also edited by Rabinowitz) had been printed in the series Zemirot la'am by Mizmor Publications. 26. Financial statement, 23 June 1932, CZA/KKL 4978. 27. Rabinowitz adapted eleven of the fifty-two songs (mostly of Oriental origin) and composed eleven. This was a tremendously active period in terms of Eretz Israeli music, with hundreds of new melodies being produced. See the tables in Shahar, Hashir haerez-yisraeli, 90, 99 and 111 for statistical information. 28. The decision to have the postcards printed in Poland came about in large part because

The Eretz Israeli Song and the Jewish National Fund

91

of a high customs tax that was being levied on imported printed matter, specifically that written in Hebrew or Yiddish. The distribution network in Poland was less efficient than that of the Yishuv, which accounts for the more limited success of this series. 29. "Ribbon days" were a common JNF fund-raising event in the Yishuv. On ribbon days, contributors were presented with a small paper ribbon to be worn on their clothing. Written on the ribbon was the name of the specific cause for which JNF volunteers were collecting funds. 30. Bistritsky to Shlonsky, Shin Shalom, Natan Alterman, Yaakov Cahan and Avigdor Hameiri, 25-27 December 1938, CZA/KKL 9170. 31. S. Shalom to Bistritsky, 20 January 1939, ibid. 32. Another musical adviser was Menashe (Rabinowitz) Ravina. 33. Rosovsky to Mordechai Zeira, 23 January 1939, ibid. It is not surprising that Zeira was Rosovsky's first choice to compose the music for "Ah, bene hagalil." Zeira was a prolific and popular composer; fifty-seven of his songs had already appeared in various publications and many more were known (and widely sung) in the Yishuv. 34. (Dr.) Mann to Emanuel Harusi, 23 January 1939, ibid. 35. This was a standard format for pageants of this sort. 36. Bistritsky to JNF national office, Warsaw, 20 January 1939, CZA/KKL 9081. 37. Bistritsky to Aharon Techner, 6 February 1939, CZA/KKL 9081. 38. Lahanukah, hagim umo'adim—tokhniyot lahagigot uneshafim bishvil batei hasefer, vehistadruyot hano'ar vegam bishvil 'askanei hakeren hakayemet (Jerusalem: 1929), introduction. 39. For a more detailed discussion, see Shahar, Hashir haerez-yisraeli, 103-106 and idem, Hamusikah vehamalhin batenuah hakibuzit: heibetim musikaliyim usoziyomusikaliyim (Master's thesis, Bar-Ilan University, 1981), 29-32. 40. Staging instructions from Lahanukah, hagim umo'adim. 41. Youth Section 20 July 1934, CZA/KKL 6203. It should be noted that phonograph recordings of various speeches by Zionist leaders had been distributed in various communities in the previous decade. 42. See the letter from the JNF national office in Lithuania to JNF headquarters, 8 May 1934, CZA/KKL 6203. 43. Following the Second World War, a number of U.S. record companies issued records featuring Hebrew and Yiddish songs; and in the Yishuv, there was more interest in having Eretz Israeli songs recorded, in part because more individuals now owned phonographs. For correspondence between the JNF and various local recording companies (e.g., Radio Doctor, Lapid and Kol Zion), see CZA/KKL 14125. 44. The JNF's policy of prompt payment was another reason for its success in obtaining musical material. Payment for special commissioned songs was as much as ten Palestinian pounds (equivalent to more than a month's average salary), and composers and lyricists were paid half a pound and a pound, respectively, for reprint rights.

Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style Jehoash Hirshberg (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

The period from 1931 to 1938 was marked by a major upheaval in the musical scene of the Jewish community of Palestine (the Yishuv). Scores of well-trained and fully professional musicians as well as a sophisticated and discriminating audience arrived from Central Europe to Palestine during this time, with the local musical establishment becoming dramatically more vibrant and diversified as a result. Within less than a decade, the Palestine Orchestra (nowadays the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra),1 the Palestine Broadcast Service and professional chamber ensembles were all founded. There also came into being a community of some thirty migrant composers whose promising careers in Europe had been ended with the ascent to power of antisemitic regimes.2 Upon arrival in Palestine they not only had to go through the agony of resettlement common to all immigrants but were immediately faced with the challenge of leading the way toward the formation of a national musical style. Yet the components and traits of such a style were shrouded in controversy and ideological polemics. The immigrant composers constituted a group of individuals who had not previously known each other. Their personal and professional backgrounds were extremely varied, and they recognized no single authority. Hence, no compositional school was ever formed. Some of the composers concentrated on composition as a way of life, viewing "national style" as an inevitable outcome of undirected professional activity that could span several generations. Erich Walter Sternberg, who had immigrated from Germany in 1931, was one of those who defended a more individual style of composition: I would like to express my thanks to Miriam Boskovitch, who allowed me full use of the Boskovitch archive, carefully kept at her home. The archive has recently been donated to the National and University Library in Jerusalem. Mrs. Boskovitch also provided me with rich information and valuable contacts with Boskovitch's former friends and students, whose generous cooperation is acknowledged. Avigdor Herzog kindly helped with the translation of documents in Hungarian. My research assistants, Roni Granot, Hana Stern and Michal Ben-Zur were a constant source of help. The research was carried out with the support of the Foundation for Basic Research, administered by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Several of the musical examples are reprinted with the kind permission of the Israel Music Institute, Tel-Aviv.

92

Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style

93

Composers from all corners of the earth, of different schools, find themselves an audience composed of many factions, each with its own taste and demands. In the present situation . . . one should not care whether one is requested to write folk music of the land of Israel, or a synagogue chant or tunes adorned with Russian color. One should go one's own way and speak the language that emanates from within oneself.3

But other composers felt obligated to take the role of ideologists whose duty was to establish the theoretical foundations of a new style through philosophical, aesthetic and ideological formulations, which were then to be followed by corresponding musical composition. Foremost among this second group was Alexander (Sandor) Uriah Boskovitch. Born in 1907 in the Transylvanian city of Cluj (also known as Kolozsvar or Klausenberg), then part of Hungary, Boskovitch grew up in an atmosphere of cultural and linguistic diversity. The local Jewish population, which nearly doubled in size between 1910 and 1927 to some 14,000 individuals (some 13 percent of the total population), supported both Orthodox and Reform (Neolog) congregations and spoke a number of languages: Hungarian, Yiddish and Rumanian.4 In addition to the Jews, Transylvania's population consisted of Rumanians, Hungarians, Germans, Roma and Slavs. Following the First World War, when Transylvania became part of Rumania, Cluj underwent forced Rumanization. The Jewish community did not suffer at first, since the new government preferred Jewish to Hungarian ethnicism. Boskovitch's middle school years (1920-1923) came at a time when the local Jewish Tarbut school enjoyed a short-lived flourishing, its principal, Antal Mark, achieving an enviable level of cooperation between Zionists, progressive Orthodox and Communists.5 Within a few years, however, the government had imposed harsh conditions on the school that eventually led to its closing, and antisemitic outbreaks had become far more frequent.6 Boskovitch's family background was both Jewish and musical. According to a curriculum vitae he once wrote, the family had originated in the Moravian town of Boscovice.7 One branch of the family had settled in Budapest in the sixteenth century, while other members had migrated to Cluj. His grandfather was highly admired in the community as a great scholar, and his father was a moderately wellto-do tradesman who frequently led the services in the local Orthodox synagogue. Family members played chamber music at home once a week, with Sandor and his brother Zoltan playing four-hand piano arrangements of classical symphonies and string quartets. In addition to attending the Tarbut school, Boskovitch as a teenager became a member of Hashomer Hazair. Interestingly, it was the movement's insistence on strict ideological discipline that eventually caused him to quit. In 1924, Boskovitch moved to Vienna for advanced piano and composition lessons. A year later, he returned home and enrolled at the University of Cluj, which he left after two semesters. He then left for Paris to study medicine, but turned again almost immediately to music. Sensitive and impressionable, Boskovitch's three years of intensive studies in Paris were crucial in forming his future attitudes and aesthetics. The most important influences on him were his composition teachers, Paul Dukas and the legendary Nadia Boulanger, and the pianists Lazar Levi and Alfred Cortot.

94

Jehoash Hirshberg

Upon his return to Cluj, Boskovitch became a coach at the fine local opera. The Italian government had sent the conductor Edmondo de Vechi to Rumania in order to improve the quality of Italian operas being performed there, and the two musicians soon became close friends. Trained by Vechi, Boskovitch became himself an opera conductor, leading performances of La Traviata and La Boheme. He also founded and conducted what became an excellent Jewish amateur orchestra, named after Karl Goldmark, that attracted intellectuals of the Cluj community and boasted performances with such great musicians as Bronislaw Huberman. During the next few years, increasing antisemitism began to block Boskovitch's progress in the opera house; one of his performances, for instance, was canceled as a result of threats by Fascist students. Because of personal differences with the management, Boskovitch also resigned his post at the Goldmark Orchestra. At about this time, he had joined the Jewish Students' Relief Society, a group of young Jewish intellectuals—Zionists and Communists—who had united for the common goal of enhancing national Jewish self-consciousness among the Transylvanian Jews. As part of his activity, Boskovitch initiated a fieldwork project on the Yiddish folk songs of the Jewish communities in the Carpathian mountains. He never elaborated on the methods of his fieldwork; it appears as though he neither used any recording device nor made any systematic transcription but rather absorbed the sound and spirit of the music in context. In 1937, the group published an anthology of essays on contemporary aspects of Jewish life, titled Kelet es Nyugat Kozort (Between East and West).8 Boskovitch's contribution, based in part on his fieldwork, was "The Problem of Jewish Music," a mature reflection by an alert young musician that displayed his knowledge of the contemporary scene in general and Jewish matters in particular. Although most members of the Jewish Students' Relief Society shared a Zionist orientation, Boskovitch had no plans to settle in Palestine, his own intention being to do further research and education within the Transylvanian Jewish community. Beginning in 1937, however, a combination of events led to his unexpected emigration. Boskovitch had just written his first major work on Jewish themes, a suite for piano titled Chansons populaires juives that consisted of arrangements of seven East European Jewish songs.9 Four movements of the suite were performed by his first piano teacher, Piroska Hevesi, at a recital in March 1937. Boskovitch submitted an orchestrated version of the suite to the great Jewish conductor, Yssay Dobrowen, who placed it on his coming program with the newly founded Palestine Orchestra. The orchestra invited Boskovitch to attend the premiere, and he was well received upon his arrival in February 1938. After the performance he decided to try to settle in Palestine; later he declared that the suite had "saved my life."10 Indeed, of the thirty-odd composers who immigrated to Palestine during the 1930s, Boskovitch was the only one who was brought there by a particular musical event, a fact that helped to establish his position in musical society from the outset. In July 1938, Boskovitch appeared on a radio broadcast in a performance of piano pieces, three of which he had composed in Palestine. A few months later he completed the orchestration of four pieces titled Four Impressions, the last of which was an arrangement of the hora dance El yivneh hagalil. The suite was performed by the radio orchestra in December 1938 and once again in July 1942.

Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style

95

Boskovitch's first months in Palestine coincided with the economic depression that hit the country during the first stage of the Second World War. He shared rented rooms with friends (or else was forced, on occasion, to sleep on park benches) and practiced on a piano at friends' homes. One of his friends, Charles Eshkar, related that Boskovitch was "absolutely detached from material matters," his lifestyle being that of a bohemian artist.11 After a short while Boskovitch was appointed music teacher at an elementary school and his economic situation improved, although the job itself was ill-suited to his personality. Boskovitch and a close friend, the stage director M. Daniel, made a protracted attempt to start an opera company, which eventually mounted Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann in 1939. The critics praised the singers and the small orchestra, but the cramped stage and the general lack of funds limited the production and the company was forced to disperse after its only production. Boskovitch flourished as a composer in the years 1940 to 1945, during which he composed the orchestral song Adonai Ro'i (The Lord is My Shepherd) (1943), The Oboe Concerto (1942), the Violin Concerto (1942), the Suita shemit (Semitic Suite) (1945) and its sequel, Pirkei neginah livnei hane'urim (Suite for the Youth) (1945). His reputation as a fine composition teacher was also established at this time, and he attracted many private students. In 1944, Boskovitch collaborated with his colleagues, among them cellist Laszlo Vincze, pianist Ilona Vincze-Krausz, violinists Alice and Lorand Fenyves and the composer and violist Oedoen Partos, to found the Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv, where Boskovitch served as a teacher of theory and composition. After a difficult initial period, the academy was integrated into TelAviv University. In 1956, Boskovitch accepted the position of music critic for the prestigious daily Haaretz, which he held until his death. The period between 1945 and 1959 has been termed "Boskovitch's period of silence" since he published no major compositions. The most significant event accounting for this silence was the composer's deep shock and grief over the murder of his parents in Auschwitz. Then, too, there is no doubt that he needed a respite in order to reexamine his musical style and aesthetics. Boskovitch was occupied at this time with his family (he had married in 1948), his many teaching obligations at the academy—which he considered a major national mission—his duties as a critic and his work on a book on Israeli music. In 1959, he returned to intensive composition, producing the symphonic poem Shir hamaalot (Song of Ascents) (1959), the cantata Bat yisrael (Daughter of Israel) (1960) (based on a poem by Hayim Nahman Bialik), the Concerto da Camera for violin and chamber ensemble (1961), the Kinah (Lament) for cello and piano (1964), and the large-scale 'Ada'im (Ornaments) for flute and orchestra (1964). Boskovitch's vibrant productivity was cut short by the sudden onset of lung cancer. He died in 1964, leaving behind an unfinished choral composition and a nearly final draft of a book titled Art Music in Israel.12 Boskovitch's essay of 1937, "The Problem of Jewish Music," was his first formal grappling with an issue that was to become central in his musical life, and as such it bears close examination. It joined a debate that went back to Richard Wagner's infamous "Judentum in der Musik" (1850), which had belittled the extent of the Jewish contribution to world music by emphasizing the allegedly small number of

96

Jehoash Hirshberg

important Jewish musicians and the alien, imitative, and superficial quality of their work.13 Wagner's essay had sparked a long-standing controversy among musicologists. Among others, Heinrich Berl (a non-Jew), had accepted Wagner's racial criterion in that he, too, defined Jewish music as "any music written by a Jew," though he went on to argue that German music had and would continue to benefit from the infusion of the "Eastern" Jewish elements;14 while Gdal Salesky, a Jew, had countered Wagner with a list of no less than sixty-six composers and 248 performers of Jewish origin whose important contribution to Western music could not be denied.15 In each case, it was the musician's biography that counted rather than the nature and content of his music—an approach Boskovitch explicitly rejected: "When examining the question of Jewish music, we should not consider Jewish descent as a decisive factor. Composers of Jewish origin, whether romantics (Mendelssohn), neo-romantics (Mahler), or theater composers ... are not more important to ... present-day Jews than, say, Weber or Saint-Saens."16 Boskovitch himself defined Jewish music as "the expression of the Jewish spirit and mentality in sound." Conceding that any definition of Jewish spirit would be difficult to reach, he argued that this by itself was no reason to avoid such definition, since music by its very nature was irrational and intuitive. As an example, he cited Hasidic dances, which he claimed revealed more about Hasidism "than Martin Buber himself." Boskovitch also responded to Wagner's evolutionary interpretation of music: European music after Wagner . . . reached a state of barrenness. This was the era of the epigones, of glittering but shallow virtuosity. The exhausted European music was revived by the Russians. Fresh blood of folk music penetrated the circulation of art music. The European major and minor tonalities offered new possibilities for the emotional expression of new music. The new Jewish music recognized the extraordinary significance of the folk song. . . . But there were problems. The Jewish popular melody had to be extracted from foreign, mainly German, Slavonian, Ukrainian, Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian and Persian-Caucasian influence.

With this argument, Boskovitch followed in the wake of Leonid Sabaneev, a contemporary composer and critic whose pioneer study in 1924 of the Society for Jewish Folk Music (founded in St. Petersburg in 1908) had been distributed and read enthusiastically in all Jewish musical circles.17 Sabaneev had considered the creation of a national school of art music as the third and final stage that would follow recognition of folk music and its systematic research. This last stage required recognition by what Sabaneev termed the "intelligentsia," since so long as a man is wholly immersed in the atmosphere of the folk-life, he does not notice the style of his nationality or, more accurately, he is unconscious of it. To become alive to it he must get away from that state of existence, must contemplate it from the outside, as it were; only then [is he] capable of artistic transformation.18

Sabaneev's approach fully fitted Boskovitch's own training as a musician. While Boskovitch supported Abraham Zvi Idelsohn's search for the origins of Jewish music in the traditional and pristine Jewish folk song—found in its purest form in the neginot or cantillation of the Bible—he also called for the organizing of a Transylvanian Jewish music society that would coordinate a large-scale project of

Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style

97

Fig. 1

Fig. 2 research and publication of European Jewish folk songs, education of choral conductors and performances by Jewish choruses and orchestras. He advocated substitutes for polyphony, citing works of Bartok and Kodaly as models, and noted with approval the musicological conference held in Cairo five years previously.19 Concluding his essay, Boskovitch appended his own arrangement of the Hasidic song "Yismah Moshe," which he had heard in his field expedition (see Fig. 1). The close link between Boskovitch's theoretical formulations and their musical realization was expressed in Chansons populaires juives (1936). In a lecture about the piece,20 Boskovitch recounted that while he had encountered the actual songs during his fieldwork expeditions, he had used the same notation as had Fritz Mordecai Kaufman in his 1920 collection of Jewish folk songs.21 In Chansons populaires juives, the East European Jewish melodies are preserved unchanged in the arrangement but are enriched and colored with elaborate harmony and orchestration, as in the first song, in which the "Ahavah rabah" steiger (cantorial mode) with its typical augmented second is supported by a Bartok-like harmony of superposed fourths rather than by romantic harmony in the minor key (see Fig. 2). The first reactions to Chansons populaires juives indicated that Boskovitch had touched a delicate nerve in his treatment of diaspora songs. Critic David Rosolio maintained that the composer has attempted to unite two contrasting poles. On the one hand, simple Jewish folk songs, powerful in their expression and emotion, clear in their musical structure, and very typical of the spiritual life of the diaspora Jews—and, indeed, the selection of these particular songs as representative of the Jewish character was very successful—and, on the other hand, orchestral instrumentation that has nothing to do with the emotional affinity to the songs. The superimposing of instrumentation for the sake of mere color, with no organic connection to the musical contents of the subjects, is analogous to the grafting of an apple to a plum—failure is inevitable.22

98

Jehoash Hirshberg

Fig. 3

According to Moshe Bronzaft (Gorali), however, "Boskovitch's way was that of the modern composers Bartok and Milhaud (. . .)—to preserve the form and shape of the folk song and to provide it with a harmonic orchestral structure and background."23 In his next orchestral piece, Four Impressions, Boskovitch appeared to take an additional step away from the diaspora toward the emerging Jewish culture in Palestine. Although the first movement is an orchestration of a piano piece composed while Boskovitch was still in Cluj, the fourth movement is a folk-like arrangement of the hora "El yivneh hagalil" (see Fig. 3). Local critics were struck by the differences between Four Impressions and Chansons populaires juives; as noted by Menashe Rabinowitz (Ravina): "There is no diaspora-like tearful tune [in Four Impressions]. Everything is new."24 During the years 1941 to 1946, Boskovitch crystallized his new worldview, first expressed in a brief lecture he gave in Tel-Aviv in December 1943 at a cultural gathering of Jews from Hungary, and more fully in his article "Ba'ayot hamusika haleumit beyisrael" ("Problems of National Music in Israel"), published six years later.25 Boskovitch's point of departure was the romantic aesthetics that viewed music as an autonomous system whose affects could not be translated into the verbal medium. Boskovitch stressed the point that music does not describe actual objects but rather represents those human impressions derived from them. He thus rejected the simplistic, naive and vague local view of Israeli music as a direct expression of Mediterranean climate and scenery, while at the same time challenging the view of music as a universal language. Indeed, Boskovitch explicitly rejected the German view that art is free of time and place. Every great art, he believed, had its roots in a clearly defined small community, and only later could it affect ever-growing communities and societies. Boskovitch illustrated this point, in his 1943 lecture, with a comparison between Northern Europe and the Mediterranean region: in the North, he argued, the cold and misty environment leads to seclusion and melancholy—a situation that encourages the use of imagination. But under the blue skies and hot sun of the Mediterranean, things are more sharply delineated, and thus people are more grounded in reality. Boskovitch made a further distinction between what he termed "static" landscape, the visual scenery of each country and region, and "dynamic" landscape, the combination of sounds within each language and its rhetoric. Having arrived from Europe, Boskovitch was engulfed not only with the scorching Mediterranean sun and the sand dunes of Tel-Aviv, but even more with the excited vocal gestures of Arabic and Sephardic Hebrew. Such a landscape, he believed, must be taken into account; Boskovitch rejected the transplantation of Western romantic orientalism and exoticism that found its expression in certain works written in Palestine, such as Jacob Weinberg's opera The Pioneers (1924), in which the central aria of the heroine, Leah, betrays the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov's 1909 The Golden Cock-

Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style

99

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

erel (see Fig. 4) or Verdinah Shlonsky's early song cycle, Images Palestiniennes (1931), the first song of which is an exotic evocation of the Bedouin's call in the desert (see Fig. 5). For Boskovitch, every artist carried within him a deeply rooted national heritage. Two shepherds, one Arab, the other Jewish, may play their flutes on adjacent hills in the Galilee, but their reactions to their surroundings would be different because of their different backgrounds. Similarly, music created in one period would be a total anachronism if written at another time. Boskovitch also rejected the notion that great artists are far ahead of their time. In his first essay, he noted that individual artists functioned within "the intellectual orbit of some great community. The pietism of Bach could not have been born in the Molieresque, French atmosphere." Thus, according to Boskovitch, Israeli music could be written only by composers who lived in Israel. Composers abroad could compose Jewish, but not Israeli music, whereas Israeli composers could compose music that was both Israeli and Jewish. Boskovitch applied his evolutionary approach of time and place not only to longrange processes but also to developments within the short history of music in Palestine and the new state of Israel. One case in point was his attitude toward the hora. When Boskovitch came to Palestine the hora was established as a hallmark of local style, characterized by the romantic image of a Dorian mode (a minor mode with no leading tone and with a major sixth), a square 2/4 meter, a symmetrical structure of short phrases and constant syncopation.26 Marc Lavri, who immigrated in 1935, composed the extremely popular song "Emek" in 1936, for instance, and then elaborated it in his symphonic poem of the same name. Boskovitch also turned to the hora in his arrangement of the folk song "El yivneh hagalil" and used hora rhythms in the first movement of his Violin Concerto (see Fig. 6) and in the "Amamiyah" movement of the Semitic Suite (see Fig. 7). But in his writings of the early 1950s, Boskovitch ridiculed the hora, arguing that [its popularity] has dissipated. The "asthmatic" rhythm has undergone far-reaching changes as a result of the psychological changes that naturally occurred after the tension of the heroic period and with the return to normalization. It is only natural that the hora is in the process of adaptation to the realities of the Israeli society. If it used to be a mark of identity for a composer to write his hora, one should no longer be encouraged to do so. The composer should rather look for new ways that would free him from the trauma

100

Jehoash Hirshberg

Fig. 6

Fig. 7 of the hora and allow for ways of rhythmic-collective expression that would suit the dialectic "time," which has changed radically.27

In this article, Boskovitch clearly maintained an attitude that Israeli composers should be "encouraged"—even guided—in their musical style. In Boskovitch's worldview, Israeli music would find its symbolism in the sound and melos of the Middle East. This view was in contrast to the prevailing attitude of Western-educated critics, who commonly equated Middle Eastern musical elements with primitivism and folk music. Boskovitch, however, applauded the rhythmic flexibility, melodic richness, virtuosity and direct expression of Middle Eastern music, which he contrasted with the "artificiality" of European music. In terms of the emerging Israeli style, Boskovitch recommended the avoidance of vertical harmony—the most Western of the musical elements—in favor of melody and rhythm as elaborated through linear polyphonic techniques. These could range from Middle Eastern heterophony to polyphony in the manner of Bela Bartok, Igor Stravinsky or Paul Hindemith, depending on the specific musical composition. Finally, Boskovitch subscribed to Sabaneev's model, according to which a scholarly project of systematic collection and accurate transcriptions of Middle Eastern melodies would function as an obligatory initial stage in the formation of national style. The melodies would then be disseminated through group singing, folk concerts, and choral gatherings and festivals—rather than through their arrangement for piano accompaniment, an "alien" dimension that should be avoided. A continuous line of thought leads from Boskovitch's early Cluj essay through the lecture of 1943 up to the publication of his comprehensive 1953 essay. His was a combination of romantic aesthetics and evolutionary historicism with an extremely antiromantic conception of the role of the composer. Boskovitch used his critic's pen as a powerful tool for spreading his ideology, evoking constant polemics in his frequent reviews. Yet Boskovitch's writings were a double-edged sword. While they were primarily directed to the local intellectual readers in the country who were destined to form a motivated and discriminating audience, they were also a means of verbally grounding his music, which he meant to serve as the collective expression of the Israeli people. In his self-imposed role as spiritual spokesman of a newly formed society, Boskovitch constantly reviewed and scrutinized each of his own works. The severity of his self-appraisal became evident with the completion of his Violin Concerto in 1942, which won first prize in the prestigious Huberman Contest.28 The concerto

Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style

101

was played by violinist Lorand Fenyves and was acclaimed both by the audience and by critics. Yet Boskovitch decided to withdraw the piece from future performances, having deemed it in need of extensive revision.29 To outside observers such as his students and colleagues, Boskovitch appeared to be a highly emotional and ultrasensitive artist capable of changing his views and directions overnight. Such an impression was misleading. The principal facets of Boskovitch's ideology remained stable throughout his career—particularly those concerning his concept of place and time—and he was always at pains to furnish ideological and theoretical justification for each of his creative endeavors. A salient example was his attitude toward the piano, the most European of musical instruments, which in Palestine (and later Israel) continued to be the principal instrument both for music education and performance. In his 1953 essay, Boskovitch defined the piano as the most domestic of all European phenomena: all pastorales in the piano literature, from Scarlatti to Debussy, depict sceneries through the window of the living room. Eastern music is more airy: it depicts the outdoors. Even in its cultured urban forms, it would have nothing of the salon-like Watteau. Certain traits of the Semitic desert would always echo in its sounds.30

He therefore recommended the substitution of Arabic instruments such as the ud and the rebab. Yet Boskovitch himself had continued to compose for the piano. In 1944, for example, the dancer Yardenah Cohen had commissioned a series of piano arrangements for her dances—which, ironically, were based on biblical themes and were meant to be danced bare-footed in Bedouin attire, accompanied by Arabic music. Cohen had first hired three Iraqi Jews who made their living at the Haifa fish market and who played the ud, darbouka (Arabic drum) and flute. After a short period of uneasy cooperation, she concluded that she could not form the proper personal communication with them.31 She then turned to Boskovitch, who felt the need to formulate a theoretical justification for the use of the piano in Israeli music. He later wrote that, the Jewish psyche uses the piano as a percussion instrument for rhythmic-motoric expression. The musical independence of the piano may have been an added psychological-social factor, if one bears in mind that the Jewish virtuosi came from Eastern Europe, where the regimes were as a rule anti-Jewish. It would be only natural that with the renewal of Jewish creativity in the homeland the piano would play a central role in the instrumental music of the Israeli composers. The rhythmic potential of the piano also fits the dynamic period of building the homeland.32

The reasoning may have been tenuous, but it provided Boskovitch with another argument in accord with his dialectics of time and place: while the place called for a visionary Eastern pastorale as performed on Arabic instruments, the dynamic era of nation-building was best expressed by the rhythmic percussive qualities of the piano. Boskovitch's first encounter with Middle Eastern music had come shortly after his arrival in Palestine. In 1939, the singer Brachah Zefira approached a number of local composers—all of whom were recent immigrants—and asked them to provide

102

Jehoash Hirshberg

her with arrangements for the ethnic songs of Yemenite, Bukharan, Sephardic and Persian origin that she had been performing. Zefira, a Yemenite Jew, had grown up as an orphan, first with foster families of different ethnic groups and then in a boarding school, during which period she had recorded in her superb musical memory a large multiethnic repertory. She turned out to be a unique performer and stage personality dedicated to the mission of introducing the Middle Eastern musical heritage to Western-educated concert audiences.33 Most of the composers she approached, notably Paul Ben-Haim,34 willingly composed arrangements. Boskovitch, however, decided to compose only original songs with piano or orchestral accompaniment.35 While there may have been personal reasons for his so doing, his main motivation was most likely ideological. In his view, the making of arrangements was to be a temporary phase in the absorption of Middle Eastern idioms into the new national style, and Zefira herself had already accomplished this. Boskovitch thus preferred to take on the more challenging task of synthesizing Zefira's voice into his own style. Boskovitch's intensive creative production during the years 1939 to 1946 was marked by his efforts to internalize the most fundamental elements of composition of Arabic music. His archive, for example, contains a manuscript of many pages of transcription of melodic figures of maqam bayat,36 (the maqam being the scalar and melodic framework for improvisation in Arabic music). Boskovitch believed in retaining those elements of Western music that complied with principles of Arabic music while rejecting purely European devices such as the fugue (which he considered the most intellectual product of the German spirit). A concrete expression of his ideology is the second movement of the Oboe Concerto, which uses the improvisatory technique of the slow section of the taqsim, the most important form of Arabic music. The oboe was selected because it is similar in sound to the Mediterranean zurna. As it would do in a traditional taqsim, the oboe gradually develops the range of the maqam with a strong attraction back to the basic note G, which creates a powerful tension throughout the movement. The oboe slowly climbs to the upper octave and then covers the lower fourth, while the orchestra maintains a recurrent ostinato figure of three notes (see Fig. 8). While Boskovitch emphasized melodic and rhythmic factors, he restricted the role of harmony. There is no modulation throughout the movement, and hence the harmony is static. At the same time, Boskovitch retained the Western conception of a closed form by having a melodic and registral recapitulation toward the end of the movement. This fusion of Western and Eastern elements was generally well regarded. According to one critic, The performance of this piece . . . should be regarded as a musical event that may lead us to a new way of musical thinking. . . . Boskovitch has an important idea: he wishes to adapt his melodies to our country, to its scenery and climate, to its people and language. ... He is not writing cheap Jewish music, although his origin is from the Jewish music of Eastern Europe ... He has moved away from Eastern Jewish music to the music of the East.37 Perhaps the most sincere and consistent realization of Boskovitch's ideology at this time was the Semitic Suite, a short and highly communicative work that was the fruit of a great deal of effort (several versions were written and discarded over a

Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style

103

Fig. 8

Fig. 9

period of at least three years). The suite's second movement, a series of variations on a theme, was virtually identical to an earlier piece Boskovitch had written for Yardenah Cohen's choreography of a scene from the Song of Songs that depicted Shulamit and the shepherds (see Fig. 9). The direct Arabic model for this movement was noted at a field work interview (1976) with the great Iraqi-Jewish musician Ezra Aharon, who had immigrated to Palestine in 1934. Upon listening to the movement, Ezra Aharon readily picked up his ud and improvised on the same melodic figures (see Fig. 10). The other movements, however, he defined as "Israeli, not Arabic" music. Boskovitch's most radical experiment in the suite, however, is the second toccata, which becomes here a monophonic dance with incidental heterophony, in which all instruments play the same basic melody with individual elaborations (see Fig. 11).38 In his program notes for the suite, Boskovitch defined it as an expression of the dialectics of time and place in the spiritual collective theme of the history of our people. As a projection of the nonmusical elements, the suite emerges as an allegedly extroverted folk music, but in reality it is based on imaginary folklore because it contains no melodic or rhythmic quotes.39

The first orchestral version of the Semitic Suite betrayed attempts at breaking away from the Western sound even more than the original piano version. The score calls for the use of the cimbalon40 as an emulation of the Arab kanun and for the use of the non-Western microintervals of 1/4 tones in the trumpet parts. This score was later used by conductor George Singer in his performance with the Vienna Philharmonic, which is perhaps the most dramatic recording of the suite so far.41 But Boskovitch later discarded those somewhat artificial attempts and limited himself to the emulation of Middle Eastern sound by means of European instruments. Despite the deliberate folk-like and communicative nature of the music, the work evoked extreme reactions. Ravina, who provided the program notes for its first

104

Jehoash Hirshberg

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

performance in February 1946, pointed out the difficulty of determining the tonic of the first movement, which is based on a recurring pattern of four pitches in different permutations rather than on a single prevailing center. And Rosolio, the Germaneducated veteran critic of Haaretz, wrote: Boskovitch distinctly and clearly aims at the creation of a new musical style, which is markedly 'Eastern.' Dispensing with any Western harmonic and melodic factor, he creates tunes that fit the world of Oriental, Arabic music. The harmonic and formal process also follows this music. Boskovitch realized that it would be impossible to proceed in this country with music based on the principles of the West: the scenery, the way of life, the environment, all require a change and another basic conception. But it appears to me that Boskovitch's method jumps too far. The most important problem is how to fuse the two styles. . . . One cannot solve the problem simply by ignoring it. Boskovitch writes in purely Eastern style, and the Western element disappears from his music.42

Rosolio, it should be noted, was an intelligent and open-minded critic at a time when the standards of music criticism in the daily press were generally high. Typically, compositions in a purely Western style were chastised for lack of Jewish or Middle Eastern content. Rosolio, for instance, had previously praised Erich Walter Steinberg for the "prevailing Jewish dialect in his Joseph and his Brethren" (1914), which had been achieved without the use of "any folk tune, neither of the Jewish diaspora nor of Eretz Israel,"43 and Ravina had commended Steinberg for applying "an individual approach with no concession to that which is commonly considered as Eastern."44 Despite such praise, critics expressed reservations about any extreme turn to Middle Eastern devices. Rosolio and others were simply not ready to admit the most radical elements of the Semitic Suite, particularly its rejection of the harmonic parameter. Another basic feature of Boskovitch's music was its near avoidance of direct quotes of folk material, the only exceptions being his early arrangement of "El yivneh hagalil" and a quote of Sara Levi Tanai's song "Kol dodi" in Suite for the Youth. Ideology might also explain Boskovitch's limited interest in composing songs in the folk style. In his statistical study of the history of the Israeli folk song, Natan Shahar has distinguished three groups of songs according to the frequency

Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style

105

and significance of their dissemination in printed sources: repertory songs, which received the broadest public recognition; interim songs, which enjoyed only a limited distribution; and "paper" songs, which were printed but rarely performed in the community.45 By 1941, the overall number of songs had reached 2,479, of which 684 could be defined as repertory songs. By 1949, the overall number had nearly doubled to 4,073, and the repertory group numbered 948 songs. Shahar has listed thirty-four songs by Boskovitch. Nine of them, however, are very short kindergarten songs organized as a small cycle, such that the actual number of separate items does not exceed twenty-four, two of which originated as art songs. According to Shahar, eight of Boskovitch's songs—a third of his output in this genre—have become repertory songs, almost all of them originating as incidental music for the theater, as with the extremely moving and popular "Dudu." It is noteworthy that, in a period in which the idiom of national folk songs was idolized, Boskovitch rarely mentioned folk and popular idioms as leading the way to the new Israeli style. His ideology called for the formation of a style that would represent the deepest spiritual layers of the Jewish people in their land rather than a naive, folklike popular style. As noted, a period of great productivity dating from Boskovitch's arrival in Palestine in 1938 came to a virtual halt in 1945. Boskovitch's renewal of intensive compositional activity in 1959 was at first retrospective in nature. The orchestral Song of Ascents, for example, elaborated and repeated melodic and rhythmic elements from his early compositions, whereas the cantata Daughter of Israel was dominated by the nostalgia of Bialik's poem and by rich tonal harmony. Then a sudden stylistic transformation occurred, one which may be understood against the background of the musical scene in Israel at that time. Following the war years, which were largely a period of seclusion for the Jewish community in Palestine, Israeli composers during the 1950s were subjected to the powerful avant garde ideology of the post-Webern composers—particularly that of the Darmstadt group, which developed total serialism and claimed for it a central role in future musical composition. One of the group, Pierre Boulez, went so far as to claim that "anyone who has not felt . . . the necessity of the 12-tone language is superfluous."46 Boskovitch's response was discriminating and slow. On the one hand, his basic premise concerning time imposed on him a constant awareness of changes in the musical world; on the other hand, his insistence on the centrality of place prevented him from any wholesale borrowing of outside influences. It was only in 1960 that he determined the aspects common to Middle Eastern music and to European serialism. Serialism allowed him to overcome the pressures for tonal directionality while relieving him of the traditional types of folk-like dance and pastoral that no longer corresponded to the complex social reality of Israel. Boskovitch at this time had expressed the belief that his earlier, "Mediterranean" style had come to a dead end.47 Serialism represented a systematic, inexpressive form of music that accorded with his own nonromantic, collective and nonindividualistic principles. His last compositions were an experiment in the serialization of the rhythmic qualities of biblical Hebrew—the intonation of which had comprised an important aspect of his early ideology. Boskovitch's sudden illness and premature death at the age of 57 prevented the realization of his new style, in which he

106

Jehoash Hirshberg

completed only three compositions, the Concerto da Camera, Lament, and Ornaments. Boskovitch himself viewed his composing as a constant search for the ideal and collective Israeli national style. On the surface, his musical output might appear to be an erratic meandering from style to style; interpreted on the basis of his ideology, it reveals itself as a consistent response to changing conditions. Boskovitch's fundamental mistake was his belief in the possibility of achieving a unified, synthetic Israeli style as a result of the collective effort of Israeli composers who would follow his model.48 What emerged instead in Palestine and later Israel was a musical society that interacted both with Middle Eastern and Western influences in a pluralistic coexistence of styles and techniques. While Boskovitch's ideology never translated into the basis of a unified style, it did form the solid foundations for a concept of Israeli music that was both more sophisticated than folk-like music and collective enough to relieve Israeli music in the 1940s and 1950s from extreme individualism, on the one hand, and reliance on folkloristic primitivism, on the other. Boskovitch never led a "school" of composers. Yet as a leading teacher of theory and composition and as an influential music critic, Boskovitch maintained a powerful influence on his students and readers. The concept of Mediterranean music that he coined became a commonplace in the Israeli musical scene, as evidenced, for example, in Menahem Avidom's Mediterranean Sinfonietta (1952) and Ben-Haim's Piano Concerto (1949) (originally titled the Mediterranean Concerto).49 Moreover, while he was not alone in his approach, Boskovitch provided the most consistent and established theoretical rationale for advancing the cause of a visionary national style. Indeed, a listener's survey in the late 1970s provided evidence that an Israeli audience (more specifically, a group of listeners of different ages and countries of origin) retained a clear conception of what constituted "Israeli" music.50 Responding to twenty excerpts of Israeli and non-Israeli music of the 1930s-1950s, more than 90 percent identified the second movement of Boskovitch's Oboe Concerto as "Israeli." While a Platonic ideal of Israeli music may not exist, there do appear to be musical patterns that help define any given piece as Israeli. Boskovitch's ideology and style provided even those who opposed him with a point of reference—known to this day as "Mediterranean music"—that still serves to identify at least some of the music produced in Israel.

Notes 1. See Jehoash Hirshberg, "Israel Philharmonic Orchestra," in Symphony Orchestras of the World, ed. Robert Graven (New York: 1987), 200-207. 2. Many of the immigrants were refugees from Nazi Germany. For a detailed sociological study of their migration to Palestine, see Philip V. Bohlman, The Land Where Two Streams Flow: Music in the German-Jewish Community in Israel (Urbana: 1989). 3. Erich Walter Sternberg, "The Twelve Tribes of Israel," Musica Hebraica 1-2 (June 1938), 27. This was the only issue of the periodical, which was the organ of the World Centre

Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style

107

for Jewish Music in Jerusalem. Its activities were terminated with the outbreak of the Second World War. See Bohlman, Land Where Two Streams Flow, 116-138. 4. See "Cluj," Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 5 (Jerusalem: 1971), 617-619. 5. Ibid. 6. See La situation de la minorite juive en Roumanie (Paris: 1928). 7. For more detailed information about the Boskovitch family, see "Boskovitch," Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 4, 1260. In Rumanian documents, the family name is spelled Boskovics. The composer himself spelled his last name in various ways in letters and manuscripts (Boskovitch, Boskowitch, Boskovich). 8. Kelet es Nyugat Kozott (Cluj: 1937). The pamphlet, which had a very limited publication, was funded by a sympathizer from the United States. Only two copies have been found so far in Israel. 9. Boskovitch's first major piece, completed in 1936, was the Cantique d'ete, which revealed the strong influence of Claude Debussy. A scheduled radio broadcast of this work never took place. Chansons populaires juives became known in Hebrew as Sharsheret hazahav (The Golden Chain). 10. From a lecture given in Tel-Aviv in December 1943 to a group of Jewish immigrants from Hungary. See the manuscript of the lecture, Boskovitch Archive, National Library, Jerusalem. 11. Interview with Charles Eshkar, Tel-Aviv, June 1977. 12. The manuscript has been edited for publication by Herzl Shmueli as part of his book, Alexander U. Boskovitch: His Life and Works (forthcoming). 13. Wagner's attack was first published under the pseudonym Richard Freigedank in Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik 33 (1850) and then as a separate booklet in 1869. The article was translated into English by William Ashton Ellis and published in Richard Wagner: Prose Works (London: 1895-1899), vol. 3, 79; an easily available edition is found in Wagner on Music and Drama, ed. A. Goldmann and Evert Sprinchorn (New York: 1964), 51. 14. Heinrich Berl, Das Judentum in der Musik (Stuttgart: 1926). 15. Gdal Saleski, Famous Musicians of a Wandering Race: Biographical Sketches of Outstanding Figures of Jewish Origin in the Musical World (New York: 1927). In the second edition of the book (1947), Saleski substituted "Jewish origin" for "wandering race." In the book itself, he used rather broad if not absurd criteria in defining Jewishness—for example, claiming that Maurice Ravel was of "Jewish origin." 16. Alexander Boskovitch, "A Zsido Zene Problema" ("The Problem of Jewish Music"), in Kelet es Nyugat Kozott, 31. 17. An English translation of Sabaneev's article, "The Jewish National School in Music," was published by S. W. Pring in The Musical Quarterly 15 (1929), 448-468. 18. Ibid., 452. 19. For a detailed discussion of Idelsohn's life and work, see Israel Adler, Bathja Bayer and Eliyahu Schleifer (eds.), The Abraham Zvi Idelsohn Memorial Volume (Jerusalem: 1986). The East-West Conference in Cairo (1932) was a landmark in the history of the then new discipline of ethnomusicology. This was the first large-scale meeting of European scholars with selected musicians from the Middle East who gave concerts and were recorded and interviewed. Among those who attended the conference were the ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann and the great ud player and singer Ezra Aharon, both of whom immigrated to Palestine three years later. 20. Alexander Boskovitch, "The Golden Chain," lecture given at the Fourth Congress of the Institute for Liturgical Music, Jerusalem, 1964. A recording of the lecture is found at the National Sound Archives, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. 21. Fritz Mordecai Kaufmann, Die schonsten Lieder des Ostjuden (Berlin: 1920). 22. David Rosolio, Haaretz, 18 March 1938. 23. Moshe (Bronzaft) Gorali, Davar, 8 April 1938. 24. Menashe (Rabinowitz) Ravina, Davar, 29 December 1938. Ravinah was the main music critic of this newspaper from the time of its founding in 1925 until his death.

108

Jehoash Hirshberg

25. Alexander Boskovitch, "Ba'ayot hamusikah haleumit beyisrael," Orlogin 9, (1953), 28-93. Avraham Shlonsky was the editor of this periodical. 26. Although the Palestinian hora has been linked to the Rumanian hora lunga, a clear connection has never been established and may never have existed. 27. Alexander Boskovitch, "Art Music in Israel," in Shmueli (ed.), Alexander U. Boskovitch. 28. The competition—held only once—was in honor of the Palestine Orchestra's founder, violinist Bronislaw Huberman, who had suffered severe injuries in a plane crash. Winners in the contest had their works performed by the orchestra. Second prize was awarded to Paul Ben-Haim for his In Memoriam. 29. Boskovitch never completed the revision of the concerto, but the second movement was published as a "psalm" for violin and piano (Tel-Aviv: 1987). According to his widow, Boskovitch considered his Concerto da Camera as a substitute. 30. Boskovitch, "Ba'ayot hamusikah haleumit," 292. 31. Yardenah Cohen, Betof uvemahol (Tel-Aviv: 1963), 31. 32. Alexander Boskovitch, "Musikah yisraelit lapesanter," Bat-kol (September 1957), 912. 33. Zefira had also received musical training in Germany and had performed in concert with her first husband, the pianist and composer Nahum Nardi. She was thus uniquely qualified to act as a mediator between the immigrant composers and the Middle Eastern musical heritage. For more information on Zefira, see Jehoash Hirshberg, "Berakha Zefirah vetahalikh hashinui bamusikah beyisrael," Pe'amim 19 (1984), 29-46; and Gila Flam, "Beracha Zephira—A Case in Acculturation in Israeli Song," Asian Music 17 (1986), 108— 125. 34. Jehoash Hirshberg, Paul Ben-Haim: His Life and Works (Jerusalem: 1990), ch. 9. 35. The four songs are "Adonai Ro'i" ("The Lord is My Shepherd"), issued in Zefira's recordings, "Tefilah" (based on A. Hameiri's poem) and a pair of drinking songs, "Shenei hitulim" ("Two Mockeries"), based on poems by Shlomo Alharizi. 36. The maqam is somewhat parallel to the Indian raga. Listeners are expected to be knowledgeable about the maqam's melodic character, expressing their admiration of the performance by applause and conventional exclamations at defined spots. 37. G.K., Hagalgal, 25 March 1944. 38. In heterophony, each instrument elaborates the basic melody in accordance with its own idiomatic nature, such that ornamentations and deviations in time occur. Heterophony is prevalent in non-European music, especially the Gamelan music of Indonesia. 39. Boskovitch's use of Yardenah Cohen's dance in the suite was not a direct quote but rather an adaptation of a basic maqam figure. 40. Boskovitch's model was most likely Zoltan Kodaly's Hary Janos, with its extensive cimbalon part. 41. The recording, which is of poor quality, is kept at the Kol Israel library. 42. David Rosolio, Haaretz, 1 March 1946. 43. Ibid., 2 January 1939. 44. Menashe (Rabinowitz) Ravina, Davar, 23 February 1939. 45. Natan Shahar, Hashir haerez-yisraeli bashanim 1920-1950: heibetim soziomusikaliyim umusikaliyim (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 1990). 46. Pierre Boulez, quoted in Leonard Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas (Chicago: 1967), 171. 47. Boskovitch expressed these views to a close friend, the composer, percussionist and conductor Joel Thome, who was himself dedicated to avant-garde composing. Recorded statement of Thome to author, April 1983. 48. Such a belief derived from the erroneous premises of the evolutionary historiography of music, which were propagated by avant-garde groups in Europe and the United States. The fallacy of their arguments was exposed by Meyer in his Music, the Arts, and Ideas. Meyer coined the term "statis" to refer to the constant state of nondirectional pluralistic and dynamic

Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli National Musical Style

109

activity during which new tactics and strategies emerge, rather than actual revolutions and innovations. 49. Hirshberg, Paul Ben-Haim, 232. 50. Jehoash Hirshberg, "The 'Israeli' in Israeli Music: The Audience Responds," Israel Studies in Musicology 1 (1978), 159-171.

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session Lionel Wolberger (BUREAU OF JEWISH EDUCATION, OMAHA)

Kol hatalmud benigun (All talmudic study is melodic)—Petahiah de Regensburg The Talmud is the music for a choir of voices; it is sung, and the music conveys the thrust and parry, the give and take of argument. . .—Jacob Neusner1

The dynamic nature of Ashkenazic Jewish talmudic study is obvious to anyone who would compare, say, a library and a beis medresh (study hall).2 In the former, books are silently read and activity—even moving the lips—is considered an impediment to the process. In the latter, to murmur while reading is a minimum requirement, and there is a hustle, hubbub and roar of voices as people read, chant, hum melodies, gesticulate and debate. As the quotations above illustrate, the resulting scene often described with musical vocabulary, and there is in fact a small body of talmudic sources and modern research that articulates the musical dimensions of study.3 By and large, however, scholastic inquiry has been focused on issues of text and language, and little effort has been made to analyze the ways in which music and movement form a coherent communication that accompanies the learning of Talmud.4 A number of methodological difficulties must be overcome before any such analysis can even be attempted. First, most study sessions are open only to participants; an audience simply does not exist. Second, talmudic academies at any level of instruction are generally closed to observation. Third, any observer who did gain access would need to be familiar with Hebrew, Aramaic and often Yiddish. And last, while every culture has some musical art—thus providing the researcher with cross-cultural methods—there are few verbal art forms that resemble Jewish study. Fieldwork for this study began at the Chaim Berlin Yeshivah, Brooklyn (1983) and continued at various sites in the United States, including three consecutive years (1985-1988) at a Lubavitch school in a major northeastern city. Later fieldwork in Jerusalem (1990-1991) was sponsored by the Interuniversity Fellowship in Jewish Studies and the Jewish Music Research Centre. I would like to thank Edwin Seroussi, Frank Alvarez-Pereyre and Hananya Goodman for their invaluable assistance.

no

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

111

Nonlinguistic materials that are manipulated in the course of study include certain effects, such as pause and intonation, that are generally considered to belong to the act of speaking rather than to music-making. If Talmud study is approached as performance, however, it is possible to apply ethnomusicological methods such as fieldwork, interviewing and transcription. Using these methods, it will be shown that Jewish study involves the presentation of oral and written text mixed with musical motifs and physical symbols: a multileveled event of which content-oriented linguistic ideas of text and meaning form only a part. In the discussion that follows, the elements of study are first identified on the basis of guidelines culled from traditional Jewish sources. Following this, an analysis is carried out of a videotaped Talmud lesson by a sixth-grade teacher in a Lubavitch day school. This specific analysis, it is hoped, will illuminate Talmud study in relation both to traditional Jewish culture and the field of ethnomusicology. The main instruments of Talmud study are the human voice and body, both of which engage in an actualization of written text. In traditional Jewish learning (lernen), silent explication of the text does not suffice: Beruriah once discovered a student who was learning in an undertone. Rebuking him she exclaimed, Is it not written [2 Samuel 23:5], 'Ordered in all things, and sure (arukhah bakol ushemurah)"? If it is ordered in your two hundred and forty-eight limbs it will be sure, otherwise it will not be sure (Erubin 53b-54a). Beruriah's rebuke reflects the general rabbinic tradition that urges students to study out loud in order to involve more of the body. In his analysis of the mishnaic cantillation used by Syrian Jews, for example, Frank Alvarez-Pereyre enumerates six distinct elements: accentuation, pause, rhythmic reading, intonational contours, syllabic prolongation and melody.5 With the addition of bodily movements, these elements accord as well with the Ashkenazic method of studying Talmud. It is true that the degree to which nonlinguistic features should be regarded as necessary to talmudic study is subject to debate. Jacob Neusner provides a particularly vociferous condemnation: Ritual-learning is not learning. Swaying, singing, jabbering, mumbling, shaking, dancing, fist-shaking, yelling, screaming, and all the other rites meant to convey intensity of learning do not necessarily bear relationship to [the] mind so long as the things the Talmud says do not stand at the center of things.6 Nonetheless, a wide variety of people continue to engage in bodily movements such as swaying, fist-shaking (often with thumb upraised) and head-shaking. Perhaps it is best to think of Talmud study as a primarily linguistic activity that takes place in the foreground, with musical activity in the background.7 Whatever the case, care must be taken with isolating elements for musical analysis. A well-known story tells of an Indian musician who attended his first Western classical concert. He reported that, while the beginning was enjoyable, the rest was dull. After much discussion it was determined that the tuning up of the orchestra was, to his ears, the most musical segment of the evening. Similarly, the melodies of talmudic study may in fact derive their meaning in a way that is utterly divorced from Western musical

112

Lionel Wolberger

concepts. A formal language was sought within Judaism that linked the nonlinguistic elements of lernen to the fabric of the talmudic life. Such a language was found in the realm of traditional Jewish pedagogy, where Talmud study occupies the loftiest position in the hierarchy of learning.8 Pedagogy must be seen as far more than a type of preparation for participation in cultural life. Four basic parameters, underlined below, express the broad role of pedagogy in the cultural patterns of Talmud study. The teaching of Talmud is transmitted by indoctrinated specialists and conforms to a theoretical tradition. Moreover, it is a culturally grounded activity that takes place in diverse settings, either independently pursued or else patronized by connoisseurs. These parameters, it is readily seen, apply as well to musical experiences and so provide a perspective for this musicological inquiry.9 In traditional Jewish pedagogy, Talmud study is a broad activity meant to involve almost every Jewish male. Children as young as the age of three begin the inculcation process, although they do not actually study Talmud until a minimum age of about ten. Once begun, Talmud study is meant to be a lifelong pursuit, with adults of all ages, levels of competence and vocal gifts engaging in what Abraham Heschel termed the "austere music of the Talmud's groping for truth."10 Talmud study also has a recognized trained specialist, the rabbi, and there is an enormous vocabulary of descriptive terms for its presentation, including indications of how nonlinguistic elements should be performed. However, such terms as benihuta or kal vahomer are solely of a technical and practical nature; there is no clearly stated theory of Jewish rhetoric as there was in the Hellenistic world. Similarly, a Jewish musical theory is conspicuously lacking in the pedagogic canon.11 However, the refined nature of this vocabulary, as well as the existence of trends, fashions and schools of Talmud study, indicate the de facto presence of a theory of rhetoric (and its accompanying musical forms) guiding the performance of study. Indoctrination in the art of study takes place with a rabbi, whether privately, in groups, or in formal institutions such as the beis medresh, kolel, heder, yeshivah or day school. These institutions, in turn, are emblematic of study and receive support, financial and otherwise, from the community. Study is conceived as independent of these settings, such that demonstrations of erudition and facility may be featured in almost any situation. Homilies, for example, draw upon the style and substance of talmudic study and appear in many important rituals—from the devar torah given at a bar-mitzvah celebration to the synagogal derashah that follows the Torah reading. Thus, any particular study event stands in relation to other such events, which are all culturally grounded, even when occurring in noninstitutional settings. Last, the culture's elite—political, financial and religious—patronize study and uphold the learned man as a paragon of the highest achievable good. A broad spectrum of the traditional Jewish population strives to attain and maintain this "connoisseur" status. As with other aspects of Orthodox life, the pedagogical pattern is of venerable age, linked as it is to sacred Scripture. It is also uniform to a certain extent among all the divergent sects. Various curricula, which are readily attainable, usually consist of lists of texts and linguistic skills; extralinguistic components are implicit rather than explicitly stated. It is possible, however, to compile a list of some of these implicit activities—both cognitive and noncognitive—and place them in rough

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

113

Fig. 1 Talmud Study Activities in Approximate Developmental Order (examples given in parentheses)

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Listening; concentrating (following a story) Manipulation of objects (holding, opening, kissing a sacred book) Movement (swaying, pointing) Singing (repeating, memorizing) Reading; cantillation (articulating vowels, punctuation) Translation Differentiation of genres (prayer, study) Questioning and discourse with teacher Improvisation (of text, cantillation) Storytelling (illustrations of text, moral tale) Engendering of polyphony (creation of beis medresh sound) Following an argument; classifying types of argument Argumentation (proving a case)

developmental order (see Fig. 1). This list does not stem from any abstraction of developmental or cognitive psychology. Rather, it distills what seem to be the essential nonredundant features of the pedagogical strategies that culminate in talmudic study. Included in the list are overtly linguistic activities that carry a strong association with a nonlinguistic form. The list itself, it should be added, is not in precise order; abilities generally accrue as students acquire new layers of competence and are given opportunities to use and display their abilities. This list of performance activities, while not definitive, makes explicit the guidelines that specialists follow as they shape the students' performances. Such implicit guidelines also act, at times, as an aesthetic. Take singing, for example. In some first-grade classes, both the text and translation of Genesis is given in taytsh-nign (translation melody), a simple song that links phrases of text and vernacular. No rabbi strikes a tuning fork before singing a taytsh-nign and reference to any independent tuning standard is categorically rejected. Moreover, once the students are singing together, no effort is made to have them all sing in tune. This acceptance and even encouragement of musical dissonance allows for a freedom of vocalization and participation that, boisterous as it is, in no way diminishes the significance of study or reverence for the text. However, while harmony may be lacking in students' performance of text, successful teachers do have an artistic aesthetic—one that imbues their performance with a pure joy and appreciation of the art not unlike that of an accomplished jazz musician improvising on a well-known and beloved song. The transcription below is a case in point of the "music of holy argument" as presented by a skilled practitioner. In the 1940s and 1950s, Lubavitcher hasidim founded a network of day schools in the northeastern United States. The transcript below was recorded in one of the oldest of these schools, which at the time of recording (1989) had an enrollment of more than four hundred children, aged two through eighteen. Each Lubavitch day school forms a kind of outpost on the border between the closed Orthodox commu-

114

Lionel Wolberger

nity in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and those Westernized Jews who derive much (if not all) of their status from interactions with secular life. The aim of the Lubavitch schools is to create a complete Jewish life in microcosm in addition to providing secular studies in accordance with state law. Educational strategies are thus constantly evolving as rabbis attempt to bridge the gap between the demands of an exclusively Jewish world and those of secular society. In this particular school, students come from families of diverse backgrounds, ranging from ultra-Orthodox to those that maintain little Jewish ritual behavior in the home. Members of the teaching staff, however, are from Lubavitch families that trace their lineage back to Eastern Europe and that pay regular visits to Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights. Rabbi Shlomo Freund (not his real name) comes from a Canadian family and was trained in the Orthodox yeshivah system; his wife, who also teaches in the school, is a daughter of the founder. The school itself has elements that are specifically Lubavitch and/or hasidic. Certain specifically Lubavitch holidays, for instance, are included in the curriculum and Judaism is interpreted through a hasidic viewpoint that privileges the nontextual component of Judaism. Vigorous motion and melodies sung to vocables are highly regarded as vehicles for cleaving to God, elevating the spirit and attaining a religious state of purity, though these expressions are to be found as well in other Ashkenazic Orthodox day schools. In its core curriculum the school is nearly indistinguishable from other Orthodox day schools, and the basic worldview of its teachers (though not necessarily of all of the students) is that of the traditional yeshivah world. The teachers, for example, believe that the Talmud and its current method of study formed part of the revelation at Mount Sinai. During the field observation, Freund taught Talmud in grades six through high school. The lesson below is taken from Chapter 1 ("Shenayim ohazin") of the tractate Bava Meziyah, a common first text for beginning Talmud students. It was recorded in the beis medresh rather than in the classroom, with the researcher and cameraman constituting the only audience. The teacher, however, presented the material as if sitting in front of his sixth-grade students.12 Before turning to the text, some explanation should be offered for the system of transcription used here (see Fig. 2). In most talmudic transcriptions, words (or phonemes) constitute the main elements of analysis. Here, since the focus is on nonlinguistic elements of the text, special marks have been added to illustrate body movements, intonation and pauses. The actual talmudic text (and its English translation) is given in bold; other text is the teacher's elucidation of the material. Two kinds of markings indicate emphasis. The symbol (!) is placed above accented syllables, while the symbol (:) is placed above elongated syllables. These accents form a rhythm of about seventy beats per minute (readers can approximate the effect by tapping a table every second, allowing the accents to fall on the beats). Pauses are indicated by the symbols (\ /) and (\ /), the latter indicating the longer pause. Below the talmudic text are two sets of lines and marks. The first, directly below some words of the text, are "movement" markers. In most cases, these indicate the teacher's up-and-down swaying, which serves as a slower counterrhythm to the accented text. Finally, below the movement marks is a three-line staff on which

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

115

Explanation of symbols used in the text Above the text:

|

Accent

\/

Pause, short

\ /

Pause, long

:

Elongated syllable

On the line of the text: Bold ! ?.,

Written text or direct translation Punctuation (for readability only)

Below the text: (1:OO)

Elapsed time on videotape (minutes:seconds)

A

Swaying, torso up

A

Swaying stops, torso up

V

Swaying, torso down

V

Swaying stops, torso down

No swaying (nonperiodic movement)

•

Note, short

o

Note, long Intonation move Fig. 2

intonation contours and relative pitch is shown. A three-line staff is used instead of the usual five-line model because the basic talmudic chant consists of no more than five relative pitch levels.13 In terms of piano pitches, Freund's melody begins on B, one octave below middle C, and then leaps away from this tone about a major third up, somewhere between D# and E. His beginning note is shown as the middle line and is called the recitation tone; while it is recognizable throughout, it is most apparent in less melodic passages as a sustained pitch. Notes are shown as being either long (o) or short (•) and connecting lines indicate slides. Lines without notes are broad intonational inflections—a major component of talmudic cantillation.

116

Lionel Wolberger

Fig. 3

Fig. 4 The presentation opens with the sounding of a well-worn melodic fragment whose contour is analogous to "Man nishtanah," the "Four Questions" melody sung by many Ashkenazic Jews at the Passover seder (see Fig. 3). "Man nishtanah" is a children's song, a particular coalescence of music and (talmudic) text that constitutes a musical object. "Shenayim ohazin," chanted in gemore-nign, or Talmud melody, would not be mistaken for a song (see Fig. 4). And yet Freund is undeniably singing at this moment, his words fitting into the melody as lyrics do in the Western classical art of the song. The song-like aspect of Talmud study serves a mnemonic function; many yeshivah students remember whole portions of talmudic text in gemore-nign long after their yeshivah years. However, the tune itself is very

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

117

simple, and it does not call attention away from the text. A more complicated melody would be lost or drowned out in the polyphonic texture of communal study. By cantillating in gemore-nign and externalizing the content of the text, Freund implicitly differentiates the Talmud study lesson from Bible study, prayer, etc. Such differentiation is desirable, as teachers and students perform text almost the entire day. A typical day may include (in order of appearance) the liturgy for waking up, morning prayer, Bible study, blessings for food, grace after meals, and only then Talmud study. Many of these events draw upon the same texts, such that variations in cantillation are necessary to help differentiate the performances in time. Since gemore-nign only emerges from Talmud study, it is a marker of a high level of competence. It clearly indicates both the advanced training of the rabbi and the presence of the children in an elite training institution. Lastly, just as whistling a portion of a beloved aria brings to mind some memories of the concert hall, so does Freund's gemore-nign evoke the diverse settings wherein he chants texts, including the synagogue and his home. Continuing his gemore-nign, Freund departs from both the written talmudic text and his initial, more literal, approach to it ("two people walk on the street"), and he begins instead to compose a story in song (Fig. 5a). Swinging and swaying help the teacher introduce original oral material in ways that passive reading cannot. Note that there is virtually no bold-faced text in this section. Freund is composing a story while performing, his steadily chanting voice forming a continuity of gemore-nign upon which he can improvise, both melodically and textually. As he embellishes that story, the melody becomes differentiated. "A truck rode . . ." (call it A-l) is chanted on a recitation tone that leaps up for emphasis and slides down for cadences. As the characters try to return the goods—"we both rush to tell the driver" (B-l)—he speeds up and gives the intonation a steady rise. He then adds that the driver has to leave (B-2, at 0:30), a further gloss on why the characters do not return the items. B-l and B-2 form opposite patterns, the first dipping low and ending high, the second jumping up a bit and ending low. Another gloss (Fig. 5b) about "friends and family" (A-2) returns to the (A-l) pattern of descending curves, but it is done in the intermediate tones of the chant. "And so therefore," (A-3) marks his return to the text and the original two-note melody. Again he notes that the characters cannot return the goods (B-3), using the same pattern as (B-l) above. This ABAB structure allows him to reflect on the story as he speaks, adding details if necessary. The story is a mashal, an example that illustrates the text. Such scenarios often appear in the Talmud in order to present the specific conditions to which the text applies. By inventing his own scenario, Freund is in effect creating a talmudic text, in similar talmudic style. As such, it mimics the structure and pattern of the original text while addressing concerns that eleven-year-olds tend to have, such as finding things near school property. This kind of scenario invention presupposes a familiarity with talmudic thought—an advanced developmental study skill—but it also engages the students' imaginations, allowing them to more readily follow the argument. The teacher now returns to the text (Fig. 6), and while the chant is very similar to

118

Lionel Wolberger

Fig. 5a

the opening, subtle changes in rhythm and linguistic content indicate a shift. Much of the above passage is in bold (in direct contrast to the preceding story), with Freund interpolating personification of the events into the text translation. A strong rhythm ensues of text and vernacular, text and vernacular, so steady that one can tap one's foot to the rhythm (Freund marks it by swaying). This intoning of text and translation in strict alternating order, usually to the tune of taytsh-nign, or translation melody, is a standard feature of early education. The melody links words, often with great precision, with their translation; note "vezeh oymer, and I say." The basic pattern is recognizable, indeed musical, even when pitched singing is abandoned and identical intonation contours link text and translation (as in 1:15, kulah shell—

Fig. 5b

119

120

Lionel Wolberger

Fig. 6

it's all mine). These contours vividly portray the story, particularly when the phrase, "I saw it," declared by the opposing parties, is marked by opposite contours. Within the translation cantillation, the teacher continues the scenario, acting out its parts and increasing the emotional involvement of both the imaginary characters and himself. The width of his pitch range (or key) becomes wider, principally as a result of his varying the height of the high-pitched syllables. Freund also raises his register, and the timbre of his voice becomes slightly more hoarse. To further underline the emotionality of the situation, Freund stops swaying when the characters scold each other, shaking his shoulders and shouting at the student. The rabbi is

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

121

here acting out the emotions common to sixth graders, making the text and verbalization of that text conform to their lives and expectations. In the next section, the rhythmic cadenced reading falters for the first time. At about 1:30 (Fig. 7a), Freund freezes in his swaying and says quickly, "you realize that I am there a litigant with you. . . . " Chanted on the recitation note, this sentence introduces a new scenario, relocating the action to the beis din, or court (the Talmud indicates that the entire mishnah takes place in court). It appears that Freund is pondering whether to explain this new scenario more fully. His momen-

Fig. 7a

122

Lionel Wolberger

Fig. 7b

tary hesitation is reflected in the nonrhythmic and less melodic nature of his cantillation. However, the framework of the original melody is still palpable in the mind and ear of the knowledgeable listener. In the last two lines of this section (Fig. 7b) the intonation drops twice, forming a cadence that underlines the fact that a section has been completed. This cadence is prepared at 1:55 in the penultimate line "sheein lo pahos . . ." and is sounded twice at the end. Freund has not only read, translated and created two scenarios, but has molded his cantillation to fit the segments. By cadencing along with the Talmud's conclusion, he imparts the feeling that the Talmud speaks the truth. Such a feeling is more than a matter of linguistic sense. As with a good blues performance, where, as Jeff Titon points out, the reaction is "that's right, you got it, that's the truth,"14 there is a sense in which the text and music complement one another. In the blues, this "rightness" comes from the interaction of rhyme and tune; in Talmud, it results from

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

123

the interaction of text (both oral and written) and cantillation, characterized by continuing and cadential formulas. As the text proceeds (Fig. 8a), presenting a variant of the original scenario, Freund shifts in his cantillation, introducing steadily descending melodic lines. The wide outline of the opening has become more compressed. In piano pitches, the key is higher—the recitation tone now D sharp below middle C, leaping up to E or F. This narrower form is more congenial to Freund and characterizes most of the remaining melodic portions.

Fig. 8a

124

Lionel Wolberger

Up until this section, "Shenayim ohazin" has evoked simple moral conflicts and has presented a commonsense line of reasoning that even beginners can follow. Here, however, things get a little difficult as a subtle legal shading is introduced. Freund personifies this in Reuven, proud and greedy, fighting it out with Shimon, who is ready to compromise (Fig. 8b). Both the first scenario and this one contain

Fig. 8b

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

125

Fig. 8c implicit moral lessons. In the yeshivah such moral tales form part of a genre called musar, which (according to Freund) has its own musar-nign. However, Freund does not press the moral issue here. He is instead considering how to explain this more difficult section. The last lines have many downward intonation curves, and the rhythm of the final accents (at 3:10) speeds up dramatically to 130 accents per minute (Fig. 8c). However, there is no cadence here—the text has one more word

126

Lionel Wolberger

(vayahloku) and Freund does not utter it until 3:45. At this point he is unsure of how he will continue. Finally he decides, and uses an intonational contour to ask the question, "why a quarter?" The question is put in cantillation—an indication that the teacher already knows how the answer will fit into the traditional Jewish framework. Freund's question here is not one that tests the foundations of belief; it fits into its boundaries, just as the words dovetail neatly into the chant. In the next section (Fig. 9), Freund supplies the answer to his question. Freund's repertoire of body movements has until now consisted of swaying and gesturing to act out the emotions of characters in the scenarios. A new form is now

Fig. 9a

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

127

Fig. 9b

introduced as, not content to leave the substance of the Talmud to linguistic content, Freund demonstrates it in physical space. Thus, he stops swaying at the very start of this section (shown underneath the text by the side-to-side arrows). He moves his open hand over his Talmud and shows the listener, "half I already gave you," motioning over half the page, and then continues to show the divisions over his own volume: whole, half, quarter, and three-quarters. Simultaneously, his hand plays a tap-tap-tap on the table in a rhythm that is matched by his linguistic accents on the words at 3:45, "going to divide it up." Freund then adds, "in such a way"— redundant linguistically, but a completion of the rhythm prepared by the preceding words, "and that is the way." This is in fact a difficult passage and Freund apparently feels a need to check that all is understood when he asks, in a very vernacular way, "all right?" As if in response, his very next phrase, "says the Mishnah" is chanted in the same melody with which he began the entire presentation. Sounding the chant is common after a long digression; it is an audible signal that some kind of summation is at hand. In this case, Freund is about to turn from the issue of three-quarter division to the next case in the talmudic text (Fig. lOa). In this section, Freund introduces what is actually a new mishnah. He indicates this by creating a new illustrative scenario, one taken from the scroll of Esther (the scene in which Haman leads Mordechai through the streets of Shushan). Freund sticks closely to text and translation here, using a cantillation very similar to the one used above at 1:00. A difference is heard on zeh omer (4:10), when he sounds the

128

Lionel Wolberger

melodic motif with which he began the entire presentation. (At 1:00, in contrast, he had used an intonational curve for the identical words, zeh omer . . . kulah sheli.) The difference points to a general goal of cantillation in study: change and innovation in response to the immediate setting. In the first example, Freund had just finished using pure gemore-nign, hence he switched to intonational contours. Here, however, he is using a compact, descending melodic line, and so he signals the forward movement of the text with a return to nign. Talmudic cantillation uses intonation in a very different way from everyday speech. At 4:23 below (Fig. 10b) there is a translation pair of kulah sheli and the whole thing belongs to me. The intonation of the latter is determined by the

Fig. 10a

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

129

Fig. 10b

previous utterance, and thus it does not correspond to any kind of intonation used in actual vernacular discourse. The next phrase, however, is more ordinary: "I have the reins." This brief return to the scenario is marked by a more vernacular intonation. Sometimes the translation contours may conflict with the usual intonational contours of vernacular speech. The meaning is not confused, however, as it is common in the musical arts for melodic contours to contradict linguistic stress; both messages are still effectively communicated. Once again, a section is ended with a question that is answered with details drawn from later in the talmudic text (Fig. 10c). The teacher now demonstrates one of the most advanced uses of gemore-nign,

130

Lionel Wolberger

Fig. 10c

namely as a marker of the hierarchization of logical clauses. The descending line of "If it's a kosher animal (4:40)" (Fig. 11) begins an extended line of reasoning that can be summarized as follows: The animal is either A (kosher) or B (nonkosher), and can be divided in manner X (slaughtered) or Y (sold). If A, then X, and if B, then Y. Freund's intonation follows the same contour that the melodic motif of "Mah nishtanah" would follow. "If A" is begun on a high-low alternating intonation that then drops. Following a pause, "if B" is given a wider range and higher pitch, dropping at the very end. Thus, cantillation outlines the if-then structure by introducing disjunctions and relations between clauses. When Freund says, "as they did in the olden days," (4:45) he gives the only hint of the age of the text he is presenting. Otherwise its events seem to occur just as the rabbi describes it, right now, at this very moment. Is this feeling engendered by the mere grammatical tense of "they will sell it," as opposed to "they will have had to sell it?" The tense is significant, but the immediacy can only partially be attributed to and/or described in the realm of language.15 It should be noted that musical communication cannot generally encode tenses such as past, present and future. Thus, the role of nonlinguistic components cannot be underplayed in the presenttense nature of Jewish study, where ancient events are participated in as if they are occurring now. The entire atmosphere of movement, cantillation and story telling conspires to shape this perception of present time. Improvisation is most apparent when it fails, as it seems to do when Freund begins the last portion at 5:10 (Fig. 12a). In the previous section his intonation was

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

131

consistently rise-fall, with an even rhythm. Here, however, he begins at 5:10 to construct a scenario of the "lucky" litigants who had ten witnesses. Overall he keeps sounding a fall-rise pattern: "people were lucky (5:20)," "people standing there," "bat of the eye, that's what they saw." Within this framework his pace quickens, and he shows no clear intonation pattern. Thus, his reading does not sound "right," and

Fig. 11

132

Lionel Wolberger

Fig. 12a

the third fall-rise is not convincing. As if to help him regain his footing, he sounds a series of descending line chants (5:30) as he abandons the "ten witnesses" scenario he had begun and returns to the text (Fig. 12b). Instead of creating a new scenario, Freund expounds on the theme of swearing or taking the name of God in vain. This is in fact one of the underlying concerns of the Talmud in all the events portrayed thus far; it is later elucidated in further detail. But Freund's words here are more than a foreshadowing—they are a moral lesson to the children, a reminder of the proper code of behavior. This is driven home by the emotional quaver in his voice when he elongates each syllable "name-God-vain" (5:45).

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

133

At the end of the presentation, following "and that is what the mishnah ends with," the teacher closes his book and ceases swaying. These three markers—open book, swaying and first textual phrase—are framing elements common to most study sessions. One gets the feeling of a curtain going up and down on a play; when it is over, one "returns" to reality.16 However, right after this, still on videotape, Freund begins reading Rashi's commentary, whose first words are the same as the opening of the Talmud: "shenayim ohazin betalis." He sings them in the same opening tune. The melody goes on, as if forever; the play never stops. But this is no play—it is the oral Torah as revealed by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Each generation, according to the Sages, has a responsibility to receive this revelation.

Fig. 12b

134

Lionel Wolberger

Fig. 12c

Thus, with this chant, the rabbi envelopes himself and his charges in divine revelation.

Notes 1. Petahia de Regensburg, upon visiting the Great Yeshivah in Babylon in 887 C.E., quoted in L. Grunhut's 1904 edition of his memoirs; Jacob Neusner, Invitation to the Talmud: A Teaching Book (San Francisco: 1973), xv. 2. Ashkenazic spelling of Hebrew words (e.g. beis medresh, not beit midrash) is used throughout. 3. For a list of sources on the musical aspects of Talmud and the semantic implications of the term "gemore-nign," see Lionel Wolberger, Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of Talmudic Debate (Ph.D. diss., Wesleyan University, 1991). 4. Those few scholarly works that have focused on the process of talmudic study (as opposed to the content) have fundamentally shaped the line of inquiry herein. In particular, Samuel C. Heilman's The People of the Book: Drama, Fellowship and Religion (Chicago: 1983) and The Gate Behind the Wall: A Pilgrimage to Jerusalem (New York: 1984, rpt. 1986) covers the sociological dimensions of adult avocational groups, and William B. Helmreich's The World of the Yeshiva (New Haven: 1982) deals with the sociology of the yeshivah. Heilman's "angles of vision" (People of the Book, p. 24f) lead him to discuss paralinguistic activity, sometimes in detail. There is no space here to define precisely where his study ends and this one picks up; suffice it to say that he gives the sociology of what I present as the musical art. Last, Mirah Spiegel's Haamirah hazamarit (cantilaziyah) shel hamishnah vehatalmud (Master's thesis, The Hebrew University, 1990) analyzes the musicology of study, introducing a division between private and public reading. 5. The term cantillation is reserved by some to refer to the reading of the Torah by the Tiberian (or Masoretic) accents. My broader usage is that of the seamless blend of music and text; see Bathja Bayer, "Talmud, musical rendition," Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 15 (Jerusalem: 1972), 747-749 and Spiegel, Haamirah hazamerit. Frank Alvarez-Pereyre, in his La

Music of Holy Argument: The Ethnomusicology of a Talmud Study Session

135

Transmission orale de la mishnah (Jerusalem: 1991), avoids use of the term, though he states that it conveniently refers to certain elements common to liturgical and paraliturgical forms, namely melodic elements. Furthermore, there is a connection to be made between the Tiberian accents and Talmud study; see Shelomo Morag's Vocalised Talmudic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections, vol. 1 (Cambridge: 1988). 6. Jacob Neusner, Invitation to the Talmud, xix. 7. Judit Frigyesi has suggested this model, adding that it is possible that the tradition has been severely interrupted by modernity, bringing both the music and worship-like elements of Talmud study to the fore. 8. There is no history of Jewish pedagogy that treats systematically its musical dimension. For an overview and bibliography, see Diane Roskies' "Heder: Primary Education Among Eastern Europeans: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography of Published Sources," in Working Papers in Yiddish and East European Jewish Studies 25 (New York: 1977) and idem, "Alphabet Instruction in the East European Heder: Some Comparative and Historical Notes," in Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science 17 (New York: 1978), 21-53; for a description of what such a history should include, see Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble (Chicago: 1973). Ethnographies are available in Avigdor Herzog's The Intonation of the Pentateuch in the Heder of Tunis (Tel Aviv: 1963), Abraham J. Heschel's The Earth is the Lord's published in a combined edition with his The Sabbath (New York: 1950), Uri Sharvit's "The Role of Music in the Yemenite Heder," Israeli Studies in Musicology 2 (Jerusalem: 1980), Yekhiel Shtern's Kheyder and Beys-Medresh: A Study in Traditional Jewish Education (New York: 1950) and Mark Zborowski's "Book Learning and Traditional Jewish Culture," in Childhood in Contemporary Cultures, ed. Margaret Mead (Chicago: 1955), 118-141. My overview of pedagogy derives from these texts and field observation. Note that the pedagogical order, or curriculum, is usually given as a list of texts to be studied, as in Pirkei Avot 5:24. 9. These four parameters were emphasized by Harold S. Powers, "Classical Music, Cultural Roots, and Colonial Rule: an Indie Musicologist Looks at the Muslim World," Asian Music 12, no. 1 (1980), 5-39, where he differentiates classical music from other musical forms, particularly in the Middle East. Although he implicitly notes that he is not addressing cantillation, as he excludes Qur'anic recitation from his scope (p. 34, no. 6), I have used these parameters because they are broad terms that emphasize social organization and competence rather than linguistic elements. 10. Heschel, The Earth is the Lord's, 46. 11. Talmud study is codified in many different ways. An early classification is Rabbi Yishmael's thirteen rules of exegesis (included in the daily morning liturgy); the most recent is that provided in Yitzchak Feigenbaum's Understanding the Talmud (Jerusalem: 1988). Feigenbaum identifies approximately 175 talmudic "structures," some of which, like benihuta, (an indication of emphasis) require differentiation by cantillation (p. 81). The Tiberian accents remain the oldest classification of the nonlinguistic dimension of reading Scripture. No Jewish theory of music is transmitted in the sacred canon itself, as noted by Israel Adler: There is a multitude of references to musical phenomena in the responsa, kabbalah, etc. These references deal with subjects such as performance practice and the function of music. . . . But they do not give any information or directions concerning musical theoretical aspects such as scales, modes, or stylistic aspects ("Musik und Religion im Judentum," in Theologische Real Enzyklopadie [Berlin: forthcoming]). 12. The artificiality of a video-taping session distorts the performance in a number of ways. The teacher heightens many chant-like aspects, and he is never interrupted. For the analysis here, I also made use of extensive observation of Rabbi Freund in his sixth-grade classroom; while I did not observe him teaching this specific text, I was able to watch it being introduced by another teacher in a different class. 13. Western notation, once the rule in ethnomusicological research, is now rarely adopted wholesale (see, for example, Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology [Urbana: 1983],

136

Lionel Wolberger

65-81). The notation used here would only include all five lines of the staff if the rabbi began singing a song (a common occurrence in private study). Jon Barlow first suggested the threeline approach to transcription in 1989; see Wolberger, Music of Holy Argument, 16-18. Frank Alvarez-Pereyre chose a similar method in collaboration with Edwin Seroussi in La Transmission orale, completely independently of the current research. 14. Jeff Titon, et al., Worlds of Music (New York: 1992, rpt. of 1984 ed.), 125. 15. Heilman, People of the Book, 62f, deals with the present-tense nature of study at some length, attributing it to the play of language, music and social forces. 16. Erving Goffman applied theatrical concepts such a framing to ethnographic study; see Heilman in ibid., 122-125 for sources and particular application to avocational Talmud study.

Essays

This page intentionally left blank

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust Eliezer Don-Yehiya (BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY)

The philosopher Emil Fackenheim has defined the Holocaust as an "epoch-making event,"1 one that leaves an imprint on the history and development of society. It is commonly believed that the Holocaust has had a key role in the shaping of Israeli culture and society. Amos Elon expresses a widespread opinion when he argues that the central values and symbols of Israeli culture reflect the influence of the "trauma of the Holocaust," which, he says, leaves an indelible mark on the national psychology . . . public life . . . foreign affairs, on politics, education, literature, and the arts. . . . All over the country countless private and public monuments . . . perpetuate a memory which lies ... at the center of Israel's historic self-image. . . . Israelis hardly give themselves the chance [to forget]. . . .2

Elon's conclusions (his book was first published in 1971) were based on his observation of Israeli society following the Six-Day War. By that time, however, social patterns in Israel were rather different from what they had been in the first two decades of the state's existence; during those first years, the Holocaust actually played a marginal role in public life. In this article, the influence of the Holocaust on Jewish society in Israel since the establishment of the state will be investigated, with a focus on the far-reaching changes that have occurred. The most striking change has been manifested both in the attitude of state leaders and institutions toward the Holocaust and their involvement in its commemoration. Elon observed that, in the rituals of government and diplomacy, Yad Vashem is given a role parallel ... to the role of national symbols that extol military glory, sovereignty, and independence. . . . Nowadays, most countries observe Memorial Day rites; few do it with such extreme and elaborate solemnity. All places of entertainment . . . close. . . . Parliament meets in special session. Year in, year out, radio and television broadcast special commemorative programs. . . .3

During the early years of the state, however, practically nothing was done on the government level to commemorate the Holocaust. Although the Knesset in 1951 139

140

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

passed a resolution proclaiming the 27th of Nisan as "the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day—a day of perpetual remembrance for the House of Israel,"4 this proclamation carried no legal weight. Only in 1959 did the Knesset enact legislation that set definite and mandatory guidelines for the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Mordechai Nurock, debating the draft law in the Knesset that year, complained bitterly that "places of entertainment remain wide open [on the 27th of Nisan], the radio broadcasts music of merrymaking and revelry, dancing and comedy . . . joy and rejoicing . . . instead of mourning and weeping ."5

Major public figures, such as the president and the prime minister, were not accustomed in those years to take part in the few ceremonies that marked Holocaust Remembrance Day (as it became widely known), which were held mainly in Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot and Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, in the Martyrs' Forest in the Jerusalem hills and on Mount Zion. Holocaust Remembrance Day went unobserved in the units of the Israel Defense Forces, while the press gave it hardly a mention. Most significantly, the nation's leaders paid little attention to the Holocaust. This was particularly true of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, who referred on many occasions to various historical events while saying almost nothing about the tragedy of European Jewry during the Second World War. The educational system, too, virtually overlooked the Holocaust in its early years. In a 220-page textbook of Jewish history published in 1948, for instance, just one page was devoted to the Holocaust, compared to ten pages on the Napoleonic wars.6 A survey of educational institutions in Israel in 1960 revealed that about one quarter of them entirely ignored Holocaust Remembrance Day. Many schools did not even mention the Holocaust in their curricula; those that included it did so in a very limited way.7 Treatment of the Holocaust was left, for the most part, to teachers or educators who were themselves Holocaust survivors; they were the ones who introduced Holocaust studies both in schools and in various informal educational settings such as youth movements and kibbutzim.8 A similar situation is revealed by a study of children's books that were published in the early years of the state's existence.9 According to Dinah Stern, only three out of forty-nine children's books on subjects related to modern Jewish history published during that period referred at all to the Holocaust.10 In fact, Israeli literature in general, particularly that of the younger generation, ignored the Holocaust. In 1959, Shlomo Grodzenski pointed out, "There is almost no story by a young Israeli author in which it is evident that the writer lived during the period . . . after the Jewish Holocaust."11 Given the prevailing disregard in government and official circles, Holocaust commemoration was almost exclusively the work of nongovernmental institutions and organizations. Prominent among these were the kibbutz movements and religious circles. In 1951, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Museum was opened at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot; in the same year a statue in memory of Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was unveiled at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai. The Jewish National Fund planted the "Martyrs' Forest" in the mountains of Jerusalem. The Ministry of Religious Affairs—which essentially represented the position of religious Jewry rather than that of the government—

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

141

arranged for the setting aside of a few rooms on Mount Zion as a genizah for fragments of Torah scrolls that had been desecrated by the Nazis; jars containing ashes of Jews from the death camp crematoria were placed in a special chamber called Martef hashoah ("the Holocaust cellar"). Finally, it was the Chief Rabbinate of Israel that first established a memorial day for the Holocaust martyrs on the 10th of Tevet, the traditional fast day marking the beginning of Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem.12 The chief rabbinate's move prompted the decision of the Israeli political leadership to proclaim another date, the 27th of Nisan, as the official national memorial day for the Holocaust. This date is close to the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which began on Passover eve, 5703 (April 19, 1943). It was decided, however, to have the annual commemoration several days after Passover. As Nurock pointed out during the Knesset debate, the 27th of Nisan falls "during the period of the counting of the Omer [from Passover to Shavuoth], when many holy communities were destroyed by the Crusaders, the Nazis' ancestors."13 Reluctant to "overemphasize" the Holocaust and its victims, the government repeatedly postponed the establishment of an official, government-sponsored institution to perpetuate their memory. The idea of a commemorative institution had actually been raised during the war itself, in September 1942, and at the Twentieth Zionist Congress in 1946 it was officially resolved to establish an institution named Yad Vashem. Soon thereafter, a memorandum of agreement was drawn up with the national funds, and a special committee was established with David Remez, then chairman of the Va'ad Le'umi (the National Council of the Jews of Palestine), as its head.14 At this time it was suggested to couple remembrance of the Holocaust with that of Jewish resistance, "not only of [those fighters of] the ghetto uprisings, but of all Jewish fighters in the war to liberate mankind from the German murderers, and in Israel's war of independence."15 Once the state had been founded, however, government authorities proved to be in no hurry to carry out the Yad Vashem project, avoiding any action that might further the documentation and commemoration of the Holocaust or the preservation of relevant documents. Speaking in a debate in the Knesset in January 1950, BenZion Dinaburg (later Dinur) complained that documents about the Nazi murders were lying about in the port of Haifa with "no one taking the trouble to get them out."16 Two months later, Zerah Warhaftig of the Religious Front warned in a Knesset debate that not only the external world, but we, too, are forgetting. Five years after the end of the war, no memorial has been erected. The material has been neither researched nor collected, and there is yet another painful phenomenon: two years after the rise of the state of Israel, cases containing considerable material are lying around in various places, uncollected. This neglect is a reminder of our sin.17

Ya'akov Gil mentioned a project, proposed just after the war, to take evidence of Nazi crimes and record it in writing, noting that "as of now, this sacred endeavor, which is of great importance, has not been carried out."18 In the same debate, Dinaburg demanded that the law being debated (regarding prosecution of the Nazis and their collaborators) include a clause providing for the establishment of a legal committee to investigate events of the Holocaust. "How can we remain silent, and

142

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

not investigate," he demanded, "not know and not determine precisely the function of various persons, when things happened, who drew up the plans? After all, literature exists, and there are many documents that should enable us to find out the facts. ... It is our duty. ... It is the duty of the government of Israel."19 The plan to establish Yad Vashem as a national memorial to the Holocaust was presented to the Knesset in a draft law entitled "Law of Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance—Yad Vashem 5713/1953," which came up for its first reading on May 18, 1953.20 During the debate, various speakers criticized the government for having so long delayed submission of the proposal.21 While former residents of European Jewish communities gathered each year for a memorial evening, one Knesset member protested, the nation's governing body had not found "one single hour" in all of five years to discuss the Holocaust.22 Speakers also found fault with the disrespectful manner in which the debate on Yad Vashem was being conducted: the seats at the government table were empty, as were those of many Knesset members, and the matter was being exploited for petty party purposes.23 By now, however, strong pressures were being exerted on the government to finally act on the subject. Particularly prominent were the efforts of Mordechai Shenhavi, a member of Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek, who saw the establishment of Yad Vashem as "the central endeavor of his life," and who lobbied tirelessly for the draft law.24 The government was also influenced to no small degree by news of plans by various Jewish and non-Jewish bodies to memorialize the Holocaust martyrs in countries other than Israel. These plans, some of which reached fruition, were an affront to the Israeli government, in part because they made its own inaction all the more conspicuous. The daily Davar pointed out that the Yad Vashem law had been submitted to the Knesset only in the wake of plans to erect a Holocaust monument in Paris.25 The minister of education and culture, who presented the draft law to the Knesset, stated that various institutions in and outside Israel were dealing with the commemoration of the Holocaust, but the most appropriate place for the purpose, he said, was Jerusalem: "Here is the heart of the nation, the heart of Israel. Everything should be concentrated here."26 Establishing memorial centers in the diaspora, moreover, could be construed as legitimation of Jewish life in the diaspora, while the function of Yad Vashem would be "to reiterate . . . that there is no future for the Jewish diaspora. The doom of the latter has been sealed: murder or assimilation."27 Even before the Knesset debate, it had become clear that the issue of Holocaust commemoration could not be separated from the public controversy concerning the part played by members of different political movements in the ghetto uprisings. The argument waxed particularly fierce between the Communists and the Zionist socialists. The latter accused the Communists (who were being assisted by the Polish government, which had set up a museum in Warsaw) of trying to "monopolize" the ghetto uprisings, thereby suppressing the Zionist role.28 Accordingly, Davar based its support for the Yad Vashem law on the fear that the ghetto fighters' struggle could be distorted by "the rewriters of history in Poland and their fellowtravellers in the country . . . who combine even the memory of sublime national heroism with their absurd, sycophantic refrain about the battle cry of the faithful of the revolution."29

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

143

How can one explain the behavior of those in official circles in the early years of the state vis-a-vis the Holocaust, their virtual disregard for the most horrendous tragedy ever to befall the Jewish people? To a significant degree, their attitude was prompted by shame, sometimes mixed with disapproval and anger, at the behavior of those who had gone, in the commonly held view, "like sheep to the slaughter." Such passivity, it was felt, had desecrated Jewish national honor. An extreme expression of this position may be found in the 1946 Passover Haggadah from Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar: Not Hitler alone was responsible for the death of the six million, but all of us, and first of all the six million themselves. Had they known that the Jew, too, has strength, they would not all have been slaughtered. Only a lack of faith, only the ghetto-diaspora selfdeprecation ... of 'who are we and what is our strength'—these made their contribution to this great Jewish massacre.30

In a similar vein, a Davar editorial written in 1960 asserted that "much has been written about the crimes of the Germans and other peoples against us, but where ... is the great storm over the sin that we have sinned against ourselves; for there are many among us who refuse to recognize our own part in the Holocaust."31 Early attempts to come to grips with the Holocaust were inclined to play down the problematic element of Jewish helplessness by laying disproportionate emphasis on manifestations of Jewish heroism and resistance during the war. It was in this spirit that the day of remembrance for the Holocaust victims was designated "Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day," (and set, as previously noted, close to the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising), and the official name given to the institution established to commemorate the Holocaust was "Yad Vashem—The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority." Many of the speakers in the Knesset debate on the Yad Vashem draft law, particularly those belonging to the socialist parties, demanded emphatically that European Jewry's heroism and resistance be assigned a central place in Yad Vashem activities. To this end, they said, it would be necessary to collect every bit of relevant information regarding resistance, recording it all in writing and bringing it to the attention of the Jewish and nonJewish public. Both the youth and the nation as a whole, they argued, should be taught to derive encouragement and strength from these manifestations of supreme valor. According to Dinur, then minister of education and culture, when the independence of Israel was proclaimed, a new era began—we have returned to the days of yore, we have renewed our independence, conquered our land. . . . And [this] is a direct sequel to the great struggle of millions of our brethren. . . . They anointed with their spirit and resolution the best of our sons, who gave their lives . . . and fought for our independence, our land, and our life here. Israel's heroism constitutes a single story.32

The reverse side of this emphasis on heroism was the downplaying of suffering and extermination. Ruth Firer, for example, found that textbooks published between 1948 and 1967 devoted more than twice as much space to anti-Nazi resistance as to accounts of Nazi atrocities.33 Such accounts, moreover, often contained an explicit

144

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

or implicit condemnation of those who had not actively opposed the Nazis. A case in point is the history book by Shimshon Kirshenbaum, first published in 1957, where the author asserts that "the heroic stand of the Jews of the ghetto somewhat compensated for the shameful behavior of those who were led to the death camps. The human dignity of those tortured and killed was restored."34 The tendency to identify as much as possible with the ghetto fighters was particularly pronounced among those in the labor movement's left wing, who attributed a decisive role in underground and resistance activities to "progressive and pioneering elements" and who even depicted events of the Holocaust as a stage in the ongoing struggle between the "progressive camp" and "international fascism."35 But others in the labor movement (particularly those close to Ben-Gurion) were notable for their efforts to minimize any reference to the Holocaust, and their treatment of the Yad Vashem issue was typical. Underlying these efforts, to a considerable extent, was the ideology of mamlakhtiyut ("statism")—a Hebrew term denoting roughly the principle that state interests should be given absolute priority. The high priest of mamlakhtiyut was Ben-Gurion, but its implications for many issues concerning Judaism, Zionism and Israel were taken for granted by many other influential officials. In Ben-Gurion's conception of mamlakhtiyut, Israel was envisaged as a focus of allegiance and identification for all members of the Jewish people, a major factor in unifying the nation and maintaining its existence.36 A second motif in mamlakhtiyut was "rejection of the diaspora"; as opposed to the alleged passivity and subservience of diaspora Jews, the "new Jewish man," citizen of the state of Israel, was seen as self-confident and free. Those espousing mamlakhtiyut preferred to disregard Jewish history in the diaspora, drawing their myths and symbols from previous periods of Jewish statehood, particularly that of the first Temple. This was an ideology that maintained and reinforced certain values and motifs that had been widespread in prestate circles of secular Zionism, particularly those of the labor movement. For the adherent of mamlakhtiyut, the Holocaust was the most salient and deplorable symbol of the Jewish plight in the diaspora. Designed as it was to cultivate and disseminate feelings of strength, self-confidence and national pride, mamlakhtiyut represented a stark contrast to the conditions of wretchedness and humiliation, isolation and helplessness, that found their most extreme expression in the Holocaust. And the heroism of individuals during the war could not readily resolve this conflict. The ghetto fighters' courage could not compensate for their final defeat; their desperate struggle could not alter the fact that they were a persecuted people forced to make a lone, hopeless stand against a cruel enemy, surrounded by a hostile or at best indifferent world. The architects of mamlakhtiyut sought to emphasize and cultivate the memory not of defeats—even glorious ones—but of victories, achievements, conquests. They viewed the state of Israel as a symbol of the Jewish people's final escape from the misery of the diaspora, and they could not readily fit the Holocaust, the symbol par excellence of this misery, into their new system of myths. There was, in addition, the danger that undue emphasis on the Holocaust might encourage Israelis to identify with the culture and lifestyle of those Jews who had perished in Europe. In the ideology of mamlakhtiyut, the diaspora was considered

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

145

an inferior form of reality, a material and spiritual sickness whose only cure was complete disappearance and replacement by an entirely new way of life. While the terrible tragedy of European Jewry aroused feelings of sorrow and fury in every Jew, whether in Israel or elsewhere, such feelings—acute though they might be—could not of themselves provide a proper background for the purposeful creation of myths and symbols in the service of mamlakhtiyut. True, its spokesmen did not entirely ignore the Holocaust. But whenever Ben-Gurion and others did mention the Holocaust, their main goal was to point to the lesson to be learned from the tragedy: the impossibility, to their mind, of Jewish existence outside the framework of a sovereign Jewish state. This lesson could be learned without institutions and ceremonies that might tend to picture diaspora Jews as a target for identification and a source of inspiration. Finally, it was feared that focusing on the Holocaust would serve to intensify the antagonism to Germany in particular and the non-Jewish world in general. Such feelings, which were by no means new to Jewish history and tradition, were being expressed with considerable force by certain thinkers, authors and poets, mainly from the religious or revisionist camps. The idea of the Holocaust as a symbol of the gentiles' profound and implacable hostility was foremost, for example, in the thought of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook and the poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg.37 But the Holocaust also had its effect on others, including certain groups within the labor movement who now sought to distance themselves from the strongly universalist elements in the socialist Zionist ideology by reemphasizing the distinctive and unique position of the Jewish people. On a number of kibbutzim, traditional ceremonies and texts previously omitted from the Passover Haggadah because of their particularistic import were now restored; even the passage "Pour out your fury upon the nations" was reintroduced in some places in the wake of the Holocaust.38 Mamlakhtiyut thus signified a return to positions that had been common in the labor movement prior to the Holocaust. On the one hand, mamlakhtiyut was more insistent than socialist Zionism on the subject of national unity and uniqueness. On the other hand, one of its basic tenets was that the national renaissance of the Jewish people was to be coupled with its acceptance as an equal member of the community of free and sovereign nations. Zionism and the state of Israel, in short, represented not only the antithesis of assimilation but also the negation of the particularist and segregationist attitudes of traditional diaspora Jewry. Implicit in the view that the establishment of a Jewish state would enable the Jews to find their place in the family of nations without giving up their spiritual distinction was the assumption that antisemitism was inextricably linked with the diaspora. In other words, hatred of the Jews was thought to be the inevitable outcome of their unnatural and exceptional position in the diaspora as a people scattered and dispersed, possessing no national territory and thus lacking the elementary preconditions for normal existence as a nation. The roots of this view may be found in classical Zionist thought, particularly that of Y. L. Pinsker. Ben-Gurion, however, took the argument a step further when he argued that antisemitism was a natural reaction to an unnatural situation. What was so surprising and unique about this idea was that he voiced it very soon after the Holocaust; writing in 1945, he claimed that

146

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

it was wrong of the Jewish people to blame antisemitism for all its ills and troubles in the diaspora. . . . Are we really incapable of understanding that all nations shape their lives on the basis of their own needs and wants—and the framework of their existence and relationships with one another is the fruit of their historical situation, [such that] it is inconceivable [for them to] attempt to adapt to the existence and mentality of the universal exception that is Jewry. It is not the evil and folly of the gentiles, the thing we call antisemitism, that lies at the root of our troubles, but our own peculiar condition that does not fit into the mold of other nations' regular life. Who are we to complain of antisemitism?39

It would seem to follow that, once the state of Israel was established, the foundations of antisemitism would be undermined, since it drew its nourishment from the unnatural condition of a nation with no country or state of its own. Antisemitism would no longer present a grave danger; hence there would no longer be any need to draw attention to it or to reinforce awareness of it by repeated reference to past persecutions and massacres of the Jews. According to the "state first" doctrine formulated by Ben-Gurion, it was more important for the new state to increase its cooperation with other states, since this would better serve Israel's needs and goals. Thus, Ben-Gurion opposed the cultivation of myths, symbols and patterns of behavior that might heighten antagonism between Israel and other nations. It could be argued, of course, that the best way to gain gentiles' support for Israel was to appeal to their guilty conscience and to apprise them of their moral responsibility toward the Jewish people and their state. This kind of argument, however, was foreign to the spirit of mamlakhtiyut, which sought to ground Israel's relations with the rest of the world on such principles as equality, mutual aid and common interests rather than on moral responsibility or guilt. By adopting mamlakhtiyut as a guiding principle, the state of Israel signaled its dissociation from diaspora Jewry's condition of siege and isolation; its leaders therefore avoided anything that would brand the Jewish state or people as "victims" in their relationships with other countries and nations. The desire to foster cooperation and create friendly relations on an international level was not derived merely from the realpolitik of securityoriented and economic interests. Rather, the statist ideology was designed to cultivate the image of a strong, self-confident Israel, reliant on its own strength while at the same time earning the sympathy, trust and support of other states. Such an image could not be squared with the traditional picture of the "sheep among wolves" or "a people that dwells apart." Proponents of mamlakhtiyut preferred to picture the ArabIsrael conflict as a conflict of interests, such as those that flare up not infrequently among sovereign states, rather than yet another battle in the all-out war between Jews and gentiles.40 The tendency to play down the anomalous nature of Jewish fate and the gentiles' attitude to the Jewish people—even in the face of an event so momentous as the Holocaust—also conditioned the government's treatment of the draft law for punishment of the Nazis and their collaborators. During the debate on the law in 1950, Knesset member Warhaftig deplored the fact that the draft law omitted any specific mention of the Jewish people. Was it conceivable, he asked, that the Knesset could pass a law "in which ... we too will slur over this great crime as just one of many matters, contenting ourselves with a general law that could appear in any country, a

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

147

law that contains nothing specific to that state of Israel . . . , that brand snatched from the fire of the millions who died as martyrs?"41 In response to Warhaftig and others, Minister of Justice Pinhas Rosen noted that there was no intention to detract from the gravity of the crimes against the Jewish people; by being defined as "crimes against humanity" their enormity was in fact increased.42 The minister nevertheless complied with Warhaftig's proposal, and the amended law, as it was finally adopted, specified three categories of crimes—those against the Jewish people, those against humanity, and war crimes. The fact that "Jews" were not explicitly mentioned at first in this law was a reflection of the government's attempt to demonstrate that even the Holocaust did not set the Jewish people apart from other nations. These, too, were the victims of Nazi brutality, which was directed against all humanity.43 Two years later, Pinhas Lavon demonstrated another instance of "mamlakhtiyut psychology" during the Knesset debate on whether to accept reparations from Germany. Speaking in favor of reparations, Lavon argued that the Holocaust was not a unique phenomenon in Jewish or even general history; its sole distinction lay in its greater number of victims and methods of extermination.44 (Lavon mentioned the Turkish crime of genocide against the Armenians, saying that "the blood of the Armenian people is no less dear to them than is our own blood to us.") Opponents of the reparations were also accused by others of galutiyut, or having a "diaspora mentality." Rather than "revel" in the past, they were told, they should devote their efforts to rebuilding and strengthening the state of Israel. This position was clearly expressed in Ben-Gurion's letter to an assembly held on the first Holocaust Remembrance Day: "The one monument worthy of the memory of European Jewry ... is the state of Israel ... in which the hope of the Jewish people is embodied . . . and [which] provides a free, reliable refuge for every Jew in the world who desires free, independent Jewish life."45 In an article entitled "Israel's Security and Her International Position," BenGurion aptly summarized the ideology of mamlakhtiyut vis-a-vis the Holocaust. According to Ben-Gurion, the legacy of the Holocaust was to prevent such a disaster ... by [means of] the Jewish people being an independent people in its own land, capable of resisting any foe or enemy . . . [and this is] the lesson deduced by the builders of the Land of Israel . . . from the entire course of Jewish history in exile, which was an almost constant chain of great and lesser disasters. ... All these things taught the pioneers of the revival not to weep, not to lament, not to content themselves with proclaiming "Pour out thine anger," but to devote all their energies to the revival of the homeland ... to accumulate Jewish strength . . . not to stand like a poor man at the gate—nor to cry in despair 'Let me die with the Philistines'—but to establish a state and become a sovereign people, equal in rights in the family of nations.46

In the same article, Ben-Gurion argued that "most people . . . cling stubbornly to the emotions of the past. They cannot perceive the transformations that take place . . . and recognize new relationships and new needs. . . . During the reparations debate, the discussion centered mainly on the question of whether the Germany of today is the same Nazi Germany."47 However, he continued, "only some-

148

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

one who lives completely in the past could possibly think that Hitlerite Germany might rise again."48 While Israel distinguished between one country and another, it was not only on account of past memories of "the situation of their Jewish communities, but also on account of the national needs of the State of Israel. . . ,"49 And if the Holocaust martyrs could have voiced an opinion about Israeli-German relations, they would have said that "what is good for Israel is good for the entire Jewish people."50 It is important to note that Ben-Gurion's formulation of mamlakhtiyut was not shared by all factions in his own party. During the Knesset debate on the Yad Vashem draft law, for example, a number of Mapai representatives spoke out in favor of a broader mandate for Yad Vashem, to commemorate not only active Jewish resistance to the Nazis but "passive heroism" as well, as represented by the everyday struggle of Jews in the ghettos and concentrations camps to subsist and maintain human dignity in unimaginable conditions. Other speakers, including some from Mapai, advocated a role for Yad Vashem in acquainting Israeli youth with prewar European Jewish culture. Some of Ben-Gurion's staunches! supporters, including such people as Ben-Zion Dinur, disagreed both with Ben-Gurion's extreme "negation of the diaspora" philosophy and his view that the Zionist endeavor was a direct continuation of Jewish political independence in antiquity, unrelated to diaspora Jewry's history and culture. Dinur was strongly committed to establishing a national project to commemorate the Holocaust, and his position as minister of education during the 1950 legislative session was an important factor in first bringing the Yad Vashem bill up for discussion. The Knesset debate on Yad Vashem in 1953 marked the beginning of a shift in Israel's political culture toward greater recognition of, and identification with, the Holocaust martyrs and their traditional, prewar culture. In some cases, Knesset members speaking in favor of the Yad Vashem proposal had themselves come from a European background, had rebelled against their traditional diaspora upbringing— and now seemed to be expressing regret for their previous attitudes. "We ourselves . . . are guilty of the youth's attitude to diaspora Jewry and its ignorance in that connection," Mapai representative Baruch Azanyah acknowledged, and went on to argue the need "to instill in the generation of native-born Israelis a living knowledge of the culture of the Jews of Europe."51 A partial response to his plea was the educational program known as todd'ah yehudit ("Jewish consciousness"), first presented to the Knesset in 1954 and put into effect only some five years later. Adoption of this program, according to a Ministry of Education official, meant the "complete abandonment of the previous approach, which had advocated negation of the diaspora and those living in the diaspora."52 Another noteworthy debate concerning Holocaust commemoration took place in the spring of 1959, when Knesset member Mordechai Nurock submitted a private member's bill outlining specific regulations for the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. In response, the government submitted a draft law of its own that both stipulated the observance of two minutes of silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day and authorized the minister of the interior to enact regulations "concerning the observance of the silence . . . and concerning lowering of flags, memorial ceremonies and other ways of communing [with the victims' memory]."53

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

149

The draft law was attacked as inadequate by several Knesset members, including Nurock. Ultimately, an expanded version of the law was approved on April 8, 1959 that provided for, in addition to the two minutes of silence, memorial services, public assemblies and commemorative ceremonies [to be held] in army camps and educational institutions. Flags on public buildings will be flown at half-mast, radio programs will express the day's special nature, and houses of entertainment will confine their offerings to suitable topics.54

Following adoption of the law, movies and shows—whose content, at times, was far from "suitable"—continued to be shown on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Demands were made that all places of entertainment be closed on Holocaust Remembrance Day; on March 27, 1961, a clause was added to the law to require all places of entertainment, cafes and restaurants to be closed on the eve of the day, with fines to be imposed on those violating this regulation.55 Leftist circles in the labor movement, for their part, protested the omission of the word "uprising" in the official name of the commemorative day, demanding that it be renamed "Holocaust, Heroism and Uprising Remembrance Day." Although approved by the Knesset committee, the suggested change in name was subsequently voted down. The law passed in 1959 and the amendment adopted in 1961 were landmarks in the relaxation of the statist approach toward the Holocaust and diaspora Jewry. This process received additional impetus in the wake of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Harold Fisch has pointed out that the Eichmann trial was intended both to demonstrate Israel's strength and to compensate or atone for the alleged impotence and passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust. The latter point became clear during the trial when witnesses were repeatedly asked during interrogation why they had not resisted their captors and torturers. Fisch believes that this was a rhetorical question, the trial itself being designed as an answer: "the implication was that through the capture and trying of Eichmann, Israel was somehow making good the failure of those Jews . . . who did not resist."56 According to this explanation, the decision to try Eichmann was also an outgrowth of mamlakhtiyut a la Ben-Gurion. However, as Fisch himself comments, the trial had an unexpected effect. Rather than generate feelings of pride in Israel's newfound strength, which had atoned, as it were, for the shameful impotence of the "submissive generation," it aroused Israeli Jews, and the youth in particular, to increased feelings of identification with their tortured and slaughtered brethren in the diaspora. The trial thus marked an additional watershed in the shift in Israelis' attitude toward the Holocaust and diaspora Jewry—although it was also at least partly a result of a shift that was already occurring. Alongside the change in Israeli attitudes toward the Holocaust and diaspora Jewry, mamlakhtiyut began to lose ground as the country's dominant system of values and symbols. Although detailed analysis of the many reasons for this decline is beyond the range of this article, several factors may be touched upon here, among them the emergence of Israel as a fait accompli whose mere existence was no longer in real, immediate jeopardy, and the considerable slowdown in immigration after 1952. These developments weakened much of the original drive of mamlakhtiyut, which had sought to marshal all available forces for the defense of Israel and the

150

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

achievement of the state's goals. As a result, attention could now be focused on various flaws and problems that had either gone unobserved or had been pushed aside during the enthusiastic and dynamic first years of Israel's existence. There was a growing awareness now of the discrepancy between Ben-Gurion's "model state" and a society that, despite notable achievements, was by no means free of imperfections and problems for which there were no easy or immediate solutions. This situation created formidable problems of identity and content, none of which found a satisfactory answer in mamlakhtiyut or other varieties of secular Zionism, particularly socialist Zionism. Among the manifestations of dissatisfaction was a growing tendency among younger, native-born Israelis to shift their focus of involvement from the collective to the personal plane. An identity crisis was also apparent among Israeli Jewish youth, represented in its most extreme form by adoption of "Canaanite" ideologies that drew a total distinction between "Israeliness" and Jewishness; and more commonly, by disdain for the religious tradition and "diaspora mentality" of Jews outside Israel. Not surprisingly, many youths had little emotional empathy for "Jewry" as a national group with a specific historical culture, and they found it difficult to attribute any real significance to definitions of themselves or of the state as "Jewish." Mamlakhtiyut and socialist Zionism had been attempts to invest the Jewish identity with a new, secular-nationalist content. But such ideologies had little attraction for sabras who—in contrast to their parents—had no firsthand knowledge of Jewish tradition or any real contact with diaspora Jewry. The resulting inroads made by "Canaanite" ideas troubled many of the older generation, inducing them to seek ways of reinforcing and deepening Jewish identity among the young. Another long-range factor in the decline of secular Zionist ideologies was the arrival and absorption of the multitude of new immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, most of them traditional in their religious outlook. Attempts were made to reeducate these immigrants, especially the young ones, in the spirit of the "new Israeli culture."57 However, these attempts—which involved a bitter conflict with the religious camp—ended in failure. It is now clear that the "magic" of modern Israel, the study of Hebrew and the act of becoming "implanted in the soil of the homeland" were not enough to detach the newcomers from their own traditional religious roots. In fact, those secular ideologies that negated or ignored diaspora Jewry specifically rejected the very symbols and lifestyles that had played so central a part in the education and culture of many of the immigrants. Thus, another factor was added to those that led inexorably to a revision of secular Zionism's negative or contemptuous attitude toward diaspora Jewry. The most crucial shift in the attitudes of Israeli society toward the Holocaust and diaspora Jewry, however, came in the wake of the Six-Day War. On the one hand was Israel's great victory with its liberation of the Western Wall and other holy places, which inspired a certain Jewish awakening among Israelis. On the other hand, there was the two-week "waiting period" before the war, a time of unprecedented feelings of identification between Israelis and diaspora Jews who agonized together about Israel's fate. The heightened hostility toward Israel and Zionism

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

151

following the Six-Day War and, later, the Yom Kippur War, exacerbated the feeling of isolation and greatly reinforced these changing attitudes.58 Proponents of mamlakhtiyut had claimed that the Holocaust and other instances of Jewish persecution at gentile hands were an inseparable part of diaspora life, of no relevance at all to conditions in Israel. The new approach, however, saw in the Holocaust the prime manifestation of the gentiles' evil and hostility toward the Jews, which was now being expressed in their attitude toward modern Israel. Within this context, the Holocaust served as a reminder and a warning to encourage watchfulness and the mobilization of all efforts to defend the Jewish people and its state. Associated with this was a recognition of the importance of Jewish solidarity in the face of a hostile world. Addressing an assembly held in 1976 to commemorate the Holocaust, Golda Meir stated that "the Holocaust, which was aimed at the individual Jew, became a collective Holocaust directed against the state of Israel." And Gideon Hausner declared that "Holocaust and uprising are part of the reality of our lives; they continue to speak to us and warn us."59 The statist approach maintained that "overemphasis" of the Holocaust could divert attention from the main task of fortifying and building up the state of Israel. It might also damage the state's vital interests in the sphere of foreign relations, particularly relations with Germany. According to the new, post-Six-Day War approach, which became even more popular after the Yom Kippur War, the very opposite was true: the best interests of the state would be served by preserving and fostering the memory of the Holocaust among Jews and non-Jews alike. Such a policy would remind the rest of the world that it owed the Jewish people and its state a moral debt; it would also explain and justify various security-oriented actions and policies of Israel. Speakers at a memorial gathering for the Holocaust in 1976 noted that the world had to "atone for its moral apathy" as exemplified by its attitude toward the Jews in the Holocaust. The world was duty-bound, therefore, "to stand constantly at Israel's side by rendering political, military and economic aid."60 In this spirit, foreign statesmen visiting Israel were taken on guided tours of Yad Vashem. Speaking at the central Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in 1980, Gideon Hausner pointed out that three presidents of the United States had visited Yad Vashem, and that "all three vowed on the spot that the Jewish people would never again be left to fend for itself. It is up to them to keep this vow."61 Clearly, therefore, the new doctrine of political lessons to be learned from the Holocaust had begun to be manifested even before the fall of the Labor Alignment government, despite the obvious deviation of such ideas from Ben-Gurion's mamlakhtiyut. The doctrine was further reinforced after the Likud came to power in May 1977. From this time on, the Holocaust was increasingly appealed to as proof positive that the gentiles were hostile to the Jews and thus could not be trusted. The Jews could depend on no one but themselves: it was for them to rely on the power of the state of Israel and not be seduced either by promises or political agreements that would require Israeli concessions. At a special session of the Knesset marking Holocaust Remembrance Day in 1978, Yitzhak Shamir (then speaker of the Knesset), declared that to commemorate

152

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

the Holocaust was "to confront the fathomless depth of our unique destiny as members of the Jewish people ... [to recall] the awful loneliness that enveloped our people in those terrible days."62 Hayim Landau, a member of the Likud government, said: We have learned from the Holocaust that we cannot . . . rely on foreigners and trust others to protect us. We can depend on no ally but the Jewish people and its strength. . . . Can anyone come . . . and call upon us ... to depend on the world . . . that stood by and watched while our brethren were being led to slaughter? ... to entrust to those same gentiles who wished us evil the responsibility for our security and existence? . . . We have learned that we cannot and must not rely on the good will of the nations.63 Such sentiments were widely supported even outside the ranks of the Likud. For instance, in an article published in the daily Maariv on Holocaust Remembrance Day of 1983, Shmuel Schnitzer replied to President Ronald Reagan's argument that Israel was behaving as if it were an "armed camp." This might be true, Schnitzer wrote, but it was "a necessity of life" for Israel, since the Holocaust had demonstrated that the Jews could not put any trust in the decency and integrity of the nations around it.64 Speaking on Holocaust Remembrance Day of 1988, President Chaim Herzog declared that Israel was the "guarantee that Jews would not remain helpless." And on the same day, Shimon Peres, head of the Labor Alignment, declared that the Holocaust was also "a national lesson. We have learned that we must not rely on others. . . . Our fate depends on the Jews."65 Since the Yom Kippur War, and in particular since the Likud's ascension to power, there has been a growing tendency to apply Holocaust-related imagery to events affecting Israel's security, particularly when Arab terrorist organizations are involved. At the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony of 1978, Yigael Yadin, then deputy prime minister, warned against the "liberation organizations" who "hide behind a neo-Nazi cloak and continue to conspire against the most persecuted nation in the world, unmoved by the blood of children and women."66 Just before Holocaust Remembrance Day of 1980, an infant named Eyal Gluska was murdered in a terrorist attack on Kibbutz Misgav-Am. Speaking at Yad Vashem that year, Gideon Hausner said, From the ghetto to Misgav-Am, the first victims have always been Jewish children. . . . The Jewish child and its fate forge a connection between the German murderers . . . and their successors, the Arab terrorists who laid their hands on Eyal Gluska. . . . It is the same hellish hatred, that same lust to spill the blood of innocent Jewish children.67 Two years later, when Beirut was under siege by Israeli forces during the Lebanon War, Menachem Begin described Yasir Arafat as "a Hitler, hiding in a bunker" for fear of the Israeli soldiers.68 In this new conception of the Holocaust, distrust of foreign nations and emphasis on their hostility for the Jewish people is one side of the coin, the other side being a resolve to strengthen contacts with the Jewish people and heighten identification with their traditional culture. National leaders have increasingly pointed out the connection between plans to exterminate the Jews, on the one hand, and to oblite-

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

153

rate their historical culture, on the other. Former President Ephraim Kazir, for example, noted that "the Nazi devil wanted to destroy not the Jews alone, but Judaism,"69 and at an assembly in 1977, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said that "there is no compensation for the loss of six million. There is no recompense for the liquidation of the fountains of creativity and wisdom that were burned in the fire of the Jewish communities."70 A 1978 Holocaust Remembrance Day editorial in Haaretz demonstrated as well the new, more positive attitude toward the cultural achievements of diaspora Jewry: "Looking at the poverty of Jewish life today, there is no escaping the conclusion that we have lost irreplaceable treasures of spiritual inspiration and culture."71 Such evaluations stand in stark contrast to the doctrine of mamlakhtiyut, which tended to belittle Jewish cultural creativity in the diaspora. With this shift in attitudes, it became less necessary to devote as much attention to heroism and resistance in the context of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Instead, there was a growing tendency to redefine such terms as "martyrdom" and "heroism" so as to apply to all victims of the Holocaust, not merely those who had actively resisted. Such views were first voiced in religious circles as far back as 1953, when Zerah Warhaftig, speaking in the Knesset debate on the Yad Vashem Law, had asked, "Who shall dare to say [that only] he who held a gun is a martyr?"72 Presenting the draft law to the house, Minister of Education Dinur had noted that "the beginning of the nation's heroism lay in its war for life ... the struggle . . . for the possibility of living ... to maintain a semblance of humanity under humiliating circumstances."73 Although Dinur had devoted the bulk of his speech, as did other representatives of the secular parties, to the heroism of the partisans and the ghetto fighters, in later years it became more common to refer to the "heroism of mere existence" in the Holocaust period and to defend the masses of Jews against the accusation that they had not resisted. In the central Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony of 1967, for instance, Minister of Education Zalman Aranne noted that the question, "Why did they not revolt in the camps?" could be addressed even more aptly to prisoners of war and hostages of other nations, "but what hardhearted fool would throw stones at them?" Such a question, he went on, was unthinkable with regard to the Nazis' Jewish victims, "forgotten by society . . . deceived, isolated, outcast . . . unarmed," who had managed to survive and lend one another support in such inhuman conditions."74 And Hayim Landau, speaking at the Holocaust Remembrance Day session of the Knesset in 1978, reiterated that there was no place whatsoever for the question, "Why did you go like sheep to slaughter?" since there was "no truth in this accusation." Taking into consideration the situation under Nazi rule, the real question was how there were any Jews at all who, under such terrible circumstances, were capable of fighting their oppressors.75 Alongside the increased sympathy for all the victims of the Holocaust was a corresponding increase in the extent and intensity of Holocaust commemorative activities. The relationship was mutual: while commemorative activities were stimulated by changed attitudes toward the Holocaust and diaspora Jewry, they themselves influenced those attitudes in a number of areas. As a result, Holocaust Remembrance Day today receives much more attention than in the past. In addition to the central state ceremony at Yad Vashem and the now routine memorial gatherings in the Martyrs' Forest, Yad Mordechai and Lohamei Hagetaot, thousands of

154

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

Israelis take part in meetings and ceremonies all over the country, addressed by national leaders of the first rank. Commemorative ceremonies take place in all of the country's educational institutions and in military camps; apart from speeches by political leaders, officers and public figures, they usually feature public readings and symbolic acts such as the lighting of six torches in memory of the six million martyrs. A recent innovation known as "Each Person Has a Name" involves public readings of the names of relatives and acquaintances who perished in the Holocaust. In a ceremony of this kind held on Holocaust Remembrance Day of 1990 in the Knesset plaza, the speaker of the Knesset was joined by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, cabinet ministers, Knesset members and other public figures, school children, new immigrants, tourists and soldiers.76 There has also been a significant increase in the establishment of new museums and institutes (or the expansion of existing ones) associated with the Holocaust. Among the more noteworthy institutions established since the Six-Day War is the Masuah Institute in Kibbutz Beit Yitzhak, which has been visited by some one hundred thousand high school and university students from Israel and abroad.77 Following the Six-Day War, and even more so since the Yom Kippur War, there has been a marked increase in the number of Holocaust monuments erected in Israel.78 Universities and other institutions of advanced studies have been devoting much more time and funds to Holocaust research. The first chair for study of the Holocaust was dedicated at Bar-Han University in 1961 by the historian Meir (Marc) Dworzecki, himself a Holocaust survivor, and since then several other university chairs and research institutes have been established. Israel's present educational system also clearly reflects the new approach to the Holocaust and diaspora Jewry. Some time after the Likud came to power, Holocaust studies were incorporated as a required subject in high school curricula. On March 26, 1980, the Knesset adopted an amendment to the State Education Law that added "consciousness of the memory of the Holocaust and heroism" to the list of values on which state education in Israel is to be based.79 Following the Six-Day War, authors of textbooks and other source material on the Holocaust had begun to devote more space to descriptions of persecution and of the extermination process itself; Jewish life before and after the Nazi occupation also began to receive more attention. In a parallel development, the relative weight of uprisings and heroism was much reduced. For example, a textbook edited by Hayim Shatzker and published by the Ministry of Education and the Hebrew University in 1977 contained only twenty pages out of a total of 350 on the subject of "heroism."80 Offsetting this deemphasis of "active" heroism was a heightened interest in what was known, variously, as "Jewish fortitude," "Jewish vitality" and the "sanctification of life"—that is, ordinary Jews' ability to maintain individual and social existence and preserve humanity even under the most difficult conditions. "Jewish fortitude" was assigned a significant place in curricula and textbooks dealing with the Holocaust; Shatzker's book, for example, alloted 150 out of the total 350 pages to the topic, and it was treated no less extensively in other textbooks published since 1967.81 Considerably more attention has also been given to the Holocaust in informal educational activity of various kinds, such as youth conferences and seminars and

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

155

organized visits to exhibitions and museums of the Holocaust and European Jewry. There has been a striking increase in the number of organized tours of Jewish youth in Poland, which are designed not only to foster awareness of the Holocaust but to deepen the participants' sense of Jewish identity, strengthen ties between diaspora Jewry and Israel and demonstrate the meaning and value of the state of Israel against the background of the tragedy of diaspora Jewry. In 1988, some two thousand young Jews from Israel and thirty other countries participated in a "March of the Living" that retraced the steps of those Jews who had been led to their deaths from Auschwitz to Birkenau.82 Among the participants in this event, which was organized by Abraham Hirschensohn on behalf of the National Zionist Youth Movement, were two cabinet ministers and a group of Knesset members. Addressing the marchers, Minister of Education Yitzhak Navon spoke of the "two obligatory 'stations' for every contemporary Jew: a transitional station—a visit to Auschwitz; and a permanent station—settling in Israel."83 After the march the participants took part in a "heroism quiz." Two years later, a second "March of the Living" was held in which approximately four thousand youths from Israel and the diaspora participated. Particular emphasis was placed on the symbolic aspect of the event, from the shofar blown at the beginning to the six torches lit at the end, followed by the raising of Israeli flags and the recitation of El male rahamim. At Birkenau, the marchers placed pegs in the ground that were inscribed with the names of relatives who had perished in the Holocaust; upon their return to Israel, they planted trees in a forest in the Jerusalem hills dedicated to the memory of Israel's military casualties—an act meant to symbolize the transition from Holocaust to resurrection. A certain amount of criticism, some of it quite sharp in tone, has been expressed in the mass media and periodical literature concerning the nature of commemorative activities and the lessons derived from the Holocaust by Israeli political leaders and educational policymakers. Critics object to the exploitation of the Holocaust in accentuating both the difference between Jews and non-Jews and the gentiles' hostility toward the Jews. They also reject what might be termed the "power-oriented" interpretation of the Holocaust, which depicts as its main lesson the need both to invest maximal efforts in Israel's military build-up and to resist political concessions and compromises. Some have challenged the familiar argument that the Holocaust confirms the Zionist thesis that the Jewish state is the sole guarantor of Jewish survival. Historian Yehuda Bauer, for example, took exception, in a 1983 article, to the argument that "everyone was against us ... everyone stood idly by while Jews were dying. . . . This nonsense has an even more nonsensical conclusion . . . [that] all the world is against us—never mind, we shall overcome!" Such a stance, Bauer argued, encourages a "deification of might and violence" in Israeli society that could have grave implications for the future. Moreover, there is no validity in any analogy between present-day political events and the Holocaust; even the Zionist lesson of the Holocaust is "dubious."84 Another critic, Amirah Hess, deplored the use of the Holocaust for political ends. Citing the pilgrimages to extermination camps and the accompanying ritual of Israeli flags, "Hatikvah" and heroism quizzes, Hess argued in an article published in 1990 that the Holocaust was being used as "the moral basis for the existence of the [Israeli] state," instead of being perceived as a "destruction

156

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

that bears neither renewal nor comfort." Her view, an extreme one, is that no lesson whatsoever can be derived from the Holocaust. Other critics, in contrast, do not deny that there are lessons to be learned; but these, they claim, pertain to the humanistic-universalistic sphere. Thus, Bauer argued that Israelis must behave in a manner "consonant with a ... more fundamental lesson to be learned from the Holocaust—that the abuse of human dignity leads to murder and destruction,"85 while Saul Friedlander noted that "the memory of [the Holocaust] imposes upon us the duty of a moral vigilance keener than ever. . . . How could the memory of [the Holocaust] fail to constantly remind us that there is no higher duty than the respect of human dignity, of human freedom, and of human life?"86 Humanistic elements are by no means lacking in statements about the Holocaust made by political and educational personalities; such elements are frequently embodied in Holocaust memorial activities organized by the official educational system. In January 1982, for instance, the Knesset held a special session to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Wannsee Conference. Opening the session, Knesset member Shevah Weiss—a Holocaust survivor—stated that one message of the Holocaust was the inherent danger of theories of race and national superiority, of "the failure to inculcate human and humanistic values."87 And in the Yad Vashem ceremony on Holocaust Remembrance Day of 1980, Minister of Education Zevulun Hammer declared, "The people of Israel have learned the lesson of the Holocaust and they know that the state of Israel has the power to defend itself. But ... the state of Israel does not walk the path of hatred and isolationism, and the people of Israel believe in dialogue and establishment of human contacts with the nations of the world."88 The "humanistic lesson" does not always exert much influence on Holocaustrelated educational ventures. For example, as part of the youth delegations' trips to Poland, meetings were arranged between the young Israelis and "righteous gentiles," with the idea of demonstrating that there were also "other gentiles" during the Holocaust. A psychological adviser to the delegation reported, however, that the trip was not particularly effective with regard to "understanding prejudices, encouraging tolerance and increasing readiness to accept differences"; where it was effective was in enhancing the Jewish identity of the young participants and their solidarity with the Holocaust martyrs.89 In general, objections to the inclusion of power-oriented and particularistic messages in the legacy of the Holocaust are not usually directed against commemoration of the Holocaust per se or identification with diaspora Jewry. In this sense, current critics of Holocaust commemorative activities share with their opponents a rejection of the mamlakhtiyut stance of deemphasis of the Holocaust. Does governmental involvement in the commemoration of the Holocaust amount to a deliberate effort on the part of the political and educational elite to impose its own conception of the Holocaust on Israeli society as a whole? Amirah Hess, for one, believes that it does, that "having been taken over by the state, the Holocaust has become a political tool . . . which, rather than reflecting a collective consciousness, tries to create it." It may well be, however, that the concept of the Holocaust advocated by the political and educational elite in Israel, on the one hand, and that

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

157

shared by the greater part of Israeli society, on the other, largely reinforce one another. As documented here, official attitudes to the Holocaust have in fact changed considerably in response to more general transformations in Israeli society and political culture—exemplified first and foremost by a decline in the influence of secular Zionism in all its variations, particularly that of mamlakhtiyut. At the same time, however, these attitudes themselves (as adopted and incorporated in Israel's educational and cultural policies) have served to reinforce various popular conceptions concerning the Holocaust. At this point, let us summarize the different attitudes to the question of the Holocaust and its legacy, and compare them—remembering, however, that we have essentially been discussing theoretical models or "ideal types"; in actual fact, one frequently encounters intermediate positions, "mixed approaches," that combine elements from different models. Present-day understanding of the Holocaust differs markedly from that of Ben-Gurion and other proponents of mamlakhtiyut, as well as from that of members of the extreme left of the labor movement. According to the doctrine of mamlakhtiyut, the Holocaust was concrete proof of the abnormal condition of the Jewish people in the diaspora—an inevitable outcome, in fact, of that condition—while the state of Israel represented the Jewish people's escape from the suffering and loneliness of the diaspora and its renewed position in the community of free nations. The Holocaust could not serve to promote closer relations between Israel and diaspora Jewry since it symbolized the profound contrast between them. An important distinction was thus drawn between the Jews in the state and in the diaspora. In contrast, left-wing labor ideology distinguished mainly between the traditional passivity of diaspora Jewry during the Holocaust years and the "new Jews" both in Palestine and in the diaspora who had taken their fate into their own hands and resisted their enemies, whether as partisans and ghetto fighters during the Holocaust or, later, as soldiers of the Haganah and the Israel Defense Forces. In accordance with these distinctions, proponents of mamlakhtiyut tended to limit Holocaust commemoration to a minimum, since it might generate identification with a form of existence that was held to be invalid and intolerable, not only politically but also socially and culturally. Leftist circles, while not ignoring the Holocaust, tended to overemphasize heroism and activism, particularly on the part of members of the pioneering youth movements. If mamlakhtiyut and left-wing ideology represent one extreme position, the other is that which views the Holocaust as a manifestation of the difference and eternal antagonism between gentile nations and the Jewish people. According to this view, establishment of the modern state of Israel has not diminished the gentile's hostility. On the contrary, the traditional hatred of Jews is now being directed first and foremost at the state that represents them. Antisemitism, of which the Holocaust was the most horrifying expression, does not distinguish between the condition of Jews in the diaspora and in Israel; rather, it expresses and signifies the unity and shared fate of Jews wherever they are. Adherents of this view, which is particularly common on the political right and in the religious camp, reject any condemnation of Jews who did not actively resist the oppressor during the Holocaust. Any criticism of the victims, they believe, would detract from the horrendous guilt of the German murderers and members of other nations who collaborated with the Nazis or else

158

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

stood idly by. The exclusive cause of the catastrophe was the evil and abysmal cruelty of the gentile environment in which the Jews of the diaspora had to live, not their passivity or alleged cowardice. This second position has much in common with traditional Jewish thinking on the uniqueness of the Jewish people and the persistence of gentile hostility. Such themes are frequently expressed in verses from traditional sources that are quoted in present-day contexts; for example, the talmudic saying, "it is the rule that Esau hates Jacob," or the biblical verse, "there is a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations." However, the traditional approach (represented today almost exclusively by the ultra-Orthodox) combines particularism with passivity, opposing any position or action that might be construed as provocative and advocating instead a faith in divine deliverance. The new attitude, conversely, combines traditional Jewish particularism with modern activism; that is, recognition of the need to defend oneself, to mobilize all possible forces and be willing to activate them in reaction to hostile attacks and attempts to harm the vital interests of Israel and the Jewish people. Put somewhat differently, the traditional approach interprets the Holocaust as just one more stage in the long chain of disasters inflicted upon the Jews as punishment for their sins.90 The emergence of the state of Israel is thus not a reaction to the Holocaust and to the sufferings of the Jews in the diaspora: It implies no radical change in the existential condition of the Jewish people. The state and the tools of physical power at its disposal do not guarantee the safety of the Jews and cannot in themselves prevent the recurrence of a catastrophe on the scale of the Holocaust. Such physical means are of no avail. Instead, the Jewish people must rely on God and pray for His help; they must also search their hearts and repent fully, mending their ways both individually and collectively. The new attitude to the Holocaust denies that the state of Israel has caused an essential change in either the separate identity of the Jews or the intrinsic gentile hatred for the Jewish people. However, the state does signify a reversal in the position of the Jewish people; through the state, they are now capable of defending themselves. Thus, the significance of the state lies not in its contribution to "normalization" of the Jewish condition, but in the possibility that it offers of preserving Jewish existence. The practical lesson of the Holocaust is that the state of Israel must be fortified and strengthened. A similar conclusion had in fact been drawn by the proponents of mamlakhtiyut; but they considered Israel a kind of sequel to the heroic and victorious tradition of the ancient Jewish commonwealth. The new approach, in contrast, frequently appeals to the memory of the Holocaust to demonstrate the importance of the state of Israel for the security of Jewish existence and the necessity of keeping watch against a hostile, anti-Jewish world. An additional lesson of the Holocaust, according to this approach, is the need to preserve the special Jewish identity of the state, to promote identification and solidarity with the diaspora and to deepen knowledge of diaspora Jewish history, religious and cultural traditions. A connection exists between the "Jewish" aspects of the present-day approach to the Holocaust and its political implications. Thus, we find the Holocaust interpreted as necessitating closer contacts with diaspora Jewry, on the one hand, and the

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

159

strengthening of Israel, on the other. Nonetheless, a good many Israelis would like to replace the power-oriented message of the tragedy of European Jewry with a more humanistic one—even though they, too, fully recognize the need both to enhance the consciousness of the Holocaust in Israeli society and to deepen identification with the vanished Jews of Europe. Such people also disapprove of the tendencies, common in the early years of the state's existence, to overemphasize the heroic element and to draw lines between those Jews who fought for their lives and those who perished passively. This development reflects a general change in Israeli political culture, which today is displaying less regard for symbols and ceremonies expressive of national heroism. There have been resultant changes in the atmosphere of such festivals as Hanukah and even Israel Independence Day: a devaluation of the political messages of these festivals, offset by a reappraisal of their family-oriented or folkloristicspontaneous elements.91 Holocaust-related ceremonies, however, exhibit just the opposite tendency—a marked increase in government involvement and political motivation. This is largely due to the fact that the symbols and myths associated with heroism, victory and national sovereignty are no longer such effective generators of national self-identity. Israel's self-image as a vigorous and self-confident "model state" has been weakened, with the result that awareness of the Holocaust and Jewish solidarity are increasingly turned to as sources of support and legitimation for the Jewish state. Notwithstanding a certain amount of political exploitation, a stronger identification with diaspora Jewry and enhanced consciousness of the Holocaust are not in themselves orchestrated "from above." For the most part, these interrelated processes have gone forward spontaneously, reflecting the diminished status of secular Zionist ideologies that "negated" both the diaspora and diaspora culture. The decline of such ideologies has impelled Israeli society to define its identity increasingly in terms of traditional Jewish symbols, while the Holocaust has become a symbol of solidarity and shared destiny with diaspora Jewry. Growing awareness of the Holocaust, conversely, has further intensified an interest in diaspora Jewry and its religious tradition. Increased awareness of the Holocaust, however, has also served as a catalyst in further polarizing Israeli society on the question of the status of the occupied territories and their Arab inhabitants. Political debate on this issue, which has escalated since the outbreak of the intifada, has also exacerbated differences of opinion concerning the true legacy of the Holocaust. Israel's continued control of the territories has aroused increasing opposition in the international arena, reinforcing a widespread feeling that once again, as in the time of the Holocaust, "the entire world is against us." In other circles, however, the situation of the Palestinians as an occupied people and the measures taken against their uprising have strengthened identification with the humanistic message of the Holocaust. A decision was made (although later canceled) to discontinue special study courses for soldiers at the Holocaust museum at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, since such courses might "affect the morale expected of them during the intifada. . . . The soldiers make comparisons, and . . . some leave as supporters of [Meir] Kahane, others . . . as 'refuseniks' [who refuse to serve in the occupied territories]."92 Clearly, then, political

160

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

exploitation of myths and symbols may sometimes have an effect opposite to that which is intended, as was the case, for example, with the Eichmann trial, which fostered deeper identification with victims of the Holocaust. The findings of this study corroborate and demonstrate the mutual relationship between a society's culture and its major historical events. Cultural values and concepts are shaped, among other things, by historical events; but these, in turn, influence the interpretation and patterns of response to those events. The Holocaust has left its imprint on the political culture of the state of Israel. At the same time, transformations taking place in Israeli society have had their effect on the accepted images and conceptions of the Holocaust.

Notes 1. Emil Fackenheim, "The Holocaust and the State of Israel: Their Relation," in Michael Morgan and Emil Fackenheim (eds.), The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim (Detroit: 1987), 289. 2. Amos Elon, The Israelis (London: 1971), 205-206. 3. Ibid., 206-207. 4. Divrei hakeneset (Preceedings of the Knesset) 5711 (1950/1951), 1659. 5. Ibid. (1958/1959), 1386. 6. See Y. Spivak and M. Avidor, 'Am yisrael bearzo uvanekhar (Ramat-Gan: 1948); cf. Ruth Firer, Sokhenim shel hahinukh haziyoni (Tel-Aviv: 1985), 70. 7. See Horaat hashoah bevatei hasefer (pamphlet of the Israel Ministry of Education, 1961). 8. Nili Keren, "Hashpa'at sheerit hapeletah 'al toda'at hashoah bahevrah hayisraelit," in Sheerit hapeletah, 1944-1948, ed. Israel Gutmann and Edna Drechsler (Jerusalem: 1990), 383. 9. See Dinah Stern, Defusei hatodaah vehazehut hayehudit basifrut hayeladim (Master's thesis, Bar-Han University, 1975), 17, 85, 86. 10. Ibid., 73. 11. Shlomo Grodzenski, "Haroman vehaaktualiyut," Davar, 29 May 1959. 12. Saul Friedlander, "The Shoah Between Memory and History," The Jerusalem Quarterly 53 (Winter 1990), 117. 13. Divrei hakeneset 5711 (1950/1951), 1655. 14. Reported by David Remez, Hazofeh, 5 June 1947; cf. Divrei hakeneset 5713 (1952/1953), 1311, 2402. 15. Ibid., 1336 (Mordechai Nurock). 16. Ibid., 5710 (1949/1950), 599. 17. Ibid., 1152. 18. Ibid., 1154. 19. Ibid., 1159. 20. See Hazd'ot hok 5713 (1952/1953), 170. For the version finally accepted by the Knesset see Sefer hahukim of that year, 144. 21. Divrei hakeneset 5713 (1952/1953), 1332. 22. Ibid., 1341 (Binyamin Mintz). 23. Ibid., 1333. 24. Ibid., 1332, 1340, 1342. 25. Davar, 19 May 1953. 26. Divrei hakeneset 5713 (1952/1953), 1313. 27. Ibid., 1331 (Yaakov Hazan).

Memory and Political Culture: Israeli Society and the Holocaust

161

28. See Josef Kermisz, "Meholelei hamered," Davar, 19 May 1953. 29. Davar, 12 April 1953. 30. Hagadat ayelet hashahar, 1946, cited in the supplement to Avshalom Reich, Changes and Developments in the Passover Haggadot of the Kibbutz Movement (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1972), 393. 31. "Hazav zakhor," Davar, 24 April 1960. 32. Divrei hakeneset 5713 (1952/1953), 1313. 33. Firer, Sokhenim shel hahinukh haziyoni, 79-80. 34. Shimshon Kirshenbaum, Toledot 'am yisrael bedorenu (Tel-Aviv: 1957), 278. 35. Divrei hakeneset 5713 (1952/1953), 1332 (Yaakov Hazan). 36. On mamlakhtiyut, see Natan Yannai, "Hatefisah hamamlakhtit shel Ben-Gurion," Cathedra 45 (September 1987), 169-189; Peter Medding, "Ben-Gurion kemanhig demokrati," Yahadut zemaneinu 5 (1989), 38-49; and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, "Yahadut umamlakhtiyut behaguto uvimediniyuto shel Ben-Gurion," Haziyonut 14 (1989), 51-88. 37. For Zvi Yehudah Kook's understanding of the Holocaust, see Eliezer Don-Yehiya, "Galut in Zionist Ideology and in Israeli Society," in Israel and Diaspora Jewry: Ideological and Political Perspectives, ed. Eliezer Don-Yehiya (Ramat-Gan: 1991), 219-257. As for Uri Zvi Greenberg, he states that the Holocaust martyrs "set us apart from the world . . . and there is no passage from one side to the other"; see Uri Zvi Greenberg, Rehovot hanahar (Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: 1951), 127. See also Barukh Kurzweil, "Shirei rehovot hanahar," in: Bein hazon levein haabsurdi (Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: 1966), 37. 38. See Yaakov Maor, "Mah nishtanetah hahagadah hazot," Yedioth Ahronoth, 1 April 1975; Charles S. Liebman, "Myth, Tradition and Values in Israeli Society," Midstream (January 1978), 44-53. 39. David Ben-Gurion, "Ein 'atid lanu beli medinah" (1945), in his Bama'arakhah 4 (TelAviv: 1949), 412. 40. On Ben-Gurion's attitude toward the Arab-Israel conflict, see Yigal Donitz, "'Ekronot yesod betefisato hapolitit-bithonit shel Ben-Gurion vehashkafato 'al hasikhsukh hayisraeli-'aravi," Medinah umimshal 1 (1971), 71-73. 41. Divrei hakeneset 5710 (1949/1950), 1153. 42. Ibid., 1161. 43. See Sefer hahukim 5710 (1949/1950), 281-284. 44. Divrei hakeneset 5712 (1951/1952), 910. 45. Davar, 22 April 1951. 46. David Ben-Gurion, "Israel's Security and her International Position," in Israel Government Year Book 5720 (1959/1960) (Jerusalem: 1960), 73-74. 47. Ibid., 72-73. 48. Ibid., 82. 49. Ibid., 77. 50. Ibid., 81. 51. Divrei hakeneset 5713 (1952/1953), 1334. 52. Ibid., 5719 (1958/1959), 2207. 53. Hazaothok57\9 1958/1959), 242. 54. Sefer hahukim 5719 (1958/1959), 112; for the Knesset debate see Divrei hakeneset of that year, 1385-1390, 1993. 55. The law declared that "Remembrance Day begins at sunset . . . [and lasts] until the stars come out"; Hazaot hok 5721 (1960/1961), 182; Sefer hahukim (5721), 182. 56. Harold Fisch, The Zionist Revolution: A New Perspective (London: 1978), 110. 57. See Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Konflikt veshituf bein mahanot politiyim: hamahaneh hadati utenu' at ha' avodah (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1977), vol. 2, ch. 4. 58. For a detailed discussion of this development, see Charles Liebman and Eliezer DonYehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State (Los Angeles: 1983). 59. Maariv, 27 April 1976. 60. Haaretz, 27 April 1976.

162

Eliezer Don-Yehiya

61. Yedioth Ahronoth, 13 April 1980. 62. Divrei hakeneset, 5738 (1977/1978), 2569. 63. Ibid., 2572. 64. Maariv, 10 April 1983. 65. Haaretz, 14 April 1988. 66. Ibid., 4 May 1978. 67. Yedioth Ahronoth, 13 April 1980. 68. Ibid., 4 August 1982. 69. Haaretz, 27 April 1976. 70. Ibid., 15 April 1977. 71. Ibid., 4 May 1978. 72. Divrei hakeneset 5713 (1952/1953), 1345. 73. Ibid., 1310. 74. Davar, 8 May 1967. 75. Divrei hakeneset 5738 (1977/1978), 2572. 76. Haaretz, 20 April 1990. 77. Ibid., 23 April 1990. 78. This statement is based on preliminary findings of a survey conducted by Nisan Rubin of Bar-Ilan University. 79. Divrei hakeneset 5740 (1979/1980), 2589. The amendment originated in a private member's bill submitted by a Holocaust survivor, Sara Stern-Catane of the National Religious Party, who argued not only that "we must remember and teach the Holocaust, so as to understand ourselves and know our own identity," but that a "national debt" was owed to "those upon whose blood and ashes we were founded." 80. Hayim Shatzker, Antishemiyut veshoah: noseh bahistoriyah lahativah ha'elyonah; see Firer, p. 83. 81. Firer, Sokhenim shel hahinukh haziyoni, 83-87. 82. Haaretz, 14 April 1988. 83. Ibid. 84. Maariv, 10 April 1983. Zionism could not save the overwhelming majority of Europe's Jews since it could not bring them to Palestine before the Holocaust, Bauer argued, while the Zionist endeavor in Palestine did not even guarantee the survival of its own Jewish population at the time. It was only thanks to "mistaken reasoning" on the Germans' part that they failed to occupy the country and exterminate its Jewish inhabitants. 85. Amirah Hess, "Shimush bilti nisbal basho'ah," Haaretz, 22 April 1990. 86. Friedlander, "The Shoah Between Memory and History," 126. 87. Divrei hakeneset 5742 (1981/1982), 1222. 88. Yedioth Ahronoth, 13 April 1980. 89. Report on the Youth Delegation to Poland, November 1988, Youth Section, Israel Ministry of Education and Culture. 90. For a detailed discussion of the haredi position, see Menahem Friedman, "The Haredim and the Holocaust," The Jerusalem Quarterly 53 (Winter 1990), 86-114. 91. Eliezer Don-Yehiya, "Festivals and Political Culture: Independence Day Celebrations," the Jerusalem Quarterly 45 (Winter 1988), 61-84, and "Hanukah and the Myth of the Maccabees in Zionist Ideology and in Israeli Society" in The Jewish Journal of Sociology 34, no. 1 (June 1992), 5-23. 92. Tom Segev, "Katav zar," Haaretz, 28 April 1989.

Education for Jewish Girls in the East: A Portrait of the Galata School in Istanbul, 1879-1912 Esther Benbassa (UNIVERSITY OF PARIS-SORBONNE)

The Galata School in Istanbul belonged to the educational network set up by the Alliance Israelite Universelle during the years 1862-1914. The express purpose of these schools was to promote both the emancipation of the Jews and their moral, intellectual and material improvement. In principle, Alliance institutions were open to all regardless of religion, nationality, sex or socioeconomic background.1 Except for its being restricted to girls,2 this was true of the Galata establishment. Evidence indicates that the Galata school had a significant impact not only on its graduates but on the surrounding community as well. In the discussion that follows, the special role of this institution will be examined within the general context of a heterogeneous cultural and social environment of an Istanbuli neighborhood, and the more specific context of the Istanbuli Jewish community during the years under discussion.3

Demographic and Social Features of the Galata Quarter Galata during the late nineteenth century was one of a number of well-defined neighborhoods in Istanbul, then the capital of the Ottoman empire. Its population in 1862 numbered 237,293, of whom some 110,000 were listed as "foreign subjects" (most of whom were actually subjects of the Ottoman empire but whose interests were represented by foreign embassies). Between one-fifth and one-quarter of the people were Muslims; most of the rest were Christians of various ethnic origins (e.g., Armenian and Greek). The Jews of Galata—some ten percent of the total population (22,865)—accounted for half the Jewish population of Istanbul.4 Known as a commercial center, Galata was a magnet for many middle-class Jewish famiA somewhat different version of this article, in French, appeared in Histoire, Economie et Societe 4 (1991), 529-559. It appears here courtesy of the Centre de documentation universitaire et societe d'edition d'enseignement superieur reunis, under whose auspices the journal is published.

163

164

Esther Benbassa

lies, both because of its proximity to the prestigious European quarter of Pera and because of the generally favorable economic conditions prevailing there. Jewish families moved to Galata from more crowded districts, such as Haskoy and Balat, that were located on either side of the Golden Horn.5 Beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the ranks of native Istanbul! Jewry were swelled by immigrants from Russia, Rumania and Poland who were fleeing from antisemitism and poverty. There were also smaller waves of immigration from Bulgaria (during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878) Corfu (as a result of a blood libel case in 1891) and Thrace (during the Balkan War of 1912). The immigrants from Eastern Europe settled primarily in the less desirable sections of the Galata quarter, where cheaper rents and employment were relatively easy to find. The women worked as servants, laundresses and seamstresses, while many of the men were employed either as domestics or guards.6 The new residents lived either at the foot of the road that led to Yuksek Kaldirim and Voyvoda Street or in the adjoining streets located near regions known for crime and prostitution.7 Fellow residents are on record as having negative attitudes toward these newcomers, who were accused of being unclean, greedy and badly dressed. The women were accused of a general lack of virtue since they were employed in the local houses of prostitution (run, so it was said, by Polish Jews).8 The East European Jews were also accused of being active in the white slave trade, which flourished in Galata.9 Indeed, the settlement of such Jews in the Galata district was a distinct cultural shock for the native Istanbuli Sephardic Jews. Religion was the only thing the two groups had in common, and even here there were significant differences in custom and observance. Institutional differences already existed within the established Istanbuli Jewish community. Members of the two major subgroups, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, often referred to each other as "enemy brothers,"10 and within each subgroup there were further divisions. In 1885, the Ashkenazim numbered some 2,500, most of whom lived in Galata.11 They were divided between the Ottoman Ashkenazim (Aschkenasische Kultusgemelnde) and the foreign, or Austro-Hungarian Ashkenazim (Oesterreichisch-ungarisch-israelitische Kultusgemein.de). While these two groups were formally united in 1890, they remained distinct for many years thereafter. The Sephardim, numerically more significant, were divided into the "Spanish" and "Italian" (Francos) communities.12 Intercommunal disagreements of a cultural or institutional nature exacerbated already existing social antagonisms. Among the Ashkenazim, the more veteran well-to-do "Germano-Israelites" were pitted against the poor, mostly working-class immigrant families.13 Similarly, among the Sephardim the long-term residents of the quarter formed a kind of aristocracy while the newcomers from the Golden Horn brought with them, so it was charged, "their [different] way of life and their retrograde spirit," which was deemed "incompatible with the spirit of progress" that was professed by the locals.14 In other words, the new arrivals were strongly attached to Jewish traditions and thus did not fit in with the Western-oriented, "modern" Jewish image promoted by the wealthier and more intellectual circles of Jewish society.

Education for Jewish Girls in the East

165

Schooling and Gender Differences in the Ottoman Empire Although there are no precise data regarding school attendance among the Jews of the Ottoman empire, it is known that a significant number of boys went to talmudei torah (in Judeo-Spanish, meldarim).15 Here they acquired basic religious instruction, some knowledge of reading and writing in Judeo-Spanish and Hebrew, and the fundamentals of arithmetic. In 1904, out of 1,030 Jewish children attending school in Galata, 585 went to Jewish schools, including the talmudei torah.16 In Istanbul as a whole, 1,420 out of a total of 4,700 went to talmudei torah and 600 to European schools.17 Such data demonstrate how deeply rooted were the traditional modes of education among the Jews, particularly where boys were concerned. Jewish girls were far less likely to receive any formal education, traditional or otherwise. No institute of the talmud torah type existed for them. During the nineteenth century, daughters of the rich were educated either at home or at foreign schools. Protestant mission schools accepted some of the poorer girls, whose attendance was encouraged by gifts of money and goods to the parents.18 There were also nursery schools that sometimes kept children until a rather advanced age.19 But the majority of Jewish girls received no formal education whatsoever. By the second half of the nineteenth century, such a situation was becoming more and more anachronistic even in the backward Ottoman empire. Thus in 1881, Sultan Abdulhamid II (ruled 1876-1909) spoke out in favor of education for girls.20 Between 1867 and 1895, the number of Muslim girls attending school in the empire doubled and reached 253,349.21 It is not surprising that this development affected the Jewish population as well. The first girls' school of the Alliance in Turkey was founded in Edirne in 1870, and between 1875 and 1882, the first elementary schools for girls were established in the main quarters of the capital.22

The Galata School: Aims, Social Profile and Curriculum In 1877, a committee made up of the local Jewish female elite was established to found a new girls' school in the Galata quarter. The committee, assisted by the Alliance, raised the necessary funds and continued to be involved in the school's administration even after its establishment. The avowed aim of the school was to westernize and modernize its pupils, to train them to play a useful role in society both as wives and mothers and as members of the working class—while at the same time protecting them from the undesirable influence of the missionary schools.23 From the very beginning, the Galata school's population was marked by strong cultural differences. This feature persisted throughout the school's history, rendering the teachers' task particularly difficult. Thus we are informed that, in 1882, seventy-five girls followed the German (Ashkenazic) tradition while seventy-three were Sephardim.24 In order to prevent intrareligious conflicts and promote integration, the students of different groups were divided equally among the classes. Moreover, Sephardic students were required to learn German, and Ashkenazim to study "Hebrew in the Spanish idiom" (i.e., Judeo-Spanish).25 French, considered

166

Esther Benbassa

"neutral," was the main language of instruction and the main vehicle of the integration process. Since the acceptance of non-Jewish girls was seen as contributing to the "moral integration of the different elements of the population,"26 a number of Christian girls also studied at the Galata school, largely to benefit from the French-language instruction. There were no Muslim girls, perhaps because they were not expected to work outside the home and therefore had no need of foreign languages. Muslim boys, however, did attend the Alliance schools for boys in the empire.27 The socioeconomic profile of the student was also far from being homogeneous. Originally it had been thought to establish two separate schools, one for the rich and one for the poor.28 This plan failed for lack of funds, although in 1909 a framework of parallel classes for wealthy students was actually implemented. During the school's first twenty years, nonpaying pupils outnumbered those who paid tuition. In addition to dealing with a perennial budget deficit, the school administration had the constant challenge of convincing wealthy parents (including some of the members of the founding committee) not to withdraw from the school simply because they wished their daughters to avoid contact with children from disadvantaged homes.29 Throughout, the staff remained dedicated to the goal of providing even the poorest of students with the type of instruction necessary for social and economic advancement.30 Gradually, as the school established itself as an important institution in the community and as more middle-class parents became convinced of the need to educate their daughters, an increasing share of the school's budget—by 1912, fully 82 percent—was covered by tuition. During the period under discussion, the proportion of girls from poor families was never more than 23 percent of the entire student body.31 Naturally enough, the headmistress played a key role in the school. Serving in an intellectual and professional capacity, she symbolized the westernizing, "civilizing" mission of the school while at the same time seeking to conform to the behavioral patterns of the respectable woman of the Orient. Assisting the headmistress was a teaching staff that consisted of general teachers and specialized teachers of sewing, German, Turkish and Hebrew (the last were usually rabbis). In later years, many of the teachers were themselves graduates of the school. The headmistress sought to imbue her staff with basically liberal pedagogical methods. In this regard the only conflicts were with the teachers of Turkish, who resisted the western model imposed on the Galata school. The Galata school was open five days a week and closed on Saturday and Sunday. Classes began at 8:00 or 8:30 a.m. and lasted until noon, then resumed at 1:00 or 1:30 p.m. until 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. During winter months, there were no classes on Friday afternoons. Teachers taught between six and seven hours a day, and the headmistress was required to teach a minimum of twenty-four weekly hours in addition to her administrative chores. School holidays followed the Jewish calendar. During the summer months the school remained open, in contrast to other schools in the quarter. Only at the beginning of the century did it close for ten days during the latter part of August. Teachers were entitled to six weeks' vacation a year, which they took in turns.

Education for Jewish Girls in the East

167

Children were accepted to the Galata school at age six. In its early years, the school was divided into four divisions corresponding to four age groups. As the number of children wishing to attend the school increased, additions were made— first a kindergarten and, in 1906, an advanced class for those who had completed the regular curriculum (at the age of 15) and who, it was feared, might continue their education in church-related institutions. In 1900, a special division was created for Ashkenazic children of Russian and Rumanian origin.32 Moreover, in another departure from the original egalitarian and integrationist aims of the school, "private" classes were established in 1909 for the wealthy students, at the same time as a bilingual German-French class was started for the benefit of the poorer pupils, most of whom were slated to become saleswomen in the shops of Pera.33 Since the Alliance mandate was to provide for the "moral, intellectual and economic uplifting" of its Jewish students, the course of studies at the Galata school included both academic and nonacademic subjects. Indeed, the main emphasis was on "socialization," the creation of a model western bourgeois woman adapted to local conditions.34 This might mean training the well-to-do girls, who were likely to take the traditional path of becoming wives and mothers, in modern hygiene and progressive techniques of child rearing. For the poorer pupils the main concern was to provide vocational skills to enable them to attain respectable positions in the working world after the completion of their studies. A good deal of ingenuity was marshalled in order to avoid creating "outcasts" who would be trapped between the conflicting worlds of school and home. The basically bourgeois model presented by the school was reinforced by the presence of students from wealthy homes; nonetheless, the proximity of houses of prostitution in the neighborhood was a constant danger. One of the main concerns of the school administration was to encourage pupils to remain in school for as many years as possible. Not only would the school's pedagogic program be better served in this way, but early marriages, which tended to preserve the cycle of large families and poverty, would be less likely. However, the school's success in holding on to pupils past the age of fifteen or sixteen was rather limited. As for the curriculum, it was basically similar to that of French schools, with the addition of Jewish studies and local language instruction. The Galata school emphasized nonacademic subjects (such as sewing and home economics) more than was customary in schools for boys. In principle, the language of instruction in Alliance schools was French, although this principle was not always followed (in Baghdad, for example, English was employed). In the Galata school, German was taught at a very early stage to accommodate the needs of the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim. Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish, however, were deprecated as dialects, notwithstanding the fact that Judeo-Spanish was taught to the Ashkenazic children as part of the school's program of encouraging integration.35 By the turn of the century, a number of subjects—e.g., natural history and geography—were taught in German. Several Sephardic notables affiliated with the Alliance deplored this development as signaling the "Germanization" of the school.36 In fact, the decision to expand the use of German probably resulted from the desire both to compete with the local Protestantrun schools and to discourage Ashkenazic families from joining the Hilfsverein der

168

Esther Benbassa

deutschen Juden, which was making plans to establish its own school.37 It is also known, from a report of 1884-1885, that the Alliance was worried about the fact that most Ashkenazic children in the area attended non-Jewish schools.38 Turkish was a late addition, placed in the curriculum only in 1909-1910 (shortly after the revolution of the Young Turks, who, among other things, promoted modern Turkish nationalism). School administrators were not particularly enthusiastic about the introduction of Turkish, claiming that Jewish girls had no need for it. Many parents, however, saw knowledge of Turkish as a springboard to full social integration. Their pressure, combined with the concern that the school might otherwise appear to be unpatriotic, led eventually to the introduction not only of Turkish language studies but also of Turkish history and geography.39 The attainment of encyclopedic knowledge was not subscribed to by the Galata school, where the motto was to "learn little, but [learn it] well." Those disciplines demanding a certain intellectual effort, such as arithmetic, history and science, were taught in simplified form.40 Development of an aesthetic sense, however, was considered very important. For this reason, singing and solfege (sight reading) were made part of the curriculum, and as early as 1888 a piano was purchased so that children of wealthy families would not absent themselves from school in order to attend music lessons. Art history was introduced in 1909-1910 in a effort to engender a sense of "decorum" that was "so neglected in the Orient."41 Jewish studies occupied a relatively minor role in the curriculum. Apart from Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish, a course on postbiblical Jewish history was taught. The main purpose of these studies was to instill the spirit of the Bible in a way that would allow pupils to transcend the simple observance of tradition, which was considered old-fashioned. Great emphasis was placed on nonacademic courses that were designed to enhance pupils' homemaking and/or vocational skills. One to two hours a day were devoted to needlework. It was felt that future mothers should be skillful in sewing and dressmaking; moreover, such skills were applicable to the local employment market. Different headmistresses stressed different programs of nonacademic studies, based in part on their assessment of local needs and future employment prospects. As noted, the shops of Pera were eager to employ the school's graduates— more so than Greek or Armenian girls—because of their reputedly higher moral standards, good manners and knowledge of foreign languages. With the relative growth of certain economic sectors in the first decade of the twentieth century and the mobilization of young men during the Balkan War, other opportunities opened up for women.42 Responding to these new conditions, the school introduced a course in business in 1910-1911; in subsequent years it added courses in typing, stenography, calligraphy, accounting, commercial correspondence and English. As early as 1888, a course that later developed into a home economics program was introduced. Basic principles of childcare and child rearing were also taught. Hygiene was a particularly important subject, given the high mortality rate during the harsh winters in Istanbul and the various epidemics that sometimes caused the school's temporary closing (from 1898, children attending the school had to bring a certificate of vaccination). The teaching staff did its best to expand the concept of

Education for Jewish Girls in the East

169

hygiene from housecleaning alone to cleanliness of body and basic practical medicine.43 In short, the wealthier pupils were given the tools to become modern mothers and the intellectual equals of their spouses, while the poorer ones were given a practical education that would allow them to be absorbed into the labor market as saleswomen, secretaries or even domestics. From the outset, headmistresses of the school sought to combine utility and pleasure in the teaching program, starting with the very youngest pupils. In the kindergarten, children were treated with "goodness and gentleness." Staff members followed the Frobel education method, which insisted on the "harmonious equilibrium of the children's faculties" and the importance of spontaneity.44 Inspired to a degree by Rousseau, the pedagogic philosophy was to awaken the child's interest through enjoyment rather than coercion. Whenever possible, teachers relied on presenting concrete examples. Geography, for example, was taught in the context of "longing for someone far away," and arithmetic through the use of chestnuts, hazelnuts and almonds. A proposal was made to exclude physical and natural sciences from the curriculum precisely because of the lack of concrete materials and the difficulty of making class excursions. Lessons were transformed into discussions to arouse the attention of the young listeners. Dictations were used to transmit oral teachings, and Jewish history was taught in everyday language. Lessons that were intensive or particularly serious in nature were interrupted by talks or anecdotes designed to give the children's minds a rest. When language study based on grammar proved unsuccessful, teachers shifted their approach and spoke to the pupils in the language being studied.45 Abstraction and conceptual thinking played only a minor role in the curriculum, while emphasis was placed on instilling habits of neatness and order. The guiding principle was that, since girls had been excluded for so long from formal education and were more accustomed to practical teaching in the home, such methods were more useful than those based on the development of critical thinking skills. Games played an important role in the school's curriculum, since these allowed the children to expend surplus energy, exercise their bodies and rest their minds— while affording teachers opportunities for more informal observation.46 Based on what they saw, the teachers would attempt to guide each child according to her natural inclinations. Careful observation of the pupils was considered extremely important, as was offering personal attention to each child. Children who rarely spoke up in class, for example, were not blamed for their shyness; instead, their teachers were urged to be less strict and more considerate with them so that in the long run their silence would be overcome by trust and affection. The school's policy on homework often clashed with the views of the wealthier parents, who generally retained the belief that the quality of a school was to be measured by the quantity of homework assigned.47 Since the school's administrators believed in the importance of household work, they preferred to limit the amount of homework so that students could help out with chores and/or the care of younger siblings. Moreover, many poorer families went to bed immediately after supper in order to save on electricity and heating fuel. Girls from such families thus

170

Esther Benbassa

had little time for homework, nor could they expect much help from their parents, since the latter were often illiterate.48 Finally, correction of homework was one more burden on an already overworked teaching staff. For this reason alone, homework most often consisted of a small copying exercise or a page of calligraphy. Concerning discipline, the preferred method of dealing with misbehavior was to give a private, gentle reprimand. If this failed, teachers could resort to more open reprimands, retention of students after school hours or temporary expulsion. In general, however, discipline was not a major problem. Most students were described as gentle, submissive and obedient, their main failing being a lack of regular work habits. A widely used "punishment" was deprivation of a pupil's weekly library book.49 Reading at the Galata school was considered both a "civilizing agent" and a source of pleasure. School officials regularly sent order lists to Paris so that they could enrich the library with new, useful and enjoyable publications. Students were introduced not only to classic authors such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo and Saint-Simon but to serious contemporary writers. The emphasis here, as always, was on the moral aspect; novels judged to be cheap or tendentious were discouraged. Reading was considered to be so important that the school even sponsored a library project for its graduates, subsidized by the Alliance. Since moral rather than academic excellence was the primary aim of the Galata school, no school prizes, honor rolls or medals were awarded to outstanding pupils. The aim was to promote an egalitarian spirit rather than to highlight differences in achievements. Prizes and the like were branded "dead concepts that ought to be dropped."50 Examinations, however, were an integral part of the curriculum, since these were the means of determining how well pupils were learning. Children were examined orally each week and semester examinations were gradually introduced. From 1898, students were made to write compositions on subjects taught during the previous trimester. Parents were given semester reports, and the children's progress was regularly elevated. After protracted negotiations, the Alliance agreed in 1890 to grant a French diploma (Certificat d'Etudes et Brevet) to graduates of the school.51 For some students, such a diploma represented the crowning achievement of their academic efforts. From its inception, a main purpose of the Galata school was to provide for the future livelihood of the poorer pupils. With this aim in mind an unsubsidized workshop was opened for former Galata students in 1882, followed two years later by subsidized Alliance apprenticeship programs in Galata and other neighborhoods.52 The first workshop program was designed to teach dressmaking skills such as cutting, ironing, sewing and mending. Subsequent programs that were introduced with varying degrees of success included antique embroidery (a craft that until then was practiced exclusively by Armenians),53 hat-trimming, bookbinding and tapestry weaving. During most of the years of the workshop program, between thirty and sixty girls served as apprentices. The decision to focus on dressmaking and related crafts reflected ideological as well as pragmatic concerns.54 Girls in the workshops would benefit from enhanced employment opportunities as seamstresses, sewing teachers, saleswomen or domestic servants, or else they would be able to put their skills to good domestic use.

Education for Jewish Girls in the East

171

Moreover, the school was limited in the kinds of courses it could offer. Since working women were not generally viewed with approval,55 the only respectable avenues of employment were those in commerce or domestic service. Although a fair number of girls found work after their apprenticeship,56 the program as a whole was not entirely successful, largely because it offered mostly traditional trades that were low-paying and devoid of opportunities for advancement. In 1902, the dressmaking workshop was closed, although a lacemaking workshop was still operating in 1909. Far more successful were the business courses that the school began to offer in the following year.

Conclusion Operating during an era of social and economic change, the Galata school served in many ways as a model for communal harmony and openness. Its avowedly integrationist policy—the mixing of Ashkenazic and Sephardic, wealthy and poor students—stood in marked contrast to the often fractious relationships of various Istanbuli Jewish congregations, while its blend of progressiveness and pragmatism reflected the aspirations of the neighborhood's growing Jewish middle class. An Alliance inspector's annual report for 1884-1885 noted that the Galata school was the best of its kind in Istanbul.57 One measure of its success was the fact that many of its students remained affiliated with the school after graduation, either through the apprentice program or in an educational or volunteer capacity. During the latter years of its operation, the Galata school was also attended by many daughters of graduates. As a report from 1897-1898 notes approvingly, the positive influence of the school could be seen both in the mothers' personalities and in their relationship with their children. Budgetary restrictions limited the school's recruitment among the poorer residents of Galata; many of those who did attend the school were often forced to drop out early. The school's success in advancing these girls' economic status was mixed, in part because of traditional attitudes opposing women's work outside the home. Nonetheless, the Galata school can be viewed as a pioneering institution in its commitment to providing vocational as well as academic and domestic training. In this way, it served as a forceful agent of change within the Istanbuli Jewish community, providing many girls of limited means with the tools for economic and social advancement.

Notes 1. Instructions generates pour les professeurs. Pamphlet of the Alliance israelite universelle. (Paris: 1903), 63. 2. There were, however, certain years in which several young boys were admitted, and at one time it was proposed to make the school coeducational for the fourth through seventh grades. See Archives de l'Alliance israelite universelle (henceforth AAIU), France XVII. 28, annual report by Victoria Semach (headmistress of the Galata School), 1903-1904. Concerning coeducational classes, the secretary of the Alliance in Paris noted in the margins, "I don't think so."

172

Esther Benbassa

3. Although the school was in operation until 1925, very little information is available after 1912. 4. For statistical material, see Steven Rosenthal, "Minorities and Municipal Reform in Istanbul, 1850-1870," in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, vol. 1, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York and London: 1982), 390 and Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830-1914 (Madison: 1985), 147. According to the Bulletin de I'Alliance Israelite universelle (henceforth BAIU) 1 (1st semester 1880), 57, there were 10,000 Jews in Galata. 5. AAIU, France XVII. 28, annual report by M. Fresco (director of the boys' school); ibid., letter from Semach, 15 November 1897. 6. AAIU, Turkey LXX. E., letter from Semach, 4 July 1912. 7. Ibid., Turkey I. C. 1, letter from M. Halevy, 1 December 1889. 8. Ibid. Also see Halevy's letters of 3 January and 12 March 1890. 9. Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery 1870-1939 (New York: 1982), 181-191, passim. 10. For a historical analysis of this question and its repercussions in the twentieth century, see Esther Benbassa, Haim Nahum effendi, dernier Grand Rabbin de I'Empire Ottoman (1908-1920): son role politique et diplomatique (Ph.D. diss., University of Paris, 1987), 391-412, 606-609. 11. BAIU 10 (2nd semester 1885/1st semester 1886), 70. 12. The administrative separation of the Italian Jews from the Sephardic community dated from 1862. See Archives of the Italian Community (Istanbul), letter of M. Cerruti (in Italian) to the Italian Royal Delegation to the foreign Israelite community of the Spanish and Portuguese rite at Constantinople, 2 May 1862. A further division within the Sephardic community was between the native "Stambulis," who followed the Spanish-Portuguese rite, and the foreign "Selaniklis." See AAIU, France, XVII. 28, annual report by Helene Salzer (headmistress of the Galata school), 1885-1886. 13. AAIU, France XVII. F. 28, letter from Semach, 15 November 1897. 14. Ibid. 15. On the talmudei torah, see Aron Rodrigue, "The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Attempt to Reform Jewish Religious and Rabbinical Instruction in Turkey," in L'Alliance dans les communautes du bassin mediterraneen a la fin du 19' siecle at son influence sur la situation sociale et culturelle, ed. Simon Schwarzfuchs (Jerusalem: 1987), 53-70. 16. AAIU, France XVII. F. 28, annual report by Fresco, 1903-1904. 17. Ibid., 1904-1905. 18. Ibid., annual report by Semach, 1902-1903. 19. Ibid., Turkey LVIII. E., letter from Levy, 12 April 1888. 20. Nermin Abadan-Unat, "Social Change and Turkish Women," in Women in Turkish Society, 2nd. ed., ed. N. Abadan, D. Kandiyot and Mubeccel B. Kiray (Leiden: 1981), 7. 21. Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (New York: 1978), vol. 2, 112. Also see Justin McCarthy, The Arab World, Turkey and the Balkans, 1878-1914: A Handbook of Historical Statistics (Boston: 1982), 117, where figures are given for the number of male and female students in Istanbul and the empire as a whole for the years 1895-1896. 22. The first school was founded in Haskoy in 1875. The girls' school and a coeducational school, both in Galata, opened in 1876. Other schools were established in Daghamami (1880), Ortakoy (1881) and Balat (1882). See BAIU 7 (2nd semester 1883), 37-38, 66. Also see Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israelite Universelle in Turkey, 1860-1914 (Ph.D diss., Harvard University, 1985), 174 for statistics on the percentage of girls attending school in the cities of Edirne, Istanbul and Izmir during the years 1879-1909. 23. AAIU, Turkey XXV. E., letter from H. Fernandez to S. Fernandez, July 1877. 24. Ibid., France XVII. 28, letter from Salzer, 22 February 1882. 25. Ibid. 26. Jacques Bigart, L'action de I'Alliance israelite Turquie (Paris: 1913), 23. 27. AAIU, France XVII. F. 28, annual report by Fresco, 1899-1900.

Education for Jewish Girls in the East

173

28. Ibid., 1906-1907. 29. Ibid., letter from Semach, 15 October 1909. 30. Ibid., 15 November 1910. 31. The Galata school had three sources of revenue: the Alliance, tuition fees and revenues from the local Jewish community, all of which fluctuated widely. See BAIL! (1-37), 1880-1912. Poor children are defined as those who participated in the food program sponsored by Baroness Clara de Hirsch (many of these students also benefited from clothing and medical care provided by volunteer organizations connected with the school). In 1896, 35 out of 330 pupils received meals through the food program; in 1905, with the Alliance also providing aid, 125 out of some 750 participated in the program. See AAIU, France XVII. F. 28, letter from Salzer, 17 February 1882, Semach's annual reports of 1903-1907 and 19111912, and her letter of 15 October 1909. 32. AAIU, Turkey LXIX. E., letter from Semach, 6 January 1901. 33. Ibid., France XVII. F. 28, letter from Salzer, 1 November 1890 and letters from Semach, 15 October 1909 and 15 November 1910. 34. BAIU 10 (2nd semester 1885/lst semester 1886), 76. 35. Ibid., 69. 36. AAIU, Turkey LXIX. E., letter from Semach, 27 February 1908. 37. Ibid. The Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, founded in 1901 by leaders of German Jewry for the uplifting and improvement of East European Jews, established several schools in the Ottoman empire. A rival (albeit an undeclared one) of the Alliance, the Hilfsverein was responsible for a certain strengthening of German language and culture in the empire. 38. BAIU 10, 70-71. 39. BAIU 34 (1909), 93-94; AAIU, Turkey LXX. E., letter from Semach, 14 May 1909. 40. AAIU, France XVII. F. 28, letter from Semach, 15 July 1912. 41. Ibid., Turkey LXIX. E., letter from Semach, 2 May 1898; ibid. LXVI. E., letter from Salzer, 15 March 1888; ibid., France XVII. F. 28, letter from Semach, 15 October 1909. 42. Ibid., 15 July 1912. See also Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd ed. (London: 1979), 229. 43. AAIU, France XVII. 28, annual report of Semach, 1904-1905. 44. Ibid., letter from idem, 15 October 1909. 45. Ibid., annual report of idem, 1904-1905. 46. Ibid., 1898-1899. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., letter of 15 July 1912. 49. Ibid., Turkey LXIX. E., letter from Semach, 9 January 1899. 50. Ibid., France XVII. F. 28, annual report of Semach, 1906-1907. 51. The pupils became eligible for a Certificat d'Etudes et Brevet after passing an exam at the French embassy. 52. BAIU 11 (2nd semester 1886), 41; ibid. 13 (1st/2nd semester 1888), 58. 53. AAIU, France XVII. F. 28, annual report of Semach, 1898-1899; ibid., Turkey LXIX. E., letter from Semach, 6 March 1900. 54. Apprenticeship in manual work, it was believed, would combat idleness and make the girls into "honest" women. See AAIU, France XVII. F. 28, annual report of Salzer, 18851886. 55. AAIU, Turkey LXIX. E., letter from Semach, 6 July 1898. 56. See ibid., LXX. E., letter from Semach, 8 May 1905 for a full report on where some 200 apprenticeship graduates found employment. Among the statistics provided: 13 were working abroad (in the United States, Egypt, France and Russia), mostly as seamstresses; 15 were maids; 33 seamstresses; 23 independent dressmakers; 18 hat-making apprentices; 15 sales trainees in commercial establishments in Pera; and approximately 50 had left Istanbul, with no information provided on their place of residence or occupation. 57. BAIU 10 (2nd semester 1885/lst semester 1886), 69.

Back into the Lion's Jaws: A Note on Jewish Return Migration to Nazi Germany (1933-1938) Down Niederland (DAVID YELLIN TEACHERS' COLLEGE CURRICULUM CENTER, ISRAEL MINISTRY OF EDUCATION)

Scholarly literature dealing with the migration of German Jews under the Nazi regime has been concerned exclusively with "outward-bound migration," i.e., emigration. Such an emphasis derives from a basic assumption that the Nazi's antiJewish policy resulted in a forced migration. However, when the question of German-Jewish migration is examined in all its aspects, an interesting phenomenon emerges: thousands of Jews who had emigrated from Nazi Germany after 1933 came back, although the "push factor"—the Nazi regime and its anti-Jewish policy—continued to exist. This fact, which demands an explanation, also calls into question the accepted approach that views the German Jews as refugees and classifies their migration as a "forced" one. "For every migration stream there is a corresponding counterstream flowing in the opposite direction."1 This statement, considered one of the basic principles of the study of migration, highlights the importance of tracing the factors behind return migration. It is obvious that migrants often return home following a reassessment of their country of origin as compared to their destination, usually resulting from their failure to integrate economically and socially. In other instances, emigration is planned in advance for a limited duration, and thus migrants return home as soon as they have achieved their goals or, alternatively, when earlier expectations of positive changes in the home country have been fulfilled. Analysis of the quantitative data on the relative proportion of return migrants in international migration movements shows that in some cases it can be highly significant, while in other cases it is marginal. Furthermore, in a country with a tradition of large-scale immigrant absorption, such as the United States, the extent of return migration varies, sometimes sharply, according to the national origins of the various immigrants (see Table 1). Clearly, the extent of return migration from the United States among Jews— 174

Back into the Lion's Jaws

175

Table 1 Migration and Return Migration of Various Nationalities to and from the U.S., 1908-1924 Number of return migrants

Relative proportion (percentage) of return migrants

Nationality

Number of immigrants

Jews

1 ,009,000

52,000

5.2

Irish

475,000

48,000

10.1

English

801,000

153,000

19.1

Poles Italians

808,000

321,000

39.7

2,085,000

1,140,000

54.7

Source: Walter F. Wilcox. International Migration, vol. 2 (New York: 1959), 477.

escaping not only economic misery but antisemitism—was significantly smaller in comparison to all other nationalities.2 Similarly, it might be supposed that the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany would leave for good, without even considering the possibility of return. This, however, was not the case. The discussion below will deal with the extent of this return migration—its timing, causes and, insofar as the sources permit, the sociological characteristics of the people involved. Those Jews who decided to return to Germany, unlike those leaving, did not usually avail themselves of the assistance and advice of the Jewish organizations that dealt with migration, and thus do not appear in their records. However, the German authorities, above all the Gestapo—who naturally disapproved of the phenomenon of return migration (Ruckwanderung)—monitored it with close attention. These authorities, then, are the main source of data on the extent of return migration, with the figures quoted unaltered in Jewish sources. In an article that appeared in the Judische Rundschau on May 10, 1935, for instance, it is noted that the Berlin Gestapo estimated, on the basis of data on Prussia, that up to that date some ninety thousand Jews and some twenty thousand "political refugees" had emigrated from Germany. The number of those returning to Germany is estimated by the same source at about ten thousand, almost all of them (99 percent) Jews. Identical figures, also based on the reports of the Berlin Gestapo, appear in one of the surveys of Jewish emigration from Germany written by Arthur Prinz, one of the heads of the Hilfsverein.3 Thus, it appears that some ten percent of the Jews who emigrated from Germany during the first two years of Nazi rule returned up to the beginning of 1935. Circulars from the Bavarian political police concerning the problem of returning migrants show that the return migration to Germany began in the first half of 1934. At this stage it was not yet considered a real threat, and the authorities contented themselves with keeping the returnees under observation.4 However, in March 1935, a circular noted that the number of returning migrants, the vast majority of them Jewish, was increasing steadily. These "undesirable elements," it was stated, were to be sent to undergo a process of "training" (Schulungsprozess) and "adapta-

176

Doron Niederland

tion" to life in National Socialist Germany.5 A later circular detailed the conditions justifying dispatch to a "training camp" (Schulungslager): All those, whether Aryan or non-Aryan, who had left Germany for political reasons after 30 January 1933 and had returned after 28 January 1935 were to be sent to the camps, the men to Dachau and the women to Moringen, while their children would be placed during the period of "re-education" with relatives living in Germany.6 From the material contained in a circular dated 27 June 1935, it appears that the order sending returnees to "training camps" was not fully enforced, especially where Jews were concerned.7 Many Jews, it was noted, had argued that they had not left Germany for political reasons; it was thus essential that the category of "political refugees" be expanded to include Jews who had left the Reich for professional or economic reasons. Moreover, since other Jews had managed to slip into Germany and to evade the training camps, claiming that they had returned for family visits and did not intend to remain, such visits should be limited to ten days only and the visitors should be required to register daily with the local police. The German policy of placing returning emigrants in training camps considerably reduced the flow of return migration. However, since it was not always carried out in practice, the return of Jews to Germany did not stop altogether between 1935 and 1938. What were the patterns of return migration to Germany? Most of the returnees went back shortly after they had left, and the sources indicate that their country of temporary residence was usually one of the East or West European countries close to Germany. Thus, for example, two articles appearing in the Jewish journals Judische Rundschau and Israelitisches Familienblatt at the beginning of 1934 note that 688 of the 4,025 German-Jewish emigrants registered in Holland during 1933—that is, approximately 17 percent—returned to Germany.8 Another article in the Judische Rundschau at the end of 1935 states that 1,548 Jews who had lived outside Germany came to settle in Berlin in the second half of 1934.9 The main countries from which these returning emigrants had come were France (228), Czechoslovakia (144), Poland (142), Lithuania (126) and Holland (112). Smaller numbers of returnees (87 and 67, respectively) came from Britain and Palestine. The central role of France as the country of temporary residence of many return migrants to Germany is noted in both German and Jewish sources. Thus, for example, the report of the district emigration bureau in Munich dealing with the third quarter of 193410 states that France, which had until recently been the main country of refuge for the Jews of Germany, was increasingly losing its attraction: more and more cases of return migration to Germany, or alternatively of onward migration to Palestine, were being reported. Arthur Prinz of the Hilfsverein estimated the number of Jews who had returned from France to Germany at several thousand.11 Difficulty in finding a settled and regular job in the new country was the main reason for the return migration. Prinz's survey indicates that the problem was particularly acute in France, where unemployment was growing during 1934 and 1935,12 a situation that transformed the fate of the Jewish emigrants into "a tragedy."13 An example of this tragedy on the individual level is the letter written by Ferdinand Israel at the beginning of 1934, which is summarized in the "German Case Files" of the Joint.14 He writes that up until 1933 he lived with his wife and two

Back into the Lion's Jaws

177

children in Heidelberg and ran a photography business. After the Nazis' rise to power, he could no longer make a living in this profession and emigrated to Paris. Shortly thereafter, his family joined him. However, although he managed to transfer most of his property and photographic equipment to France, all his efforts to obtain a foothold there were a failure. As a result, Ferdinand Israel was forced to send his wife and children back to Germany, where they were maintaining themselves with difficulty on assistance from relatives and a small amount of financial aid given by relatives living in the United States. The factor of unemployment was at work in other European countries as well. A report, for instance, of the Zentralausschuss fur Hilfe und Aufbau notes that East European Jews who had left Germany for their country of origin had returned to Germany in growing numbers during the first half of 1934. And according to the Israelitisches Familienblatt, employees in various branches of commerce in Britain decided to return to Germany at the end of 1933 because of the increase in unemployment.15 According to this report, the number of Jews from Germany remaining in Britain had fallen sharply from a high of 2,500 to only 1,500 at the end of October 1933. Apart from the critical factor of employment, more general absorption difficulties or family problems resulted in return migration to Germany. Such was the case with Kurt Manasse. In a letter sent to the Joint by the Committee for Jewish refugees in Amsterdam,16 it is related that Manasse, a dealer in photographic supplies, emigrated from Germany to Holland in 1933 and ran a small business there. In October 1934, he decided to move to Paris in the hope of finding new sources of income. Once there, however, he was informed that his mother was dying. Manasse decided to return to Germany in the spring of 1935; as he stepped onto German soil, he was taken to a "training camp" and held there for seven months. It is not surprising that most of the returnees participated in the "panic emigration" of the spring and summer of 1933, which was directed toward European countries bordering Germany. These emigrants regarded their departure as a temporary measure; they were seeking a place of refuge until the storm passed, and they believed that the situation of German Jewry would improve sometime in the future. As the wave of anti-Jewish measures subsided somewhat in the latter part of 1933, their optimistic outlook was strengthened. It was only natural that when they met with problems in finding employment or adapting themselves to their new place of residence, they decided to return to Germany, which they still considered as their homeland. Indeed, the explanation for the return to Germany from neighboring countries during the first two years of Nazi rule resides mainly in the self-image of those Jewish emigrants who had difficulty in accepting the idea that they must face a new future outside Germany. It might be supposed that Jews who had left for distant countries overseas might think otherwise, even if only as a result of geographical distance from Germany. However, this was not the case. Even among these migrants there were those who returned or wanted to return to Germany, again as a result of various kinds of difficulties that appeared to overshadow the suffering they had undergone in Nazi Germany. An example is the case of Moritz Florsheim, as detailed in an August 1934 letter to the Joint. 17 Florsheim had originally left Germany for Paraguay after

178

Doron Niederland

suffering physical violence at the hands of the Nazis. He then moved to Buenos Aires, where, despite strenuous efforts, he failed to acclimate. As a result he decided to return to Germany despite the humiliating treatment he had received there. His father, however, who had remained in Germany, was endeavoring to persuade him against a return. For this reason, the letter concludes, Florsheim was enquiring about the possibility of migration to the U.S.A. Similar cases are to be found even in Palestine, which theoretically should have attracted immigrants for ideological reasons. From letters sent to the German consulate in Palestine between 1936 and 1938, it appears that among the immigrants from Germany there were people wishing to return—even, it should be emphasized, after the establishment of the "training camps" at the beginning of 1935.l8 The main motive for the return to Germany, according to these letters, was unemployment and difficulties in making a living, which increased mainly in the second half of the 1930s because of the general economic crisis. The older immigrants also cite the harsh subtropical climate and the diseases that were common at that time in Palestine. Two other categories of returning migrants from Palestine were people receiving German incomes and pensions, who were affected by severe foreign currency regulations issued in 1934 with regard to the export of foreign currency, and non-Jewish spouses whose Jewish partner had died in Palestine or who had been divorced there. There were also people who came back to Nazi Germany from Palestine in the mid-1930s for what was described as tourism and recreation; it seems reasonable to assume that, in at least some instances, the real motivation was an attempt to retrieve capital. This phenomenon is described in a circular sent out by the German foreign ministry to the diplomatic and consular legations of Germany abroad.19 Relying on data given by the Bavarian political police and the Prussian Gestapo in July and August 1935, the writer notes an increasing number of foreigners—most of them Jews with Polish citizenship or stateless Jews who had emigrated from Germany to Palestine during the previous two years—coming back to Germany on "vacation." These people had succeeded in obtaining entry visas for Germany (for a fee) from German legations abroad that had not been informed about the new and severe regulations with regard to returning migrants. The author of the circular warns that this "tourist phenomenon" is an undesirable one, with the recommended course of action being immediate expulsion. The only exceptions were to be visits for a limited period that contributed to Germany's economic interests. With regard to the demographic and economic characteristics of people returning to Germany, the data do not allow us to draw a complete and reliable picture. The little that is known suggests that it was more often individuals rather than families who returned to Germany. Of 1,547 Jews from abroad who settled in Berlin between July and September 1934, for examples, 1,251 (some 80 percent) arrived as individuals, and only 296 as families.20 We are also informed that many of the emigrants who returned came from wealthy circles. In fact, most of the returnees were either rich people who had left Germany temporarily in 1933 and who returned in 1934 when it appeared that the political situation had stabilized or else Jews from the lower economic classes who returned to Germany because they had not succeeded in making a living abroad.

Back into the Lion's Jaws

179

The very existence of the phenomenon of return migration in which thousands of Jews took part is perhaps the best proof that an approach defining the emigration of German Jews between 1933 and 1938 as a "forced migration" cannot be reconciled with historical reality. Furthermore, it seems quite clear that many of the emigrants themselves, especially those who took part in the "panic wave" of 1933, did not want to remain in their new homes. On the contrary, some of them believed that within a short time they would be returning to Germany, and thus the country to which they had emigrated was perceived as merely a temporary asylum. The deep emotional ties of the emigrants to their homeland was sometimes not severed even after emigration. When they encountered various types of difficulties in adapting to their new place of residence, a not insignificant number of them gave these ties concrete expression and returned to Germany.

Notes 1. The quotation is taken from Donald Bogue, Principles of Demography (New York, London and Toronto: 1969), 765. A slightly different formulation of the same idea, with the addition of a theoretical-analytical discussion of the causes of return migration as presented later in the text, is found in Everett S. Lee's "A Theory of Migration," in John A. Jackson (ed.) Migration (Cambridge: 1969), 293-294. 2. See Jonathan D. Sarna, "The Myth of No Return: Jewish Return Migration to Eastern Europe 1881-1916," American Jewish History 71 (1981). 3. Arthur Prinz, "Der Stand der Deutsch-Judischen Auswanderungsfrage" (1935), Leo Baeck Archives (New York), AR-5103, Box 4, Folder 4. 4. Circular of the Bavarian Political Police, (29 June 1934), Das Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich FA/119/1, 47-48. 5. Ibid., 1 March 1935, FA/119/1, 92-93. 6. Ibid., 21 March 1935, FA/119/1, 101-102. 7. Ibid., 27 June 1935, FA/119/1, 132-135. 8. Israelitisches Familienblatt 1 (15 February 1934); Judische Rundschau 12 (9 February 1934). 9. Judische Rundschau 88 (1 November 1935). 10. Bayerische Landsiedlung—Abteilung fur Auswandererberatung-Vierteljahresbericht Juli-Sept 1934, BayHSTA, MInn 74182, 7. 11. Arthur Prinz, "Der Stand der Auswanderungsfrage," Judische Wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik 5 (1935), 77-82. 12. The economic crisis in France, which began in 1931, became more severe in 19341935, in contrast to other Western countries that had begun to recover by this period. The following table makes this apparent: People Receiving Unemployment Benefits in France Year

No. Receiving Benefits

1931

54,000

1932

273,800

1933

275,300

1934

341,600

1935

425,800

1936

433,700

180

Doron Niederland

This table is taken from: Tom Kemp, The French Economy 1913-1939 (New York: 1972), 107. Kemp analyzes the economic crisis in France during the period discussed (pp. 99-114) and the government's efforts to overcome it. 13. Arthur Prinz, "Der Stand der Auswanderungsfrage." 14. A summary of a letter written by Ferdinand Israel (13 February 1934) Leo Baeck Archives, Joint-German Case Files, AR-7196, Box 9, Folder 3. 15. With regard to return to Germany from East European countries during the first half of 1934, see: Arbeitsbericht des Zentralausschusses fur Hilfe und Aufbau (1 January 1934-30 June 1934), 12. For the return migration of employees in commerce from Britain, see: Israelitisches Familienblatt 42 (19 October 1933). 16. A letter concerning Kurt Manasse (19 March 1939), Leo Baeck Archives, JointGerman Case Files, AR-7196, Box 15, Folder 5. 17. A letter concerning Moritz Florsheim (27 August 1934), Leo Baeck Archives, JointGerman Case Files, AR-7196, Box 3, Folder 5. 18. A series of correspondence between potential return migrants and the German Consulate in Palestine (1936-1938), Israel State Archives, Section G7, Files 1236, 1237. 19. Letter from the Gestapo of Prussia to the Foreign Ministry (17 August 1935) and a circular from the foreign ministry to German consular representations abroad (31 August 1935), Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem, Inland II A/B 118/2. 20. Judische Rundschau 88 (1 November 1935).

Review Essays

This page intentionally left blank

The Former Soviet Union and its Jews

Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry Since the Second World War: Population and Social Structure. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. 278 pp. Viktor Kozlov, The Peoples of the Soviet Union. Trans. Pauline M. Tiffen. London and Bloomington: Hutchinson and Indiana University Press, 1988. 262 pp. Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917: The Paradox of Survival. 2 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1988. 1013 pp. Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 397 pp.

We may simultaneously welcome these four books devoted to Soviet Jewry, even while expressing the hope that works like them will never be published again. They are all products of the immediate pre-glasnost era (although the Levin volume does glance presciently ahead) when the contemporary history of Soviet Jewry was still a spornyi vopros ("controversial subject") within the U.S.S.R. and off-limits to researchers both foreign and domestic. Consequently, the work of Levin and Pinkus are devoid of Soviet archival material. Kozlov, relying on officially published Soviet population statistics, complains of the inadequate methodology that often underlays the compilation of such materials in the U.S.S.R. Mordechai Altshuler's more specific study demonstrates how creativity and imagination were once required to stitch together a demographic portrait of Soviet Jewry from scattered and incomplete sources. Never again must historians approach Soviet Jewish history without a firm archival underpinning. With the dissolution of the old Soviet Union, the cold grip of the Central Archival Administration in Moscow has fallen away. Archives in the capitals and in the provinces have opened their holdings to researchers. In St. Petersburg, for example, archival workers were fighting a winning battle against access restrictions even before the abortive coup of August 1991 and the final blow to Communist controls that followed in its wake. In Ukraine, the correct treatment of minorities, especially the Jews, has come to be viewed as the "admission ticket" to European culture and acceptance. Researchers are already beginning to unearth the rich archival resources of Kiev: in the Archive of the October Revolution and Socialist Construction, there is copious documentation of Soviet political activity "on the Jewish street," and the Central Scientific Library of Ukraine has reactivated its Judaica section and is reorganizing its great collection of Hebrew and Yiddish books and newspapers. 183

184

Review Essays

Even the archive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine is getting into the act: renamed the "Institute for Political Studies," it has opened to researchers such files as Number 41, "Jewish Nationalist Parties and Organizations," which chronicles the history of the Jewish political parties in Ukraine before, during and after the October revolution. In Moscow, the archives of the KGB have already disgorged the file detailing the fate of Isaac Babel, and one hopes for material that will cast light on the circumstances surrounding the liquidation of the Jewish Yiddish cultural leadership in 1952 and the "Doctors' Plot" of 1953. Work on these newly available sources will take time, of course, which is why readers will find the books under review to be a handy compendium of narrative, statistics and analysis, representing a pre-glasnost, state-of-the-art historical and demographic portrait of Soviet Jewry. These books have the added advantage of being (despite initial appearances) complementary works rather than rival texts. Benjamin Pinkus offers the most scholarly analysis of modern Soviet Jewish history. This comes as no surprise, since his earlier study, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948-1967: A Documented Study (1984), demonstrated his mastery of published sources. Moreover, Pinkus is quite correct to observe that "the press ... as regards the 1920s and perhaps the 1930s and even later, could be a crucial source for the study of Soviet Jewry" (xiv-xv). Explaining his methodology, Pinkus sets a scholarly agenda for his book that displays an unerring recognition of the major problems surrounding the writing of Soviet Jewish history. It must be set in context, so that the treatment and status of the Jews is measured with and against that of other national minorities. It must recognize the reciprocal relationship between Jews, as individuals and as a community, and the rest of Soviet society. It must also take into account a peculiarity of Soviet Jewry: its links with the Jewish diaspora and, later, with the state of Israel. For all its promise, however, Pinkus' book disappoints in a number of important respects. A long appended synopsis of the history of the Jews in prerevolutionary Russia consumes space that might be put to better use, especially since it does not reflect the current state of scholarship on the topic. It suffices to note the outdated characterization of the pogroms of 1881-1882 (p. 28). It might seem impossible to write a boring book about Soviet Jewry, but this one is strangely bloodless and dry. In part this is a reflection of the author's decision to eschew narrative history for a topical approach. Instead of a chronological survey, there are sections devoted to such topics as juridical-political status, demographic and socioeconomic processes, religion and education, and culture. Indeed, organization and structure is the bane of this book, which begins with an attempt to catalog Soviet Jewish history into three periods: years of construction (1917-1939), years of destruction (1939-1953) and after Stalin (1953-1986). The subdivisions required by such a broad periodization actually make the entire schema more confusing. It seems questionable in the extreme to attempt to impose unity upon the period 1917-1939, especially when the link purports to be the category of "construction." This era began with the lethal pogroms attending the Russian civil war. In the period of the New Economic Policy (1921-1928), the economic status of the Jews marginally improved even while Judaism as a religion was under the most

The Former Soviet Union and its Jews

185

severe attack. The Jews suffered the turmoil and dislocation attending industrialization and collectivization. This latter phenomenon, which contemporary Russian antisemites like to blame upon the Jews, served to halve the Jewish agrarian population, which had been settled with such difficulty over the previous decade. Although the press provides ample documentation of the process, Pinkus offers little more than passing reference to the changing fate of the new Communist Jewish national and cultural institutions: built up during the 1920s, they fell victim first to the Russifying ideology of "Socialism in One Country" and then to the great purges, which claimed many Jewish activists with a Bundist, Menshevik or Trotskyite past. In contrast, Soviet Jewish culture actually received a breathing space with the creation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1941, at the very moment when the national depository of Yiddish culture was being destroyed by the Nazi occupiers. Other topics are lost or neglected through this process of periodization, such as the fate of the Polish Jews who came under Soviet control between 1939 and 1941. In the end, Pinkus' book conveys the sense of a very detailed outline of the topic, an impression reinforced by the author's practice of raising a question or subject and then listing, as a given, a variety of explanations that are often undifferentiated and on occasion highly debatable. To cite only one example, apropos of the "Doctors' Plot," what proof is there that the security organs, on Stalin's orders, killed Frunze and Kuibyshev (p. 180)? Nora Levin's entertaining and fluent narrative puts flesh on the bare bones of Pinkus' outline. This is clearly a work intended for the general reader: the notes are inconveniently placed at the end of the second volume and there is no bibliography. Despite the absence of Russian-language source materials, Levin capably touches on the major issues of Soviet Jewish history. At times the text is overwritten—there is, for example, too much detail given to the role of foreign Jewish welfare groups in the U.S.S.R. after the Revolution than is strictly warranted—but in general she serves her subject well. Of all the works reviewed here, Levin suffers least by the dramatic changes that followed publication. For example, she correctly raises the topical question of the reconstruction and reanimation of Jewish life within the U.S.S.R., recognizing that its entire Jewish population will not suddenly disappear through emigration. At first glance, the works of Altshuler and Kozlov might suggest that the disappearance of Soviet Jewry is an imminent prospect. They each depict a population that is declining and aging even before the existence of emigration is factored in. The naked statistics, in fact, stand as an ironic reversal of those figures from which nineteenth-century Polish and Russian antisemites conjured warnings that, by the year 1900, Jews would constitute 100 percent of the population of Poland and Russia. As was the case then, so now there is more here than meets the eye, as the analyses of Kozlov and Altshuler reveal. Let us proceed from the general to the particular. Viktor Kozlov provides a portrait of the Soviet Union as a vast, multinational and multiethnic entity. Despite the optimistic predictions for the future of Soviet society offered from no less an authority than Leonid Brezhnev (this clearly being a book written before the era of perestroika), Kozlov's figures, drawn primarily from the Soviet censuses of 1926,

186

Review Essays

1939, 1959, 1970 and 1979, suggest the presence of many ethnic chickens that are coming home to roost. Thus, Kozlov documents the striking spread of Russian settlement outside the boundaries of the Russian republic. This process involves sizeable minorities: as of 1979, Russians comprised 21.1 percent of the massive Ukrainian S.S.R., 32.8 percent of the Latvian S.S.R., 27.9 percent of the Estonian S.S.R., and an amazing 40.8 percent of the Kazakh S.S.R. (thus outnumbering the indigenous Kazakhs, who constitute 36 percent). This massive colonization has eliminated the practical need for Russians to learn native languages or to acculturate. Significantly, only 3.5 percent of the Russian population of the U.S.S.R. can claim proficiency in the language of another union republic. (Small wonder that several draft laws for the grant of citizenship in the now independent Baltic republics included mandatory language proficiency.) Since the Russians are overwhelmingly urban in their settlement patterns, there is the common phenomenon—aptly demonstrated by the city of Tashkent—of urban Russian islands floating in alien ethnic seas. These factors have an impact on the position of the Jews, who are the only totally urbanized nationality in the U.S.S.R. (98.9 percent in 1979, as compared to the next highest group, the Koreans at 78 percent, and the Russians at 74.4 percent), as well as being overwhelmingly Russian-speaking. Consider the Jews of the Baltic states: in the main settled there since the Second World War, they are urbanized and Russian-speaking. They could easily be lumped in the category of the Russian colonization wave. Interestingly, the policy of the new Baltic leadership has been to detach Jews from the Russian camp by emphasizing their Jewishness and granting them extensive cultural autonomy (ironically, largely in the Russian language). A similar approach has been taken by the National Front, Rukh, in Ukraine. While Kozlov provides the broader context, Mordechai Altshuler concentrates on the Jewish population itself, juxtaposing a variety of local and regional studies in order to create a composite picture. Many of his findings are to be expected: the Jews constitute a declining population, not just because of outmigration, but because of a decidedly aging population. It is also a highly educated sector, centered in a variety of the professions, such as medicine. Nonetheless, Altshuler offers some surprises. Despite the traumas of the postwar period, ranging from the campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" to the Brezhnev-era quotas on Jews in many areas of national life, the Jews remained well-represented in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (KPSS). As late as 1976, they were the sixth-largest national group in the KPSS, and their percentage in the party exceeded their percentage in the population as a whole. Altshuler attributes this interesting finding to the traditionally high percentage of Jews in the party, to their relatively high average level of education and professional skills (a strata from which the regime preferred to recruit cadres) and their relatively elderly age structure. In other words, just as party recruitment is a lengthy process, so too is the weeding out of old cadres. In areas where this process can be accelerated, such as in elections to local and regional councils (the Soviets), Jews are grossly underrepresented, revealing a policy of conscious discrimination. All of the works under review deserve the attention of those with an interest in Soviet Jewry, even as we hope that they will rapidly become obsolete. In closing, it

The Former Soviet Union and its Jews

187

remains only to lament that Pinkus and Kozlov were not better served by their editors. Typographical errors, mistranslations and mistransliterations abound in both books. Should not the advent of new publishing technology produce better books, not worse? Or has the post of copy editor been abolished in order to free up funds for the purchase of new word processors that none of the editorial staff know how to use? JOHN D. KLIER University College, London

Judaism and Jewishness

Steven M. Cohen, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival? Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. 140 pp. M. Herbert Danzger, Returning to Tradition: The Contemporary Revival of Orthodox Judaism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989. x + 374 pp. Calvin Goldscheider and Jacob Neusner (eds.), Social Foundations of Judaism. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1990. xvi + 288 pp. Charles S. Liebman, Deceptive Images. New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1988. x + 114 pp. Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli and American Experiences. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990. xi + 202 pp. Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.), American Pluralism and the Jewish Community. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1990. vii + 281 pp.

Many of the authors of the books and contributors to the anthologies under review address themselves to the debate on the present condition and future of American Jewry following on the works of the so-called "revisionists": Charles E. Silberman's A Certain People (1985), Calvin Goldscheider's and Alan S. Zuckerman's The Transformation of the Jews (1984) and Steven Cohen's earlier work American Modernity and Jewish Identity (1983). The revisionists presented an optimistic counterperspective to the pessimistic view that the assimilation of American Jewry was proceeding at such an accelerated pace that the community's survival beyond a few more generations was in doubt. The revisionists argued that the pessimistic view was based on faulty calculations and assumptions and that, when the evidence was analyzed in a sophisticated manner, it was evident that American Jewry was not only surviving but was in a most healthy state. The majority may have abandoned the social and cultural features that had suited segregated and antisemitic societies, but they were replacing them with new patterns that were adaptive to an open and tolerant society. Presentation of the debate in terms of the demise or survival of the American Jewish community has come to be seen as too simplistic. The more interesting theme that has emerged is the changing relationship between Judaism and Jewishness, as recognized by Nathan Glazer in his article "American Jewry or American Judaism" that appears in the anthology edited by Seymour Martin Lipset. Glazer 188

Judaism and Jewishness

189

writes that such authors as Cohen and Liebman (in their recent books reviewed here) do not so much address the issue of survival in a demographic sense as they do the questions of "what kind of religion is surviving as a vehicle of survival?" "If the only function the religion is serving is survival, what kind of religion is that?" and "if the only content of the religion becomes survival, can it even serve that single function?" (p. 33). This reformulation is presented in an especially acute form in Liebman's Deceptive Images, and it presents us with a number of historical, conceptual and analytical problems. A brief historical introduction here might help to put the debate in perspective. The recognition of a distinction between Judaism and Jewishness among many Jews (not just scholars) followed the Enlightenment and the emancipation of Western Jewish communities. The identity of the Jewish religion and the Jewish people (or, in modern terms, nation) continued to be taken for granted in many Jewish communities of Eastern Europe up until the two world wars. These communities were segregated from non-Jewish society, and religion continued to regulate most aspects of their lives. In other European communities, two new distinctive forms of Jewish identity, based on a distinction between Judaism and Jewishness, emerged in the nineteenth century. The first reinterpreted Jewish identity as a purely religious one, eschewing any Jewish national, or what came later to be known as Zionist, identity. It was seen to be incumbent upon Jews to adopt the culture and national identity of the dominant society, and many Jews proclaimed that they differed from non-Jewish compatriots only in their religious persuasion. These were the Englishmen, Frenchmen or Germans of the Jewish faith or Hebrew persuasion who found an affinity with forms of Judaism that allowed them both to participate in the wider society and to retain a Jewish identity. The form of Judaism that became dominant among these sectors varied among the national communities (Reform was far more successful in Germany and the United States than in Britain and France), but in most cases involvement in Judaism was limited to the rites of passage, infrequent visits to the synagogue and a few yearly observances in the family setting. This type of identity developed among communities where Jews no longer lived in segregated communities and were able to achieve considerable socioeconomic success in the wider society, but where their cultural and social ambitions were often thwarted by low ethnic status and discrimination. There were considerable variations of status among these communities, and in many cases the situation worsened in the last decades of the nineteenth century with the emergence of new forms of antisemitism, both political and racist. The second type of emergent identity was, in some respects, the converse of the first type: Judaism as a religion was rejected, and secular forms of Jewish expression and identity were espoused (Zionist, socialist, "culturalist"). This type appeared mainly in those communities of Eastern Europe where the vast majority remained segregated from non-Jews and were subject to severe persecutions, but had become exposed to secular trends and ideologies. Many believed that their problems required radical solutions (a socialist revolution or an autonomous Jewish state), and religion was seen as an irrelevance or obstacle in the attainment of such solutions. These identities came to have their representatives in the United States. The

190

Review Essays

religious, nonethnic identity was prevalent among American Jews of largely German descent, and it came to be more a product of American society than a transplant from Germany. American Reform Judaism flourished in what many Jews came to see as the Promised Land. The secular, nonreligious ethnic identity was brought to the United States by East European immigrants, and it continued to find support among many of the second generation in the interwar years. This brief summary unavoidably oversimplifies complex figurations in which Judaism and Jewishness were distinguished and combined in various degrees and forms, but it is evident that the tendencies to identify either on a purely religious or purely secular ethnic basis are no longer prevalent among American Jews today. Such identities were already in decline, at least in their more radical manifestations, in the interwar period, and they have almost disappeared since the Second World War. The American Council for Judaism continues to represent a nonethnic or nonZionist Jewish identity, but it is of marginal importance in the American Jewish community. With regard to Jewish identities antagonistic to Judaism, Glazer writes, "This seems strange to us now, but in the 1920s and 1930s one could find, for example, anti-religious Zionists, secular Jewish schools that were anti-religious, Yiddish culturalists, anarchist, socialist, and communist Jewish organizations for different age groups and with varied objectives, all of which could have been described as atheist and anti-Judaist" (p. 32). Although only two of the articles in the Lipset anthology (by Glazer and Chaim Waxman) deal directly with the major theme of this review, a number of other articles contribute to our understanding of the changing social and political context in which one-sided identities on the basis of Judaism or Jewishness have been replaced by those composed of mutually reinforcing dimensions. The anthology can hardly be said to be integrated by means of a closely woven theme, but taken together the articles show that pluralism within the American Jewish community can only be understood in the context of a wider societal pluralism. However, for a book whose title indicates that the intention is to focus on pluralism, there is little analysis of the changes in forms and extent of pluralism in American society. In his introductory essay ("A Unique People in an Exceptional Society") Lipset emphasizes that, almost from the beginning of their history in North America, Jews benefited from a pluralistic society in which their characteristics and values were congruent with the larger culture. His discussion highlights American philosemitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and plays down the importance of antisemitism in America's past, interpreting it as a European survival or import and thereby minimizing the importance of post-Second World War developments such as the greater incorporation of Jews in all areas of American society. In order to understand the changes in American Jewish identity, however, it is necessary to put a greater emphasis on the more recent tendencies of pluralism within American society: a shift from the dominance of Protestantism, which in many respects provided a model for classical Reform Judaism, to a situation in which religious, and from about the late 1960s, ethnic pluralism gained considerable legitimacy. Will Herberg wrote his now classic work Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955) at a time when religious pluralism was far more legitimate than the ethnic variety. He argued that the religious "revival" of the late 1940s and the 1950s, when a consider-

Judaism and Jewishness

191

able increase in churches and synagogues paralleled migration to the suburbs, was an attempt to deal with the dilemma of those who had moved from ethnic neighborhoods and who wished to combine their identities as Americans with loyalties to their cultural backgrounds. Marshall Sklare wrote (in a 1975 article reprinted in the Goldscheider and Neusner anthology) that it is a general characteristic of the American social structure "for ethnic differences to be expressed and sustained as religious differences" (p. 136), and that this is especially so for American Jewry. The Jewish religion may be "the prototype of an ethnic religion" (p. 137), and it is hardly surprising, therefore, that in the American context "the specific character of American Jewish religious energy is more ethnic than religious" (p. 136). Despite denominational divisions, the majority of American Jews remain united by a common ethnicity, and according to Woocher's thesis (an extract is included in Goldscheider and Neusner), this unity is given transcendental expression in an American Jewish "civil religion." The theme of religion as a mask for ethnicity is still with us, but it has become less prominent at a time when open expressions of ethnicity are accepted and widespread in American society. The question now is: What are and will be the relative importance and interrelationships of religious and ethnic identities, of Judaism and Jewishness, when American Jews can choose one or the other, a combination of the two, or none at all without constraints imposed by the wider society. In an environment of religious and ethnic pluralism and voluntarism, an explicit and self-conscious rejection of one form of identity is unlikely, but although religious and ethnic identities may no longer be in opposition to each other, there remains a range of possibilities. One possibility is that the open, tolerant, pluralistic society will make Jewishness in whatever form weaker, leading to the complete assimilation of the vast majority of American Jews, with the remainder a small sectarian and self-segregating enclave. According to this view, whereas pressures on Jews to abandon their community and culture had failed in the past, it will now come about—without an assimilationist ideology—as an unintended consequence of tolerance and pluralism. In contrast, Silberman and others have argued that the possibilities of unconstrained choice result in a revived community that can draw on the enormously rich and varied resources of Jewish culture. Silberman wrote that a religious "revival" was part of this newly vibrant community, but the more common opinion among the "optimists" appears to be that the American Jewish community is retaining its strength despite its secularization. One might also argue that, although the wider society may not have the effect of pushing Jews in either an ethnic or religious direction, it will still be among the important determinants of Jewish cultural expression. Thus, if there is an overall societal trend of secularization, this is likely to influence Jews toward a secularized ethnic rather than religious direction. An analysis of the historical changes in the relationship of Judaism and Jewishness can become entangled with a more general theoretical debate over the relative importance of cultural and social structural factors throughout the history of the Jews (and human society in general). Calvin Goldscheider and Jacob Neusner, the coeditors of the anthology Social Foundations of Judaism, appear to represent opposing viewpoints on this issue, but they omit any discussion of their differences

192

Review Essays

and give little indication of why they chose those articles and book extracts reprinted in their collection. Goldscheider is a sociologist who "emphasizes the role of structural factors in determining ideological, institutional, and behavioral changes" (p. 84). In an extract reprinted from a book he co-authored with Alan Zuckerman, he argues that it was not ideological changes that led to religious modernism (in this case Reform Judaism in Germany) but political factors, especially the policies of the German state governments. Neusner, in contrast, is a historian of the Jewish religion, leaning toward the humanities rather than the social scientific side of his discipline. In an extract from one of his works, reprinted in the anthology, we read: "In the case of Judaism . . . religion imparts its pattern upon the social world and polity ... it is the Jews' religion, Judaism that had formed their world and framed their realities, and not the world of politics, culture, society, that has made their religion" (p. 25). Neusner writes that no Judaic system could exist without a social entity ("Israel"), that religion is also social and political as well as a belief system, but in Jewish history it is the religion that molds the society. From this perspective, he writes on deep themes in the sacred writings such as the "paradigmatic statement of exile and return," that are built upon and reworked in many communities, producing a plurality of Judaisms. A more appropriate title of the anthology from this perspective would have been "The Judaic Foundations of Israel (or Jewish Society)." Neusner's approach, which postulates a deep structure at an idealist level, may not necessarily be incompatible with Goldscheider's empiricist social structural approach, but as noted, the coeditors make no explicit references to these differences, let alone attempt to reconcile them. One item in the Goldscheider and Neusner anthology provides a clear exposition of the view that Jewishness rather than Judaism has become the major element in the cohesion of the American Jewish community. This is an extract from Goldscheider's own book Jewish Continuity and Change (1986) in which he analyzes data from the 1965 and 1975 surveys of Boston Jews. He writes: In the past, religion and Jewishness were inseparable. Changes in Judaism were indeed threatening to Jewish continuity and cohesion. However, in the process of expansion of community size and institutions, and the integration of Jews in the social, economic, political, and cultural patterns of the broader society, opportunities for new forms of expressing Jewishness have developed as alternative ways to reinforce Jewish cohesion, even as links between religion and Jewishness have weakened (p. 195).

The analysis of the Boston data showed declines in religious observance, synagogue affiliation and Orthodox and Conservative identification. These signs of weakening religiosity did not mean that religion was no longer of any importance in the continuation of the Jewish community; the great majority continue to practice at least a few rituals, only very few never attend synagogue and there appears to be greater generational continuity in religious identification and behavior than in the past. Goldscheider's contention, however, is that religion has lost its centrality and that other sources of group cohesion, such as the concentration in prestigious occupations and a concern with Israel, have emerged as alternative Jewish expressions and conveyors of Jewish continuity.

Judaism and Jewishness

193

According to Goldscheider, the argument that secularization among Jews is an indicator of the decline of the Jewish community results from a confusion of Judaism with Jewishness. He admits, however, that the available data cannot answer the questions: "How much secularization and erosion of traditional religious practices can occur without having a major impact on the Jewishness of the younger generation?" and "are the new forms of Jewish ethnicity able to balance secularization?" (p. 209). These are interesting questions, and it is a pity that Steven Cohen does not address them explicitly in his book American Assimilation or Jewish Revival?, in which he analyzes data from a 1981 survey of Jews in the Greater New York area. Cohen attempts to evaluate the competing assimilationist ("pessimistic") and transformationist ("optimistic") perspectives without giving much attention to the relationships between Judaism and Jewishness. Cohen acknowledges the limitations of his data: the survey measures dimensions of behavior (ritual observance, communal involvement, friendships) rather than consciousness or inner meanings, and because the measures were constructed in continuity with previous research, emerging or unconventional forms of Jewishness may have gone uninvestigated. Another limitation noted by the author is that the New York Jewish community differs from other American Jewish communities in a number of important respects: because of its size and density, there is an increased chance of respondents having Jewish friends and wives, and there is also a higher proportion of Orthodox Jews. The significance of New York Jewry in American Jewry is enormous (30 percent live in the Greater New York area), but detailed comparisons with the high-growth and seemingly more assimilationist communities of the West and the Sunbelt could have added to the value of the study. The New York area sample may differ little from those of other older metropolitan areas, but data from these areas probably underestimate the overall assimilationist trends among American Jews. This is especially likely to be the case with respect to intermarriage. Cohen estimates that intermarriage in the New York area will have only a minor impact on its Jewish population, but he admits that the rate is far below the rest of the country. He emphasizes that losses are often counterbalanced by converts, but it may be that the proportion of mixed marriages (where partners continue to profess different religions) to intermarriages (where the non-Jewish spouse converts) is higher outside New York. In his analysis of trends in religiosity, Cohen presents similar data to those of Goldscheider, but he tends to put less emphasis on the theme of secularization. Along with many other researchers, he shows that levels of religious observance have declined from the first to the third generation, but that the great majority of later generation Jews participate in at least a few yearly celebrations. In a careful analysis that measures the independent influence of generation and age, Cohen finds some indications of possible desecularization, or at least a stemming of the secular trend. Post-Second World War immigrants and their children have strengthened Orthodoxy in the United States, and they have not repeated the sharp declines of religiosity that were common among the prewar immigrants and their children. Moreover, the fourth-generation descendants of the earlier wave of immigration do not appear to continue the decline in religiosity. A comparison of the religiosity of

194

Review Essays

respondents and their parents (as reported by respondents) also shows that an increasing number of respondents with highly observant (or Orthodox) parents are retaining the high levels, and that children of the least observant do not report further reductions (some respondents report increases). These findings, although interesting in themselves, only slightly dent the overall picture of a decline in religiosity that may be stabilizing, but at a minimal level, among the majority. And as Cohen admits, it is difficult to evaluate the Jewishness of those whose religious observance is limited to two or three annual practices. For these "low observers," the meanings of the observances that they retain may be different from the meanings among "high observers." Cohen is more interested in combining dimensions of Judaism (ritual practice) and Jewishness (communal involvement and interpersonal ties) in order to arrive at measures of Jewish identity than in interpreting their interrelationships. He distinguishes five types of identity based on the highest to the lowest combined scores on ritual, affiliation, and interpersonal ties. Scores on the different measures tend to be consistent; heavily discrepant combinations (such as relatively low on religiosity and relatively high on interpersonal relations) are infrequent. Cohen's approach might be called additive: he adds together his findings on religiosity, intermarriage, communal affiliation and friendship networks in order to compare assimilationist and transformationist interpretations. When relationships among the dimensions are noted, this is done in order to show how the relationship favors either the assimilationist or transformationist position. When discussing the assimilationist perspective, Cohen notes that less Jewishness, especially mixed marriages, results in lower religiosity. When discussing the transformationist perspective, the emphasis is more on strictly demographic considerations: he claims that intermarriage does not result in a net loss of the Jewish population. It is also emphasized, however, that marriage, especially early marriage, and parental status leads to higher levels of Jewish identification, including greater religiosity. Cohen's conclusion is that more gentile friends, higher intermarriage and lower religiosity "do not amount to large-scale assimilation if assimilation means the neardisappearance of Jewish cultural expression and cessation of ties to other Jews except in the most perfunctory and statistically random fashion" (p. 115). But if the evidence does not support the argument that American Jews are rapidly assimilating, how should the changes be termed? Cohen writes that the evidence does not support the notions that there is either a revival of, or polarization within, the Jewish community; he prefers to describe the changes as "moderate transformation" or "stabilization." His evidence could equally well be termed "moderate assimilationism" (after all, he only rejects defining the trends as assimilationism if this translates as the "near-disappearance of Jewish cultural expression and cessation of ties to other Jews") or even "moderate polarization." His heart is with the transformationists (hence his designation), but the evidence, as he himself shows, can be interpreted both ways. The title of Waxman's article (included in the Lipset anthology) is an appropriate one in discussing these issues: "Is the Cup Half-Full or Half-Empty?" A number of surveys in recent years, including those of Goldscheider and Cohen, have shown Judaism to have a much reduced, albeit still significant, place in the identity and behavioral patterns of the majority of American Jews. The title of M.

Judaism and Jewishness

195

Herbert Danzger's book, Returning to Tradition: The Contemporary Revival of Orthodox Judaism, might appear to indicate a reversal of secularization. In fact, the subtitle is somewhat misleading. The book's interesting subject is ba'alei teshuvah, returnees to Judaism, but the numbers involved hardly constitute a revival, if that term is understood to mean that a significant proportion of the population have adopted Orthodoxy. Danzger calculates that approximately 15,000 to 20,000 people have attended yeshivot for ba'alei teshuvah since their conception, and from one third to one half of this number were born into Orthodox families. Most of the yeshivot are located in Israel, but the majority of both staff and students are from America. Danzger notes that these yeshivot have stopped growing since the early 1980s, and that the newly Orthodox do not appear to balance the outflow from the Orthodox community. His analysis of the background of the ba'alei teshuvah suggests why the phenomenon is likely to continue to decline in importance. A large proportion of the ba'alei teshuvah were former hippies whose attraction to Orthodox Judaism was explained in part by its compatibility with countercultural styles and themes: mysticism, charismatic leaders (rabbis as gurus), special diet (kosher in place of "natural" foods), a unique style of dress and opposition to, or dropping out of, conventional society. There were, of course, clear differences between Orthodox Jewry and hippiedom; the discipline and strictness of the yeshivah contrasted with the relaxed, do-your-own thing styles of the hippies, but it is possible that the instability of hippie groups led some to seek security within the Orthodox community. The hippie pool of potential recruits has dried up, and there appear to be fewer recruits from more conventional backgrounds. Israeli bdalei teshuvah appeared in the years following the 1973 war when there was much questioning of dominant values, but this phenomenon as well appears to have passed its peak. Danzger focuses, however, on American bdalei teshuvah, and he argues that for them, unlike the Israelis, the process of "returning" was, at first, a matter of ethnic identity. The general upsurge of ethnic consciousness in the United States revived interest in Orthodox Judaism with its more particularistic interpretations of the religion. The relationship between ethnicity and religious developments is just one of a number of subjects that are loosely organized around the subject of ba'alei teshuvah in Danzger's work. The book is overlong and weakly structured, with its major themes, such as the factors affecting paths of return, and minor ones, such as the role of women in Orthodoxy, distributed and sometimes repeated in various parts of the text. The author's sociological analysis and comments are sometimes astute, but they tend to follow long descriptive sections on religious practices and institutions that may not be of much interest to readers interested in sociological interpretations. The special attention given to the histories of the yeshivot and personalities in the yeshivah world indicates an attempt to write for those who are interested primarily in the religious facets of the phenomenon as well as those interested in sociological perspectives. The latter may find the descriptive sections too detailed, with too few references to general themes in the sociology of religion and to the now large literature on religious conversion.

196

Review Essays

Both the sociologist of religion and ethnicity and concerned observers of American Jewry (possibly the same people) are likely to find Charles Liebman's Deceptive Images a thought-provoking collection of papers. Most of these have been published previously and have been revised here in order to present an integrated work. While Liebman counterposes the same perspectives as Steven Cohen, he focuses on qualitative rather than quantitative issues, and his tone is more polemical. With regard to the relationship of Judaism and Jewishness, Liebman argues that most American Jews are concerned primarily with Jewishness, but unlike the revisionists or transformationists he believes this to be a sad state of affairs. His polemic is directed especially against the arguments of Goldscheider and Zuckerman in their book The Transformation of the Jews. Liebman comes down on the side of the traditionalists who evaluate contemporary trends in relation to some model of the Jewish tradition or what they regard as an essential Jewish quality, and he castigates the transformationists for the absence in their writings of a notion of Jewish essence. For Goldscheider and Zuckerman, the all-important criterion of the quality and vitality of the American Jewish community is its cohesion, and their findings that most Jews continue to interact with other Jews in families, neighborhoods, schools and at work lead them to be optimistic about the community's present and future state. What is important is that Jews are doing things together; the actual content of that activity is of little interest. Liebman argues that Goldscheider and Zuckerman are interested in Jewishness rather than Judaism, and that they assume that the former can survive without the latter. From their point of view, Jewish continuity is not dependent on adherence to the beliefs and practices of the Jewish tradition, or indeed on any values and beliefs that Jews might have. Liebman is highly critical of a position that appears to approve of any kind of transformation as long as it secures the survival of the Jews as an identifiable people. Surely, writes Liebman, one kind of transformation can be more authentically Jewish than another, and Judaism might conceivably be transformed so radically that it could no longer be called Judaism. Goldscheider and Zuckerman (and, in a more qualified way, Cohen) are optimistic about the future of the American Jewish community because they believe that its demographic future is secure. While Liebman expresses some doubts about the demographic arguments, he is primarily concerned with what he regards as the erosion of the quality of American Jewish life. He argues that assimilation is indeed taking place, not in the sense of demographic disappearance but in the sense that the emergent American Jewish identity blurs any distinction from other Americans. Aspects of this assimilation include mixed marriages that produce children with low levels of Jewish affiliation and identity, Jewish education with little Jewish content of substance, the increase in the relative number of Reform Jews who have lower scores of Jewish identification than Orthodox and Conservative Jews, and an organized Jewish community that does not focus on Judaic content. Liebman finds little compensation for these developments in the "alternative" modes of Jewishness emphasized by the transformationists. Visiting Israel can hardly be said to be taking the place of religious belief and ritual, especially when it is the more ritually observant who are the most pro-Israel. The high proportion who participate in the Passover seder has little significance when it may mean little more than a family meal. And the affiliation of a majority to a synagogue represents only a residual

Judaism and Jewishness

197

commitment when its only object is to provide school-age children with some kind of Jewish identity the parents themselves cannot provide. There are some countertrends, such as the greater interest of many Jewish university students in Judaism and the strengthening of Orthodoxy in recent years, but these point to the polarization of the community rather than the absence of assimilation. A minority are reinforcing their Jewish identity and Judaism; for the majority, there is an attenuation of identity and religious practice. Liebman's critique is directed against both the American Jewish community and those social scientists whose optimistic assessments are based on tacit approval of the minimization of Judaism and its substitution by Jewishness or ethnic Judaism. For Liebman, a community based on Jewishness without (or with very little) Judaism produces deceptive images of a flourishing Jewish life. While American Jewish leaders may find it easier to attain consensus by separating Jewishness and Judaism and focusing on the former, this is a mistaken strategy, since Judaism and Jewishness are essentially interrelated; the symbols of one necessarily evoke those of the other. Israel and the Holocaust may be the symbols that evoke the greatest resonance among American Jews, but even in the secular context of the Jewish federations, religious or quasi-religious symbols point to a transcendental source of meaning. Liebman asks rhetorically: "Why should American Jews involve themselves in Jewish life in the United States if they have no commitment to Judaism?" This is a religious rather than a social scientific question, and Liebman's basic arguments are in fact religious. His criticism of the transformationists—that they do not have a Judaic model against which changes can be evaluated—is based on his assumption that there is an essential Judaism. This premise is stated a number of times, and Liebman goes even further when he states that Orthodox Judaism is closest to that essence and that the observance of Jewish ritual is the most effective instrument in locating Jews in a culture and tradition. From this standpoint, he argues that the decision of the Reform movement to accept children of Jewish fathers and nonJewish mothers as Jewish is both a disaster for Judaism and a threat to American Jewish life. Liebman recognizes two conflicting currents in his essays. One is between the concern to present a detached analysis and his belief that there are a number of harmful manifestations of Jewishness in the United States. The other is between his identity as a social scientist and his deep skepticism concerning the contributions of social science to knowledge. These contradictions may be conflated, however, into a problem that pervades the essays—namely, that a large part of Liebman's critique of the social scientific literature on American Jews is contingent on a religious stance that he makes explicit but does not justify by religious or philosophical arguments. It would no doubt require an additional work to justify his belief that Judaism has an essence and that the closest contemporary approximation to that essence is Orthodox Judaism. However, this belief is so basic to his arguments that the lack of almost any kind of substantiation lessens the force of his critique. His references to social scientific data showing that Orthodox respondents rank highest on all dimensions of Jewish commitment are not substitutes for what must be justified at a religious or philosophical level. While Reform apologists might admit that Reform Jews have the lowest levels of Jewish commitment among those that

198

Review Essays

identify with a Jewish denomination, they could argue that without Reform Judaism the American Jewish community would shrink to an insignificant enclave. Liebman's polemic against the transformationists shares with them an emphasis on the evaluation of changes within the American Jewish community. Their focus has been not so much the religious and secular changes within the American Jewish community as the consequences of these changes for the future of the American Jewish community. By arguing that the transformationists' optimism is misguided and that they fail to provide a model of a community or a conception of Judaism, Liebman follows them in submerging his social scientific role beneath a concern with the future of the American Jewish community—or more correctly, in Liebman's case, the future of an authentic Judaism. I am not questioning the legitimacy of these concerns, but the focus on consequences rather than causes has, in my opinion, limited our sociological understanding of Judaism and Jewish ethnicity. In one of his essays, Liebman argues that the study of American Jews should draw upon the concepts and perspectives of the sociology of religion. He writes in that essay: "The best of the sociology of religion literature provides theory and insight which helps us understand behavior as it is embedded in social and psychological structures of society" (p. 20). I agree, and I would argue that the polemics into which he has entered have not taken us any nearer to such an understanding of American Jewry. The distinctions and relationships between Judaism and Jewishness become even more complex when American Jewry is compared with Israeli Jewry in Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli and American Experiences, co-authored by Liebman and Steven Cohen. "Two Worlds of Jewishness" would have been an equally suitable title because the authors compare secularized Jewish identities and beliefs as much as religious ones. With respect to conceptions of common ancestry and history, Liebman and Cohen write that Israeli Jews have a stronger sense of familism, emphasizing Jewish uniqueness and sharply distinguishing themselves from nonJews. The familistic or ethnic sentiments of American Jews are tempered by Western conceptions of liberalism and humanism, resulting in a combination of particularistic and universalistic themes. Traditional Jewish conceptions of antisemitism are still held by a surprising number of American Jews despite their comfortable integration within the wider society, but antisemitism is a more prominent theme among Israeli Jews. In contrast with early Zionist settlers, who believed that antisemitism stemmed from the anomalous situation of Jews in the diaspora, Israeli Jews today believe that it is endemic to non-Jews; and the image of the eternal antisemite is often mixed with Jewish racism and ethnocentrism, especially toward Arabs. There is also a common feeling that non-Jewish citizens are not really part of the state of Israel. A related difference between the two communities is the centrality of the land or territory of Israel in the identity of Israeli Jews compared with its peripheralness among American Jews. For some of the early secular Zionist settlers, the land of Israel provided an alternative expression of Jewishness that took the place of the Jewish tradition or even peoplehood, but since 1967, the notions of the Jewish people, Judaism and the land of Israel have become closely interrelated. Further, the religious Zionists have become the leading interpreters of the meaning of the land, anchoring it within a religious framework.

Judaism and Jewishness

199

Liebman and Cohen show how American and Israeli Jews differ considerably in their political and religious perspectives. Although some American Jews have become more conservative in recent years, the great majority remain liberal and have continued to support civil and minority rights, the separation of church and state, and cultural pluralism. American Jews, and especially Reform Jews, are likely to see a link between their liberalism and their Judaism. Most Israeli Jews, in contrast, are not liberal and are likely to label liberal Jews as less Jewish because they are less nationalistic and religious. Religious Israelis tend to be among the more politically conservative and antagonistic toward Arabs, and this in turn leads secular, liberal Israelis to associate Judaism with antiliberal and antidemocratic tendencies. American Judaism is characterized by voluntarism (the legitimacy of individual choice), personalism (emphasis on personal meanings), universalism (containing a message for all peoples) and moralism (an emphasis on ethical behavior). These features are especially prominent among Reform and Conservative Jews, although they are also found among the Orthodox in America. While personalism has had some influence among the mainly Orthodox religious Jews in Israel, they tend to reject voluntarism and universalism and to put less emphasis on ethical aspects, stressing instead the importance of the halakhah and the authority of rabbis. The greater penetration of religion into Israeli public life since 1967 has given some people the false impression that the proportion of religious Jews has grown substantially. In fact, the proportion of religious or Orthodox Israelis remains about twenty percent, and although the masorati (traditional or partly religious) pattern is widespread among Jews of North African and Asian descent, the great majority of Ashkenazim identify themselves as secular and only participate in highly secularized forms of popular observances, especially the Passover seder and the lighting of Hanukah candles. It is a pity that comparative analysis is so rare in the sociology of contemporary Jewry. As Liebman and Cohen demonstrate, a discussion of both similarities and differences can lead to important insights and a questioning of cultural features that may otherwise often be taken for granted. One problem for those attempting a comparative analysis is to arrive at a balance between highlighting the differences between two or more societies and presenting the ethnographic complexity of each society. The dangers of ignoring or giving little attention to internal differences or nuances in each society are especially great when, as in the work under review, the comparisons focus on aggregates of individual attitudes, values and cultural orientations. Social structural differences are not ignored (they are, in fact, given a major explanatory role), but the space allotted to them is small compared with cultural and religious differences. The comparisons of attitudinal dimensions are supported by survey data, and although there are some substantial percentage differences in the responses of American and Israeli Jews, it could be argued that the authors make too much of differences of ten or even twenty percentage points when such differences may also be found, for example, between Jews of European and North African/Asian (or what the authors would term "Sephardic") origins in Israel. Liebman and Cohen by no means ignore internal differences, but their significance might appear to be understated in order to emphasize cross-societal differences. A statement including a reference to "the greater religiosity of Israelis and the greater

200

Review Essays

secularism of American Jews" (p. 30) might be understood somewhat differently if, as appears to be the case, the overall pattern and levels of religious practice of Israeli Ashkenazim are very similar to those of American Jews. Jews from North Africa and Asia and their descendents currently constitute more than one half of the Israeli Jewish population (the Russian immigration may change this), but Liebman and Cohen do not believe that "population characteristics" can explain the differences between American and Israeli Judaism and Jewishness. They argue that the ethnic variable in Israel, the differences between Ashkenazim and "Sephardim," can be eliminated from the analysis because ethnic differences can be explained by religious differences (the "Sephardim" are closer to the religious tradition). At this point, the authors too quickly brush aside the complex relationships of religion and ethnicity in Israel. They ignore what I believe are important differences among Jewish communities ('edot) of European and Middle Eastern origins with respect to the relationships between religious and ethnic identities and styles of religious behavior. Neither do the authors believe that much is to be explained by the fact that the Orthodox constitute twenty percent of Israeli Jews and only ten percent of American Jews, especially as there are also differences between the Orthodox populations in the two countries. Far more important, they believe, are the structural or environmental factors. The major difference here is between the situation of a minority in a pluralistic society and the situation of a majority dominating a state with formidable enemies. Liebman and Cohen claim that, despite considerable differences, Judaism in America and Israel have enough in common to warrant the assertion that they do not yet constitute two separate religions. It is not made clear, however, what kind of differences would have to prevail in order for us to be able to speak of two Judaisms. Presumably, they would no longer share the commonalities listed by the authors, but these are delineated in such a way (for example, reference to a common tradition) that, without them, it is difficult to envisage that any form of Judaism could exist. Surely, such evaluations depend on the observer's Judaic viewpoint; for many Orthodox Jews, "Reform Judaism" is not Judaism at all. One problem here is that few comparisons are made with non-Jewish religious systems in order to clarify the commonalities of systems delineated as Judaism. At one point, the authors write that, in its image of God, American (Reform) Judaism is closer to liberal Protestantism than to Israeli (Orthodox) Judaism; this similarity is considered less significant than the distance between the symbols of Protestantism and Judaism. But even if we admit that the most central symbols of American Reform Judaism and Israeli Orthodox Judaism are still held in common, we might ask whether this is more important than their differences with respect to the referents or meanings of the symbols. And is not the image of God a symbol? Perhaps the commonality is built less on common religious symbols than on a common ethnic identification that makes possible a common rubric in which considerable religious differences exist. At the end of their book, the authors state their own position: American Judaism goes too far in its universalistic and cosmopolitan interpretations of the tradition, and Israeli Judaism goes too far in its particularism and parochialism. They write that each version "would be enriched by elements of the other," thereby implying that the middle way is the best. This might be considered by some readers a rather

Judaism and Jewishness

201

tame conclusion, but whatever views readers might have regarding the relative qualities of Judaic religious and secular patterns in the United States and Israel, they are likely to find that this work advances the accurate portrayal of those differences. Most of the authors of the books and articles reviewed here appear to agree that the American Jewish community has become a predominantly secular one; although some believe that average levels of religiosity have ceased to decline, it is assumed that religion is no longer the core component of Jewish identity among the majority of American Jews. The thesis of secularization does not require a uniform decline in religion—there may be reversals among a minority—but when a writer such as Waxman argues that there are indications of a religious revival as evidenced by greater interest in Judaism among some younger Jews, most scholars are unlikely to be convinced. As in the Christian population, the decline of a shared religious worldview has meant that religious revivals have become successively smaller in scale and significance. The major focus of disagreement is not whether secularization has occurred but what its implications are for the future of Jewish identity and the Jewish community. The most divergent views here are expressed by Goldscheider—who believes that Jewishness can remain strong without or with a much reduced religious component—and Liebman, who believes that Jewishness without a material foundation (such as it has in Israel) requires a strong religious basis. Empirical findings that religiosity and secular expressions of Jewishness are mutually supportive in the identity of most contemporary Jews can be reconciled with both secularization and a weakening Jewish identity. Secularist Jewishness had its high point at a time when the religious worldview was beginning to lose its shared, taken-for-granted qualities but religion still retained a strong influence over a large part of the community. Once the pervasive influence of religion came to be confined to a minority enclave (or a number of enclaves), secularist Jewishness lost its appeal and was replaced by minimal religiosity and religious indifference. This is as true in Israel as it is in the United States. The Jewish secular humanist movement in Israel will remain a marginal one, not because of an inherent contradiction in anti-Judaic Jewishness (this is Liebman's argument, one that assumes that Judaism has an essence), but because the majority of secularized Israeli Jews do not experience the religious or ultra-Orthodox as a real threat to their life-styles. The vision of an Israel dominated by the ultra-Orthodox may make an entertaining futuristic scenario, but because of its remoteness from the secularized milieu of the majority, such a vision is unlikely to mobilize support for a militant secularist movement. And if secularist Jewishness, with its overblown portrayal of an ultra-Orthodox menace, finds little appeal in Israel, it is even less likely to find a response in the American context, where the ultra-Orthodox rarely, if ever, impinge on the lives of the majority of American Jews. In brief, secularization not only means a decline in Judaism, it also brings about a decline in secularist Jewishness. The polemics between the "optimists" and "pessimists" or "transformationists" and "traditionalists" have included the presentation of interesting data and analyses, but I have suggested that the focus on the implications of the changing forms and interrelationships of Judaism and Jewishness has taken the place of a causal analysis. Greater attention to the social and cultural determinants of changes in the

202

Review Essays

religion and ethnicity of American Jewry might lead American Jewish sociologists away from parochial debates and make their work a more integral part of the sociological study of religion and ethnicity. STEPHEN SHAROT Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

The Case of the Kovno Ghetto

Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary. Trans. Jerzy Michalowicz, ed. Martin Gilbert. Textual and historical notes Dina Porat. Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. 554 pp.

The Kovno ghetto diary of Avraham Tory has been translated twice so far: once from Yiddish into Hebrew by David Shlomi, and then from Hebrew, with use of the original Yiddish text, into English. But this English version is not only a translation. The book has been edited by the well-known historian and writer Martin Gilbert and includes Dina Porat's helpful textual and historical annotations. While in the Hebrew edition the diary was separated from the documents collected by Tory during the war years, here the documents are interspersed with the diary text in chronological order, making the work an organic literary entity. In the Kovno ghetto the author was at first the assistant secretary of the Jewish Council; later, in May 1942, he was nominated as its secretary after his predecessor had been arrested by the Gestapo. As the diary makes clear and other sources confirm, Tory's status in the council was considerably stronger than suggested by his formal job title. For example, one of his functions was something close to that of a liaison officer between the council and the German and Lithuanian commanders and officials who controlled the ghetto. In this function, Tory was able to leave the ghetto and move about in the city almost without limitation. Clearly, Tory enjoyed a number of advantages in writing a diary of events in the ghetto and in collecting relevant documents, both Jewish and German. He received an uninterrupted flow of information, not only official and public, but also secret and even top-secret (which at times did not even reach other members of the council). Because of his relatively easy access to the Nazi bosses in the city, he was the address for pleading and intercession, and he was able to make all the holders of responsible jobs in the ghetto (the director of the department of labor, of police, of health, etc.), feel dependent on him, a fact that increased the amount of information at his disposal. At the same time, as the "strong man" of the Jewish Council, Tory was hardly a disinterested observer—a fact that is of some relevance when judging the historical significance of his diary. Tory's main thrust may be inferred from the title of the diary in its Hebrew edition: The Everyday Ghetto. Such a title suggests the distinction between the "everyday" of hard labor, stubborn struggle against the system of degradation, starvation and monstrous limitations in all domains of private and public life—but without mass murder—and the terrible days of the Aktionen, in which the Nazi 203

204

Review Essays

masters of the ghetto carried out the main task of the Final Solution, the annihilation of the community. Those who denounce the Kovno Jewish Council may well argue that the initial Aktionen clearly revealed the Germans' purpose in establishing the ghetto and nominating the Jewish Council. The idea was that every word of the oppressor's directives was to be fulfilled with order and discipline. Having seen these terrible operations, was additional evidence for the Nazi's basic motives needed? Why did the members of the council cooperate loyally with the oppressor, thus becoming an instrument in carrying out the Final Solution? The diary gives some answers to these accusations. True, on the day of any given Aktion the council could not save the ghetto inmates; a decision had already been made and it was left to the German security forces to carry it out. At such times the Jewish Council was completely helpless. The situation changed, however, in the days following each period of mass murders. During these "relaxed" periods, the Nazi rulers acted differently. Now they were interested in a "working ghetto," in squeezing from the Jewish inmates the maximum in terms of both simple and skilled labor (the latter, abounding among the Kovno Jews, was almost absent among the non-Jewish population of the city). To achieve their goal, the authorities were ready to relax somewhat their draconian system of controlling the ghetto. At such times, the council and its departments, while mobilizing Jewish labor, would exploit every crack in the cruel system in order to improve, at least slightly, the living conditions in the ghetto while battling to gain time in the hope that sooner or later the fortunes of war would turn, the Germans would be defeated and at least part of the community would survive. But objections may be made to this line of reasoning. First of all, let us note that the distinction between the two different existential situations in the ghetto was not as clear-cut as described above. The interference of the security forces and the Gestapo in ghetto life was marked, and usually lethal, even in more "relaxed" times. The punishment for almost any "transgression"—barter with non-Jews, buying a newspaper in town, or any provocation whatsoever—was death. Moreover, if the "transgressor" was a family man or woman, the oppressor would not rest until all the family members were found (usually with the help of the ghetto Jewish police) and executed. Hundreds of ghetto inmates thus found their death in the periods between Aktionen. In one case described in the diary, known as the "Meck affair," Gestapo officials made the Jews themselves carry out a death penalty. On November 15, 1942, the German commander of the ghetto guard detained a young Jew by the name of Nahum Meck who was trying to escape from the ghetto by crawling under the fence. Meck was arrested. Gestapo officers searched his apartment and found there "a treasure": gold, diamonds and other valuables. On November 18, Meek was publicly hanged in the ghetto by two young Jews appointed by the ghetto police (pp. 153-156). Is there any way to justify this operation of the Jewish Council emissaries? It may be argued that, while the verdict was completely arbitrary, brutal and unjustified, refusal to carry out the execution would have not only endangered the lives of the council members and Jewish police, but perhaps put into jeopardy the existence of

The Case of the Kovno Ghetto

205

the entire ghetto. Clearly, the members of the Jewish Council faced an extremely difficult moral problem: Is it permissible to be involved in taking the life of one person in order to save the lives of others? This frightful dilemma was magnified time and again in the days of the mass murders. Is there a moral principle that can justify the part taken by the council and the ghetto institutions in the Aktionen? On October 24, 1941, Helmut Rauca, the Gestapo official in charge of the Jewish desk at the Gestapo headquarters in Kovno, entered the offices of the council, accompanied by another high-ranking Gestapo officer. According to Tory's diary, He opened with a major pronouncement: it is imperative to increase the size of the Jewish labor force in view of its importance for the German war effort—an allusion to the indispensability of Jewish labor to the Germans. Furthermore, he continued, the Gestapo is aware that food rations alloted to the Ghetto inmates do not provide proper nourishment to heavy-labor workers and, therefore, he intends to increase rations for both the workers and their families so that they will be able to achieve greater output for the Reich. The remaining Ghetto inmates, those not included in the Jewish labor force, would have to make do with the existing rations. To forestall competition and envy between them and the Jewish labor force, they would be separated from them and transferred to the small Ghetto. In this fashion, those contributing to the war effort would obtain more spacious and comfortable living quarters. To carry out this operation a roll call would take place. The Council was to issue an order in which all the Ghetto inmates, without exception, and irrespective of sex and age, were called to report to Demokratu Square on October 28, at 6 a.m. on the dot. In the square they should line up by families and by the workplace of the family head . . . When leaving for the roll call they were to leave their apartments, closets, and drawers open. Anybody found after 6 a.m. in his home would be shot on the spot (pp. 43-44). Members of the council could have had no doubt of the impending disaster. They had to decide whether to issue the order or not. Should they warn the community of what was going to happen and not issue the order—or else issue the order with the warning? When it became clear that the council was divided, it was decided to ask the advice of the Chief Rabbi of the community, Abraham Dov Shapiro. The rabbi considered the matter for a day and a half. We are told that his conclusion was as follows: [He] had found that there had been situations in Jewish history which resembled the dilemma the Council was facing now. In such cases . . . when an evil edict had imperiled an entire Jewish community and, by a certain act, a part of the community could be saved, communal leaders were bound to summon their courage, take the responsibility, and save as many lives as possible. According to this principle, it was incumbent on the Council to publish the decree. Tory adds, however, that: other rabbis, and a number of public figures in the Ghetto, subsequently took issue with the ruling. They argued that it was forbidden for the Council to publish the decree, since by doing so it inadvertently became a collaborator with the oppressor in carrying out his design—a design which could bring disaster to the entire Ghetto (p. 47).

206

Review Essays

In the end, the council acted on Rabbi Shapiro's advice and published the decree, not informing the ghetto inmates of its doubts and fears. Did Jewish Council members really believe their actions to be justified? Such a question is not confined to the Kovno community since, in one form or another, incidents such as these occurred throughout occupied Europe. To answer the question it is necessary to examine again the distinction between everyday life in the ghetto and the periods of Aktionen. As noted before, everyday life meant slavery, degradation, systematic subjection to hunger and other hardships. The leaders of the community had to shoulder the moral responsibility for collaboration with the Germans in enforcing their rule. But this was done "for their lives," in the sense of "for the lives of all." Hence this responsibility is of a completely different order than that of publicizing an edict that was rightly considered by the council to be part and parcel of the implementation of the mass murder of thousands of Jews "without obstacles"—that is, without a single hair falling out of place on the head of the S.S. officer or his loyal Lithuanian assistant. Is the reason given by the Kovno Chief Rabbi sufficient for justifying such an action? Can an ethical principle be found according to which one could have approached one of those led from the ghetto to the Ninth Fort and to have calmed him down by saying, although you are led to slaughter, two others will be saved in your place—do you not agree? I have looked for such a principle in the moral teachings of the nations, but have not found one. If Nazi crimes in the Kovno ghetto and the policy of the Jewish Council are examined in historical perspective, we must take into account the destiny of those two thirds of the community who survived the first mass murder. It is therefore important to find out what happened in the ghetto from September-October 1943 until its evacuation by German security forces in August 1944. The diary itself and other documents in this work give us no information on the period from March 1944 until the liberation in August 1944, for the simple reason that Tory was no longer in the ghetto at the time. As he says in the epilogue (p. 523), he succeeded in escaping at the end of March 1944, finding shelter with some Lithuanian peasants. What, then, does he have to say about the period from October 1943 until the end of March 1944? Dina Porat noted in an article published in the Hebrew edition that: there was chronological continuity in the writing almost every day from the summer of 1941 until the summer of 1943, and in more fragmented notes from that time until the spring of 1944. ... It was then that groups of the underground started getting out of the ghetto into the forests, and the diary describes the doubts and misgivings of those who had left and of those who remained (p. 16). But neither the Hebrew nor the English edition fits this description. The Hebrew edition of the diary ends on October 13, 1943, while the English one contains material until March 1944, with only one entry that does not deal with what happened in the ghetto. This particular entry tells the horrible story, with its sensa-

The Case of the Kovno Ghetto

207

tional and heroic end, of the labor squad in the Ninth Fort that carried out the order from Berlin "to eradicate the mass graves: to exhume the corpses and to burn them" (p. 508). The Ninth Fort, Tory writes, was a military fortress near Kovno that had served for a long time as part of the Kovno prison for dangerous criminals. The Nazis used it for mass murders. Here, some 25,000 Kovno Jews were executed, along with many thousands of other Jews deported from Germany and other European countries. At the end of the summer of 1943, with the change in the course of the war, Nazi leaders became concerned to conceal the traces of their crimes. Thus, they ordered the eradication of the mass graves. The labor group carrying out this terrible task was composed of three subgroups: Red Army prisoners of war of Jewish origin; ghetto inmates seized and brought to the fort; and young fighters from the ghetto who were on their way to join the partisan movement in the forests but were caught by the Nazis. On Christmas day the whole labor group escaped from the Ninth Fort. There is no consensus on how this happened. For instance, in the book The Story of an Underground: The Resistance of the Jews of Kovno (Lithuania) in the Second World War1 it is reported that the idea of escape originated in two of the subgroups, the ghetto fighters and the prisoners of war. Tory's entry of January 9, 1944 follows an account given by Captain Kolia Vasilenko (also mentioned in Story of an Underground). No other names are mentioned as organizers of the escape, and no other reports are brought into account. This is peculiar, as details of the escape had become immediately known to some of the Jewish Council members as well as to the police chief, Moshe Levin (who gave assistance to the escapees), police officer Ika Grinberg and others. Did this information not reach Tory? Moreover, the activities of this fighter group were only a part of the underground movement in the ghetto, which grew rapidly in the period under consideration. It involved people from all levels of society, about one thousand in all, from the simplest workers to members of the Jewish Council. Tory's silence concerning these activities, apart from the group in the Ninth Fort, will astonish every member of the movement who survived the war. I am one of them, having lived in the Kovno ghetto for two and a half years, until March 1944. There were rumors in the ghetto that Tory strongly opposed the underground movement that organized the escape from the ghetto to the partisans of the forests. If this is true, Tory's silence would be comprehensible. But is it true? Perhaps the absence of a clear answer to this question does not affect the value of the book, both for historians of the Holocaust and for every other reader interested in the tragic history of the Kovno Jewish community. Many, however, will remain uneasy about the selective information given in this diary. A. ZVIE BAR-ON The Hebrew University Note 1. Zvie A. Brown and Dov Levin, The Story of an Underground: The Resistance of the Jews of Kovno (Lithuania) in the Second World War (Jerusalem: 1962), ch. 6.

This page intentionally left blank

Book Reviews

This page intentionally left blank

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (comps. and eds.), Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989. xxi + 526 pp.

There can be no doubt about the usefulness of presenting for the English reader a book containing selected sources regarding one of the biggest and most important ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland. The sources are well chosen, affording the reader considerable information concerning the daily life and struggle for survival of the Lodz ghetto inmates. Among the material represented here are "The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto," diaries, some poems and prose written in the ghetto, and several Nazi documents. Especially important are the selections from Oskar Rosenfeld's notes, the sketches of Jozef Zelkowicz, the diaries of Dawid Sierakowiak and the remarks of one anonymous young man who wrote on the margins of his book "Les vrais riches." Here is where the positive work of the editors comes to an end. Not only have they failed to provide necessary footnotes, but they have added some confusing and misleading explanations of their own. Primary sources quite often contain partial information only—and in some cases even false details—that may be the result not only of subjective views but also (in most cases) of lack of knowledge. The task of the editor is, therefore, to provide some explanatory footnotes to the text, which may otherwise be misunderstood or misinterpreted. Adelson and Lapides have failed to do so. I shall limit myself to two examples only. In an important note from "The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto" dated June 24, 1944 (p. 416) we read: "Reportedly, a note was found in one freight indicating that the train went only as far as Kutno, where the travelers were transferred to passenger cars." This note deals with an event during the deportation to the death camp Chelmno. The editors have failed to explain it, instead offering the inaccurate information that Kutno is in the county of Kolo near Chelmno, when in fact it is the name of a different county altogether. (The village of Chelmno [in German, Kulmhof], where the Nazis built the first death camp for mass murder by gas, was located in Kolo County.) And further, in one of the published excerpts from the diary of Jakub Poznanski, in his note dated November 24, 1944 (p. 482), the author, at that time in the camp at Jakuba Street, writes: "Today two trucks brought over furs and suitcases, which belonged to the German Jews deported to Kolo in 1942. That camp was liquidated not long ago." Here the reference is clearly to the death camp in Chelmno—but no 211

212

Book Reviews

footnote is provided to explain this to the reader, notwithstanding the fact that fully one third of the Lodz ghetto inmates were murdered at Chelmno. There are, moreover, a number of mistakes in the book that may be only printing errors, but which in some cases are quite significant. In a note from June 26, 1944, for example (p. 424), we read that "from the 25,000 remaining in the ghetto, 500 are expelled every day." The correct figure is 75,000 remaining in the ghetto. However, my most important criticism concerns the editors' explanations and interpretations. To my regret, it appears as though the editors have read a good deal about the Lodz ghetto, yet have failed to understand the events or surrounding circumstances. As a result, they often come to conclusions that have nothing to do with the realities of the Holocaust and the Lodz ghetto. The editors deal at length, for instance, with Hayim Mordechai Rumkowski, the chairman of the Judenrat (in Lodz it was called Aeltestenrat—Council of the Elders), but reveal complete ignorance of the man. Let me again limit myself to a few exemplary quotations: Rumkowski was noteworthy among the Jewish leaders who proposed for the sake of peace to deliver daily quotas of Jews to the Nazis . . . Rumkowski loved the ghetto, his dominion. On a visit to the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1941, he tried to point out the 'creative' value of the ghettoization, as he saw it—a partial fulfillment of the Zionist goals he embraced (p. xvi). Unquestionably, Rumkowski succeeded in making the Jewish ghetto a remarkably profitable enterprise for the Germans. Within six months of its sealing off, the ghetto was self-sufficient. . . The ghetto had worked instead as a giant war industry, arming the enemy (p. xix). And finally: The Nazis killed these Jews. Rumkowski did not want their deaths. But again, a hypothetical: If it had not been for Rumkowski's deceitful or misinformed assurances of those truth-telling 'rumor mongerers' who warned of the Nazi genocide, would so many of those people have willingly boarded the trains? (p. 494).

Each of these quotes is nonsense—based on misunderstanding and complete lack of elementary knowledge. Did Rumkowski really come up with the initiative of proposing daily quotas of Jews, and did he believe in buying peace from the Germans? The Germans forced almost all members of the Judenrate to participate in one way or another in the organization of deportations. The alternative was to sacrifice their own lives, a choice in fact made by some of the Judenrat members. Rumkowski did not follow in the path of Adam Czerniakow, the chairman of the Warsaw ghetto Judenrat. He did not commit suicide, he obeyed German orders; but he was neither noteworthy among the Jewish leaders, nor did he propose to deliver quotas of Jews for the sake of peace. I wonder where the editors got their information about Rumkowski seeing in the ghetto a "partial fulfillment of ... Zionist goals." Here the source is undoubtedly the editors' own fantasy. How can the Lodz ghetto be called self-sufficient? One has to be deprived of

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

213

elementary knowledge on war industry during the Second World War in order to consider the ghetto, where starving inmates worked under the most primitive conditions, a giant war industry center. And did the Lodz ghetto inmates really board the trains for the death camp willingly, and this only because they were stupid enough to believe Rumkowski's assurances? I wonder how anyone writing a piece on the Holocaust can lack the elementary intellectual ability to understand the tragedy of people living in the most desperate situation imaginable. What choice did the Lodz ghetto inmates have when the Germans decided on the deportations? To remain in the ghetto meant for almost all of them a certain death: only very few could provide themselves with some shelter and food. And so they were forced to leave—a step that all of them resisted as long as they could, sensing its great danger even while the true dimensions of that danger were unknown. Can one say that these helpless and defenseless people willingly boarded the trains? The book ends with a very problematic afterword by Geoffrey Hartman, which contains the following confusing sentences attributed to Oskar Rosenfeld, one of the contributors to the "Chronicle": This tragedy has no heroes. And why [call it] tragedy? Because the pain does not touch upon something human, on another's heart, but rather is something incomprehensible, linked with the cosmos, a natural phenomenon like the creation of the world. One must begin again with the Creation, with B'raishit (the first word of the Bible). In the beginning, God created the ghetto.

Hartman has failed to give a reference for this quotation (the same is true of the editors throughout the book, who fail to provide citations). As a result, I found it impossible to locate these sentences in Oskar Rosenfeld's writings. Perhaps something was wrong with the translation. Knowing Rosenfeld's writings, I doubt if he really meant to say that the Lodz ghetto did not have its heroes. He wrote with great love for his people, as another quote provided in this book shows: "The dynamic spirit of the Jewish people could not be broken. . . . That meant surviving with its existing human and intellectual resources, adapting these to prevailing conditions, and organizing them to prepare for future tasks" (pp. 293-294). Moreover, I must sharply protest against including, as the concluding words of this book, the statement that "God created the ghetto." The ghetto was created by the Nazi Germans only. They are responsible for the enormous suffering of the ghetto inmates and they are the ones who murdered innocent people. Do not free them of any responsibility. God has nothing to do with Nazi German crimes. SHMUEL KRAKOWSKI Yad Vashem

214

Book Reviews

Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933-1943. Trans, by William Templer. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1990. xiii + 226 pp.

A number of eminent German scholars have produced detailed accounts of Jewish economic deprivation following the seizure of power by the Nazis. Two works are particularly important in this respect: Helmut Genschel's Die Verdrangung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich (1966) and U. D. Adam's Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (1972). Significant though those studies have been, they are flawed by a heavy dependence on archival material emanating from the legislative, administrative and propaganda sources of the Nazi regime itself. The upshot has been a view of the Jewish community as a passive, self-deluding victim of discrimination and persecution. Avraham Barkai (Research Fellow at the Institute for German History, Tel-Aviv University, and the author of numerous works in this field) has now attempted to redress the balance by making extensive use of the surviving records of Jewish central and local communal institutions. Hence, the Jewish struggle for economic survival rather than Nazi policy-making and implementation is the underlying theme of this new study, resulting in a much clearer picture of Jewish responses to the mounting barrage of harassment. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Germany's Jews suffered relatively little economic discrimination during the first four or five years of Nazi rule, Barkai demonstrates that the process of ousting them from the economy and appropriating their assets "pressed ahead with inexorable consistency" (p. 54) from 1934 to 1937. At first, the pressure was exerted in the smaller towns and rural areas where nearly one hundred thousand Jews still lived; boycotts, threats, intimidation and occasional violence quickly forced the owners of small and medium-sized shops and firms to sell their businesses for a tiny fraction of their real worth. By 1937, the German Jewish population had shrunk by about 130,000 (some 27 percent) through emigration (at least 90,000) and mortality rates higher than corresponding birth rates. This first wave of deprivation and emigration had been produced without special legislation or public proclamations—in fact, the evidence suggests that it was precisely the lack of legislative clarity that created an ideal atmosphere for economic harassment. As early as the end of 1935, the European representative of the Joint Distribution Committee was reporting a massive sell-off of Jewish businesses at farcical prices and estimating that more than a quarter of the community was already destitute and in need of welfare. So that when we reach the watershed year of 1938, a process of what Barkai terms "creeping displacement" had already undermined the socioeconomic position of German Jews. The Nazis had succeeded in isolating and ostracizing them from the broader population. The preconditions had been created for the Entjudung der deutschen Wirtschaft—the final removal of Jews from the German economy. Viewed in this perspective, the wave of pogroms surrounding Kristallnacht in November of that year was merely the signal given to complete the process. The official files and other documents of the Reichsvertretung der Juden and the Gemeinden (the incorporated local communities) throw light on a question that has

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

215

puzzled two generations of historians: once the cycle of plunder began in earnest— legal expulsion, expropriation, "Aryanization"—how did individual Jews survive? Some apparently were able to live off their savings from earlier years and the proceeds of liquidations; even though the latter sums were held in blocked accounts under Gestapo control, Jews were permitted to withdraw fixed monthly amounts as determined by the "control agency." Those who had no such funds were kept alive by the Jewish welfare system. By 1939, the starvation "wages" of those performing forced labor services were virtually the only remuneration still received by Jews for any economic activity. There no longer was any serious debate within Jewish leadership circles about the direction of policy and communal energies, which were now exclusively concentrated on plans for emigration. In fact, by this stage, Barkai points out, German Jews were not "in the least bit choosy about their destination," (p. 142) and occupational or language preparation or even the transfer of assets were factors of diminishing importance. The emphasis was on flight, on escape. Altogether, some 280,000 (out of a 1933 total of 525,000) managed to emigrate (though Barkai does not give us an estimate of how many eventually were caught up again in the Nazi net as it spread across Europe). Also by 1939, more than a quarter of the Reichsvertretung's funds was being devoted to the Zionist movement's hakhsharah occupational retraining programs, though prospects of getting into Palestine were becoming increasingly remote. By the time war broke out, German Jews had been almost totally excluded from any sort of gainful economic activity; with all escape routes now effectively closed, the attention of the Reichsvertretung's leadership and officials switched to assisting the remnants of the community in the task of sheer physical survival. Throughout the early war years, special taxes and arbitrary expropriations plundered what was left of Jewish assets. In terms of Nazi ideology, whatever wealth Jews possessed had been pilfered or acquired by fraudulent means, and now had to be returned to its rightful and legal owners—the Volk. The last phase in this "redemption" coincided with the first mass deportations in the autumn of 1941. In a brief concluding section, Barkai establishes a relationship between this economic despoliation and the Holocaust that followed. Of the Jews exterminated by the Nazis, only about two percent came from Germany itself. However, the entire experience of German Jewry had great significance as a laboratory for the ultimate destruction of European Jewry as a whole. The measures aimed at economic exclusion and displacement evolved into the precise methodology of genocidal murder. The gradual and systematic process of Entjudung took place in public before the eyes of millions of Germans and involved their profitable complicity, thereby liberating the Volk from any moral compunctions. By officially branding them as "enemies of the people" it became possible to exclude Jews from the human community, while from the ranks of the "frolicsome schoolkids out for a holiday romp" (p. 188) during the shop-window smashings of 1933 came the later scruplefree recruits to the Einsatzgruppen. Barkai's investigation and analysis has both broadened and deepened our knowledge of the economic annihilation of German Jewry. Not only has he ably demonstrated how the process began at a much earlier stage of Nazi rule than is generally

216

Book Reviews

believed, but he has also shown how this increasingly terrorized, beleaguered and impoverished community reacted with dignity, courage and a somber understanding of the engulfing nightmare—in strong contrast to the allegations of self-delusion so frequently leveled against it. MARCUS ARKIN University of Durban-Westville

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989. 224 pp.

The question of whether the Holocaust was a singular product of modernity or of the centuries-long history of antisemitism will undoubtedly continue to inform our historical discourse for a good many years to come. There is something of a disciplinary divide in the way in which this question has been answered. Theologians, particularly Christian theologians attuned to the history of Christian supersessionism, have often blamed theologies going back to the New Testament for the Holocaust. In their account, Nazism—despite its modern features—turns out to be a Christian heresy. Modern historians, in contrast, have tended to emphasize precisely those features that make the Holocaust modern: no premodern regime ever decreed the wholesale extermination of the Jews; racial antisemitism has no real precedent in medieval forms of anti-Judaism; and the technological and bureaucratic methods of killing represent differences not just in degree and technique but in mentality and motivation. The most recent scholarship has begun to rethink these issues. Gavin Langmuir, a medievalist, and Paul Lawrence Rose, a historian of the nineteenth century, have each suggested the fundamental continuities between medieval and modern antisemitism. The continuities are most evident on the mythic level, such as the blood libel, which clearly took hold on the popular imagination at precisely the time— around the twelfth century—when the doctrine of transubstantiation became dogma. The belief that the Jew holds demonic powers, linked to magical and mysterious substances such as blood and gold, ties together medieval and modern antisemitism. Needless to say, these latest reflections cannot provide more than a partial solution to the problem; they serve instead to remind us that the Holocaust surely owes much not only to medieval sources but also to the realm of mythic symbols and their stubborn persistence in modern, "rational" society. The question of causation remains: Did these ideas "cause" the Holocaust by triggering a genocide in specific historical circumstances, or were they merely the inherited language that a radically new movement exploited for its own purposes? Zygmunt Bauman's new book harkens back to the older historical approach, arguing that the Holocaust was peculiarly modern and that its ostensibly "medieval" elements had to be suppressed by bureaucratic rationality. Thus, Kristallnacht was essentially a medieval pogrom and its mob violence had to be replaced by cold,

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

217

rational means before true genocide became possible. Bauman offers a persuasive account of how traditional "heterophobia" and "boundary-making" were pressed into new molds by scientific racism and modern concepts of social engineering, which he calls the "gardening metaphor" of the modern state. The Holocaust was a result of the "emancipation of the political state, with its monopoly of means of violence and its audacious engineering ambitions, from social control—following the step-by-step dismantling of all non-political power resources and institutions of social self-management" (p. xiii). The way in which the bureaucratic mentality anaesthetizes moral sensibility and turns mass murder into technique has been pointed out by a number of observers, among whom the best known is probably Hannah Arendt. Modern genocide is devoid of passionate hatred, requiring instead a deformed version of scientific rationality. Bauman rehearses these arguments in some detail, but he is in fact after bigger game. His intended audience is the discipline of sociology, which, he argues, has paid little attention to the Holocaust as an event that demands a paradigmatic shift in theory. The question, he says, is not what sociology may have to say about the Holocaust (although he finds that Max Weber's notion of rationalized bureaucracy remains fruitful), but rather what the Holocaust has to teach sociologists. This book, then, is both a polemic against what Bauman takes to be a dominant mode of sociological discourse and a proposal for a new paradigm. Bauman claims that for traditional sociology, modernity means the imposition of moral constraints on otherwise rampant selfishness and savagery. The Holocaust represents the failure, not the product, of modernity. In addition, and much more interestingly, Bauman offers a critique of the traditional sociological view of morality, which, he claims, holds that morality is produced by society for functional reasons; that is, morality always fulfills some specific or general social need. Bauman resists this functional explanation and argues instead for an innate moral quality that human beings develop as a result of the proximity of other human beings. Modern society creates distance between people and thus weakens feelings of moral responsibility. Modern warfare, in its lack of a moral calculus, represents this process: "The accomplishment of modern weaponry [in making it possible to kill an enemy without seeing him] can be taken as a metaphor for a much more diversified and ramified process of the social production of distance (p. 194)." Modern society therefore creates a sphere—the total state—where morality does not apply. This is the precondition for mass murder: "The Holocaust could be accomplished only on the condition of neutralizing the impact of primeval moral drives, of isolating the machinery of murder from the sphere where such drives arise and apply, of rendering such drives marginal or altogether irrelevant to the task (p. 188)." The Nazis therefore took the modern "neutralization" of "primeval moral drives" to its most extreme conclusion. The techniques of social isolation applied to the Jews were extreme and deliberate instances of the way in which modern society unconsciously alienates people from each other; once isolated, it became easy to exterminate them without opposition from the population as a whole, which otherwise did not particularly favor extreme solutions. The paradigm shift that Bauman proposes for sociology is based on this theory of morality. The Holocaust teaches us to resist bureaucratic institutions as they sup-

218

Book Reviews

press our moral instincts. It also teaches sociologists to reconsider the "value-free" nature of their discipline; the issue of moral responsibility must now take center stage in social theory, where it had previously been banished to the wings. This is an intriguing argument and it deserves serious attention. It is certainly useful for historians, who have become increasingly enamored of "rhetorical tropes" and "discursive practices," to be reminded by a sociologist how the logic of institutions can create historical events. It is also good to hear that the critique of the valuefree school of sociology remains alive. But in this latter respect, Bauman has not broken new ground. The Frankfurt School, among others, offered a critical alternative to positivist sociology many decades ago, and its legacy remains very much alive. Moreover, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment [English translation 1972] presents a picture of modernity that both incorporates and extends far beyond Bauman's. From their point of view, the Holocaust represents both the product and the failure of modernity, which is itself a contradictory phenomenon. This dialectical way of framing the issue seems the most fruitful way of understanding the seeming paradox of modernity. There also seem to me real problems with Bauman's moral theory. Bauman is undoubtedly correct that modern society has constructed the most morally irresponsible bureaucracies in history, although one should not exaggerate the moral qualities of earlier governments. Is there any reason to believe that the so-called "primeval moral drives" were any more operative in the Middle Ages than in the modern period? Surely the fact that medieval regimes did not engage in outright genocide against the Jews proves very little about their moral character. The Rousseauian idea of innate morality that Bauman counterposes to the Hobbesian view of "traditional sociology" has been taken up in recent years in a different form by sociobiologists. There is much evidence that Bauman might have mustered from these theorists to buttress his claim of innate altruism, but in the end he asserts rather than proves it. Even if he had offered such evidence, however, the argument would probably not have been any more convincing. Since human beings have never been isolated from larger social groupings (tribes, cities, states) that operate from self-interest rather than morality, there is no way of determining whether some "primeval" moral sense exists independent of political structures. Is our morality constructed by society or does it preexist social life? The question looks rather like a variant on the insoluble nature-nurture conundrum. It would probably be more helpful to think of human beings as complex creatures who exist at one and the same time in social relationships governed by moral responsibility and in political communities that "neutralize" the moral compulsions of their members. Both are part of the human condition, just as both the tendency toward violence and toward peacefulness are "innate." These are probably biological givens that culture proceeds to construct in a variety of different ways. There can be no question, as Bauman rightly claims, that the amoral rationality of modern government played a significant role in the execution of the Holocaust. The kind of social engineering undertaken by modern governments was also a critical element in this process. But I wonder whether these modern inventions really tell the whole story. Whether we celebrate modernity or curse it, we tend to think of it as somehow fundamentally different from earlier periods of history. Yet the propensity

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

219

of human beings to act out mythic fantasies and to indulge in sanctioned group violence seems to cross the divide between "modern" and "traditional" societies. Perhaps it is time to put these chronological distinctions aside and recognize the extent to which we remain prisoners of both cultures and biologies that have changed very little since the Stone Age. DAVID BIALE Center for Jewish Studies Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. 283 pp.

This is the definitive biography of Gerald L. K. Smith, whom the author calls "the most persistently successful of America's anti-Jewish propagandists." A decade or so ago, some might have asked whether the world needed such a study about this failed dinosauric figure. But today, when Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke can win more than half of the white votes in his campaign for a Louisiana seat in the U.S. Senate, a review of Smith's career takes on more relevance. That career was in a way typical of political extremists of bigotry in America. Glen Jeansonne, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, emphasizes the effect of populism and progressivism on Smith's early career. Smith was an antimonopolist, a friend of labor, the small farmer and the indigent aged. He angrily opposed sweatshops, worker abuse in the mines and farm foreclosures. He was awarded an honorary membership card by William Green, head of the American Federation of Labor. Smith was a great admirer of Robert M. La Follette, and became politically involved with both Dr. Francis Townsend and Huey Long. There has long been an off-and-on debate about populism as a historical cradle of antisemitism. But since the definition of the generic term includes a strong stance in support of social reform and an antiestablishment bias, there is no wonder that there is a frequent, although not inevitable, linkage. Social reform politics becomes most attractive at a time of mass discontent, the time when extremist demagogues flourish. Father Charles Coughlin's newspaper was called Social Justice. And the "establishment," the source of that discontent, is often, at its worst, seen as the big financial institutions. The next paranoid step is to introduce the Rothschilds. One of Smith's early causes, as a minister in Louisiana, was prevention of a threatened foreclosure of the home of one of his congregants. The culprit was a mutual building association whose director and controlling partner was named Philip Lieber. With Huey Long's help, Smith quashed the foreclosure, and in his retelling of the story never failed to mention that Lieber was a Jew. Smith's public career peaked in the mid-1930s with his associations with Long, Townsend and Coughlin. He was a charismatic speaker, to put it mildly. Jeansonne quotes H. L. Mencken: "Gerald L. K. Smith is the greatest orator of them all. . . He is the master of masters, the champion boob-bumper of all epochs, the Aristotle and Johann Sebastian Bach of all known ear-splitters, dead or alive."

220

Book Reviews

But embittered by some failures to find a successful electoral role for himself, Smith turned from his populist path after 1936, shifting from a central "soak-therich" theme to that of anti-Communism and from union supporting to unionbusting. His organizations, now supported by rich contributors, did well financially, but his mass appeal began to decline. Smith's anti-Communism, and undoubtedly his antisemitism, led him to some partiality toward Hitler and an involvement in the isolationist movement. Even during the Second World War he maintained these sentiments and later became one of the first "revisionists," denying that the Jewish Holocaust had ever taken place. He ended up in the 1950s and 1960s as a pamphleteer with a limited audience, a failed and bitter prophet. Jeansonne makes some efforts to pinpoint the origin of Smith's antisemitism. As background, he documents Smith's upbringing as an evangelical Protestant and his early career as an evangelical preacher. Jeansonne also details the rigid nature of Smith's family life as a child, and suggests the possible development of an "authoritarian personality." There is also a description of his learning experiences as an antisemite, especially with Henry Ford who, Smith claimed, taught him the connection between Jews and Communism. If Jeansonne gives short shrift to any facet of Smith, it is in not fixing him more analytically into the extremist modes of his times. The more successful demagogues of the 1930s did not use bigotry as their chief hook. They attracted followings on the basis of widespread economic and status discontent. The bigotry was just an effective aid in putting together a dramatic and paranoid package. Smith rode high when he was associated with programs of social reform. After the Second World War, the same fertile field of discontent was not present. The antisemitism that was now at the center of Smith's message, along with anti-Communism, was not a useful tool in the 1950s. And as a mass organizational tool, anti-Communism also proved to be a paper tiger—even, finally, for Joe McCarthy. Moreover, as his program became more centrally bigoted, Smith became more unacceptable to mainstream politics and politicians. Even the Dixiecrat candidate for President in 1948, J. Strom Thurmond, rejected Smith's endorsement, signaling that extremists now had to present as moderate a face as possible in order to win elections. David Duke understood the need for a moderate facade and, while running for office, avoided the public expression of the kind of antisemitic and blatantly racist beliefs he in fact held. But Smith never did understand; he was "stunned and amazed" when Thurmond rejected him. Perhaps that is what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. meant when he said that Smith's later career "represented a triumph of principle over success." Or perhaps this may just be translated to mean that Smith was too dense to understand the dynamics of a successful career in political extremism. Jeansonne has not always explicitly or systematically analyzed the nature of these extremist dynamics. However, the material is all here, researched in a thorough and scholarly manner and written in an easy and agreeable style. No student of extremism in America will be able to do without it. EARL RAAB Brandeis University

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

221

Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion and Antisemitism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. vii + 380 pp.

Is there a need to reopen the discussion of first principles regarding the nature of antisemitism, xenophobia and ethnic prejudice? After all, since the Second World War, an immeasurable quantity of research has been devoted to these and related issues from, variously, the historical, sociological and sociopsychological points of view. It is now some fifty years since Joshua Trachtenberg published his The Devil and the Jews; some forty years since Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's Authoritarian Personality; and some twenty-five years since Norman Cohn published Warrant for Genocide and Leon Poliakov began to bring out his monumental history of antisemitism. The scholarly literature on the development of antisemitism in pre-Nazi Germany alone is vast, and that on the Holocaust greater still. Nonetheless, it is specifically a reexamination of basic terms of reference that Gavin I. Langmuir, a professor of medieval history at Stanford University, has now undertaken in two books: Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (a collection of his essays, some old, some new) and History, Religion and Antisemitism (a monograph). Together these companion volumes, both brought out by the University of California Press in 1990, comprise almost eight hundred pages (and rumor has it that a third volume is to follow). The argument that he develops is multilayered and extremely wide-ranging; mercifully free of jargon, it is not without its complexities and is occasionally hard to follow. An attempt at a brief summary cannot convey justly either the deep seriousness of the undertaking or the intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, mode of discourse—he engages the classic works of scholarship in a prolonged and relentless dialogue (echoes, perhaps, of intense graduate seminars at Stanford?). What should probably be seen as the pivotal thesis underpinning the two books involves a confrontation with the widely-held view (associated by Langmuir, inter alia, with Bernard Lazare, Hannah Arendt and even Jacob Katz) that a deep gulf divides traditional or religious from modern or racist and secular antisemitism. In general, he argues—here specifically, for example, against Ernest Gellner—that it is a cardinal error to depict modernity as some kind of great tidal wave sweeping away the past as so much debris: The [modernizing] trend is clear. Yet revolutionary as it was, its extent should not be exaggerated. Most Europeans in the late nineteenth century still adhered to Christian religions. . . However much the Christian 'God' might be dying in the minds of intellectuals and many who were not intellectuals, 'His' existence was still taken for granted by most people during the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth (p. 311). Building his case that the traditional and the modern eras should not be seen as dichotomous, Langmuir subjects the concept of "surrogate religions"—often used to describe Marxism and Nazism—to a sustained critique. In order to do so, he

222

Book Reviews

takes the reader through a detailed and often fascinating examination of the attempts made by the sociologists and anthropologists (from Marx, Weber and Durkheim to Clifford Geertz, Robert Bellah and Peter Berger) to explain the historical, social and psychological function of religions. He concludes with his own definitions of "religion," a concept that he associates with social structures, and "religiosity," a term used to describe the thought patterns of the individual mind. Ultimately, he insists, the difference between the traditional creeds centered on belief in a God or in gods or spirits and a modern creed such as Marxism or Nazism is one of degree rather than of kind: the difference between "psychocentric" and "physiocentric" religions. They are all rooted in the nonrational or nonempirical modes of thinking that are endemic to the human mind. (Or, in Langmuir's words, "The fissures and barriers that impede a universal culture of rationality are not merely the result of past social inequalities and traditional religions. . . . They are rooted in basic human characteristics that have been present throughout history and are as active as they ever were" [p. 208].) Once he has these conceptual foundations firmly in place, Langmuir shows no hesitation in arguing that the roots of the Holocaust have to be traced back in significant part to the traditional hostility of the Christian churches to Judaism and the Jews. Of course, Nazism was profoundly antagonistic to Christianity, but as a new religion, it easily assimilated from the old those symbols which met its needs: "Except for their biological premise and the accusation of the Dolchstoss, the Nazi stereotypes were remarkably lacking in originality; most were simply repetitions of the old Christian xenophobic and chimerical accusations already embedded in the religiosity of many Europeans" (p. 342). Age-old Christian hostility, in this view, was a necessary although not sufficient cause of the catastrophe that overtook the Jewish people in the twentieth century. That said, Langmuir insists no less trenchantly that it would be "meaningless and morally lazy" simply to argue that "Christianity was responsible for Auschwitz" (p. 367). From its inception, and of logical necessity, the Church was virulently opposed to the Jewish people, which, by its persistent refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah, flouted the most fundamental expectations of the daughter faith. But here Langmuir makes a key distinction between hostility based on empirical facts (the Jews did, after all, totally reject Christianity as posited on a false premise) and hostility based on wild and hideous fantasies—or, in his terminology, between a "non-rational anti-Judaism" and an "irrational antisemitism." (His anachronistic use of the term antisemitism is deliberate.) Given the centrality of nonrational thinking in the makeup of mankind, interethnic enmity, prejudice and competition—of which anti-Judaism has been an extreme example—can only be seen as endemic. However, instances of hostility based not on a stereotypical distortion of fact but rather on pathological flights of the imagination are comparatively rare. Using his specialized knowledge of medieval Europe, Langmuir traces the qualitative change from anti-Judiasm to "antisemitism" back as far as the twelfth century, but no further. It is then that one first begins to meet charges of a type that would build up power in subsequent centuries: the Jews slaughter Christian children for ritual purposes, desecrate the host, poison wells. The existence of these fantasies, which soon "became deeply embedded in

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

223

the mentality of millions of normally rational Christians" (p. 304), represented a threat of a special kind because, dehumanizing and demonizing the Jew, they rendered genocide a logical possibility. In what is perhaps a relatively weak section of the book, Langmuir raises what must remain a, possibly the, key issue for the historian of antisemitism. What factors rendered some societies at given moments so much more vulnerable than others to the antisemitic virus passed down from the Middle Ages? Even though Langmuir could not be expected to address this problem in detail, he could, I believe, have done more to clarify the questions involved. Did, for example, the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Lutheran churches serve in equal or differing degrees to preserve and transmit demonic images of the Jew? Why did Italy, one very Catholic country, prove so inimical to the genocidal plans of the Nazis, while neighboring Austria was so receptive? Why were so many of the nineteenth-century pioneers of antisemitism in Germany (as Langmuir points out) of Protestant rather than Catholic origin? How far would a close study of a map of Europe, divided by its religious frontiers, contribute to understanding the rise of modern antisemitic movements and varying receptivity to the Holocaust? How much weight should be assigned to a very long-term cause of the Holocaust that was necessary but insufficient, as opposed to various relatively short-term factors that combined to render it sufficient? But then, to be fair, these are not the issues that are of primary concern to Langmuir in this (and the companion) volume. What he has done is to state in the boldest terms the view that, in order to see antisemitism in a correct perspective, the historian can confine himself neither to the modern period nor to his own academic discipline alone. His monumental (two-volume) work, although in some ways flawed, is wholly admirable in its call to break down both chronological and interdisciplinary frontiers. It will, I believe, take its place alongside the most influential studies of anti-Judaism and antisemitism. JONATHAN FRANKEL The Hebrew University

Avraham Margaliot, Bein hazalah leovdan: 'iyunim betoladot yehudei germanlyah 1932-1938 (Between Rescue and Destruction: The History of German Jewry 1932—1938). Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, The Institute of Contemporary Jewry-Hebrew University and the Leo Baeck Institute, 1990. 313 pp.

German Jewry's pioneer role in many aspects of modern Jewish history came to its tragic conclusion before and during the Second World War. This was the first Jewish community to face the Nazis' spiteful harassment, economic deprivation and social ostracism, as well as an ideologically incited population. But unlike the later victims of the Shoah, the Jews of Germany were granted a reprieve of six to seven years during which they had considerable latitude to react to persecution and seek rescue by emigration.

224

Book Reviews

From his first scholarly publication in 1965 until his untimely death in 1987, Avraham Margaliot's main focus was on penetrating the mists of preconceived judgments to reach a just and objective assessment of the way in which the German Jewish community—above all its leadership—attempted to cope with its unique and desperate situation. The first section of the book under review is a selection of seven essays written between 1975 and 1985 that deal with different aspects of this main subject. In the latter half of the book, readers are presented with central chapters of Margaliot's doctoral dissertation (The Hebrew University, 1971) on "The Political Reaction of German-Jewish Organizations and Institutions to the Anti-Jewish Policy of the National Socialists 1932-1935," a trail-blazing, extensively documented study based on a host of hitherto unpublished sources. (Margaliot refused, on principle, to return to Germany to work in German archives.) Despite the mass of evidence made available to himself and to later researchers, Margaliot declined to publish this work during his lifetime; pained by constant doubts, he was reluctant to regard his findings as the last word on the subject. Rather, in an unceasing search for new sources and evidence, Margaliot returned time and again to the same troubled question: Why was emigration, demanded and supported by the Nazi regime, not more strongly propagated by a leadership that, until the mid-1930s, spent its main efforts in ensuring a continued endurable Jewish life in Germany? Margaliot's first response to this question was a largely critical analysis that blamed not only the ideological commitment of the majority, led by the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbiirger judischen Glaubens, but the internal dissension of community leaders and the main Jewish organizations: "The host of diverse opinions and guidelines rendered it difficult for the Jewish community, whose world was shattered by the loss of emancipation, to find its way" (p. 23). Margaliot's cautiously worded but nonetheless unmistakable criticism also embraced Zionist leaders both in and outside of Germany. In the many and often contradictory private and public utterances by outstanding leaders such as Chaim Weizmann or Berl Katznelson, Margaliot perceived a "hesitation about the appropriate way of action regarding the disruption of Jewish life in Europe under the pressure of antisemitic regimes." Despite his awareness of the pitfalls of hindsight, Margaliot could not refrain from wondering (in a paper delivered at Yad Vashem in 1974) why no one before 1938 "prepared any practicable plan for the urgent rescue of German Jewry" (p. 87). Ten years later, however, Margaliot's criticism of the Jewish leadership had become far more cautious. Years of further research had evidently led him to a new and more restrained evaluation. Margaliot now held objective economic and political circumstances to be the dominant factor in the reluctance of German Jews to emigrate. An unwillingness on the part of political leaders both in the Western democracies and in developing countries overseas to assist and absorb Jewish emigrants was what restricted emigration, rather than the shortsightedness of individual German Jews or their leaders. Margaliot now believed that "some of the efforts of an orderly emigration could not be realized . . . but not all these planned initiatives were in vain . . . more than 100,000 people were able to leave Germany between 1933 and 1939" (p. 105).

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

225

Beside the central issue of emigration, this volume contains a good deal of firstrate information on the stages of economic and social persecution, the institutional framework of an impressive self-help organization, internal political developments within the German Jewish community and its reactions to persecution during the last stage of its existence. Some readers may find areas of discussion that are not sufficiently explored, or may disagree with the author's conclusions. As with other scholarly endeavors, however, a main merit of this work is the way in which it instigates further investigation and fruitful discussion. Beyond this, Margaliot's book fills a void in the literature on the first stages of Nazi persecution. Its publication in Hebrew should be welcomed by historians and teachers of the Shoah; one hopes that the book will also be made available in English to a wider public. AVRAHAM BARKAI Kibbutz Lahavot Habashan

Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust 1941-1943. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. xvi + 320 pp.

In January 1943, Pierre Laval asked Mussolini's ambassador in Paris why the Italians were protecting foreign Jews. He could understand their interest in their own nationals; but why this interference in French domestic affairs? Why indeed? Since the end of the Second World War, this amazing story has often been told but never fully explained. Now Jonathan Steinberg of Trinity Hall, Cambridge has attempted to fill the gap. Steinberg divides his book into two parts, one dealing with "events" and the other with "explanations," each consisting of four chapters. In order to understand Italian behavior, he argues, "the historian has to consider the whole interconnectedness of the Second World War. Extermination of the Jews was not a random part of the Nazi war effort but its very heart and raison d'etre. To understand why these Jews survived is to grasp the essence of the war itself" (p. 5). During the first phase of the events under review (April 1941 to June 1942), the Italian occupiers in Yugoslavia had to cope with the unsystematic murder of Jews and Serbs by Croatian Fascists. Their reaction took the form of spontaneous opposition to barbarism; by September 1941, this opposition had crystallized into official policy. During the second phase (from June to November 1942), they were faced with systematic murder, i.e., Hitler's policy of genocide. At first they failed to grasp the true meaning of what the Germans called "resettlement" and "labor service." As late as November 1, 1942, Carabinieri General Giuseppe Pieche, who had been sent to Croatia to investigate the problem, recommended handing over the Jews to the Croatians for internment because that would rid the Italians of elements who were "the eyes and ears of London." But three days later he changed his tune, having meanwhile found out that the Croatian Jews deported from the German zone of occupation had been "eliminated" by means of toxic gas. In his next report to Rome (November 14, 1942), he urged the Foreign Ministry not to consign the Jews

226

Book Reviews

because it would be the equivalent of condemning them to death. Thus, the policy of obstructing Hitler's Final Solution in Italian-occupied Croatia began to take shape. During phase three (November 1942 to June 1943), the net widened: the Holocaust spread to Greece and France, prompting the Italians to extend their policy of obstruction to those countries. The Greeks and the French naturally exploited the clash between the two Axis partners for their own ends; the German Jewish affairs experts were predictably indignant at this open sabotage of the Final Solution, but Hitler refused to do anything about it. The last phase (July 25 to September 8, 1943), began with the fall of Mussolini and ended with Badoglio's surrender to the Allies, after which the Italians lost control of the situation and had to abandon the Jews to their fate. Why did the two allies inhabit "different moral universes" in their attitude toward Jews? The first part of Steinberg's answer is highly original: Italian aid to Jews was an outcome of the "general humanity" of a civilized people; but this primary virtue rested on a matrix of secondary vice (disobedience, corruption) that facilitated resistance to genocide. Conversely, German inhumanity rested on a matrix of secondary virtue (discipline, efficiency) that "trapped" the German bureaucrats and "made them accomplices and facilitators of the worst crime in human history" (pp. 169-170, 176). The humanitarian motives of the Italian rescuers were reinforced by political ones: "Protecting Jews made sense to those who spun schemes to extricate Italy from the Axis" (p. 169). The second part of Steinberg's "explanations" centers on the relationship between the two leaders. Hitler admired Mussolini and saw in him the sole guarantor of Italian loyalty to the Axis. Hence, as the Duce's position weakened, Hitler propped him up and tolerated the incompetence and treachery of his henchmen: "The Italian army could save Jews in part because Hitler let them" (p. 205). The third part of the "explanations" deals with the two armies. Unlike the Wehrmacht, the Regio Esercito was never gleichgeschaltet: loyalty to the Crown, to traditional values and to the inheritance of the Risorgimento insulated it from the Fascist regime. Italian officers "habitually used the language of Christian virtue" both in public and in private; German officers almost never did. In the entire file of the German armies in the Balkans, Steinberg found only one document in which the word "ethical" appeared. Thus, while Italian generals did their best to save Jewish lives, German generals willingly cooperated in Hitler's extermination policies: "The equation Jew-Bolshevik-Enemy made it difficult for German officers ... to act as their Italian colleagues did or even to understand their motives" (p. 239). Was the Italian army "philo-Semitic"? On this point Steinberg contradicts himself. On the one hand, he states that the protectors of the Jews "were no philo-Semites. . . Some of those same officers had sanctioned savage atrocities against the Ethiopians and Arabs." On the other hand, he affirms that the "traditional, liberal, masonic, philoSemitic culture of the Royal Italian Army provided a framework within which a conspiracy to save Jews from the Germans, French or Croatians would be applauded" (pp. 7, 240-241). The last part of the "explanations" concerns the differences between the German and Italian approaches to the "Jewish question." Steinberg accepts the prevailing

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

227

view that there was no such question in modern Italy: "Jews in Germany were certainly vulnerable in a way that Jews in Italy were not. They were prominent, numerous, identifiable, and concentrated. Italian Jews were almost literally the opposite. Germans had a set of attitudes and values which heightened imagined distinctions between Gentile and Jew; Italian values minimized them" (p. 240). Mussolini's conversion to the racial gospel was entirely due to his alliance with Hitler: "The Jews paid the dues for the regime's new association" (p. 226). In conclusion, the author stresses the contrast between Hitler's consistency of purpose ("all or nothing") and Mussolini's cynical opportunism: "Hitler never wavered in his determination to destroy Jewry. Mussolini never fixed his attention on anything for very long" (p. 243). Although the book is based on a wealth of published and unpublished material, there are some surprising omissions. The Jewish archives have been ignored and so have the researches of Andrew M. Canepa (on antisemitism in liberal Italy) and Klaus Voigt (on Jewish refugees in Fascist Italy). Some of the most important Italian documents have been overlooked, including those on the tug-of-war between the Ministry of the Interior and the Foreign Ministry over the Jewish issue. There are also a good many minor inaccuracies, of which two are worth mentioning. Cavallero never defined relations between Mussolini and Hitler as a "cordial friendship"; he merely quoted a statement by Hitler to this effect. And Ettore Ovazza did not take part in the punitive expedition against the Zionist weekly Israel. But whatever its shortcomings, All or Nothing is an important and original piece of research. It brings a new perspective to bear on every subject it deals with. No student of the Holocaust can afford to miss it. MEIR MICHAELIS The Hebrew University

Shulamit Volkov, Judisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und20. Jahrhundert. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990. 234 pp.

This anthology often essays that were originally published between 1974 and 1988 reinterprets antisemitism and Jewish life in Imperial Germany. The former, Volkov argues, constitutes a "cultural code" for conservative culture rather than a rehearsal for the Holocaust. Impatient with assumptions about continuities in antisemitism that are based on studies of ideas and stereotypes, Volkov insists on placing the subject in concrete social and political context. The key essay summarizes the findings of her 1978 monograph The Rise of Popular Antimodernism in Germany: The Urban Master Artisans, 1873-1896. The artisans, she maintains, made the transition from liberalism to conservatism by way of antisemitism. This phenomenon was based not so much on direct abhorrence of Jews as on their being linked with liberalism, socialism and capitalism—forces that artisans held responsible for their decline. Two accompanying articles examine the larger process by which antisemitism became a code for the defense of nationalist

228

Book Reviews

and preindustrial values against modernizing trends in Wilhelmian Germany and contemporary France. Volkov concludes that pre-Nazi antisemitism had little to do with actual hatred for the Jews. As a symbol within a written culture, it was a substitute rather than a preparation for action. Hence it ought to be distinguished in fundamental ways from the deadly serious Judeophobia of the Nazis. Volkov's analysis of the distinguishing characteristics of antisemitism in Imperial Germany does much to clarify the complex relationship between the masses of "ordinary" antisemites and anti-Jewish leaders and spokesmen. As postwar events were to demonstrate, the traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes contained in the "code" were extremely dangerous precisely because they led many Germans to mistake parts of Hitler's message for the relatively harmless manifestations of earlier antisemitism. Indeed, what makes this trio of essays important and compelling is what they imply about Nazi exploitation of anti-Jewish themes. Historians of the Weimar years have found that widespread "moderate" antisemitism among Germans fell far short of the Hitlerian ideal and forced the Nazis to fudge their racist message; it is no longer tenable to argue that popular animosity toward the Jews was a major source of National Socialist success. However, Volkov is less successful in her treatment of the leading antisemites of the Second Reich. Her preoccupation with the social functions of antisemitism leads her to underestimate efforts by anti-Jewish spokesmen to articulate one or another practical solution to the "Jewish problem." A distinction needs to be made as well between them and the Nazis, since most of the Second Reich antisemites wanted the Jews hobbled by special laws or else fully assimilated. Only the lunatic fringe argued for expulsion, or, rarely, something worse. Two related essays reveal as much about Volkov's views on contemporary politics as about the history of antisemitism. Decrying efforts to equate all forms of antiZionism with antisemitism, Volkov holds that the important left-wing critique of Zionism, although seriously flawed, should be understood as a cultural code for anticolonialism and antimilitarism. At any rate, it must not be allowed to justify maintaining a garrison state in Israel. She is equally troubled by attempts to politicize the history of Zionism. From time to time, she states, illiberal forces have sought to deflect Jewish nationalism from its generous original vision, most recently by identifying Zionism with radical rejection of Western civilization. Volkov takes her stand against such misuses of history by the Israeli Right. The issue of tension between Jewish assimilation and dissimilation in nineteenthcentury Germany dominates the remaining essays. Volkov is more inclined than many historians to recognize the high level of acculturation achieved by German Jewry and the very considerable integration of Jews into German society. She is equally cognizant of the limits set on that integration by the hostility and exclusiveness of the host society and by the Jews' tendency to elaborate their own distinct social structures and nontraditional intimate culture. Drawing upon social history and borrowing the concept of "negative integration" from historians of the German workers' movement, Volkov argues that the Jews gradually became integrated into German society as individuals but not as a group. They leaped ahead of the bulk of the educated bourgeoisie in limiting family size, providing higher education for daughters as well as for sons, and stressing women's domestic role. Volkov also

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

229

minimizes the friction between "German citizens of the Jewish faith" and newlyarrived Eastern Jews, maintaining that the latter boosted the former's Jewish consciousness by reminding them of their not-so-distant origins. Antisemitism's role in determining Jewish dissimilation is imaginatively explored in Volkov's inquiry into the sources of outstanding Jewish success in science. Here, traditional explanations based on the supposed results of systematic Jewish religious education and the "creative skepticism" of an outsider group get short shrift. Few Jewish scientists came from religious milieus, and still fewer doubted their integration into the German scientific community. And yet, Volkov avers, discrimination against them was actually an advantage. Forced to spend much of their university careers at lower academic ranks, Jewish scientists were spared the kinds of pressure placed on full professors to become generalists and were able to specialize. Moreover, since they were often stranded at provincial universities, they were relatively remote from pressures to conform that emanated from the center, and hence free to try new things. Even here, among secularized and "assimilated" Jews, centrifugal and centripetal forces interacted in ways that forged vital and impressive new syntheses between German and Jewish culture. Volkov's concluding essay reexamines the myth of widespread "Jewish selfhatred" in German-speaking Central Europe. It really ought to be called "Jewish self-criticism," she maintains, although some Jews mistook it for treason. In fact, criticism of Jews by Jews was not intended to be destructive but rather was aimed at making its objects better Jews and better Germans. Volkov thinks there was only one authentic self-hating Jew, Franz Kafka, and he was unique. More nearly representative examples associated with the genre, including Walter Rathenau and Theodor Lessing, are best regarded as reformers and ethical philosophers who saw deeply into the problematic character of Jewish life in Germany. This essay typifies Volkov's determination to transcend traditional (but now rather quaint) debates between Zionists and liberal assimilationists. That, and the synoptic and interpretive strengths evident in this collection, identify her as one of the most thoughtful members of the post-Holocaust generation of Jewish historians. DONALD L. NIEWYK Southern Methodist University

Samuel Willenberg, Surviving Treblinka, ed. Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, trans. Naftali Greenwood. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 210 pp.

Treblinka was one of the three "Operation Reinhard" death camps in Poland (along with Belzec and Sobibor), where more than 1,700,000 Jews were murdered during a mere nineteen months. Treblinka itself existed for just over a year, from the summer of 1942 until the summer of 1943. The 1943 revolts and escapes from Treblinka (August 2) and Sobibor (October 14) are two of the most dramatic resistance stories of the Holocaust. Yet drama aside, these three camps were places of no return. We count the survivors of Sobibor and Treblinka in the few dozens, while we know of

230

Book Reviews

only two survivors of Belzec, only one of whom managed to give testimony. This has meant that until approximately a decade ago, our very limited knowledge of these camps was based mostly upon the German perspective provided in Nazi documents. These sources generally reached a small audience of German readers, followers of German war crimes trials and Holocaust scholars. Among the few published works in English, Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness is perhaps the best known, while Yankel Wiernik's brief work published by the Polish underground in 1944, Rok w Treblince, and translated shortly thereafter as A Year in Treblinka, is the first known memoir.1 During the last decade, there have been six significant contributions to our knowledge of these camps, all of which have reached much wider audiences. These include Yitzhak Arad's The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, the relevant entries in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Richard Rashke's memoir, Escape from Sobibor and the feature-length film dramatization of the same title, and Claude Lanzmann's remarkable film Shoah (1985).2 To this we should add the widespread publicity given the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk in Jerusalem in 1987. The book under review is an important addition to the literature on these camps. Among the increasing number of Holocaust survivor memoirs published in recent years, Willenberg's is the first detailed, book-length survivor account of Treblinka in English. The author was born in Czestochowa, lived for a time in Warsaw and was deported to Treblinka in October 1942 from Opatow, where he had been hiding. Polish (not Yiddish) was his native tongue and this, together with his not particularly Jewish appearance, enabled him to spend a good part of the war years posing as a Pole. The fact that his mother was not Jewish and had a birth certificate identifying her as Maniefa Popow, a Belorussian of Russian Orthodox faith, gave him a ready false identity. Although mixed marriages were hardly a widespread phenomenon among Polish Jews and the children of such marriages often did not strongly identify themselves as Jews, Willenberg seems to have had a very deeply felt Jewish consciousness. Similarly, his non-Jewish mother seems to have had an abiding sense of shared destiny with Jews. The book begins and ends abruptly, presented in the form of a rather contrived flashback from Holocaust Memorial Day in Tel-Aviv. Abruptness is the hallmark of Willenberg's style. At times, this style can be confusing and annoying to the reader, but it also provides many of the book's most poignant insights into daily life in the camp, as when the author offers shocking juxtapositions of the mundane or even beautiful with the horrible. His description of the grisly tranquility of one of the innumerable shootings at the "Lazarett"—the infirmary facade hiding the pit into which the ill were shot and where the corpses were burned—is just one example: As a sick prisoner was taken down by the sandbank, the Ukrainian guard, seated in a chair on the raised area by the pile of burning corpses, got up lazily, shuffled down the hill, loaded his rifle placidly, warmed his hands over the corpses and ordered the sick man to be laid on the ground. Gently he raised the rifle and aimed it at the victim's head, at a distance of several centimetres. . . (p. 99). In another instance, Willenberg describes how a trainload of dead Jews arrived from Siedlce, some sixty kilometers from the camp. The Jews had tried to resist and

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

231

had all been shot before transport, their possessions sold to the local peasants. The inmates at Treblinka were ordered to carry the bodies at a run to the Lazarett for burning. Of this incident, Willenberg writes: "Overhead I saw a lovely autumn morning, illuminated with a warm sun, and at my feet, a mounting heap of corpses. . ." The work was exhausting and many began to slow down after a while. They were beaten for moving too slowly, or for no reason at all. Willenberg notes that "some selected children's bodies; these weighed less and improved one's chances of avoiding further beatings. . . Here's what we've come to: looking for children's corpses to make things easier for ourselves" (p. 67). Willenberg succeeds in giving the reader a picture of daily life in the lower camp (as opposed to the separate upper camp, where the gas chambers were situated), including the roll calls, various jobs performed by inmates, daily murders and severe beatings, and the inner concerns of the inmates. Acquiring adequate food and clothing and avoiding beatings or the Lazarett occupied much of the prisoners' thoughts, while Willenberg himself seems to have engaged in many philosophical discussions on the meaning of the events of which they were a part. The roles of the various work groups are described as well: the "reds" who carted corpses and drugged, weakened Jews to the Lazarett, the "blues," who sorted the belongings of the gassed victims, the "Goldjuden," who collected the victims' valuables and dressed like bankers, and the "Tarnungskommando," which was assigned the task of camouflaging the camp. The author himself worked in several different groups. Willenberg recalls people in the camp in great detail, especially his fellow inmates. Most of these people did not survive, and his descriptions and accounts of their experiences and feelings serve as their only epitaph, granting them the human dignity the camp was meant to deny. The reader becomes familiar with Alfred Boehm, one of the underground leaders, Galewski, the camp elder, Willenberg's former teacher Professor Merring, the Protestant minister of Jewish origin, and others. He also remembers many of the camp's SS personnel, and he describes their physical appearance and character in considerable detail. Kurt Franz, nicknamed "Lalka" by the prisoners, was tall, athletic and vicious. August Miete, the "Angel of Death," had crooked feet and a moustache. "Fessele" was a fat SS man with a bulldog face, Sidow was short and stumpy, and so on. By contrast, his recollections of the Ukrainian guards, with whom he came in more regular contact and who were far more numerous than the Germans, are less detailed, and few of them are named. In general, the Ukrainians in the camp are described as less-than-human brutes: "The dispassionate murder of Jews was their great joy in life. Their cheeks sprouted wispy blond hair; they had the foreheads of beasts, and their every feature burned with hate. Their faces were wholly devoid of even a glitter of sense or humanity. . ." (p. 57). Willenberg was not an early member of the camp underground. This is clear from the fact that he was not privy to underground information, even from his close friend Alfred, until shortly before the uprising. This calls into question the emphasis Willenberg places on his activities on the day of the uprising. His subsequent heroics in Warsaw during the Polish uprising and in later partisan battles seem similarly exaggerated.

232

Book Reviews

Apart from its self-centered nature (common to most memoirs), a number of features detract from this book's effectiveness. Willenberg relates lengthy conversations in the camp in quotation marks, as if to suggest that he is in possession of transcripts. In addition, the contents of some of these conversations are most improbable. For example, Professor Merring, who was from Czestochowa, expounds at great length on the nature of the Jewish police and the Judenrat in the Warsaw ghetto in terms that reflect later research and commentary (pp. 129-130). The author would have served his subject better had he rendered his lengthiest conversations and monologues as paraphrases and had he reduced his numerous intrusions of obvious postwar knowledge. This reviewer also would have appreciated some information on Willenberg's life before and after the war. What was his family like? Where did they live? In what activities did they engage? Who were their friends? Did Willenberg marry Hanka, his Polish girlfriend during the last months of the war? What did he do after the war? One puts down this book with a very incomplete picture of Samuel Willenberg, a figure not fully in context. Naftali Greenwood's translation from the 1986 Hebrew version (itself a translation from Polish) is excellent.3 The slight modifications and changes in chapter headings have not changed the essence of the memoir, while the English is no less readable than the Hebrew, and perhaps even more so. The book also includes a useful glossary and a sketched map of Treblinka, drawn by Willenberg (which differs considerably from that of historian Yitzhak Arad in his above-cited book). Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, the son of the famous historian, has provided a lengthy introduction whose main section, relating the history of Treblinka, is most useful and informative. One of the many noteworthy points in this section concerns the low rank of the camp commanders, Dr. Irmfried Eberl and his successor, Franz Stangl (lieutenants when appointed). Other camps' commanders held similar ranks, all of which is food for thought regarding the nature and qualities of the murderers. This background section on Treblinka is sandwiched between two smaller, weaker sections: a simplistic overview of the Holocaust and a very apologetic five pages on Polish-Jewish relations. If only the extortionists, denouncers, murderers and indifferent were as unrepresentative as Bartoszewski would like us to believe, and the Council for Aid to Jews (Zegota) as popular a phenomenon as he implies. Willenberg's experiences led him to very negative conclusions regarding Polish attitudes toward Jews during the Holocaust. Bartoszewski correctly cautions the reader to understand these as one man's opinion. But many other survivors have the same views. In the final analysis, the book's overriding virtue—its insight into a little-known yet central aspect of the Holocaust—makes it very worthwhile reading. DAVID SlLBERKLANG

The Hebrew University

Notes 1. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London: 1974); Yankel Wiernik, A Year in Treblinka (New York: 1944). See also Alexander Donat, ed., The

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

233

Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary (New York: 1979); Miriam Novitch, ed., Sobibor— Martyrdom and Revolt: Documents and Testimonies (New York: 1980); and Michael Tregenza, "Belzec Death Camp," Wiener Library Bulletin 30 (1977), 8-25. 2. Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: 1987); Israel Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: 1990); Richard Rashke, Escape from Sobibor (Boston: 1982). 3. Shmuel Willenberg, Mered Bitreblinka (Tel-Aviv: 1986).

Robert Wistrich, (ed.), Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary World. London: Macmillan, 1990. x + 213 pp.

Most of the essays in this collection were prepared in the mid-1980s for a conference (the date of which is never specified but it probably was around 1985) on antiZionism and antisemitism in the modern world sponsored by the Institute of Jewish Affairs in London, the International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Program for the Study of Political Extremism and Antisemitism at Tel-Aviv University. Sponsors of this conference hoped to shed light on the subject of how anti-Zionism is often no more than a cover for antisemitism throughout the world. The contributing essayists in this volume have fulfilled that goal. Robert S. Wistrich invited an international group of noted scholars, had them write up their conference presentations and then edited the collection for publication in 1990. Although the Communists have fallen in the former Soviet Union and world conditions are now significantly altered, the insights provided here are still valuable. Most of the writers have summarized their areas of expertise for these brief essays, and for a novice the collection provides a useful introduction to the subject. Four of the essays deal with Europe (two on the Soviet Union alone), six with the Moslem and Arab worlds and the other five with Christian churches, American blacks and their views of Israel, and anti-Zionism in the West. Particularly strong are Zvi Gitelman's piece on the Soviet Union and Natan Lerner's on Latin America. The authors point out that anti-Zionism has more to do with the political realities in any given society at a particular time than it does with some deeply held ideology. They are also aware that antisemitism predates any of the current world problems and stems more from religious teachings than any particular event. More attention might have been paid to historic and contemporary Christian attitudes, although the brief essay on the subject by Norman Solomon is quite enlightening. The authors are apparently all Jewish, pro-Israel and unified in their beliefs that anti-Zionism is in fact a form of antisemitism. Thus Yehuda Bauer: "anti-Zionism today is very largely another way of propagating antisemitism" (p. 207). This shared point of view limits the value of the collection. Not that I wish to appear antiZionist, but some effort should have been made (perhaps it was and was unsuccessful) to include the writings of some scholars who are anti-Zionists and who might have provided different insights on the subject. To prepare another collection de-

234

Book Reviews

fending Israel's right to exist and attacking the fallacious and prejudicial thoughts of anti-Zionists, and to present an almost unanimous point of view about the limitations of those who want to delegitimize Israel, does not greatly advance the understanding of the horrendous conflicts that have existed in the Middle East during the past half century. LEONARD DINNERSTEIN University of Arizona

History and Social Sciences

Michel Abitbol, The Jews of North Africa During the Second World War, trans. Catherine Tihany Zentelis. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989. 212 pp.

This is a very welcome and readable translation of Michel Abitbol's important work Les Juifs d'Afrique du Nord sous Vichy (1983), which I reviewed in Volume 3 of this annual. 1 The title of the English rendering is actually a more accurate reflection of the book's contents than the original French title, since Abitbol surveys the experience of Maghrebi Jewry from the years immediately preceding the Vichy regime through those immediately following it. Each of the Jewish communities of the French Maghreb underwent somewhat different wartime experiences, and Abitbol deals with each separately. He is most successful in his accounts of Algerian and Tunisian Jewry because of the greater amount of printed sources available on them, including the valuable memoirs of several Algerian and Tunisian communal leaders that appeared shortly after the liberation. He paints a poignant picture of the Maghreb Jews' steadfast loyalty to la Patrie adoptee and their unshakable illusion that all of the persecution that was being inflicted upon them was imposed by the Nazis and really did not emanate from Petain's government. When Abitbol's book first appeared in 1983, it represented the first significant step in filling in a vacuum in modern Jewish history, and it was a pioneer effort at a preliminary synthesis. Since that time, there have been a number of important studies in English, French and Hebrew that complement Abitbol's work and in some instances challenge some of his specific hypotheses and conclusions, although certainly not his overall perspective. Among these studies are those of Gitta Amipaz-Silber, David Cohen, Michael Laskier and this reviewer. For some reason, it was decided not to include the documentary appendix of the original edition in the English translation. This is regrettable, since the nine items in the original were well-chosen and very revealing documents. This, however, is a minor quibble, and it should be noted that Abitbol's narrative is generously interspersed with extended quotations from his sources. It is good to see Abitbol's stimulating and valuable survey available to a wider audience. NORMAN A. STILLMAN State University of New York at Binghamton 235

236

Book Reviews

Note 1. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 3, Jews and Other Ethnic Groups in a MultiEthnic World, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York and Oxford: 1987), 239-240.

Joelle Allouche-Benayoun and Doris Bensimon, Juifs d'Algerie hier et aujourd'hui: Memoires et identites. Toulouse: Bibliotheque historique Privat, 1989. 290 pp.

Prior to the long and bloody Algerian revolution, there were about 140,000 Jews living in Algeria. Most of them were part of the indigenous population but were also French citizens, thanks to the Cremieux Decree of 1870. Today, in independent Muslim Algeria, only about three hundred, mostly elderly, Jews remain. Like so many other Jewries, that of Algeria is a historical memory. This book is one attempt at recording that memory. The book grew out of the authors' involvement in the Histoire orale des Juifs de France project of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). It is based upon interviews with thirty Jewish informants—both male and female and mostly over sixty years of age—who were born in Algeria and now reside in France, some of them being members of the writers' own families. In addition to these oral sources, the authors drew upon published historical works, demographic studies, autobiographies and novels written by Algerian Jews that are set in the recent past. (There is a considerable and growing body of novels of this sort by Jewish emigres from Arab countries—particularly in French, and to a lesser extent in Hebrew and English—and they deserve to be studied both as an ancillary historical source and as a genre.) The book is divided into four parts, each of which is subdivided into chapters. Part One (pp. 9-58) comprises a brief historical survey in the French sociohistorical mold with a number of useful statistical charts and tables. Part Two (pp. 59-178), which is the longest section of the work, deals with the reminiscences of the informants on their daily life—customs, rituals, cuisine, folk beliefs, interpersonal and interconfessional relations. This is by far the most original and most valuable part of the book, and it is an important supplement to the ethnographic literature. Part Three (pp. 179-222), which is entitled "Facing History," deals all too briefly with important but painful topics of colonial antisemitism, the Second World War experience and the Algerian Revolution. The chapter on the Second World War relies heavily on Michel Ansky's Les Juifs d'Algerie (1950) and makes too little use of Michel Abitbol's more up-to-date and historically analytical book Les Juifs d'Afrique du Nord sous Vichy (1983). It reflects official French Jewish and Algerian thinking on the subject and makes no attempt at a critical assessment that would delve beneath the surface of this ugly period. The chapter on the Algerian War, by contrast, is somewhat more reflective. Part Four (pp. 225-257) deals with the exodus of Algerian Jewry and its transplantation in France. Only a little more than two pages are given over to a discussion of the small number of Algerian Jews who made aliyah and the relations between

History and Social Sciences

237

Franco-Algerian Jewry and the Jewish state. The last two pages of this section are on the Sephardism of Algerian Jewry in the context of the current French Jewish resurgence. There are several useful appendixes in this volume: a brief biographical note on each of the informants, a combined glossary and index of Hebrew, Arabic and Judeo-Arabic terms, and a chronological table synchronizing Algerian Jewish history with general history from antiquity to 1962 (the year of Algerian independence) in two parallel columns. There are also a sketch map, some good photographs and a bibliography arranged by general subject headings. Like so many works published in France, the bibliography totally ignores anything written in languages other than French, which is unfortunate, since there are some significant pieces of historical, anthropological and sociological research in English and Hebrew on this topic. A definitive history of Algerian Jewry (and indeed of Moroccan and Tunisian Jewry) remains to be written. In the meantime, this new book is a valuable addition to the literature. NORMAN A. STILLMAN State University of New York at Binghamton

Mordechai Altshuler, The Jews of the Eastern Caucasus: The History of the "Mountain Jews" from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi and the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University, 1990. 663 pp.

Mordechai Altshuler's book deals with some of the most exotic and least known of the diaspora communities. Geographic location, distance from the major Jewish centers, language barriers and above all the paucity of well-documented sources have combined to create an image of a Jewish community shrouded in myth and legend. Altshuler's huge study is a first-rate contribution that dispels many of the myths. In sheer size it is an impressive accomplishment. The text and appendixes run to more than six hundred and sixty pages, supplemented by an exhaustive bibliography. Moreover, a special chapter is devoted to the description and analysis of the bibliography and the different sources used for the study that are available for further research. A detailed index is also provided. Altshuler's book, while billed as a "history of the mountain Jews from the beginning of the nineteenth century," is much more than an ordinary book of history. While the general approach is historical, only the first part is devoted to a survey of the history of this ancient Jewish community. The author investigates the origins of the Jewish presence in the region and then proceeds to a detailed history of the community up to the present. Large sections of the book deal in depth with various aspects of the life and culture of the mountain Jews. They numbered about twenty thousand in 1897 and, according to Altshuler, about fifty thousand today. Yet despite their small size they developed an idiosyncratic and fascinating culture and way of life. Altshuler devotes special chapters to the study of family and

238

Book Reviews

community leadership and the leaders' unique role in maintaining community unity. Detailed chapters deal with the cultural and educational life of the Mountain Jews and their special language—Tati-Jewish. Their longstanding ties with the land of Israel and Zionism also receive their proper place in the study. In short, Altshuler's work is a reference book of the highest value for scholar and layman alike. It fills a lacuna in the existing historiography and will remain the fundamental work on this subject for many years to come. B. PINCHUK University of Haifa

Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. xii + 286 pp.

This is one of those rare books that may be even more important than their authors think. In Troubled Waters, Michael Aronson undertakes to reexamine the widely accepted view that an antisemitic conspiracy was responsible for the pogroms in 1881 in southern Russia. However, the implications of this study apply as well to broader issues. The pogroms, as is well known, played a critical role in the development of Jewish nationalism in the Russian empire; and the claim that they were instigated by the regime touches on basic questions concerning the nature of antisemitism in Tsarist Russia. Moreover, while attention has been given to the rise in Jewish nationalism after the pogroms of 1881, far less has been made of the fact that assimilation and Russification continued almost unabated after and despite the pogroms. Aronson makes this process, and much more, understandable. Various suggestions have been made as to the identity of the conspirators. The main suspects have been the Tsar himself or the government leadership, elements in the government or provincial governors, the Holy Brotherhood (a secret conservative organization) and the radical Left. Aronson examines each possibility and finds that none of these "suspects" was responsible. Rather, he claims, the pogroms were not planned by anyone. In the summer of 1881, there was higher than average unemployment in the South of Russia because of crop failures and an industrial depression. The assassination of Alexander II, in which a Jewish woman was involved, aroused popular fears. Moreover, during the period of official mourning no entertainment was sanctioned. When rumors spread among the restless population that there was a directive from the new Tsar to beat the Jews, many were quick to respond. Once the disorders began, it was clear that neither the authorities nor the police were prepared to deal with them. The uncertain official response to the first pogroms was interpreted in some circles as approval—and this, in turn, stimulated additional pogroms. It took time for government officials to realize the seriousness of the situation and clamp down; most of them, Aronson argues, were in fact opposed to the violence because it went against their own interests. Aronson's introduction is a useful critical survey of the historiography of the pogroms. Surprisingly little has been written on the historiography of East European

History and Social Sciences

239

Jewish history, even though most Jewish historians have possessed a strong ideological interest in their subjects. Aronson's introduction addresses this point and shows how ideology can color the writing of history. The book itself is divided into three parts. In the first, "The Historical Background," Aronson concisely but lucidly places the pogroms in context. He gives a clear description of the role of Jews in the economic life of the Russian empire and describes the changing situation of the nonJewish populations in the pogrom regions. The descriptions of the pogroms themselves are objective and informative and, in a sense, very detached. The text is interrupted by a seven-page table (which really belongs in an appendix) that lists all the disorders and pogroms. The bulk of the book consists of an analysis of the government attitudes toward the pogroms. Aronson effectively explains many of the constraints limiting government activity both before and afterwards. The same liberalism of Alexander II that granted more freedom to the press also enabled some elements of the press to preach antisemitism. Aronson also belies some of the myths related to agitation in the press by showing that many of the calls for a Jewish bloodletting attributed to the press never existed. In an ironic way, the same pattern of rumormongering that contributed to the pogroms also characterized the Jews' later assignment of guilt to the press and the government. The examination of responses by local authorities leads to similar surprises. Much of the "gentle" treatment of the rioters derived from a lack of forces to repress them and a real concern that a harsh response might trigger even more violence. One can argue about the wisdom of such a response, but it is a far cry from a planned conspiracy to "get" the Jews. The last two chapters deal with the Holy Brotherhood and the revolutionary socialists. It turns out that the former group was not involved at all in the antisemitic violence; it is not even clear how antisemitic it was, if at all. The full presentation of responses of socialists to the pogroms clarifies both their political dilemma and their efforts to find a way out. Aronson has worked carefully. Exaggeration is a characteristic common among revisionists. While Aronson is out to rewrite history, he does not fall into the trap of overestimating the scope of philosemitism. His claims are also well substantiated by a variety of sources. After the revolution, state archives in Russia were searched in order to discover material that would further blacken the Tsarist regime. Nothing was found to contradict Aronson's thesis. While closed archives are now being opened, it is highly unlikely that new material will surface to challenge his basic points. Troubled Waters is not always easy to read. The necessity to refute a widely held hypothesis sometimes leads the author, perhaps unavoidably, to repetitions and to complicated presentations of counterarguments. However, this is a very important study that will be required reading for anyone interested in the history of Jews in Eastern Europe, the history of antisemitism, Jewish historiography and East European history in general. SHAUL STAMPFER The Hebrew University

240

Book Reviews

Esther Benbassa, Un Grand Rabbin Sepharade en politique 1892-1923. France: Presses du CNRS, 1990. 261 pp.

Esther Benbassa belongs to the generation of younger scholars who have brought a breath of fresh air to Jewish studies in France. Based at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), she concentrates her research on aspects of the history of the Jews in the Balkans and the Ottoman empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Together with Aron Rodrigue, she has written on Jewish artisanship in late-nineteenth century Turkey1; she has also published on aspects of the relationship between Ottoman Jewry and Zionism before the First World War and the problematics of the relationship between occidental and oriental Judaism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Her doctoral dissertation, presented to the Universite de Paris III in 1987, was devoted to Haim Nahoum, the last Chief Rabbi of the Ottoman empire3; the work under review here is apparently based on her doctoral research. The format of the present volume was determined, to no small extent, by the fact that it comprises part of a series published by CNRS entitled "singulierpluriel." The rationale of the series is the marriage of material written in the first person by historically significant individuals with background commentary by contemporary scholars, which is aimed at placing the source material in its historical context. Thus, our volume is divided into two distinct parts. The first, entitled simply "Introduction," comprises slightly more than fifty pages of text that is devoted to a scholarly biography of Haim Nahoum. The second, comprising some 170 pages, is entitled "Correspondence," and includes a number of letters written by Nahoum to leaders of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris between January 1892 and January 1922. Most of the letters (more than seventy percent of them) relate to the period before January 1908, the year that Nahoum was finally elected Haham Bashi (Chief Rabbi) of the Ottoman empire; after that, his correspondence with Paris seems to have slackened dramatically. All along, one gains the impression that his great interest in the Alliance was not unrelated to his belief that the organization would be supportive of his tireless efforts to advance his own career. Which brings me to the central point I want to raise here—the significance and importance of Haim Nahoum's correspondence with the Alliance. Historical research is based, of course, on primary sources. Usually, however, the sources themselves are not published by the researcher, who chooses instead to survey the wide array of material available, analyze their content and import and present in an article or monograph a synthetic overview of the facts and their significance. This is what Benbassa does in her introduction to the volume, which is (primarily) a succinct version of her dissertation. For the primary sources themselves to be published, they must have a significance and interest far exceeding the analytic and synthetic possibilities of any one researcher. I must say that Haim Nahoum's letters to the Alliance are not at all of such caliber. Rather, Nahoum comes across as a rather shallow, self-centered individual, with a pedestrian "Enlightenment" view of cultural and social realities and a complete lack of empathy for persons and attitudes with which he disagrees. In consequence, his observations and

History and Social Sciences

241

analyses are unperceptive and unoriginal—all the more so, as their main focus of concern is the implications of current developments for the advancement of his own career and status. That being the quality of the correspondence, the raison d'etre of the volume under review eludes me: whatever the general merits of the dual format of the series "singulierpluriel," the choice of this particular corpus of first-person material seems unjustified. Over and above this very basic critique, however, the texts themselves seem to be insufficiently "introduced" by Benbassa; she seems to have decided to rely on her introduction for that purpose and to minimize comments on any specific letter. Thus, quite a few letters receive only brief, one-line comments such as "The synagogue—a strategic place" (p. 81); "A brief respite along the road to power"—introducing a letter in which Nahoum informs the Alliance of the birth of a son (p. 122); "The community leadership—a bastion of tradition" (p. 127); and so on. To my mind, such cryptic captions add virtually nothing to the reader's understanding of the text and seem to have been tacked on pro forma to affirm the presence of a redactor. Finally, there remain questions concerning the corpus of texts and the verisimilitude of the correspondence presented to us in this volume. First, regarding the corpus: all the letters in this volume are identified as originating in one file of the Alliance archives, i.e., AAIU, Turquie, XXX. E. Are there no other files in the archives that contain correspondence of Haim Nahoum? And have absolutely all letters by Nahoum that do appear in this one file been published here; or has the editor omitted some? This brings us to the second question regarding the text before us. On page 12, in an "n.b.," we are told that "The letters of Haim Nahoum have practically not been retouched . . . " except for slight matters of spelling and French usage." It may well be the case that what we have before us has not been revised; but it is plain that much has been omitted: many letters are interspersed with ellipses indicating (unless Nahoum had an idiosyncratically strange style) that words, sentences or (perhaps) paragraphs have been edited out of the letter. What has been left out and what were the editorial considerations involved? The editor has not enlightened us on these matters, and thus we have no way of knowing without actually checking the originals in the Alliance archives. My own high regard for Esther Benbassa's research achievements leads me to wonder why it is that she agreed to have her findings published in the inappropriate format provided by this particular series of the CNRS. One can surmise various answers to this question; nevertheless, Benbassa's doctoral research should not have been allowed to be thus eclipsed by Nahoum's letters. It would have been better had she published her findings as a reworked, fully documented version of her doctorate. As it is, what we have is an all-too-condensed and only semidocumented version of her doctoral thesis appended as an introduction to a corpus of shallow, rather conventional letters by Haim Nahoum that in no way merit publication in their own right. In sum, what one would like to read is much less of Nahoum, and much more of Benbassa. Zvi ZOHAR Hartman Institute The Hebrew University

242

Book Reviews

Notes 1. Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, "L'artisanat juif en Turquie a la fin du 19e siecle; 1'Alliance israelite universelle et ses oeuvres d'apprentissage," Turcica 17 (1985) 113-126. 2. See, for example, Esther Benbassa, "Presse d'Istanbul et de Salonique au service du sionisme (1908-1914), Revue historique 560 (oct.-dec. 1986) 337-365, and idem, "Israel face a lui-meme; judaisme occidental et judaisme ottoman (XIX-XXe siecles)," Pardes 7 (1988) 105-129. 3. Esther Benbassa, Haim Nahoum Efendi, dernier grand rabbin de I'Empire ottoman (1908-1920): son rolepolitique et diplomatique, (Ph.D. diss., Universite de Paris III, 1987).

Annie Benveniste, Le Bosphore a la Roquette: La Communaute Judeo-Espagnole a Paris (1914-1940). Paris: Editions 1'Harmattan, 1989. 184 pp.

La Roquette, a working-class district in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris, has absorbed French provincial and foreign migrants since the nineteenth century. Among these migrants from the early twentieth century until the Second World War was a Judeo-Spanish population from Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. In 1936, some 2,600 persons of Judeo-Spanish descent, about five percent of La Roquette's population, lived in a space bounded by four streets. Today, the Judeo-Spanish people of La Roquette comprise the poorer segment of Sephardic immigrants to Paris, the more wealthy ones choosing to live in other districts of the capital. There is much research in the general field of French Jewry, but little work has been done on the Jewish population of specific districts and towns. The chief merit of this book is the author's successful use of various sources for this kind of research. In her survey of this microcommunity, Annie Benveniste, a sociologist and university teacher in Paris, combines documentary research with a selection of interviews. Though there is no existing archive of the Judeo-Spanish community of La Roquette, some relevant material does exist in the archives of the Consistory of Paris. After discovering the names list in the official census of the population for the years 1926, 1931 and 1936, Benveniste used an onomastic method that combined family names, first names and places of birth in order to reconstruct the entire Judeo-Spanish immigrant population that lived in the four streets forming the "Oriental" subdistrict of La Roquette. Moreover, she compares these data with that of firms located in the same places, which purchased licenses. Such a method could be profitably used on a larger scale for sociodemographic research on the Jewish population of Paris—and eventually other towns—of the interwar period. The compilation of life histories among the immigrants, who are today quite aged, was far from easy. "There is nothing to say about Turkish people," was the usual response of those interviewed. These people were also survivors of the Shoah; most of the Judeo-Spanish population of La Roquette perished during the deportation. Judiciously combining written documents, statistical data and life histories, Benveniste describes migration paths and integration processes in the district, and

History and Social Sciences

243

among French Jewry and society as a whole. Most of those interviewed said they had not been exiled from the Ottoman empire but had made their way to the West for cultural and economic reasons. Some men, however, admitted that they wanted to avoid Turkish national service; although the same men or their children enlisted as volunteers in the French army during the 1914-1918 period and particularly the 1939-1940 period. Family solidarity played an important role in the reception of the Judeo-Spanish. This migratory movement lasted many decades: close or distant relations helped the newcomers to find housing and work. Benveniste analyzes the socioeconomic structure of this population, 50 percent of which was employed in trade. According to the census data, "trade" comprised a variety of activities undertaken by wholesalers, peddlers and door-to-door salesmen. Some Judeo-Spanish people of La Roquette were shopkeepers; but most of the "traders" were peddlers. Benveniste's precise analysis points to the precariousness of making a living among this immigrant population. Young people as well as women often had to work in order to fill in the gap. Women worked most often at sewing and the manufacture of clothing; but they also quickly became office employees. This salaried work contrasted with the Oriental tradition of activities appropriate for women. Within their district, the Judeo-Spanish founded communal, cultural and institutional organizations, aided by the Consistory and Sephardim living in the wealthier districts. But today, their distinctive ethnic identity has all but vanished. Moreover, most of those who survived the Shoah and who achieved socioeconomic integration into French society eventually left this working-class district. During the interwar period, most French Jews were Ashkenazim. Since the end of the 1960s, Sephardim have become the majority. But these more recent arrivals are of North African origin, such that the Judeo-Spanish immigrants are now a minority even among the Sephardim. Benveniste succeeds in restoring the broken memory of this community, although her monograph—as is characteristic of this kind of research—refers only briefly to the relations between the Judeo-Spanish community of La Roquette and their Ashkenazic co-neighbors. This research focuses on the 1914-1940 period. One can only wonder what the current relations are between the Judeo-Spanish immigrants from Turkey and the Jewish immigrants from North Africa. DORIS BENSIMON Universite de Caen INALCO, Paris

Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry. New York: Basic Books, 1990. 277 pp.

Paul Breines' thesis is clear enough: today's Jews have bought into a philosophy of toughness that is the diametrical opposite of their traditional image of passivity. This polar position may provide Jews with a sense of control, but it also limits their

244

Book Reviews

options on the world stage. Breines' negative reading of "toughness" provides an interesting twist to this argument. There has been a rather striking literature since Yehuda Bauer's The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness (1979) that has discussed, usually in positive terms, the new direction in Jewish history since the Shoah in terms of the acquisition and use of power. Like Bauer, Breines places the desire for toughness at the same moment in time and place in history as the rise of the reaction to acculturation, the latter half of the nineteenth century. Citing Max Nordau's well-known call for "Jews with muscles," Breines sees the Jew's body and spirit as the locus for the debate about the place of the Jew in modern culture. What is most valuable about Breines' book is his cataloging of the comprehensive American fantasy about the tough Jew and the resultant need for American Jews to identify with the purported strengths of the new "tough Jew," the Israeli. Breines presents an intelligent and intuitive reading of "Jewish spy novels" (such as John Rowe's The Aswan Solution [1979]) in American and British popular fiction and of the related popular fiction dealing with Israel (such as that of Leon Uris). In these fictions, toughness replaces intellect, action replaces thought and emotion. But traditionally, American and British popular images of the Jew (even in the literature by American and British Jews) did not glorify the intellectual, passive Jew—they excoriated the money Jew or else the corrupting effects of antisemitism. From Henry James to Israel Zangwill, Abraham Cahan, Budd Schulberg and John Updike, the image of the Jew as thinker was always unwholesome in one way or another. Even in the work of Philip Roth and Clive Sinclair in the 1970s, the new, more modulated image of the Jew as the conflicted intellectual, paralyzed into inaction, is found. These Jews are not "tough" not because they don't want to be—to be "tough" is their profound wish—but because they are so conflicted as to eliminate toughness as a real option. These are the Jews emasculated by the complicated meaning of their own Jewishness in the diaspora. Why is it that Sinclair's and Roth's protagonists become impotent when confronted with Israeli women? This is the embodiment of the conflict between desire and identity for Jews in the diaspora. It is the reliance on polarities—the tough vs. the thinking Jew—that marks the major problem with Breines' book. And this can be best seen in his long introductory chapter on "Sigmund Freud's Tough Jewish Fantasy, Philip Roth's, and Mine." Breines wishes to see all three of these figures (including himself) as acting out their toughness within the text but living in a pacifistic mode. All of them recognize the pitfalls of violence and avoid it. Now it is true that Breines' reading of Freud's dreams about Semitic generals and French marshalls shows us a pacifistic Freud, seeking to work through his sense of aggression in his dreams and in his texts. But we in our own writing, scientists as well as novelists, all generate idealized images of ourselves. In "real life," Freud was as conflicted about violence as any other Jew in a period of active antisemitism. Freud was mortified (he said) about his father's admission that he stepped off the sidewalk and into the street to retrieve his cap, which had been knocked off by an antisemitic bully. His response may well have been to work this through in an internal manner, as he states in the Interpretation of Dreams. But one must also note that his eldest son describes a scene in which Freud waded into a crowd of Bavarian peasants with his walking stick flying because they had threatened his children with antisemitic remarks. Toughness is a quality of

History and Social Sciences

245

location and moment. No one—except in pulp fiction—is tough or weak all the time. My own background perhaps documents this best. My father's father was an illiterate teamster in the Russian Pale. He was extraordinarily strong and could be very violent (at least as seen from my perspective as a child). He and a group of his friends were said to have defended their street against a pogrom at the turn of the century. He was tough in Breines' sense of the word. And yet he was a Jew who "knew his place" in Russia and in the United States. He was hardly meek, but he knew enough to avoid most situations of conflict. And his ideal was the man who could study. Breines has done a first-rate job in putting forth his thesis. And this thesis has been read by critics of Israel, such as Edward Said (in the Washington Post, fall 1992) as "explaining" the present "intransigent" mind-set of the Israeli government. Such a government must be "tough" or else it will be perceived as too Jewish (read: weak). This is at best reductive; at worst, a cruel misreading. The actions of the Israeli government in the Gulf War showed that even though certain elements needed to be seen as "tough," and thus argued in favor of retaliating against Iraq as a sign that Jews will not stand this sort of aggression, others within the conservative government—and they were evidently in the majority—felt that being "tough" could also mean "hanging tough," by not retaliating and allowing the anger of the moment to be balanced by other needs. In "real life," even "tough Jews," unlike the James Bonds of pulp fiction, balance "toughness" with introspection, violence with emotions. Here Eli Wiesel's image in Dawn of the Jewish soldier holding his British prisoner captive and eventually killing him shows the need to understand both qualities. For the soldier in this work is not simply aggressive and tough—but he does kill his prisoner, an act that is both. SANDER L. GILMAN Cornell University

Stephen Brook, The Club: The Jews of Modern Britain. London: Constable, 1989. 435 pp.

The Jews of Britain have been ill-served by the social sciences. For decades, historical accounts and sociological analyses were dominated by amateurs, social workers and apologists, often hacks employed by the Board of Deputies. There have been few works to rival the wealth of studies of U.S. Jewry by Marshall Sklare, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Elazar, Charles Silberman, Charles Liebman, Steven Cohen and Calvin Goldscheider. Aside from several arid statistical surveys, the field has been left to gifted journalists such as Stephen Aris, Chaim Bermant and now Stephen Brook. Why has Anglo-Jewry spurned expert self-analysis for so long? Brook repeatedly draws attention to what he sees as the self-effacing, nonintellectual character of British Jews, but even if he is correct, this only makes him part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

246

Book Reviews

Brook's briskly paced survey begins with the fragmented and contentious religious world of British Jews, toward which he adopts a posture of "a plague on all your houses." The ultra-Orthodox are bedeviled by "a small-mindedness and a narrowness of vision"; Reform Jews suffer from being "wishy washy"; the Liberals are "spiritually aenemic." He then moves on to the central institutions: the Board of Deputies is a farce, the Anglo-Jewish Association a rather pointless body with snobbish appeal. Only Jewish educational and welfare agencies can claim any degree of effectiveness. While Jews excel in finance and commerce, their profile in the humanities, according to Brook, pales to insignificance. Jews in Britain are distinguished by a "cultural barrenness," they are "scarcely in evidence at all in British literature" and have a "mostly undistinguished record in the arts." "The plain truth," he writes, "is that virtually no academics of the highest distinction have been produced by the Anglo-Jewish community." Only the central European Jewish immigrants of the 1930s can claim to have made an impact in these fields. English Jews even fail the Brook virility test when it comes to politics. Despite the fact that several Jews were in the Cabinet when he was writing, he ascribes to Jewish career politicians a "lack of political ambition." (I'm not sure that non-Jews around at the time would have thought this of Rufus Isaacs, Herbert Samuel, Samuel Hore-Belisha or Harry Nathan.) Brook attributes all of this to a feeling of marginality and insecurity, particularly among the immigrant generations of 1870-1914. To his mind, Jewish political behavior with regard to Israel, Soviet Jewry and antisemitism betrays a nervousness of being accused of dual loyalty and the fear of proclaiming a particularistic agenda. When, near the end of this fat book, Brook deals with Jewish identity in Britain today, he gropes for reasons why it is not "done" to assert Jewishness, why Jews in the U.K. are so reluctant to be classified as an ethnic group and why they cannot seem to act with the same self-confidence as other minorities. He concludes that "in Britain . . . Jews marginalise themselves and thereby relegate themselves to obscurity." This is a circular argument; while it may be true, Brook does nothing to explain why it obtains, though he does unwittingly offer some clues. When he berates British Jews for laboring under a "self-imposed stigma," Brooks falls into the trap of blaming the victims of prejudice for their own defensiveness. Modern Anglo-Jewry was formed during the nineteenth century within a powerful liberal culture that, while superficially tolerant, deployed a universalism actually inimical to the cultural continuity and political claims of non-Christian, nonEuropean and non-white minorities. It took the Jews of Britain more than thirty years to achieve full civil rights. After the formal grant of equality, they sensed correctly that it was still necessary for them to be on their best behavior and minimize all friction between their communities and the majority society. There was an emancipation contract in Britain: every time Jews pursued an item on their own agenda—such as Sunday trading, support for Jews abroad, recognition of Jewish marriage laws—they were reminded that such "demands" tested the patience of a society that tolerated them on the basis that they would be identical as well as equal. The only acceptable difference was denominational: what religious Jews did at home or in their place of worship was their business. The diffidence of

History and Social Sciences

247

British, but particularly English, Jews can only be fathomed if it is historicized and contextualized in this way. Brook is ill-equipped to handle ideas and history. The child of 1930s refugees, he had a Jewish education of sorts, but seems to have derived most of his notions about Judaism and Jewishness from his fearsome Hungarian grandmother. His previous books were on travel and wine—not the most helpful background for someone about to dissect "The Jews of Modern Britain." It ill-behoves Brook, who boasts Honkytonk Gelato: Travels Through Texas and Liquid Gold: Dessert Wines of the World among his publications, to accuse Ignaz Maybaum of "intellectual barrenness." Indeed, the entire project is symptomatic of the malaise he himself describes: unwillingness on the part of non-Jewish society to engage seriously with the subtlety and density of Jewish culture, and the resulting self-denigration of Jews willing to operate within the given stereotypes. Brook writes very well, and he is a shrewd commentator on contemporary Jewish politics, personalities and places. His accounts of encounters with communal leaders—including Lord Jakobovits—are incisive to the point of cruelty. His descriptions of the Board of Deputies and the Jewish representative council in Manchester are hilarious. This is an acute portrait of Anglo-Jewry at the height of Thatcherism and it is distinguished by some fine reportage. At times the overreliance on interviews leads to a cacophony of voices, a technique that calls for either condensation or a more rigorous structure. His own obiter dicta tend to be squeezed sheepishly into the interstices between the pontifications of communal machers. The Club gives readers a grandstand seat at a fascinating parade: Arnold Goodman, R. B. Kitaj, Claus Moser, Jonathan Miller, George Steiner and George Weidenfeld are a few of the interviewees whose ruminations and witticisms alone make this a rewarding book to read. It is a paradox that Brook quotes these impressive figures endlessly, then bangs on about the intellectual sterility of Jews in Britain. The approach is part of the problem: ask a certain question and you'll get a certain answer. Without altering a single fact, just by reversing the pejorative adjectives used throughout the book, one can view the small Anglo-Jewish community in an entirely different aspect. How did a Jewish population that in 1880 numbered less than 90,000 souls and at its height in the 1950s reached only 450,000 produce Benjamin Disraeli, Herbert Samuel, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Isaac Rosenberg, Harold Pinter, Muriel Spark, Lew Grade and Israel Sieff, nurture refugee talent and throw up a host of brilliant entrepreneurs? Quite amazing, really. The question for another study is why, given this plethora of achievement, Jews such as Stephen Brook still feel the need to engage in self-flagellation. DAVID CESARANI Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library

248

Book Reviews

Werner J. Cahnman, German Jewry: Its History and Sociology. Ed. Joseph B. Maier, Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tarr. New Brunswick, N.J. and Oxford: Transaction Publishers and Oxford University Press, 1989. 265 pp.

Werner Cahnman's twelve selected essays, now published in book form, are an important contribution to the historiography of German Jewry. While it may be difficult to accept the editors' statement that the book fills a still-existing gap in the study of Jewish life in Germany during the 1930s, the author's deep insight into this period justifies the effort involved in gathering together these essays. This insight derives from Cahnman's involvement in the events of his time, first as director of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsburger judischen Glaubens (C.V.) in Munich from 1930 until its disbanding by the Nazis in 1933, and later as a social worker (he fled to the United States in 1939). The outstanding essay in this work is "Friedrich Schelling and the New Thinking of Judaism," whose main theme is the possible existence of a German-Jewish symbiosis. Cahnman exhibits great knowledge and deep understanding of Jewish and German-Christian thought as he penetrates the complex of the spiritual development of Judaism in Germany during the generations before the Holocaust. The conclusion of the essay includes his own thinking about modern Judaism. In this, his last work (first published in 1981, a year after his death), Cahnman writes that "the third solution"—a faithful philosophy of Judaism that would be traditionalist and reformist at the same time—has not yet been fully formulated. This anthology of Cahnman's papers includes many autobiographical notes, which in some of the essays are of prime importance. In his essay on Clementine Kraemer, for example, Cahnman depicts his aunt's life story and in so doing makes an additional contribution to the historiography of the Munich Jews. This brief biography also relates the sad story of Jews who did not succeed in emigrating before the war; Cahnman here recollects his futile attempts to save his family. In more analytical articles, he uses family history in order to illustrate conceptual considerations. Thus, family history is integrated into the interesting paper on "Village and Small-Town Jews in Germany," in which Cahnman argues that after a few generations of continued settlement in a particular region all the Jewish families somehow became related. The data he collected on his own relatives in villages and country towns of Wuerttemberg also helps him document his view on the occupational structure of the Jews in southern Germany before the Nazi advent to power. Cahnman tries to prove that the Jews fulfilled functional tasks in the villages, and that Jews and peasants needed each other. He also rather apologetically stresses that the village Jews were not exploiters (as the Nazis tried to present them) but rather pioneers of modernization. "The Jews in Munich: 1918-43" is mainly based on personal experience and only partly on diverse source material. Some of its sections read like recorded oral history. While the article will certainly be used as an outstanding document by the future author of the comprehensive history of Germany Jewry from 1918-1945, it cannot be regarded as the comprehensive history of the Munich community during the 1920s and 1930s. This article follows a short demographic summary on "The

History and Social Sciences

249

Decline of the Munich Jewish Community" written in 1941. From the former essay, we learn that the whole decade before Hitler's rise to power was a period of popular and steadily growing antisemitism in Munich. As early as 1924, Jewish professors could not receive an appointment at the Munich University since, as the rector stated, "We must take into consideration the mood of the time and the mob in the streets." Everyone who wants to understand the fate of German Jewry and the Holocaust should read the autobiographical sections of this book. Cahnman combines descriptions of partly unknown historical events with his conceptual insight as a sociologist and historian. In his description of the aftermath of Kristallnacht, for example, he writes of the Jews that their "organs of self-knowledge and self-consciousness were dissolved, the process of isolation had turned into the process of atomisation. The soul had gone out of the body and now the body could be destroyed" (p. 137). There is no possibility in a short review to mention other enlightening essays included in the book. Interested readers will discover for themselves the major contribution made by Cahnman to the understanding of what he describes in one essay as "the second epoch of German Jewish history," an epoch that ended so catastrophically. MENAHEM KAUFMAN The Hebrew University

Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir 1938-1947. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989. xiv + 333 pp.

As a young woman possessing an extensive Yiddish secular education and as a dissatisfied graduate student in English literature, Lucy Dawidowicz (then Schildkret) left New York City for Wilno (Vilna, Vilnius) to study at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO). She arrived there on August 27, 1938 and departed nearly a year later, on August 24, 1939—the day after the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed and seven days before Germany invaded Poland to begin the Second World War. She thus became perhaps the last outsider who lived in the "Jerusalem of Lithuania" before its degradation under the Bolsheviks, followed by its destruction at the hands of the Germans. She was one of YIVO's aspirantn, equivalent to researchers-in-training. The title, From That Place and Time, refers specifically to her experience of Wilno during 1938-1939. YIVO in Wilno was led by the inspired, masterful Max Weinreich, the greatest scholar of Yiddish and the man who directed the aspirantn in their respective courses of research. The author was also deeply attached to YIVO's folklorist, Zelig Kalmanovich. Except for Weinreich, she found YIVO not very stimulating intellectually, nor did she find much of interest in her specific subject, the Yiddish press in England. She was also not much impressed by most of her fellow aspirantn. But Jewish Wilno captivated her. After some didactic sections on the history of the Jews in that city and in Eastern Europe, she provides a lively portrait—one without myth

250

Book Reviews

or idealization—of a fabled Jewish community. She recalls Wilno Jewry's pervasive sense of hopelessness in the face of popular and governmental antisemitism, and she depicts scenes of harrowing hunger and poverty. Yiddish secular culture, she concluded, could last only while the Jews were forced into closed communal life; even then she had deep doubts over its future. Dawidowicz's view of Wilno Jewry is limited to its Yiddish secular sector. Orthodox Judaism and its rich traditions are but slightly noticed, and Zionism with its educational system and vibrant youth movements is virtually disregarded. Yet the streets, sounds and smells of Jewish Wilno, and its economic and political tragedy, are vividly recalled. Back in New York with the outbreak of war, the years until 1945 were an agonizing vigil. What was the fate of her friends and colleagues? The news of mass murder accumulated, especially among the well-informed Bundist refugees. It became clear that the vast tragedy of European Jewry engulfed Wilno as well, and that most of the people Lucy Dawidowicz had known in Wilno were dead. Some consolation came from her work among Jewish displaced persons in Germany after the war for the Joint Distribution Committee. She also had one great scholarly triumph, the retrieval and subsequent transfer of YIVO and Strashun library books from Wilno—now Vilnius—to YIVO in America. The author's distinguished career in writing Jewish history came later, after her memoir concludes. From That Place and Time is too spotty to be called a distinguished memoir. It includes passages of American, Jewish and Second World War history that do not fit well into the book. However, it also contains sober observations and cool judgments of individuals, including the author herself. It is for Wilno Jewry that Lucy Dawidowicz wrote, and on that account her work deserves to be widely read. LLOYD P. GARTNER Tel-Aviv University

Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov. Ed. Jeffrey Shandler, trans. Judith Vowles. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. x + 285 pp.

Half a century ago, in December 1941, the Nazi occupiers of Riga murdered the Jewish writer and historian Simon Dubnov. According to the legend surrounding his death, Dubnov, ever mindful of his commitment to the recording and interpreting of Jewish history, implored all those who were witnesses to the mass murder of the Jews to record their testimonies so that future generations would have the sources upon which to write this chapter of Jewish history. Dubnov's own literary efforts as journalist, critic and historian spanned six decades. Even though his writings were bounded by the Elizavetgrad pogrom of 1881 and the Holocaust, Dubnov was not a chronicler of Jewish suffering and victimization, nor was he a practitioner of what has been termed the "lachrymose" conception of Jewish history. On the contrary, from his initial reformist and integrationist-

History and Social Sciences

251

minded essays to his later sociologically-oriented Jewish historical studies, Dubnov focused on the Jewish community: its past, present character and future needs. Dubnov's concentration on the Jewish people led him to delineate a new Jewish historiography that was communal-minded and thus very different from the idealist versions of the Jewish past offered by his predecessors. Dubnov believed that the world Jewish community was a single entity held together by cultural rather than political or economic ties. While his commitment to a positivist worldview did not divert Dubnov from the sufferings of contemporary Jewry, his overall faith in human progress convinced him that the community would persevere in his own day as it had in the past. He continued to affirm the possibility of a vibrant and creative Jewish life in the future even after surviving the triumph of Bolshevism in the Russian empire and witnessing the rise of Nazism during his residence in Berlin. Although Dubnov was both communal-minded and a Jewish nationalist, he rejected all arguments for Jewish territorial concentration. Instead, he emphasized the need to extend cultural freedoms to Jews in those areas where autonomous Jewish life in all its manifestations was to be found. He first articulated these views in a series of essays published at the close of the nineteenth century. Together with his major historical studies, which followed shortly thereafter, these essays contributed to the fashioning of those bases upon which modern ideologies advocating secular Jewish identities with their attendant cultural needs came to be founded. In addition to his writings, Dubnov's other activities are of historical importance. His political efforts, especially after 1905, as well as his work as a journalist, editor and educator elevated him to a position of prominence within Russian Jewish communal life in the years before the revolution. In fact, Simon Dubnov is an excellent representative of that segment of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia which was born in the era of the "great reforms" under Alexander II and came to maturity in the post-pogrom period in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. A study of Dubnov's life and work thus becomes an important contribution to the history of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia in the last decades of tsarism, as well as a crucial chapter in the analysis of modern Jewish historiography. The primary sources upon which such an analysis can be undertaken are of course Dubnov's published writings, his letters and written reflections. In fact, in the early 1920s, Simon Dubnov began to write an autobiographical memoir in order to review his own life work and make it available for posterity. Dubnov worked on the memoir for a number of years and finally published the first of what would be three volumes under the title Kniga zhizni (The Book of My Life) in 1934. These volumes covered Dubnov's life through 1933. The work under review here, written by Dubnov's daughter, is based in the main on Kniga zhizni together with other materials used by Sophie Dubnov-Erlich to reconstruct the last nine years of her father's life. Originally published in Russian in 1950, this work was soon translated into both Hebrew and Yiddish. However, this is the first English-language edition of that text. Augmenting Dubnov-Erlich's presentation are two additional pieces. The first is a valuable essay by Hebrew University historian Jonathan Frankel, who examines Simon Dubnov's historiographical achievement, and the second is a warm recollection of his grandfather by the literary critic Victor Erlich.

252

Book Reviews

Beyond highlighting the outlines of Dubnov's life—his early travails, residences, friendships and literary and personal interactions—Dubnov-Erlich notes the principal issues her father addressed himself to over the years. These included the controversy over Yiddish versus Hebrew versus the vernacular as the language of modern Jews, political versus cultural versus spiritual nationalism, and the structure of Jewish history. However, these themes are introduced only in passing fashion here. Dubnov-Erlich's text is neither a biographical study of her father nor an assessment of his written work. Rather, it is the presentation of a father's life by a devoted daughter. Nevertheless, the work is most revealing for the image of the man that it projects. Through these pages, Simon Dubnov emerges as a person totally committed to his craft. For him, the reconstruction of the history of the Jewish people seems to have become not only a holy cause but a safe refuge in the midst of cataclysmic change. Thus, he tells us that during the civil war in the aftermath of the Bolshevik takeover, as his wife was trying to secure fuel and food for the family, he was consumed by the need to work on his manuscript (pp. 179-180). He described his own life as one "dedicated to historiography. I tear myself away only for a few days to read manuscripts . . . and on Saturdays, to prepare and give lectures" (p. 153). Without doubt, the liveliest and most appealing sections in this memoir are those where Dubnov-Erlich offers us direct quotations from her father's memoir and letters. For this reason, all readers should echo Frankel's hope that Dubnov's Kniga zhizni will soon be made available to the English-reading public (p. 3). For Simon Dubnov, Jewish history had come to replace the void left in his life when, as a youth, he abandoned the religious practices and beliefs of his family. Through his historical studies, Dubnov hoped to find what he now determined to be the real truth in Jewish life, and to transmit that truth to future generations so that they would be able to organize Jewish communal life appropriately. No doubt, his engaged perspective cast a shadow over his own scholarly efforts. However, his vision remains compelling even today, a full half century after his death. He continues to merit our serious attention at both the scholarly and popular levels. Publication of this memoir is thus a timely reminder both of Dubnov's achievements and our debt to him. ALEXANDER ORBACH University of Pittsburgh

Daniel J. Elazar, The Other Jews: The Sephardim Today. New York: Basic Books, 1989. xii + 236 pp.

Daniel J. Elazar's stimulating study is a serious attempt to write a comprehensive sociopolitical analysis of the Sephardim and Oriental Jews in Israel and the diaspora. The book's diverse topics include Sephardim and Ashkenazim: myth and reality; Israel's new Sephardic majority; Sephardim in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America; and Sephardim in North America.

History and Social Sciences

253

Elazar rejects the definition of the Sephardim in the strictest sense, that is those Jews whose ancestors lived in the Iberian Peninsula and who preserved Spanish ways and the Judeo-Spanish language after their exile. He maintains that such a definition can be misleading on two points. For one, the biblical term Sepharad (first appearing in the book of Obadiah) was applied to Iberia relatively late in Jewish history. Some believe it originally referred to the city of Sardis in Asia Minor, and it was first applied to Spain in the Targum Yonatan, where it is translated "Ispamia" or "Spamia." Its application to the Iberian peninsula was fixed only at the end of the eighth century C.E. Second, the geographical distinction gets at only part of the uniqueness of the Sephardim as a group. For Jews, what is most important as a distinguishing characteristic is not the specific culture acquired in any particular country of exile by any particular Jewish population, but the broader issues of halakhah and mishpat (Jewish law and jurisprudence), communal organization and common cultural patterns ranging from food to rituals. In these respects, Elazar concludes, "the Sephardic world is one, from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans" (pp. 14-15). Although I belong to the school of thought that defines Sephardim as the megorashim (expelled) and their descendants, excluding Iraqi, Yemeni and Iranian Jews as well as large segments of Egyptian and Maghrebi Jewry, I do not take issue with Elazar's formulation; the subject is complex enough to allow diverse definitions by different scholars. Highlighting several main features of Elazar's book, we begin with his concern over the negative image of Israeli Sephardim portrayed by writers and educators, among them Amoz Oz and Shlomo Avineri. Elazar sets out to defend the Sephardim by praising their elite and the elite's contribution to Jewish intellectual excellence. Contrary to what Oz and Avineri write, Elazar notes, the Sephardim have a Yitzhak Navon, "acknowledged as a man of broad culture, the perfect example of what Shlomo Avineri seems to mean by European, middle class, and liberal" (p. 24). Elazar is absolutely justified in challenging negative stereotypes when these, more often than not, do not correspond to reality. Yet he sometimes overextends his interpretations, presenting the Sephardim in Israel and the diaspora as perfect beings, never discriminating against Ashkenazim, never resorting to the stereotyping of others. Quite to the contrary, Elazar argues, they were continuously victimized by Ashkenazic narrow-mindedness. Another example of "perfect Sephardim" is Elazar's observation about the Sephardim and Zionism: What is special about Sephardic Zionism is its unquestioned merging of religious and political aspirations. Having never undergone secularization on the one hand or embraced other-worldly pietism on the other—unlike the Ashkenazim in the modern epoch—the Sephardic world was earlier attuned to seeking political solutions to the Jewish condition, at the same time never divorcing such solutions from a deep religious commitment (p. 197).

In other words: the Sephardim maneuvered perfectly in the complex web of Jewish politics and religion. They remained committed to Judaism and to Jewish national aspirations, not relinquishing—as did many Ashkenazim—any aspect of their glorious heritage.

254

Book Reviews

Needless to say, neither Ashkenazim nor Sephardim are symbols of perfection. Elazar's efforts to bestow this attribute on the latter does not render them either more or less attractive to most intelligent readers of the 1980s and 1990s, for these readers usually have some familiarity with the Sephardim's vital contributions in the diaspora and Israel. Second, it is misleading to suggest that the Sephardim have "never undergone secularization." In fact, Algerian Jewry, particularly in the city of Algiers and its environs, were exposed to this process since the 1870s, as the archives of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the Quai d'Orsay and the Algerian Jewish communities clearly indicate. The extensive reports since 1900 by Moi'se Nahon, Albert Confino, Chief Rabbis Eisenbeth and Fingerhut, and Benjamin Heler could have been most instructive to Elazar. Was Albert Antebi (who purchased land for the "new" Yishuv and served on its behalf as a major lobbyist to the Ottoman administration in Jerusalem and Constantinople) not a secularist? And what about the leading Maghrebi and Egyptian Jewish leaders with diverse Zionist orientations: Alfred Valensi, Meir Bellity, Alfred Rossi, Maitre Albert Bessis, Dr. Albert D. Mosseri, Leon Castro, Vito Sonsino, Emilio Levy, Elie Gozlan, Felix Allouche and David Amar? Can they possibly be regarded as "having never undergone secularization?" Could the Jewish graduates of the ecoles europeennes or French lycees of Algiers, Tunis, Casablanca, Tangier, Beirut or Alexandria—Zionists and nonZionists—have emerged unaffected by secularization? Not likely. When discussing the Sephardic diaspora, Elazar expertly analyzes the main contributions of the Sephardim and the challenges and conflicts they have confronted in recent history. One may not always accept his interpretation of the facts. Nevertheless, Elazar's survey of Mediterranean basin Jewry, in particular, is as thorough as can be for a compact-size book. There are only two minor criticisms here: (1) the section on North Africa does not include some of the most important studies conducted on Moroccan and Tunisian Jewry during the past decade; and (2) the author would have done well by either eliminating his description of certain small Latin and Central American communities or expanding his analytical scope. This is definitely the case for Bolivia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whose communities are described in one or two brief paragraphs each (see pp. 155161). There are two other issues that warrant attention. First, Elazar's assessment of the Sephardim's political emergence in Israel and second, his analysis of "Sephardic responsibility." In several instances, reference is made to Sephardic political awareness. As a result of their emigration to Israel from Islamic countries, they became a majority in the Jewish state; consequently, although by 1984 only twenty percent of the world Jewish population was said to be Sephardic, "they are potentially the dominant group in the Jewish world" (p. 50). Elazar then remarks that since 1977, with Likud's emergence to power, the Sephardim have gained leadership posts in Israeli politics, accurately exemplifying this with leaders such as David Levy, Moshe Katzav and Meir Shitrit. Some of these men initially sought to enter the ranks of the Labor party and, having failed in their endeavor, finally joined Likud. Elazar credits the Sephardim with Likud's victory and reproaches Labor for shortsightedness and

History and Social Sciences

255

prejudicial feelings toward them. The Sephardic political ascendancy since 1977, Elazar concludes, is a sign of the times: Having achieved economic stability and having gained power in local communities where they represent majorities or substantial minorities, the Sephardim are now taking an ever greater leap forward in public life (p. 65).

These assessments are highly accurate if one confines the analysis to the pre-1988 period. However, nothing remains static in the shifting political sands of Israeli society. The Labor party's list for the Knesset elections of November 1988 had quite a few Sephardic names, including those from development towns and ethnic neighborhoods. I would go so far as to suggest that, whereas since 1983, Likud's leadership under Yitzhak Shamir has paid less attention to cultivating more high-ranking Sephardic leaders, Labor—seeking to enlist large-scale support among the Sephardim—has gone out of its way after 1984 to afford greater representation in its Knesset list, even at the expense of distinguished and internationally renowned personalities such as Abba Eban. Furthermore, a key Laborite such as the Iraqi-born Moshe Shahal, a skillful attorney and a sophisticated politician, may very well emerge as a leader within his party in the not too distant future. At the same time, changing developments in Israel could hamper and gradually challenge the Sephardim's "leap forward" to top leadership posts in the government and Knesset. And this is where Elazar's analysis suffers from inevitable shortcomings. Like the rest of us, Elazar could not foresee in 1988 or early 1989, when the book was published, the revolutionary political changes affecting the former Soviet Union and its spheres of influence, changes that included Soviet flexibility regarding Jewish emigration to Israel. Unless Israel fails to absorb and integrate the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who began inundating the country at the end of 1989, and/or political developments in the former Soviet Union bring the aliyah to a virtual halt, Soviet Jews in Israel might well constitute a challenge to the potential of the Sephardim to become "the dominant group in the Jewish world." As for "Sephardic responsibility," I fully share Elazar's contention that among Israeli Sephardim and those in the diaspora, the affluent and the powerful have not yet provided the resources to make a Sephardic presence felt in Jewish life. They have failed to make the kinds of contributions to institutions that would give the Sephardim recognition as contributors to the Jewish state and the diaspora (pp. 201202). Whereas, for example, the Ashkenazim continue to endow Judaic studies chairs throughout North American and Israeli universities, seeking in this way to promote their intellectual heritage, affluent Sephardim have made but modest headway in this domain. In order to realize Elazar's aspirations of enhancing the research and study of Sephardic and Mediterranean Jewish culture, Sephardic leaders and the wealthy among them should provide far greater support. MICHAEL M. LASKIER University of Judaism

256

Book Reviews

Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History 1656-1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 246 pp.

"What is Anglo-Jewish history about?" is a question that historians of an older generation never saw fit to ask of themselves or to pose to others. Perhaps they considered the answer too obvious. Instead, they defined Anglo-Jewish history by default—what they didn't write about was not Anglo-Jewish history. This was rather a lot. There were hardly any women and very few radicals. There was very little about everyday experience, particularly that of the lower orders. There was no room for the unconventional, the nonconforming or the unseemly. There were no "half-Jews" such as those who inhabited the real East End world of Arthur Harding1 or the real Manchester of Howard Spring or Ben Goodwin,2 no "Hebrew Christians" and none of the other subgroups or subcultures in which Jewish identity played some part. There were no deserters or conscientious objectors, no "deviants," prostitutes or criminals (except as suitable cases for philanthropic treatment, rabbinic invective or elite disdain). Such customers were altogether too awkward for a history overwhelmingly preoccupied with the projection of a favorable communal image. The same apologetic and deferential posture led these historians to posit a substantially comfortable and mutually rewarding relationship between Jew and gentile. From this perspective, antisemitism could be seen as a rare occurrence, unrepresentative of majority English opinion. More typically, the English welcomed Jewish neighbors into their social circles and, for his part, the Jewish parvenu lent his support to the glorious enterprise that was England. In his most recent excursion into English Jewish history, the American scholar Todd Endelman has mounted a formidable challenge to this orthodox historiography. In the first place, he has chosen to highlight a particularly numerous body of nonconformists—the "radically assimilated"—those who, for whatever reason, had broken all their explicit ties with the organized Jewish community and allowed themselves to be absorbed, with or without religious conviction, into the surrounding Christian society. And in recounting the stories of these departing Jews, Endelman has quite deliberately broken with tradition by drawing attention to one of the more "discordant aspects of the processes of acculturation and integration" (p. 7). The erosion of the Jewish identity, he argues, was a function of the very tolerance to which earlier historians had devoted such unreserved praise. In England, conversion was neither a response to overt hostility, which was comparatively rare, nor a matter of individual religious conviction, which was even rarer. Still less was it a result of missionary effort, which was notoriously unsuccessful. It was "largely secular and opportunistic" (p. 4). Most commonly, it was an attempt to escape the residual stigma that remained attached to Jewish identity after the fact of political, social and economic acceptance. It was employed not primarily as a device for gaining an initial entry into gentile circles but as a route, most commonly pursued over two or three generations, to achieving total integration. It was not tolerance per se that was the problem but a peculiarly English brand of liberalism that combined an openness to the admission of "strangers" with hostility

History and Social Sciences

257

to any notion of cultural diversity. Jews were allowed into English society without undue difficulty—but only by shedding their Jewishness could their acceptance become complete. This central theme is powerful and persuasive, particularly as it relates to middleclass Englishmen and middle-class Jews (although Endelman is unwilling to define England's halfhearted and ambivalent liberalism as a bourgeois phenomenon). Less convincing are his attempts to trace the finer threads of radical assimilation. Early in the book, in commenting upon the paucity of documentary sources, he warns his readers: "there may be too much speculation here for historians accustomed to more abundant and precise evidence" (p. viii). Quite so. Most of Endelman's evidence is biographical and anecdotal. It cannot always bear the heavy weight of his conclusions. Some of these conclusions are simply wrong; most are plausible rather than proven. Is it true, for example, that the commonest cause of mixed marriages and disaffiliation among "native Jews" in Victorian England and families of East European origin after the First World War was their entry into occupations, institutions and districts outside a traditional Jewish orbit—a move (as Endelman sees it) from "exclusively Jewish settings" to "predominantly gentile surroundings"? But were those "Jewish settings" really so exclusive? Is it really the case that East European newcomers were "largely insulated from the pressures and temptations of radical assimilation" by their "religious loyalties and sense of Jewish identity"? Was their cultural and social milieu really as insular as Endelman believes? What seems much more likely is that the broader (and de-mythologized) realities of the Jewish working-class experience, including the inroads of radical assimilation, are rendered relatively inaccessible to Endelman by the kinds of literary sources on which he has chosen to rely. Endelman faced the additional problem of trying to squeeze out general deductions from evidence that was highly specific and totally nonstatistical. His unsatisfactory solution is to give speculative judgments a notional quantitative weight: "the majority of immigrants from Central Europe in the Victorian period took advantage of their new surroundings to shed or fatally dilute their Jewishness" (p. 119; emphasis added in these quotes), "most of the German merchants who arrived in Manchester between 1790 and the mid-1830s abandoned Judaism" (p. 121), "the children of German immigrants plunged into the mainstream more rapidly and extensively than did the descendants of other immigrants" (p. 131), and so on, or, taken to a convoluted extreme, the absorption of German Jews and their offspring into English society progressed steadily in the years before World War One. Although it is impossible to gauge their incorporation into gentile society in any quantitative way, the available evidence seems to indicate that with every year increasing numbers of these Jews ceased to be identifiable as such (p. 141).

What evidence? Other general remarks suggest an unfamiliarity with the ground floor of the Anglo-Jewish scene. In seeking explanations for the decline in Jewish religiosity and the increase in Jewish dissatisfaction in the interwar years, Endelman com-

258

Book Reviews

ments, inter alia, that "English Jews never developed an extensive network of voluntary social organizations capable of reinforcing sentiments of ethnic solidarity" (p. 207). There was, he believes, no counterpart in England to the "rich nexus of nonreligious extrasynogogal organizations" (p. 207) that characterized the American Jewish landscape. The explanation, he suggests, lies partly in the fact that there were "too few Jews in England ... to sustain such an associational network" and partly in the easy accessibility of gentile organizations. This is fantasy. More impressive in the real Anglo-Jewry is the strength and multifaceted character of just such an associational network—from the 1890s, at the latest, there was scarcely a social activity in England of which the Jewish community did not provide an effective "walled" version. The Jewish Working Men's Club, Literary Society and Friendly Society movements are only the most obvious examples. Perhaps this is no more than a conspicuous example of Endelman's distance from the routine social and economic activities of Anglo-Jewry and, more to the point, from the routine records of those activities. He has not used the minute books of Jewish organizations. He has not used oral evidence. His footnotes suggest that his use of the non-Jewish press has been minimal. Crucial elements of the AngloJewish experience are thus placed beyond his reach—not simply evidence that might have persuaded him to refine some of his conclusions and alter others, but evidence that would have opened up different and important perspectives. More might have been written (there is very little here) on radical assimilation within the Jewish working class (including the immigrant working class), the substantial impact of the political Left and, perhaps most of all, the significant links between social nonconformity and religious disaffiliation. This is perhaps further than Endelman wished to go. In focusing on the downside of emancipation and highlighting the disaffected, he has broken out of the comfortable confines of an older Anglo-Jewish history. Those who follow him might travel further, from the routes of one kind of nonconformity to nonconformity (of all kinds) per se and onward to a radical redefinition of the content of Anglo-Jewish history. Endelman has mapped out part of the route. BILL WILLIAMS Manchester Jewish Museum

Notes 1. Raphael Samuel, East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding (London: 1981), especially ch. 11. 2. Howard Spring's novels Shaby Tiger (1934) and Rachel Rosing (1935) have Manchester Jews as central characters. Spring's work also illustrates the acceptability of casual antisemitism and anti-Jewish cliche in the urban England of the 1930s. Ben Goodwin's novels Down Our Street (1952) and How's By You (1952) are set among the Manchester Jewry of the 1940s.

History and Social Sciences

259

Robert E. Fierstien, A Different Spirit: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 18861902. New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990/ 5750. xii + 146 pp.

Robert E. Fierstien implicitly acknowledges at the outset of his brief history of the pre-Solomon Schechter era of the Jewish Theological Seminary (1886-1902) that a paucity of extant archival sources has limited the breadth and depth of his scholarly contribution. Having neither school files, records nor memoranda from which to work, Fierstien relied almost exclusively on one external source, the American Hebrew, to document his story. Nonetheless, Fierstien believed that the information he found within that important Anglo-Jewish weekly would yield a full-length study of the Seminary until its early twentieth-century reorganization. He hoped to "demonstrate that the early Seminary was a first-rate academic institution from its inception, many of whose graduates went off to careers of distinction and prestige in the rabbinate . . . [and] that long before . . . Schechter . . . the Jewish Theological Seminary played a vital and significant role in the intellectual and religious life of the Jews in America" (p. x). The results of this effort are less than satisfying. Fierstien's scanning of the American Hebrew for items detailing the Seminary's life and mission did not uncover a trove of uncommon sources nor reveal major historical insights previously unknown to scholars. Ultimately, his yield of new material informs only the second half of this 138-page volume. It is only there that Fierstien, in a chapter entitled "Academic Aspects of the early Seminary," begins discussing how the Seminary was run, what was taught and whom it graduated. The first sections of the book cover territory that has already been fully charted. Fierstien weighs in, for example, with a review of the history of Jewish seminary building efforts through 1886 and the historical and historiographical controversies over the implications of the 1883 treyf banquet at the Hebrew Union College. He also offers extensive biographical sketches of Seminary founders such as Sabato Morais and Alexander Kohut. Derived primarily from published secondary sources, these recapitulations are presented moreover in a highly stilted manner, and this work as a whole is plagued by a distinctive "dissertation read." The historiographical asides clearly testify to the author's knowledge of the literature, but they are not novel scholarly contributions. Ultimately, then, there are questions about the very usefulness and reliability of that single, central primary source utilized by Fierstien to argue for the significance of the early Seminary. Newspaper accounts of events, personalities and programs do serve to illuminate the ongoing activities of an institution, but often in an uncritical way. This is especially true of accounts of the Seminary in the American Hebrew, an organ that, as Fierstien points out, was published by Jewish leaders with the closest of connections with the fledgling institution. Thus, a historian in search of data has to be grateful that the weekly devoted its space to chronicling both the day-to-day and special events of their favored school. But a scholar must be wary of attributing much compelling value to these reports. Fierstien unfortunately permits frequently laudatory anecdotal data to ascertain the supposed "first-rate" quality of the institution. And his evidence is never judged against any established objective criteria of

260

Book Reviews

excellence, nor are the Seminary's achievements compared with the record of performance of comparable institutions. Finally, while no one would deny that many Jewish Theological Seminary alumni became distinguished and prestigious American rabbis—Fierstien readily lists some of the most eminent—newspaper sources touching on these leaders' student years offer few insights on the actual role the educational institution played in influencing, motivating and directing their rabbinic lives after ordination. Fierstien's argument is that the later achievements of Seminary alumni such as Rabbis Joseph H. Hertz, Mordecai M. Kaplan and Herman Abramowitz "shatters the popular notion that the early Seminary was weak and ineffective" (p. 98). But with the narrow range of sources at his command, he can in fact render no true evidence linking the relationship of study in a seminary classroom to success in the congregational and communal field. The most that can be established with certainty is that the Seminary did develop a multifaceted curriculum, a program that also included field work among the immigrant poor on the Lower East Side. Such experiences could have been put to good use later on by its most talented students. These considerations are clearly lost on Fierstien, who is content with his newspaper sources since they further his ultimate goal of celebrating his alma mater rather more than studying it critically. As a result, this narrow institutional history will be of special interest only to those previously unacquainted with the personalities who built and attended the early Seminary. Scholars will deem A Different Spirit as little more than a footnote to the historiography of late nineteenth-century American Judaism. JEFFREY S. GUROCK Yeshiva University

Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna 1918-1938. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. 272 pp.

Stefan Zweig's depiction of Viennese Jews as the creators and consumers of fin de siecle Viennese culture has been revised in recent years, as scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the internal workings of Viennese Jewry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While denying neither the contribution of individual Jews to this culture nor the existence of a large, cultured middle-class Jewish community in Vienna, the focus of studies in the last decade has shifted to a concern with Jews qua Jews rather than with Jews as the progenitors of modernity. This has provided a sober corrective to what has aptly been called the "coffee house" view of Viennese culture. Harriet Freidenreich's study of Jewish politics in interwar Vienna certainly reflects this shift in emphasis, providing for the first time in English a comprehensive account of both internal Jewish politics and external Jewish political behavior in the first Austrian republic. In a well-organized and clear narrative, Freidenreich guides the reader through the intricacies of communal and general elections, both at the municipal and nation-

History and Social Sciences

261

al levels, without at any time losing sight of the importance of the interplay between internal Jewish and external Viennese and Austrian forces. Freidenreich sees the main fault line in interwar Viennese Jewish politics as the division between nationalist and non-nationalist forces. Accordingly, she divides the republic's twenty years into pre- and post-1933; in the communal elections of December 1932, the Zionists finally succeeded in "conquering the community," winning a majority of seats on the community's governing board, while in March 1933, Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss suspended the parliament and established an authoritarian regime, leading in 1934 to the single-party Catholic corporate state, which survived until the Anschluss of March 1938. The bulk of the book is devoted to the years prior to 1933, describing in detail the primary Jewish political groupings in the community (liberals, nationalists, socialists and the Orthodox) and chronicling their electoral successes and failures, shifting alliances and major personalities. The final two chapters deal rather more summarily with Jewish attempts to cope with increasing economic distress and antisemitism in the 1933-1938 period. Freidenreich's approach is primarily political, supported by a thorough and highly informative base of demographic work. We are treated to a detailed socioeconomic and geographic profile of both the leadership and bases of support of the various political persuasions, and the "ethnic" dimension of communal politics (defined by geographic origin) is rightfully given close attention. All this very valuable information is, however, too often conveyed without a supporting context or explanation, with the reader being left to ponder its significance. That Moravian Jews, for example, provided much of the leadership of both the nationalist and liberal camps (pp. 48-49) is indeed interesting, but what are we to make of such a fact? And why was it the case that "the more assimilated, Viennese-born Jews of middle-class parentage, especially the children of Liberals from the Czech lands," gravitated to socialist rather than nationalist politics (p. 85)? Freidenreich's assertion that social democracy was the ideological heir to liberalism for Austrian Jews is certainly credible, but needs fleshing out. Time and again, analysis is subordinated to narrative. Of greater consequence is the author's failure to explore the nature and parameters of Jewish politics. Defined as "a comparative study in Jewish ethnopolitics on communal, local and national levels" (p. 4) the work in fact narrows this broad spectrum to one predominant element—party politics. Freidenreich deals in authoritative fashion with political developments within Austria, but provides no significant comparative dimension. This results at times in a certain lack of historical perspective and depth. The surge in Jewish nationalist support in November 1918 and 1919, for example (pp. 52—55), is presented in a historical vacuum, ignoring the enormous political progress made by the Zionist movement during the First World War. Viennese Jewish politics was radically transformed by the war and by the subsequent loss of the city's function as a focal point of Jewish political life in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Freidenreich underestimates the impact of the war on the decline of liberal Jewish politics in Vienna by locating the end of "the era of liberal complacency" in the revolutionary turmoil at the war's end (p. 38). The author ambitiously claims that Vienna provides "a microcosm of twentieth century Jewish politics" (p. 1) and that interwar Viennese Jewish politics "strongly resembles Jewish politics in other major Jewish commu-

262

Book Reviews

nities in the twentieth century" (p. 209). But precisely which period of the twentieth century and which major Jewish communities we are not told. Also in need of elaboration and justification is the comment that the Israeli electoral system bears a striking resemblance to that used in Jewish communal elections in Vienna (p. 19). Proportional representation and what Freidenreich calls a "central European multiparty model" were exclusive neither to Israel nor interwar Viennese Jewry. A number of potentially interesting issues are given rather short shrift because of Freidenreich's focus on narrative rather than analysis. What stand, for example, did the Jewish parties take on the possibility of Anschluss to Germany in 1919? Similarly, the positive and patriotic Jewish responses to the creation of the Catholic corporate state and its single party, the Fatherland Front, are merely described rather than explored in depth. Both instances have something to tell us about Jewish identity and self-perception in the first republic. The role of the formidable nationalist Chief Rabbi Hirsch Perez Chajes deserves greater attention, as does the (entirely ignored) Jonas Kreppel, a Galician-Viennese writer, publisher and Austrian patriot. Here, the author's apparent neglect of Hebrew and Yiddish sources makes itself felt. Freidenreich's portrait reveals a community in severe demographic and economic decline, crippled by intractably fragmented politics and vainly attempting to deal with massive internal economic and social distress while turning away in failure and impotence from an increasingly antisemitic environment. It is in many respects a convincing portrayal, if on occasion overly schematic and not entirely free from what Salo Baron (in Vienna himself for much of the war and the 1920s) called the "lachrymose" conception of Jewish history. DAVID RECHTER The Hebrew University

Peter Freimark and Arno Herzig (eds.), Die Hamburger Juden in der Emanzipationsphase (1780-1870). Hamburg: Freimark Herzig, 1989. 337 pp.

Die Hamburger Juden in der Emanzipationsphase is a collection of fourteen essays on a wide range of subjects organized under four general headings: the inner development of the Jewish community; Jews in literature and the press; the social development of the Hamburg Jews; and Hamburg Jewish politics. Under the first heading, Peter Freimark provides interesting examples of the conflict between religious innovations and Jewish tradition. Basing himself on hitherto unpublished sources, he describes and interprets the traditional stance of the late eighteenthcentury rabbi Raphael Cohen as exemplified in his use of the ban against people who opposed tradition. Freimark thus illuminates the last phase of the traditional rabbinate when the insistence upon traditional law was losing ground to the pressure for change and more individual liberty. This same period of early emancipation is touched upon by Chaim Shoham. He introduces us to enlightened (but still Ortho-

History and Social Sciences

263

dox) Hebrew writers who wrote in Hebrew because, as Jacob Emden put it, "this is our most natural [language] and only he who expresses himself in it is able to find his identity and to reach the depth of his soul" (p. 31). The last essay in this chapter belongs to the final period of emancipation when the Jewish community of Hamburg was forced to look for a new kind of organizational system after a decade of strife between Orthodox and Liberals. Ina Lorenz describes the ideas and conflicts between the various parties and the mediating contribution of the Senate. Her conclusion is that the final agreement, which allowed for diversity of religious association within the community, developed into a model of internal Jewish tolerance. In the second section, Franklin Kopitsch introduces the nearly forgotten writer and journalist Joseph Mendelssohn (1817-1856), whose writings have not yet been studied. Mendelssohn's biography of Salomon Heine, published in 1845, remains the principal source for the study of this Hamburg banker, the uncle of Heinrich Heine. In another essay in this section, Klaus Briegleb compares texts by Heinrich Heine with those from other sources, offering by this means some new critical analysis. Gunter Marwedel's well-documented contribution reviews Jewish life through the Altona publications of the 1770s and the 1780s, presenting an excellent overview of the varied positions regarding the Jews during this period. A similar subject is taken up by Raoul Wenzel Michalski in his essay, "The Hamburg press and the Jewish question, 1819-1849." This article makes clear the degree to which the press depended upon the general social and political context in tackling Jewish-related subjects. Various essays shed light on social subjects. Contributions by Anke Richter, Shulamit Volkov and Jurgen Ellermeyer deal, respectively, with Jewish care for the poor, an evaluation of the censuses of 1867 and 1890 in Altona and the controversy over freeholding and freedom of residence. Sybille Baumbach's contribution is a portrayal of the "Israelitische Freischule" and its contribution toward the assimilation and raising of the cultural level of the Jewish lower class during the first half of the nineteenth century. The section on Jewish politics in Hamburg features Arno Herzig's and Cornelia Suss' description of the politics of emancipation. The authors conclude that Hamburg's policy was not overly progressive in this matter, even though it was not particularly influenced by dogmatic arguments (such as the necessity to uphold the Christian state). Ulrich Bauche writes on Max Mendel (1872-1942), whose life spanned the era from the obtaining of full civil equality to the worst persecutions of the Jews. Under the impact of growing antisemitism, Mendel joined the Social Democrats. Being a trained merchant, he was an ardent promoter of the "Produktion" cooperative; in 1925 he was elected to the Senate. At the age of seventy, Mendel was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he died. The book also contains the texts of the three laws governing the rights of the Jews—those of 1710, 1849 and 1863. Apart from these, and the individual contributions adding to our understanding of the Jews of Hamburg and the process of

264

Book Reviews

emancipation, this volume presents a number of thematic and methodological incentives for those wishing to undertake local history studies. HELGA KROHN Jewish Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Judith Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France Since 1968. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. 248 pp.

Upheavals in Eastern Europe are lifting, slowly but surely, the blanket of silence that long enveloped the region's various societies, distorting their history and hiding their cultural particularity. The Communist revolution, determined as it was to create a new human being purified of his old beliefs and directed toward the building of a classless society, had never favored the survival of particularistic cultures and traditions. Religion, along with value systems in their most general sense, were leveled; even urban topography underwent a complete transformation as historically significant names disappeared in one fell swoop. Now, however, some of these names have reemerged to stir up memories—and to awaken Jewish memory, in particular. For example, there is Koenigsberg (Kaliningrad), whose past resurfaces every day: an emblem of emancipation and enlightenment; the home of Kant and Mendelssohn (and later, Hannah Arendt); at once a lost city cut off from its cultural surroundings and a newly-rediscovered place that bears witness to and never departed too far from its own past. Nearby lies Vilna, revived (under the name of Vilnius, to be sure) as the new capital of independent Lithuania. Memory there remains an open wound, immediately calling up the antisemitic collaboration between city natives and the German occupiers, alongside the present-day hostility toward Jews. It is a place in which the most cliched and threadbare of fantasies persist,1 memory moving confusedly toward the recovery of what was once called the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." In Vilna, Judaism flourished in its many forms—univeralist, Orthodox and Liberal. Yiddishism had its beginnings there, as did Jewish sociology and Bundism. This magical city no longer exists, and today's gusts of freedom will change nothing. Yet in some strange way, Vilna seems to have been reborn in today's France— inasmuch as the present revival there of Jewish thought in a variety of forms may be inspired, as Judith Friedlander shows, by the Jerusalem of the North. The Bundist outlook that originated in Vilna animates various organizations in present-day France, causing not only a revival of Yiddish but also an interest in contemporary forms of cultural pluralism. From the Gaston Cremieux Circle to today's socialist reforms aimed at decentralization, this outlook legitimizes a variety of particularist cultures that had long been forced out by Jacobinism. Emmanuel Levinas, the French Jewish thinker who has influenced so many Jewish and non-Jewish philosophers, was born in Kovno, not far from Vilna, and his teaching was inspired by the Vilna Gaon. Levinas' words travel far beyond their academic setting and are eagerly heard by a large audience; through his teaching, a vanished tradition remains alive.

History and Social Sciences

265

At the same time, and somewhat unexpectedly, this tradition also inspires the creation of numerous yeshivas, such as Strasbourg's "Yechiva des Etudiants," which draws on the Lithuanian talmudic tradition for its authority while turning its back on emancipation and enlightenment. Led by Rabbi Abitbol, this site of a Jewish revival inimical to the idea of the nation-state has influenced, here and there, the creation of similar centers of study. Far from Jacobinism and Franco-Judaism and yet unmoved by the Zionist dream, a cultural Judaism is coming into being that may challenge the strict French division between public domain and private space (to which religion is traditionally relegated). In the context of a general religious revival that is also affecting Catholicism and Protestantism, and with the collapse of the great socialist ideologies that have been particularly alive in France, this vigorous return of the spirit of Vilna—often attracting Jewish youth and drawing on a vibrant, communal Sephardic Judaism— represents a challenge to the Jewish establishment. To some extent, it has already altered the urban landscape in which, from time to time, one still can glimpse a silhouette from days gone by, clothed in traditional garb. Let us not exaggerate however: Vilna on the Seine remains more a symbolic reference point than a portrait of a collective reality. If Friedlander brilliantly demonstrates the existence of intellectual continuity, she may at the same time be underestimating the strength of a Franco-Jewry that does not wish to return to the communities of the past. It has many members anxious to uphold the republican contract, a contract that may well erode values but thus nevertheless remains an emancipatory force in a world of burgeoning ethnocentrism. Just as the revival of charismatic Catholicism cannot conceal the fact that contemporary French Catholicism has undergone a very rapid decline (as numerous recent studies show), the flourishing of cultural Judaism indicated by the creation of schools and centers of Jewish learning does not signify the rebirth of an insular, self-contained Jewish community in the midst of the republican public domain. This holds true especially today, as the fashion of respecting differences falls victim to a Front National that takes possession of this outlook only to pervert it. History cannot be transposed from one society to another. PIERRE BIRNBAUM Universite de la Sorbonne

Note 1. See the New York Review of Books, 14 to 30 October 1990.

Evyatar Friesel, Atlas of Modern Jewish History. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. 159 pp.

Go into any bookstore and one of the most prominent items on display will be atlases. It would seem that maps are enjoying a vogue they never experienced

266

Book Reviews

before. But the inquisitive browser will discover soon enough how much he or she has been deceived, because most books that today carry the name atlas contain little of what one expects to find—maps. Instead, most atlases have become coffee-table volumes, usually of high technical quality, that are dominated by text and photographs with a few maps added for "local color." Such a description fits not only today's historical and cultural "atlases," but even geographic and political atlases, which often include as much text as they do maps. As a historian ever concerned with the abominably low level of geographic knowledge among today's readers, I direct my students (and myself) to atlases in order to find maps that can locate places described in historical and other texts. Atlases, therefore, should first and foremost be tools that contain the kind of visual images (charts and diagrams as well as maps) without which texts of a historical nature are frequently difficult if not impossible to comprehend. It was with such expectations that I turned to Evyatar Friesel's Atlas of Modern Jewish History. I was not disappointed, because happily the book's contents reflect its title. Friesel's work is primarily a collection of maps and graphs, even though there is a substantial amount of explanatory text as well. The atlas is a revised English translation of the Hebrew original (Atlas Karta letoldot 'am yisrael bazeman hehadash) published in 1983. In his short preface, Friesel does not really spell out how this edition differs from the earlier one. The concept "modern Jewish history" is meant to refer to the period from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries to the present, which is, in turn, subdivided into the "modern period" down to 1939 and the "contemporary period" from 1948 to the present. The intervening decade from 1939 to 1948 is classified as "those fateful years . . . that changed the course of Jewish history" (p. 10). The volume contains 185 maps, many of which include inset maps, charts, diagrams and other illustrated material. The maps are arranged into seven sections or chapters: demography (14); European countries from the seventeenth century to the First World War (24); major themes in modern Jewish history (38); Muslim countries (20); interwar Europe (25); Europe 1940-1980s (22); and new centers of Jewry (43). Throughout, there is a conscious effort to assure that the volume is worldwide in coverage, from Europe to America to the Middle East, South Africa and the Far East. Not surprisingly, however, most of the atlas is devoted to Europe (in particular East Central Europe), the continent that by the late nineteenth century contained some 80 percent of all Jews. The maps were prepared by Carta, Israel's leading cartographic publisher. While they are not particularly imaginative from the standpoint of graphic design and typeface, they are generally clear and easy to read. And this is what is ultimately essential for a research tool. In an effort to save on costs, the atlas is produced in only two colors (black and blue), although varying degrees of screening have allowed for a wider range of shading. The maps are generally free of errors, whether in terms of place-names or borders, which is remarkable considering the worldwide geographic coverage. A bibliography, general index and select place-name index close the volume. Friesel's atlas is at its best when reviewing demographic patterns and when focusing on individual countries. Here the maps and charts speak for themselves,

History and Social Sciences

267

with the text playing an appropriate subordinate role. This is less the case in Section 3, entitled "Major Themes in Modern Jewish History," where the text and charts transform this section into a brief history of intellectual and social activity that is probably best told elsewhere in a standard narrative. This section also reveals the problems of rendering in brief paragraphs complex intellectual ideas and movements that require the use of specialized terms not readily known—nor always adequately explained—to the general reader. For instance, in the section on Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe, the Russian-Polish variant of that movement is said to have included both the mitnagdim and Hasidim. The next sentence then refers to the Haredim, which an unsuspecting reader might assume is another movement altogether and not a Hebrew term for ultra-Orthodox Jews. Such inconveniences, however, are few and far between in what is otherwise a remarkable volume. The author is to be congratulated for producing the best available atlas of modern Jewish history with maps, charts and other data that are accurate and reliable, and with a textual commentary that succeeds in presenting an impartial and rhetoric-free account of tragic events (pogroms, the Holocaust) without any kind of bias or judgmental accusation. PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI University of Toronto

David M. Gordis and Yoav Ben-Horin (eds.), Jewish Identity in America. Los Angeles: Wilstein Institute of Jewish Policy Studies, University of Judaism, 1991. 296pp.

This is the edited proceedings of a 1989 conference on Jewish identity in America convened by the newly created Wilstein Institute of Jewish Policy of the University of Judaism. It is a model for what the edited proceedings of a conference should look like. It is produced in soft cover and published by the host institution. The papers and the responses have the flavor of oral presentations rather than the style of polished academic papers. Hence, the very absence of pretension invites sympathetic treatment. The reader is patient with the occasional paper that didn't merit inclusion (and I found very few such papers in this volume) or the observations offered without adequate documentation. Some of the participants were nonscholars, and my impression is that their presence enhanced rather than diminished the level of discussion. A few of the comments suggest underlying themes that did not find expression in the papers. Most noticeable is the question of the utility of quantitative studies for the understanding of Jewish identity. The vehemence with which one of the participants defended the value of such study: . . . if Jewish identity exists, it exists in some quantity. And if it exists in some quantity it can be measured. . . . We should not attend to the nahrishkeit that somehow diminishes the enormous strides in methodology that have been made over the past twentyfive or thirty years. (David Rosenhan, p. 280)

268

Book Reviews

suggests that serious questions may have indeed been raised about the merit of such study. It is unfortunate that we didn't hear more about this issue. I would have appreciated a paper on the inherent limitations of quantitative research for understanding Jewish identity—a limitation, it seems to me, that is becoming ever more apparent. A number of points recurring through the various sessions also suggest that the conference was more than the total of disparate papers. One point was the necessity of stressing the spiritual dimension as a means of strengthening Jewish identity. Three rabbis (Harold Schulweis, Richard Levy and Daniel Landes), one from each of the major denominations, offered brief but outstanding presentations that highlighted this theme. Matters of the spirit, much less the name of God, aren't often invoked these days, even in Jewish conferences, even when the topic is Jewish identity, and even when the speakers are rabbis. But in this case, it wasn't only the rabbis who spoke of spiritual matters. The same theme recurred in a number of other papers, including the presentation by Jimmy Carter's former adviser Stuart Eisenstadt. A second point that recurred in virtually every presentation was the relationship of American Jews and Israel. Steven M. Cohen offered a marvelous overview of the topic, and virtually every speaker dealt with the issue in one way or another. These included Jonathan Sarna, who offered a very provocative paper on the rising number of Muslims in the United States and its implications both for the status of Jews and the popularity of the notion of a Judeo-Christian heritage that has, up until now, shaped American culture; and Bernard Cooperman, whose paper addressed the issue of the declining enrollment of students in Jewish studies courses. Cooperman attributes this decline, in part, to the declining status of Israel in the eyes of American Jews. His paper, of serious concern to anyone interested in the development of Jewish studies in American universities, is followed by excellent responses from Arnold Band and Steven Zipperstein. I have not mentioned the other papers: "Sociological Analysis of Jewish Identity" by Bruce Phillips; "The Psychology of Identity Formation" by Perry London and Allissa Hirschfeld; "The American Component of American Jewish Identity" by Henry Feingold; "Popular Fiction and the Shaping of Jewish Identity" by Arnold Band; "Job's Children: Post-Holocaust Jewish Identity in Second-Generation Literature" by Alan Berger; and "Keeping the Cost of Living Jewishly Affordable" by J. Alan Winter. This is not intended to slight the superior quality of most of them. I do not recall ever reading the edited results of conference proceedings with such a feeling of having learned so much. CHARLES S. LIEBMAN Bar-Ilan University

History and Social Sciences

269

Stefan Kanfer, A Summer World: The Attempt to Build a Jewish Eden in the Catskills, From the Days of the Ghetto to the Rise and Decline of the Borscht Belt. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. 333 pp.

"The vacation habit is unquestionably stronger among the Jewish poor than among any other poor class," observed the American Hebrew, a leading Anglo-Jewish newspaper, in the summer of 1903. "There are towns in this state, in the Catskill region and along the seashore, whose summer population is made up almost entirely of East Siders. Slowly yet surely, with the ... rapid Americanization of the new arrivals and their families, the country-going habit has extended to those of moderate means to a considerable extent." That American Jews of moderate means and immigrant origins enjoyed and took advantage of what was for many a newly available commodity—free time—is the subject of Stefan Kanfer's A Summer World. As its overly long, somewhat quirky, full title suggests, this account focuses on the social history of the Jewish Catskills, the so-called "Borscht Belt," attempting to portray that experience while also making sense of its former appeal to generations of American Jewish vacationers. At its height during the interwar years, when thousands of visitors annually spent summers at Grossingers or the Concord, two legendary hostelries of the "mountains," or in the hundreds of small, spartan boarding or rooming houses known as kukhaleyn (lit: "cook-alone") that dotted the area, the Catskills barely survived postwar changes in leisure-time behavior. Once the unquestioned center of recreation among New York Jews, the Catskills eventually languished, and its popularity, Kanfer reminds his readers, "now seems as remote as the Pleistocene Era" (p. 319). Affectionate and warm-hearted, Kanfer's history surveys the development of this "affordable oasis" (p. 125) from its first manifestation as a Jewish farming community in the early years of the century to its emergence as a mecca for Jewish vacationers several decades later. "Summers ago a whole world was here," writes Kanfer, "a place of unparalleled vigor and humor—and sometimes of conspiracy and crime. There has never been a domain like it in America," he concludes, noting its concentration of performers, gangsters, basketball stars and "waiters and busboys who were later to run hospitals and serve on appellate courts. . ." (p. 10). By the early 1920s, the presence of thousands of vacationing Jews in the former Kaaterskill (a name of Dutch provenance) imparted a thoroughly Jewish stamp to this mountainous, verdant stretch of territory north of New York City. The numerical and cultural predominance of a seasonal Jewish clientele gave rise, in fact, to the quip that in the Catskills even the horses were Jewish: "Quite often they stop short at the foot of a hill and refuse to go on ... Jewish horses—Jewish strikes," related the Jewish Daily Forward. A venue for relaxation and for courtship, both of which Kanfer details amusingly, Catskill resorts such as Grossingers and the Concord became "household words" as well as the springboard for the development of a singularly American Jewish talent: Borscht Belt comedians. A roster of those who apprenticed in the mountains reads like a Who's Who of Comedy and includes Jackie Mason, Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, Joan Rivers and Eddie Fisher.

270

Book Reviews

More cinematic than conventional in approach, Kanfer frames his discussions in scenes or short takes rather than in sustained analysis: a chapter entitled "Sex, Love, and Expandable Time" looks at Jewish mating customs; another, "The Fifty-Hole Golf Course," recounts Jewish Catskill legends; a third, "Arthur Murray, Cary Grant, Solomon and Charley's Aunt," discusses Jewish vaudeville. Given the author's background as a film critic, it is also not surprising that he places the entertainment industry at the center of his narrative. Reproducing many characteristic, if long-forgotten, "routines" or comedy sketches, and drawing heavily on the memoirs of Moss Hart, Joey Adams and other former tumlers, or entertainers, he gives a vivid and at times even instructive description of the Borscht Belt comedic world. Ultimately, though, there is much more to the leisure-time experience of America's Jews than Kanfer would have us believe. As both consumers of and participants in American leisure culture, American Jews fashioned a complex and often ambivalent relationship to that "sphere of pleasure" known as the vacation. As a multifaceted phenomenon, leisure not only reinforced patterns of ethnic sociability and distinctiveness but often served as an agent of acculturation. The pursuit of leisure, or what psychologist William James called the "gospel of relaxation," ritualized distinctions between work and play while encompassing new attitudes toward family togetherness, physical well-being and time. As opportunities for recreational activity grew, so too did the democratization of leisure: the social value of a vacation assumed greater importance among all segments of American society. The idea of segmenting and organizing free time into a distinct sphere of activity was at first unfamiliar to the newly arrived immigrant. Within a remarkably rapid period of time, though, taking a secular holiday—if only for a weekend—became a much anticipated and integral aspect of the immigrant experience. As early as 1901, a reporter for the Tageblat was told by residents of the Lower East Side that "we are all talking and thinking and dreaming of our vacation." As more and more immigrants and their children talked, thought, dreamed and actually took a regularly scheduled vacation, leisure became an accustomed part of their vernacular culture. The vacation experience, however, was not without its social and cultural pitfalls. "Be intelligent vacationists," wrote a columnist for the Froyen Zhurnal, a popular Yiddish women's monthly of the 1920s, urging young women especially to "think twice before going into any undue expenditures." Maurice Samuel's poem, '"Al Harei Catskill" ("On the Catskill Mountains"), which first appeared in The Menorah Journal in the summer of 1925, also reflects some of the complexities associated with leisure-time in general and with its Jewish nuances in particular. Rueful and at times even sarcastic, the poem seems to draw on both the elegaic tone and style of the traditional Jewish lament, '"Al naharot bavel" ("By the Waters of Babylon") as it contrasts the "summer world" of the Catskills with the experience of the narrator's great-grandfather who "knew only of two worlds— Golus and Zion." "And here in Catskill what do Jews believe?" the narrator asks rhetorically. In Kosher, certainly; in Shabbas, less . . . In charity and in America.

History and Social Sciences

271

But most of all in Pinochle and Poker, In dancing and in Jazz, in risque stories, And everything that's smart and up-to-date. A telling indictment of the frivolous leisure culture characteristic of the Catskills, Samuel's poem is equally adept at conveying a sense of lost innocence, of dissonance between the old world of one's great-grandparents and the perplexing and perhaps equally unfamiliar world of contemporary American Jewry. Unlike Kanfer's work, it reminds us that beneath the carefree, casual appearance of a summer spent in pursuit of leisure, a more textured, complex reality awaited vacationers. JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT Princeton University

Yosef Kaplan and Menahem Stern (eds.), Hitbolelut utemiyah: hemshekhiyut utemurot betarbut ha'amim uveyisrael (Acculturation and Assimilation: Continuity and Change in the Culture of Israel and the Nations). Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1989. 260 pp.

Historians of Jewish acculturation and integration in the modern world will find in this collection only a few essays relevant to their work. Of the sixteen essays, which were initially delivered as papers at a conference in Jerusalem in the summer of 1986, only two—those of Robert Cohen and Shulamit Volkov—treat Jewish assimilation in the modern period. The others are devoted either to questions of cultural contact between Jews and non-Jews in much earlier periods (Hellenistic Palestine, the medieval Islamic world, early-modern Spain) or to questions of cultural assimilation in non-Jewish contexts (orientalism in modern art, the reception of Western culture in Japan, the civilizing role of the Church in medieval Western Europe). The underrepresentation of modern Jewish history in this collection may reflect an unintended division of labor in the writing of Jewish history that has developed in recent decades. While not willing to push the matter too far, it strikes me that the study of Jewish assimilation in Europe and America has increasingly become the preserve of historians outside the state of Israel. This should come as no surprise, of course. Questions of Jewish cohesion and continuity occupy a prominent place on the communal agenda of diaspora Jewries in North America and Western Europe. Social scientists, rabbis, writers and intellectuals, and communal functionaries and activists have been engaged in an animated discussion for at least two decades about the future of Jewish communities in liberal societies. In light of this, it is only natural that diaspora historians have assigned a higher priority to studying earlier experiments with assimilation than have their colleagues in Israel, whose work is represented in this collection. For the latter, there is no pressing extrascholarly motive for undertaking this kind of research and analysis. To say this is not to detract in any way from the two contributions in this volume that do speak to the topic of Jewish assimilation in the modern world. Robert Cohen of Haifa University provides a useful review of the current debate over the demo-

272

Book Reviews

graphic future of American Jewry. He begins by noting that voices of doom about the impending demise of the Jewish community are nothing new and cites many interesting examples. Thus, as early as 1820, Joseph Lyons of Savannah prophesied that in half a century it would be impossible to find a synagogue in America. What such early prophets of doom could not foresee was that future immigration would more than compensate for the demographic losses occurring among families long settled in America. However, as Cohen points out, it is unlikely that there will be any further waves of immigration capable of influencing current demographic trends. Cohen's presentation of the two schools of thought on the future of American Jewry—the so-called optimistic or transformationist school and the so-called pessimistic or Israeli school—is as evenhanded as one can expect regarding such a highly charged issue (he himself is more sympathetic to the pessimistic interpretation). The real debate between the two camps, he argues, revolves around how intermarriage influences the religious and communal identity of the intermarrying couple and their children. If so, it may be too early to reach any definitive conclusions about how the descendants of such families one or two generations from now will relate to Judaism and the Jewish community—especially since radical assimilation in the Western world is a cumulative, multigenerational process. However, if the past is any guide, which admittedly it may not always be, there is little hope for optimism. Shulamit Volkov's contribution to the volume—"The Jews of Germany in the Nineteenth Century: Ambition, Success, Acculturation"—is the latest in a series of important articles that she has published in Hebrew and German since the early 1980s on the character of Jewish identity and assimilation in modern Germany, primarily in the Imperial period. There is now a substantial literature on this topic, within which Volkov's work stands out by virtue of its conceptual subtlety and methodological sophistication and its implications for studying Jewish assimilation in other contexts. In this and other essays, Volkov argues that German Jews, despite their apparent embrace of the majority culture, remained a cohesive group, set apart from other bourgeois Germans not only by their social isolation but also by a host of distinctive attitudes, many of which found expression in family and domestic life (thus escaping the attention of historians, who have tended to concentrate on Jewish activity in the public arena of politics and self-defense). In this essay, Volkov focuses on the concern with success, accomplishment and distinction in German Jewish families, a concern she traces to the failure of the social dimensions of emancipation to be realized in imperial Germany. Occupational and cultural achievements came to function as psychological compensation for social rejection. At the same time they also served as a tactical weapon in the ongoing campaign to achieve full social equality, serving as evidence that Jews had met the conditions for their integration into German society. In constructing her argument, Volkov musters a wealth of arresting evidence about German Jewish distinctiveness. Her suggestion that Jewish parents lavished more attention on their children's medical care and education than other middle-class city dwellers is especially intriguing. For example, in light of substantial differences between Jewish and non-Jewish rates of infant mortality, even when social status is held constant, she asks whether Jewish mothers breast-fed their children more frequently instead of

History and Social Sciences

273

feeding them the unhygienic milk substitutes that were commonly used at the time. She admits that we have no answer to the question, but merely raising it helps to reorient our thinking about how to evaluate cultural assimilation in modern Jewish history. TODD M. ENDELMAN University of Michigan Hagit Lavsky, Beterem pur'anut: darkam vihudam shel ziyonei germaniyah, 19181932 (Before Catastrophe: The Distinctive Path of German Zionism). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1990. 292 pp.

Jewish intellectuals in German-speaking countries played a leading role in the transformation of Zionism into a worldwide political movement. Not only were Pinsker's Autoemanzipation (1882) and Herzl's Judenstaat (1896) written in German: for many years, until the outbreak of the First World War, the movement's organizational center was stationed in Germany and its leaders were German Jews. Even after the shift of central Zionist activities to London (and later Jerusalem) and the emergence of a new generation of activists in Eastern Europe, German Zionist leaders for many years wielded a disproportionate influence in the movement and its executive bodies. The title of Hagit Lavsky's excellently written book on this subject is somewhat misleading. The doctoral thesis on which it is based was more accurately titled "The Ideological and Political Role of German Zionism in the World Zionist Movement," and indeed the preponderant part of this extensively documented study deals with the ideological, political and organizational positions of German Zionist leaders inside the World Zionist Organization (WZO). The reader who seeks to learn something new about the practical work, political affiliations and conflicts of the ZVfD (Zionistische Vereinigung fur Deutschland) in the context of the German Jewish community will be somewhat disappointed. The youth movements of the Hehalutz movement and the hakhsharah (training) centers, as well as the community work not only of the Judische Volkspartei but also of organizations such as the Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden (in which Zionists played the dominant role), remains largely neglected. Lavsky pays only cursory attention even to the heated disputes between the Zionists and the Centralverein deutscher Staatsburger judischen Glaubens, which at the time represented the vast majority of German Jews, concerning the problems of Jewish existence in Germany and the political fight against antisemitism and the emergent Nazi party. Apart from being the author's preference, the focus on German Zionists within the WZO reflects the Palestinocentric orientation of the ZVfD under the uncontested leadership of Kurt Blumenfeld. The first affirmation of this orientation, at the ZVfD's famous convention in Posen in 1912, is usually regarded as the decisive turning point in the movement's ideological development. In fact, as Lavsky persuasively shows, the Posen proclamation that every Zionist's duty was "to include Palestine in his life-program" (Lebensziel) passed rather casually, without much real

274

Book Reviews

ideological discussion. Only after the close of the First World War, the Russian revolution, the Balfour declaration and renewed settlement work in Palestine, along with the ascent of a new generation of leaders in the German movement, did Palestinocentrism become the official and leading principle of the ZVfD. At the Hanover convention of 1921, Blumenfeld's Nationaler Einheitsblock had to overcome the opposition of the older, established Zionist leadership and the advocates of Zionist Gegenwartsarbeit, i.e. educational and political activity in the Jewish communities of the diaspora, in order to establish his faction's preeminence. From this point on, an operative though not formal split divided the movement. The majority concentrated its efforts on fund-raising for Palestine, mainly through the Keren Hayesod and the propagation of aliyah by means of the educational efforts of Hehalutz and the youth movements. The Judische Rundschau, edited by Robert Weltsch from 1920 until its demise in 1938, served for many years as the de facto mouthpiece of the world Zionist movement. Its pages were mostly dedicated to developments in Palestine and the discussion of general issues of Zionist policy, with political events in Germany and the problems and struggles of German Jewry receiving only secondary coverage. The political work inside the communities was left to the activists of the Judische Volkspartei, led—with some misgivings—by Alfred Klee, Max Kollenscher and Georg Kareski. More than a matter of functional division, the two camps were divided by their differing ideological and political outlooks. Blumenfeld and his followers were mostly intellectuals whose radical convictions had been formed in the Zionist student's movement, the K.J.V. (Kartell Judische Verbindungen). Many of the leading members belonged to Hapoel Hazair, a non-Marxist, moderate socialist movement strongly influenced by the ideas of A. D. Gordon and other ideologists of the Second Aliyah. This basic ideological affiliation positioned the majority of the ZVfD's leadership on the left side of the political spectrum within the Zionist movement. They were the most reliable supporters of Chaim Weizmann's pragmatic constructivism and his coalition with the increasingly influential Labor movement in Eretz Israel. Among their adversaries, Max Kollenscher belonged to the right-ofcenter wing of the so-called "B-Faction General Zionists," while Kareski moved even farther right to become the leader of the German Revisionists. Inside the Weizmann camp, prominent leaders of the ZVfD stood out as the protagonists of moderation and restraint in the face of the national aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs. Men such as Arthur Ruppin, Martin Buber, Hugo Bergmann and Robert Weltsch, to name only a few, became leading figures in the Brith Shalom, which was founded in 1925 with the declared aim of "[creating] a Jewish-Arab agreement in order to realize the establishment of the Jewish homestead, founded on full equality of rights of Jews and Arabs in a binational state in Palestine." Lavsky presents a profound and persuasive analysis of the ideological background and political developments that caused the German Zionists and the Judische Rundschau to become the outspoken protagonists of a binational arrangement with the Arabs. The last of the conventions discussed in this work is that held in Jena in December 1929. The crisis facing the world Zionist leadership after the bloody riots in Palestine seemed to have been satisfactorily settled by a "renewed covenant" between Weizmann and the majority of the German Zionists. In fact this was only a

History and Social Sciences

275

temporary resolution that was followed by new and harsher conflicts, finally resulting in Weizmann's resignation in 1931. For German Zionists this was the swan song of their longstanding position in the World Zionist Organization. Lavsky attributes their decline to the rise of Nazism in Germany. In my opinion it was even more inevitably linked with the increasing influence of the Yishuv and its leaders in Palestine. AVRAHAM BARKAI Kibbutz Lehavot Habashan

V. D. Lipman, A History of the Jews in Britain Since 1858. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990. xvi + 274 pp.

This posthumously published synthesis of recent writings on Anglo-Jewish history is a fitting memorial to a man who, despite spending his life as a civil servant, became a pioneer in the field through the publication in 1954 of his Social History of the Jews in England, 1850-1950. Like most pioneers, he has provided a point from which to move on, but the conservative character of the approach and conclusions of this book should not obscure its real merits. It is a worthy introduction, suitable for undergraduates, to the subject of British Jewish history since 1858. This is institutional history, clearly written and well-informed. Migration, demography and social geography are well presented. For the life of the community, its texture and fabric, readers will have to go elsewhere. There is also no real discussion of cultural life, the press, Yiddish literature, rabbinic learning, entrepreneurship, crime and corruption (up to and including Robert Maxwell), areas where the character of Jewish life is revealed with perhaps greater clarity than in the committee rooms of notables and "Anglo-Jewish personalities." This is polite history, the kind that Jews think will not embarrass them. What we need now is a more stringent, critical, comparative social history of twentieth-century Jewry. J. M. WINTER Pembroke College, Cambridge

Alfred D. Low, Soviet Jewry and Soviet Policy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 249 pp.

A great deal has been written about Soviet Jewry and Soviet Jewish policy. This does not mean that there is no place for further books on the subject, especially now that sources have become available that only a short time ago would have seemed unrealistic even to dream about. These new materials will not necessarily compel historians to make basic revisions, but they will unquestionably provide important details and enable us to address ourselves to a number of queries that until now have remained unanswered.

276

Book Reviews

Unfortunately, the book before us not only breaks no new ground; it really has nothing to recommend it by any criterion. While apparently intended as a scholarly study, since it contains some three hundred and fifty notes and a "select bibliography," it lacks any systematic approach—-let alone analysis—is full of errors of every magnitude and is blatantly tendentious. The prejudice displayed in this book makes it very difficult for a scholar to digest. It is really a lengthy diatribe, a j'accuse of the Soviet regime as a whole and Stalin in particular, of a simplistic and unsophisticated nature. No one who has studied Soviet Jewish policy would exonerate the Soviet Union from discriminating against its Jews, from placing them in impossible dilemmas both as a group and as individuals; every serious study of this general subject, or any of its facets, has led its readers to such a conclusion. But surely it is the essence of scholarship to provide the primary material and the analysis that will enable its audience to reach conclusions without strings of denigratory epithets; I, for one, do not permit this sort of attempted brainwashing in undergraduate essays. The factual mistakes in this work are so many as to defy enumeration. Some of them are merely the result of slipshod writing and editing. All scholars know that the first Zionist Congress was held in 1897 and not 1898 (p. 20) and that Valerian Zorin was never Soviet foreign minister (p. 86). Other errors are the result of simple ignorance of Soviet affairs. To write of churches being repaired and reopened while synagogues were being closed in the course of Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign (p. xiii) is a case in point, for in the last years of the Khrushchev regime the number of Russian Orthodox churches alone is said to have been reduced from 20,000 to 6,850.1 Similarly, Low's remarks concerning the criteria for republican status in accordance with the Soviet constitution (pp. 48-49) ignore several fundamental components. Low makes no distinction between autonomous republics and union republics, although the Soviet constitution differentiated between them very clearly and specifically. This has important implications regarding the status of Birobidjan. There are some basic misunderstandings as well in connection with the Soviet census figures. One gets the distinct impression that Low chooses which data to accept and which to ignore in accordance with the thesis he is seeking to present. In any case, in 1959, Great Russians comprised some 55 percent of the population and not "less than half" (p. 1). Moreover, the official figures—again of the 1959 census—do not enable us to conclude that the Jews were more numerous than the total population of eight of the fifteen union republics. Finally, the present-tense use made of 1959 and 1970 census data in a book published in 1990—the implication is that such data is up-to-date, since no mention is made of the censuses held in 1979 and 1989—makes the author's analysis appear spurious and unconvincing. Finally, there is the problematic use of sources in this work. In a great many instances no source at all is given, despite the fact that Low presents some very detailed information. My own personal acquaintance with the material directly connected with the chapter on Soviet policy toward the establishment of the state of Israel or the section on the anticosmopolitan campaign makes me suspect that a fairly large portion of the primary sources referred to by the author may not actually have been consulted by him.

277

History and Social Sciences

Not surprisingly for a book of this quality, there are an unforgivable number of typos, not to speak of some very questionable and erratic transliteration. In short, one can only regret that such a respectable series as the East European Monographs agreed to publish a book that is almost an insult to the intelligence of its intended audience. YAACOV Ro'i Tel-Aviv University

Note 1. Dmitry V. Pospielovsky, Soviet Anti-Religious Campaigns and Persecutions (New York: 1988), 135.

Michael A. Meyer, Jewish Identity in the Modern World. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1990. 110 pp.

In this slim volume, Michael Meyer addresses a substantial, complicated and intricate problem: Jewish identity in the modern world. This is a question that will undoubtedly engage the attention of an ever-growing number of historians dealing with the past century of Jewish history, a century that witnessed changes of great consequence in the social and political status of the Jews. The claim can be made that, whereas classical Jewish historiography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to define the essence of Jewish existence, historians at the end of the present century will be faced with the definition of Jewish identity. The difference between the two, I believe, lies in the discovery of the historical distinctiveness of a socially and culturally well-defined nation on the one hand and, on the other hand, the search for the collective traits of a very loose-knit "peoplehood" (a term Meyer intentionally uses again and again) that is dispersed throughout several cultures, speaks different languages and lives under different political conditions. Meyer's book, which grew out of a series of lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle, is an excellent example of historiographical writing that straddles the borderline between the style of academe and that of popular lecture, and between that of historical analysis and historiosophical thought. As a historian, Meyer deals with the historical processes that shaped Jewish identity in the modern age and still influence it. He examines three continuing processes, two of which can be defined as being external, and the third as internal. The external ones are enlightenment and antisemitism, while the third, the internal process, is a sense of Jewish peoplehood that finds expression in the concept Zion. Each of these processes had a dual effect on the shaping of modern Jewish identity. The positive contribution of the Enlightenment, or modernity—which I believe to be a more fitting term—lies in the fact that it brought Jews to identify with the world outside the limits of Judaism. Simultaneously, however, it caused broad segments

278

Book Reviews

among the Jews to adopt an exaggerated universalism that led to estrangement from the Jewish people and the loss of their collective identity. Antisemitism, which is in effect rejection of the Jews by society at large, resulted in an enhanced sense of Jewish unity but also led to its decline, as expressed in a growing desire to flee a Judaism that seemed doomed to be an everlasting object of hatred by surrounding society. Zion or Zionism, though the cause of no little controversy within Jewish society, does unite the Jews around a common cause. Two aspects of Meyer's interpretation are worthy of note. The first is his attitude toward religion as a factor affecting Jewish identity. Despite his statement that some form of religious affiliation is the most important characteristic of individual Jewish identity in the Western countries, he does not consider religion to be an important factor in shaping the collective identity. Though he admits that religion ensures continuity, he does not believe that it possesses the ability to shape Jewish identity. And justly so, when one considers the division of religious Judaism into at least four branches: Reform, Conservatism, Orthodoxy and Ultra-Orthodoxy. These are in deep disagreement one with the other as to what constitutes Jewish identity, or to use the popular term, "Who is a Jew?" The other interesting aspect is Meyer's dialectical assessment of antisemitism, and especially of the collective memory or consciousness of the Holocaust among broad circles of American Jewry. He writes that, "antisemitism, especially as collective memory, serves as a basic motive for Jewish identification. The erosive force today comes almost exclusive from the enlightenment side, from the absence of barriers inhibiting the contact between Jews and non-Jews" (p. 57). For example, Meyer believes that the reason for the growing proliferation of "intermarriage today, as compared to the pre-Holocaust period, is no longer the desire to escape discrimination, but rather because universal values have replaced particularistic Jewish values." Therefore, he writes, "today, antisemitism serves almost exclusively to shore up and intensify Jewish identity" (p. 58). Coming from an American Jewish historian, such a statement is worthy of special note in another context. Meyer, apparently, does not expect much of the spirit of ethnicity so influential in the United States today. He believes that it is no more than a psychological-cultural fad which, due to its general and superficial nature, will be unable to intensify Jewish distinctiveness in the long range. The third process, which he calls Zion or Zionism, is defined as being "the centripetal force of Jewish peoplehood" (p. 59)—this despite the difficulty Meyer sees in defining the identity of Israeli Jews who, he believes, are wavering between their Israeli and Jewish identities. As an example, he points to the complex relationship between American Jews and the ever-growing community of Israeli yordim (emigrants) in the United States. Despite the differences of opinion among large segments of diaspora Jewry regarding Israeli policy in relation to religious life and foreign policy, and despite the cultural gap between Israeli and diaspora Jews, Meyer claims that "never in modern times have Jews in the West been more committed to Jewish peoplehood. And most of them see Israel as its chief embodiment" (p. 81). This, he believes, is the very essence of American Jewish ethnic consciousness, which leads him to reach the following conclusion toward the end of his volume: "Mostly, I trust, Jewishness will focus in the future, as in the past, on Zion. For

History and Social Sciences

279

Zion not only represents Jewish origins and Jewish unity. It is also the symbol of ... its highest goal and gives it intrinsic meaning" (p. 58). Yet despite this sentiment—or perhaps because of it—Meyer emphasizes a clash of ideas between "conceptual" Zion and "earthly" Zion; between that Zion which serves as a symbol of Jewish Utopian yearnings and the one that is historical reality, with all its abundant problems and contradictions. Meyer, who in this chapter, I believe, continues the tradition of Zionist thought originating in Ahad Ha'am and Mordecai M. Kaplan, is distressed by what he sees in the "earthly" Zion. Though I sympathize with him, I should like to make the following comment: the tendency to differentiate between Zion as a spiritual concept and Israel as a political entity entails some danger to the unified Jewish identity as it exists today. Those who believe that Zion/Zionism/ Israel is the "centripetal" historical force holding Jews together must be prepared to pay the resulting price, that of accepting a reality they may not entirely approve of. YOSEF GORNY Tel-Aviv University

George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of World Wars. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. 264 pp.

George L. Mosse's Fallen Soldiers demonstrates impressive scholarship in addition to being an elegant and highly readable book. It represents an integral part of the author's decades-long analysis of the political ideas and myths of the nineteenth century and pre-Second World War European Right by focusing on a crucial aspect of this complex mosaic: the themes and political implications of "the myth of the war experience." At the outset, Fallen Soldiers describes the rise of the new citizen-soldier and the new notion of honor and glory attached to military virtues as creations of the French Revolution. During these same revolutionary years, the "volunteer" appeared. He was a man ready to sacrifice his life in fighting for a noble cause. The volunteers of the Revolution are followed by those of the German wars of liberation against Napoleon. A few years later, the volunteer achieves a truly mythic dimension when Byron dies in the Greek War of Independence. The nurturing ground of a new consciousness has been created. This new consciousness gives its full heroic echo to the death of millions of soldiers during the First World War, the "Great War." The myth of the war experience is born. Fallen Soldiers deals in particular with the German scene during and after the Great War. In this sense, the subtitle of the book, Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, is too encompassing. Giving such broad titles, however, seem to have become a common practice: Paul Fussell took similar poetic license when he entitled his own study of the British literary expression of the experience of the First World War The Great War and Modern Memory. According to Mosse, the myth of the war experience entails a set range of

280

Book Reviews

elements. It comprises the cult of manliness and youth, the religious dimension of the war experience, the ritualization of this experience in monuments and military cemeteries, etc., as well as its literary expression. In a particularly interesting and original section, Mosse deals with the "degradation" of the myth: the trivialization of the war experience during the period of fighting and afterwards, as seen, for example, in the commemorative endeavors of survivors. There is much here that evokes later examples of such a process. However, it is Mosse's analysis of the political exploitation of the war experience that lies at the very core of his study. After describing the impact of this myth on German postwar, right-wing violence and on Nazi mythology before and after Hitler's accession to power, the author closes the circle by linking the mythology of the volunteers who joined the Waffen SS during the last stages of the Second World War to the myth of the volunteer as it arose at the end of the eighteenth century. It is only with the total defeat of Germany in the Second World War that the potency of the "myth of the war experience" seems, according to Mosse, to have disintegrated—or rather to have been transformed into an ideal of pacifism and international understanding. Given the fact that Mosse does from time to time raise points of comparison between Germany and other countries, one major aspect of the "myth of the war experience" should have been given, in my opinion, greater saliency. I am referring to the monuments aux morts, the local war memorials that are found in almost every French, or, for that matter, German small town. The French historian Antoine Prost has recently studied both the styles of these monuments, with their archetypalmythic representations, and the commemorative rituals that were organized at least once a year at the sites of these memorials by sometimes antagonistic political organizations. In Fallen Soldiers, Mosse demonstrates once again the breadth of his erudition and the finesse of his cultural and psychological insights. This book provides a new stage of an oeuvre that has already reached an outstanding scope and cogency. SAUL FRIEDLANDER Tel-Aviv University University of California, Los Angeles

Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880—1935. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. xi + 327 pp.

At the beginning of this century, most Americans believed that differences in behavior and belief among ethnic groups (at least those based on a common race or national origin) stemmed from essentially permanent biological differences. Today almost all scholars are convinced that biology explains very little. Beyond that scholars sharply disagree. Those who might be called "internalists" contend not only that the behavioral differences are intrinsically important, but also that they

History and Social Sciences

281

demonstrate the persistence of long-established patterns of culture. Those who might be called "externalists" contend that ethnicity is a "myth," and that differences in behavior are in fact largely imposed by the economic structure and the constraints of class in the particular environment in which the newcomers find themselves. Perlmann's study of Providence, Rhode Island is a closely reasoned, heroically researched, heavily documented reaffirmation of the "internalist" position. Improving upon the social-historian pathways pioneered by his mentor Stephan Thernstrom, Perlmann shows that the occupational opportunities Providence offered differed from those in Boston (see Thernstrom's The Other Bostonians), Detroit (see Olivier Zunz's The Changing Face of Inequality) or New York. He describes how differently various ethnic groups participated in the economy; and how patterns of participation changed over time. His unique contribution is his ability to clarify the mooted question of how far the amount of schooling that children received affected their ability to succeed economically. Perlmann is able to match the records of students in both the public and Catholic schools in Providence with their subsequent occupations and with the occupations of their fathers. It will surprise few readers to learn that the first generation of Jews from Eastern Europe ("Russian" Jews), arriving in considerable numbers in Providence after 1880, differentiated themselves in two ways from other ethnic groups: the rapidity with which they got middle-class jobs and the length of time their children (or at least their sons) attended school. To an internalist such as Nathan Glazer, whose influential article "Social Characteristics of American Jews" (1958) Perlmann cites, the explanation lies in cultural history—in the fact that "the Jews, far more than any other immigrant group, were engaged for generations in the middle-class occupations, the professions, and buying and selling." Presented with the opportunity, "they could . . . easily return to the pursuit of trade and study, and thus to the ways of their fathers and forefathers" (pp. 127-128). Externalists—such as Calvin Goldscheider and Alan Zuckerman (in The Transformation of the Jews [1984])—are skeptical of the existence, let alone the persistence, of "universal Jewish norms." Perlman cites their argument that, because Jews arrived in America with artisanal and commercial skills that were in demand, they "earned more money than did other immigrant groups. Their relative income and occupational security made it easier ... to invest in the schooling" of their children (p. 129). Structural features, such as these, Goldscheider and Zuckerman conclude, are sufficient to explain why Jews made disproportionate use of the schools. Conversely, Jewish commitment to education does not account for Jewish upward mobility and economic success. Perlmann concentrates on the 1915-1925 period, by which time it was possible to define some of the characteristics of two generations. He finds that the "great majority" of fathers "were not members of the working class in any usual sense of that term" (p. 136). For what he terms cultural as well as economically rational reasons, they had chosen occupations, especially in commerce, in which experience gave them a very real edge. Second, Perlmann finds that a higher percentage of the second-generation Jewish boys entered and finished high school, took the "classical

282

Book Reviews

[academic] course" and entered college than any other ethnic group (even when the comparison is controlled for family background—including such structural characteristics as father's occupation, father's property and number of siblings). Perhaps most illuminating are Perlmann's attempts to account for the marked occupational advantage enjoyed by the second generation. Family background, of course, helped. The independent effects of the education the second generation received contributed considerably more. Yet even the combination of these measurable factors leaves much of the observed advantage unaccounted for, and Perlmann feels obliged to place great weight on the cultural heritage—"the ways in which the Jewish religion and the unique socio-economic and political situation of the Jews in Europe could have encouraged attitudes, values, and habits conducive to economic advancement in a modern industrial society" (p. 160). Externalists, Perlmann recognizes, will deny that it is either appropriate or necessary to place "great weight on an influence . . . not observed directly." His analysis, however, makes a persuasive case that it is necessary. Indeed, one of the signal merits of this exhaustive study is the mandate it establishes for students wanting to explain the Jewish occupational advantage (and the connection of schooling to that advantage) to undertake a different kind of study, probably one deprived of the facticity of Perlmann's quantification but endowed—one certainly hopes—with Perlmann's rigor and willingness to entertain competing hypotheses. ROBERT D. CROSS University of Virginia

Shimon Redlich, Tehiyah 'al tenai: havaad hayehudi haanti-fashisti hasoviyeti, 'aliyato usheki'ato (The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Antifascist Committee in the Soviet Union 1941-1948). Tel-Aviv: Kibbutz Hameuhad and BenGurion University of the Negev Press, 1990. 208 pp.

During its seventy-four year existence, the Soviet state treated Jewish claims to national recognition with a certain degree of inconsistency, its policy ranging from experimental approval to downright hostility. Lacking a defined territorial base within the U.S.S.R., the Jews did not fit the Leninist-Stalinist definition of a "nation." Nonetheless, the Soviet state could not ignore other aspects of the Jewish question: the immediate problem, in the early years of Soviet power, of what to do about millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews; the propaganda potential of foreign Jewry; the obvious usefulness of the Jews to a state starved of scientific and professional talent. Theoretical broadsides written against the Bund in the context of prerevolutionary polemics on the national question could provide only partial guidance on Jewish policy to a Soviet regime that faced far different problems after the revolution and the civil war. This tension between ideological denegration of Jewish claims to nationhood and pragmatic considerations created varying degrees of space and opportunities for those Jews who believed, as Shimon Dimanshtein hoped, that one might find

History and Social Sciences

283

"Palestine in Moscow," a Soviet solution to the Jewish question that would avoid full-scale assimilation. But what kind of Palestine? The Yevsektsiia, OZET, Birobidzhan and Yiddish newspapers such as Ernes, Shtern and Oktiabr reflected the various twists and turns of a policy that lacked consistency and a firm base of political support. By the mid-1930s, all but the most fervent Jewish Communists could see the signs of unmistakable decline: the abolition of the Yevsektsiia, the atrophy of the Yiddish school system, the questionable appeal of Birobidzhan to the mass of Soviet Jewry. Yet in 1939-1940, some signs of hope appeared: the annexation of new territories and the addition of two million nationally conscious, mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews offered the promise of offsetting the unmistakable assimilatory tendencies of the previous decade. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin set up a new Jewish "address," the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). The JAC was supposed to manage pro-Soviet propaganda among foreign Jews and induce them to lobby for a second front, aid for the U.S.S.R. and the marshaling of Western public opinion against the Polish government-in-exile in London. But from the very beginning, the facts of Soviet Jewish life forced another agenda on the JAC. It found itself becoming, willing or not, the tribune of Soviet Jewry, its shtadlan (intercessor) in the Kremlin. Egged on by ordinary Soviet Jews, and probably by their own hearts, the leadership of the JAC tried to remind the Soviet leadership that Soviet Jews were fighting heroically, that they had no home to return to, that antisemitism often had the tacit approval of local authorities and that radical steps were necessary after the war's end to reestablish a foundation for Jewish life—in proper Soviet fashion, of course. Shimon Redlich's Tekhiyah 'a/ tenai is a welcome Hebrew translation of the author's English-language Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR, 1941-1948 (1982). Since the original publication of the English-language monograph by Columbia University Press, some new sources have come to light that the author has incorporated. Redlich himself discovered highly interesting documents on a recent trip to Moscow. Especially important is his analysis of the JAC's 1944 memorandum to Stalin on the future of Soviet Jewry.1 But it is a tribute to Redlich's scholarship that the conclusions of the original monograph have largely stood the test of time. The basic theme of Redlich's book is the inherent tension between the assigned role of the JAC and the pressures to turn it into an organization representing the interests of Soviet Jewry at the highest level. Redlich deftly describes how the JAC served Soviet interests during the sordid Ehrlich-Alter affair, when Stalin had the two leaders of the Polish Bund murdered for alleged spying on Hitler's behalf. He skillfully analyzes the JAC's relations with the Jewish community in Palestine, describing the successful 1943 visit of Itzig Fefer and Shloime Mikhoels to the United States and developing an informative case study of the role of such fellow travellers as B. Z. Goldberg both during and after the war. The book contains a useful description of the JAC membership. His judgements on potentially controversial subjects, such as the role of Ilya Ehrenburg, is judicious and balanced. Redlich makes excellent use of available archival sources. It is regrettable, however, that unlike the English version the Hebrew version of the book does not contain detailed footnotes.

284

Book Reviews

But the drama of Redlich's account derives from the impact of the unfolding tragedy of Soviet Jewry on the committee itself. Deluged with letters and appeals from ordinary Soviet Jews, Shloime Mikhoels, Itzig Fefer and the other members of the JAC called on Stalin to consider turning the Crimea into a Jewish Soviet Republic and asked the security organs to protect Soviet Jews returning to their homes from antisemitic outrages. In an attempt to reconcile Jewish identity and Soviet patriotism, the JAC tried to use its relationships with world Jewry as an argument that Soviet goodwill in helping the Jews would continue to reap rich propaganda dividends. Redlich's account of B. Z. Goldberg's postwar trip to the Soviet Union, based on excellent archival sources, provides some keen insight into the evolving strategy of the JAC. The end of the Second World War, the beginning of the Cold War and the obvious impact of the founding of the state of Israel on Soviet Jewry starkly changed the position of the JAC in Stalin's eyes; the murder of Mikhoels in January 1948 served as the prelude to its final liquidation. Redlich has given us a solid contribution to the history of Soviet Jewry. One might quibble with the way he chose to present his material. He hews so closely to the topic at hand—the Jewish Antifascist Committee—that he misses a chance to enrich and enliven the book by making better use of memoir material (Yitzhak Yanosovitch, Avraham Sutzkever) or by integrating some wartime Yiddish literature into the narrative. These complaints should not in any way obscure the fact that Redlich has written an excellent account of an important subject. SAMUEL D. KASSOW Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.

Note 1. See Shimon Redlich, "In arkhiv fun yidishn antifashistishn komitet in moskve," Di Goldene Keyt 129 (1990), 123-134.

Monika Richarz (ed.), Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. x + 484 pp.

The publication of the original three-volume German edition of this anthology between 1976 and 1982 occasioned expressions of delight from scholars in many fields. Drawing on the invaluable collection of unpublished autobiographies at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City, the trilogy provided a multitude of insights into the social history of German Jewry from the beginnings of emancipation in the eighteenth century to its destruction in the 1940s. Pleas for its translation have now been answered in this volume, containing fifty-one of the original 126 essays. It retains the chronological organization of the trilogy, granting roughly equal attention to the periods 1780-1871, the Kaiserreich and the postwar era, although in the

History and Social Sciences

285

last section the reactions of Jews to persecution under the Nazis somewhat overshadow the story of the Weimar years. Monika Richarz has set out to illuminate the everyday lives of ordinary Jews rather than the accomplishments of the Jewish elites. When prominent Jews such as Eduard Silbermann and Philipp Lowenfeld appear, it is the recollections of their private rather than public lives that predominate. What emerges is a highly nuanced, regionally informed picture of the pace and process of German Jewry's modernization. Richarz demonstrates an unerring instinct for selecting the most varied and representative manuscripts, and she has edited and annotated them immaculately. They teach us much about the inner life of the German Jews, including the impact of secularization and urbanization on their spiritual life, changes in family life and women's roles, and the evolving conception of what it meant to be both German and Jew. The autobiographies also reveal a great deal about the Jews' relations with gentiles and their reactions to antisemitism. Time and again the reader is struck by the diversity of Jewish experiences in Germany. There are cases of prejudice and of cordial relations with non-Jews; of neglect and of affirmation of Jewish identity; of piety and of religious indifference; of friendship and of friction between indigenous Jews and their immigrant Eastern European coreligionists. Hence this anthology is a welcome corrective to easy generalizations about rampant antisemitism, assimilation and secularization. Richarz' substantial introduction helps reconcile and contextualize the variety of personal experiences, ably summarizing in just under forty pages the latest research on the history of the German Jews. By tracing the various strands of the story up to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and examining the plight of the Jews under Hitler in a separate section, Richarz underlines the tragic break represented by 1933. It would have been good if this volume had adopted something similar to the German trilogy's three-part index, which enables readers to find references to places and themes as well as individuals. Here only people are indexed. Yet let us not cavil but rather rejoice that this costly project has been consummated, making available to our students valuable primary material that would otherwise be beyond the grasp of most of them. Honors go as well to Stella P. and Sidney Rosenfeld for their elegant and idiomatic translation. DONALD L. NIEWYK Southern Methodist University Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860—1925. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. xv + 235 pp.

Aron Rodrigue has written a mature study of the impact of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in the Ottoman Empire. His book focuses on the French schools established by the Alliance in Edirne (1867), Izmir (1873) and Istanbul (1875), the most important of its educational efforts. In addition, most of the materials available in that country undoubtedly referred to these three centers. This is as it should be,

286

Book Reviews

although the reader would probably have liked to know much more about the other Ottoman foci of Alliance cultural activity as well. The book's first two chapters discuss the emergence of what Rodrigue calls the "Jewish Eastern Question" and Turkish Jewry in the age of the tanzimat (reforms). Succeeding chapters deal with the Alliance's impact on Turkish Jewry in the areas of education, society and politics (i.e., its negative attitude toward Zionism). One of the main merits of this study is that it links Alliance activity in Turkey with general and Jewish events and trends, both in Western Europe and in the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the start of Alliance activity in Muslim-dominated areas occurred at a time when Western Jews had already acquired a great measure of emancipation— both political and socioeconomic—and were eager to have the same process repeated in the Ottoman Empire, which seemed then to be seriously bent on reforms. Alliance educational activity ended with the Turkish Republic's increasing nationalism, signifying an effort to achieve a more homogeneous Turkish culture: the Alliance schools closed in the 1920s. Within this time frame, the author unfolds a tale of efforts to westernize the Turkish Jews and raise their cultural level. For the Alliance, evidently, culture meant the French language, literature and history. This was combined in the curriculum with a basic program of Jewish studies and something about the country in which the Jews lived, mainly the study of the Turkish language. The collaboration of Jewish notables in Turkey had to be secured before any Alliance school was set up. Such collaboration was vital, financially and administratively, but did little to solve the basic issues of the curriculum. Indeed, it was the curriculum that remained a problem throughout. While French culture and to a lesser degree Hebrew and Jewish subjects were studied, as in Alliance schools elsewhere, the ratio was debatable, and even more so the place of Turkish in the schools. Since a knowledge of foreign languages was highly valued for commercial purposes, such studies were in high demand: indeed, in some Alliance schools, English and/or German were offered as well. This was less the case in the Alliance vocational schools for boys and girls, and for this reason many parents preferred the regular schools. Rodrigue makes some pertinent comments on the social impact of the Alliance schools, which seem to have encouraged the Frenchification of Turkish Jews but simultaneously hindered their integration into the surrounding non-Jewish society. He has little to tell us about how the Turks reacted to the activities of these schools and how Turkish society regarded their pupils and graduates. Perhaps the reason for this omission lies in the fact that the author consulted an impressive wealth of Western sources—archival and other—but relatively few Turkish ones (such as the press), although he is fluent in Turkish. Summing up, one should congratulate Aron Rodrigue on having written a scholarly, very readable study on a subject of primary importance to historians of Jewish education in the Ottoman Empire. It will doubtless help to better our understanding of the penetration of Western values and attitudes into this Jewish community. JACOB M. LANDAU The Hebrew University

History and Social Sciences

287

Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture 1888-1988. Philadelphia, New York and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1989. 430 pp.

Early in his thorough and engaging history of the Jewish Publication Society (JPS), Jonathan Sarna discusses the publication criteria developed by the young society. These "unwritten guidelines," Sarna argues, defined "overall standards" as well as "social assumptions and cultural values." JPS books should be "broadly educational" and "noncontroversial," reflecting a spirit of unity among American Jews, and "dignified," projecting a "positive Jewish image" (pp. 88-90). Though clearly a product of its own era and the maturing of American Jewish historical scholarship, Sarna's judicious volume would undoubtedly have met the society's own criteria of almost a century ago—an impressive achievement. Not that Sarna avoids controversy. The society's early years were marked by dissension between the orthodox and the reformers, laymen and rabbis, Zionists and anti-Zionists. As he contextualizes the conflicts and illuminates the vigorous antirabbinic bias of several early leaders, Sarna enriches our understanding of the culture of American Jewish leadership in the late nineteenth century. He also has much of interest to say concerning the bitter debate over Zionism and the publication of a volume by Maurice Samuels during the Second World War. In this case the contemporary challenge posed by Zionism, specifically its threat to Jewish unity and its promise of radical change, rattled many American Jewish organizations, including JPS. Sarna emphasizes continuity. Another scholar might have seen a succession of discrete periods in the history of the JPS administration. There are, for example, rather sharp disjunctions between the only two eras appropriately identified with a particular individual, those of Henrietta Szold and Maurice Jacobs—the former the secretary, in essence the editor, from 1893 to 1916, the latter the executive officer from 1936 to 1950. Sarna, however, stresses the gradual process of change and the commonalities linking JPS publications, while at the same time acknowledging the imprint left on the society by individuals. The heart of this history concerns publishing, both the process of choosing what books to publish and an analysis of the significance of the publications. Sarna's narrative account of the publication process has style and verve. He deftly guides the reader through the endless discussions, debates, negotiations, correspondence, editing and, finally, publication of numerous volumes by both famous and obscure authors. One emerges with a clear understanding of how JPS worked, especially in the years through the Second World War. Sarna has had access to valuable sources that he has used astutely. He does not, however, devote similar attention to the extensive co-publication program that JPS developed with several commercial presses. The discussion of the significance of JPS publications is interspersed within the historical narrative. Here a tension exists between popular books and scholarly ones. JPS wanted to publish both, that is, books that were at once popular yet scholarly. Well aware of the inherent difficulty of such a publishing program, Sarna

288

Book Reviews

writes sympathetically of the many failures, those books that never achieved popularity or that lacked scholarly substance. He understandably focuses upon some of the signal successes: the two Bible translations, Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews (1909) and several histories, starting with Graetz's History of the Jews (1891) and subsequently including several one-volume histories by Alexander Marx and Max Margolis, Ismar Elbogen, and Solomon Grayzel. As in his history of the JPS administration, Sarna stresses the continuities in the publications, constantly linking innovations back to earlier, often unsuccessful efforts. Substantial changes introduced in the character of JPS children's books, for example, appear as the belated achievement of repeatedly unimaginative juvenile publishing ventures of previous periods. The great strength of this volume is its historical approach. Sarna never neglects the larger context of American Jewish life and he regularly reminds the reader of important changes occurring within American society and European Jewry. The book falters only when it reaches the 1960s. Obviously, JPS wanted its entire one hundred years covered, oblivious to the loss of perspective that occurs when a historian must write about what happened in the recent past. This is unfortunate. Centennial anniversaries provide valuable opportunities for taking stock, and this book is evidence of just how useful such occasions are. Although JPS is to be commended for its choice of scholar and the history he has written, it would have been wiser to resist the impulse to write contemporary history. Organizations contemplating the celebration of their centennial should recognize that they can learn much about themselves by understanding their history—by retrieving a useable past. DEBORAH DASH MOORE Vassar College

Erwin A. Schmidl, Juden in der k. (u.) k. Armee 1788-1918 (Vol. 9 of Studia Judaica Austriaca). Eisenstadt and Vienna: Heeresdruckerei, 1989. 238 pp.

Among the memorabilia of the history of the second-largest Jewish community of pre-1914 Europe is the fact that many Jews served in the Habsburg Army. And not only in the ranks! In an era when even Jews who had converted were conspicuously rare among the officers of virtually every other army in Europe, most particularly in the Prussian and Russian armies, Jews in some abundance held rank in the Austrian Armed Forces. At the end of the Monarchy, a converted Jew, Baron Hazai, one-time Hungarian Minister of Defense, was in charge of the entire army's recruiting and supply. This record of generally respectful Austro-Hungarian tolerance of the Jews belies the conventional myth that Central Europeans have always been prime Jewhaters. It recalls the fact that the Jews in the old Monarchy were in some ways the best Austro-Hungarians of them all (some would say they were the only ones). The Austrian Jewish Museum at Eisenstadt issued the short paperback under review in connection with an exhibition commemorating the two hundredth anniver-

History and Social Sciences

289

sary of Joseph II's induction of the first Jews into the army. The volume contains Erwin Schmidl's sixty-four page text first in German, then in English, plus several pages of footnotes, a statistical record of Jewish participation in the army after 1872, a few other appendixes scholarly and otherwise, and twenty-five pages of photographs from the Vienna Kriegsarchiv. Since much of Schmidl's material has previously appeared in two Englishlanguage essays, this "book" can hardly be considered earthshaking. The author has, however, gone through the Vienna archives carefully, digging out everything he could find about Jews in the old Imperial Army. His work fairly bristles with references to the original materials. It is model scholarship, and it will serve as a most useful handbook for anyone wishing to venture further into the subject. WILLIAM O. McCAGG, JR. Michigan State University

Julius H. Schoeps (ed.), Juden als Trdger bitrgerlicher Kultur in Deutschland. Stuttgart and Bonn: Burg, 1989. 396 pp.

Yet another collection of papers on the Jewish role in German culture? The topic seems almost inexhaustible. For half a century now we have been witnessing a growing stream of symposia, colloquia, conferences and seminars, all dealing with the contribution made by Jews over the last hundred years to art, literature and learning in Central Europe. This preoccupation must reflect more than intellectual curiosity or scholarly zeal. It is at least to some extent an expression of guilt, an act of atonement. It constitutes an attempt to expiate for an unparalleled historic crime. It represents, explicitly or tacitly, a legacy of the Holocaust. The Germans see in it a vicarious acknowledgement of their collective responsibility for genocide; the Jews view it as a solemn ceremony commemorating the innocent victims of antisemitism. For both it has become an almost inescapable duty. The volume edited by Julius H. Schoeps is a good example of the genre, better than most, even if it does not entirely escape the dangers inherent in any work composed of disparate pieces written by various authors and dealing with diverse subjects. Some of the papers seek to analyze the unique quality of the Jewish achievement in German civilization, to capture its flavor or spirit. Others examine the part played by Jews in the various categories of arts and letters, in literature, music, painting, theater and journalism. And still others look at important and sometimes not so important Jewish figures in the cultural life of Central Europe: Arnold Zweig, Theodor Wolff, Siegfried Kracauer and Hans Goslar. Some have something profound to say, some are simply informative, and a few are superficial or trite. The whole is thus less than the sum of the parts. This is a chronic weakness of collective works. The tone of the book is set in the opening essay by Nicolaus Sombart describing "The Contribution of the Jews to German Culture." It is an anguished cry of mea culpa, a reverential act of contrition and breast-beating: "Everything which repre-

290

Book Reviews

sented an emancipatory impulse in Germany came from the Jews; everything which brought Germany the unbound recognition and admiration of the world, which bestowed on [Germany] spiritual distinction and glory in the world was 'Jewish'" (p. 36). The two outsiders of Europe, the Germans and the Jews, joined to seek entrance into the great movements of mankind and to find a new secularized concept of humanity. "The chosen people had chosen the Germans," only to be repaid a hundred years later with expulsion or extermination. Some readers may find this cri de coeur almost too effusive. But what about specific contributions by Jews to German culture? How important in fact was their role? Several of the papers deal concretely with this question. Klaus Siebenhaar describes the Jewish presence in the German theater, Alphons Silbermann writes about "Jews in the Musical Life of the Weimar Republic," Gert Mattenklott examines the participation of Jews in periodical literature, and Michael S. Cullen looks at Jewish collectors and patrons of art. Not all of these studies are equally successful. Some are little more than enumerations of familiar or unfamiliar names, long catalogs of men and women who achieved prominence in the cultural life of Germany and who happened to be Jewish. What made their accomplishment distinctive, how it differed from the accomplishment of non-Jews in the same field, is often left undiscussed. There is simply the assumption that somehow, in some way, a significant difference must have existed. Yet even these less inspired pieces occasionally provide a poignant glimpse into cultural life. On March 28, 1929, for example, a memorial performance of Frank Wedekind's Marquis von Keith in the Preussisches Staatstheater in Berlin brought together on the same stage a brilliant array of the luminaries of the German theater: Heinrich George, Werner Krauss, Veit Harlan, Conrad Veidt, Fritz Kortner, Elisabeth Bergner, Alexander Granach and Ernst Deutsch. A few years later, many would be refugees while others would gladly serve the new order that had driven their former colleagues into exile. In the light of what was about to happen, this scene as described by Siebenhaar assumes a strange pathos. The most successful pieces are those dealing with individual figures. Here the problems of organization and interpretation are simplified by the limited scope of the subject matter. Jost Hermand, to give an illustration, provides a sensitive, perceptive analysis of the transformation of Arnold Zweig from a German cultural nationalist to an ardent Zionist and finally to a committed political radical. Bernd Sosemann presents an interesting portrait of the prominent journalist and editor Theodor Wolff, whose life mirrored the tragedy of the Jewish community, beginning with his early faith in the democratic future of Germany and ending with his death as a victim of National Socialism. Ingrid Belke's article on the political analyst, social critic and cultural historian Siegfried Kracauer recalls an unjustly neglected figure in the intellectual life of the 1920s. These are among the more effective articles. Finally, two papers, though not really dealing with the contribution of Jews to culture, deserve mention because they illuminate important aspects of Jewish life in Germany. Walter Grab describes the participation of Jews in the labor movement from 1840 to 1933, providing a sound and readable summary of a subject that is admittedly not altogether unfamiliar. Even more enlightening is Ludger Heid's

History and Social Sciences

291

study of "Eastern Jewish Culture in Germany during the Weimar Republic." The author depicts with sensitivity the uneasy relationship between the Ostjuden and the German Jews, their mutual sympathy and aversion, and the cultural interaction of "brothers and strangers" exposed to the same pitiless forces of antisemitic bigotry. On the whole, then, this volume provides a solid addition to our understanding of the role of Jews in German culture, although it is not likely to be the last word on the subject. Nor should it be. It is rather part of a continuing scholarly preoccupation with a vanished ethnic community whose tragic fate continues to haunt and fascinate the contemporary world. THEODORE S. HAMEROW University of Wisconsin, Madison

Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America: The Publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia. Monographs of the Hebrew Union College, No. 13. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1991. xii + 235 pp.

When the present reviewer worked on the Encyclopaedia Judaica, whose sixteen volumes appeared in 1971, the Jewish Encyclopedia of seventy years earlier was the object of constant admiration by the staff. The quality of many of its articles—those by luminaries such as Louis Ginzberg, Wilhelm Bacher and Jacob Z. Lauterbach, for instance—seemed to defy imitation. When we wondered how we might meet our implacable deadline, failing which the project would forfeit a prohibitive sum, we held up as a model our illustrious predecessor that had really gotten published, all twelve volumes, in the space of a mere five years. Actually, no one had the slightest notion of what had gone on in publishing that extraordinary work. Now everyone may learn, thanks to Shuly Rubin Schwartz's illuminating book. The story of the Jewish Encyclopedia is full of curiosities and ironies. It all began with Isidor Singer, a restless promoter who also agitated for universal religion. While still a comparative newcomer in America, he sold the idea of the encyclopedia to the Funk & Wagnalls publishing house. They were experienced in Christian religious publishing and shared some of Singer's fervor for reconciliation and understanding between Judaism and Christianity. His conception of a Jewish encyclopedia was remote from the splendid product that ultimately, and fortunately, emerged after he was shunted to the sidelines. Singer's enthusiasm also led him to utterly unrealistic business estimates and proposals. Simply put, he was the man for selling the project but not for executing it. Singer could not maintain editorial control, for which he was not really fitted, nor could he attract financial guarantors for the complex schemes devised by Funk & Wagnalls to avoid the heavy financial losses they feared would ensue. Readers who lose their way in the convoluted financial arrangements described here may find comfort in the fact that not until the final settlement in 1916 did Jacob H. Scruff, a leading guarantor who knew a few things about finance, declare that he fully understood the arrangements (p. 103).

292

Book Reviews

The encyclopedia's editorial work was replete with struggles over personalities and ideologies. Joseph Jacobs came on the scene and more or less took over Singer's work, to the latter's anger. Kaufmann Kohler and Emil G. Hirsch, learned and powerful Reform leaders and brothers-in-law, early emerged as dominant influences, especially as editors for Bible and theology. One major issue was to what extent biblical criticism would be used rather than a more traditional approach to Scripture, and how Jewish traditions in general would be presented. Cyrus Adler, already an influential figure but still junior and in charge of a different field, struggled to have traditional Judaism properly represented. When Solomon Schechter arrived in America in 1902 he joined the board, where he was expected to strengthen traditionalist influence. However, his tenure was brief and controversial. Schwartz provides an excellent analysis of some of the central articles, especially those written by Kohler. It is likely that few readers of the Jewish Encyclopedia notice that Kohler's Reform-leaning article, "Judaism," is countered by a traditionleaning article, "Theology." Its author, Jacob Z. Lauterbach, was a few years later appointed professor of Talmud at Hebrew Union College by Kohler—then the college's president. Talmud in fact turned out to be one of the strongest divisions of the Jewish Encyclopedia, which cannot be said of Talmud at the Encyclopaedia Judaica. The articles on the Bible in the two encyclopedias were planned and written under contrasting conditions. The underlying problem with the Bible in the old encyclopedia was the weakness of Jewish biblical study during the nineteenth century. For reasons that have often been discussed, scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums did little in the field of Bible. Christian scholars' biblical criticism ruled the field, and displayed a pronounced bias against Judaism. The editors were delighted to have the nearly unique Benno Jacob, a younger German rabbi and scholar who treated the Bible critically as well as traditionally. By the time of the EJ, however, Jewish scholarship had reclaimed Bible studies. Biblical criticism had become less radical, and it no longer exuded hostility to Judaism. Biblical criticism was presented mainly by Jewish scholars who were respectful of tradition, and the field of Bible had comparatively smooth sailing in the newer encyclopedia. Many articles on biblical and other subjects included a subsection, "In the Kabbalah," that was written by Gershom Scholem. That great scholar of Jewish mysticism practically summarized his life's work in the articles he produced for the EJ. Scholem's work on mysticism, as well as work on such fields as American and East European Jewish history, obviously surpass what could be produced in the old encyclopedia. Schwartz reaches her main subject after a somewhat spotty introductory chapter, and she concludes with a paean of praise for contemporary Judaica scholarship in the United Sates. She does best in her often subtle analysis of the Encyclopedia's articles and their deeper implications, while treating effectively the complex editorial and financial structures of the project. Clearly written and based on meticulous research, Schwartz' work tells us much about early American Jewish scholarship and its quite astounding debut on the world Jewish cultural scene. One wishes she had examined a bit further the long-term influence of the Jewish Encyclopedia, but her book as it stands is solid and meritorious. Starting as a doctoral thesis at the

History and Social Sciences

293

Jewish Theological Seminary, it has been published by Hebrew Union College; eminences of both institutions sat—not always harmoniously—on the editorial board of the Jewish Encyclopedia ninety years ago. LLOYD P. GARTNER Tel-Aviv University

Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1990. 666 pp.

One would be hard pressed to think of a more timely book—a general history of Ukraine at the very moment when this long-oppressed nation has emerged as one of the brand-new states of Europe. The author may be excused for not foreseeing this dramatic development. He writes in his preface that one of his major tasks will be to explain why the Ukrainians, a great people inhabiting a rich land, have never been able to establish a state. This development is defined by Subtelny as a "historical puzzle" (p. xi). Moreover, at the end of his opus he remarks that Ukrainian nationalism has apparently reached a dead end (p. 533). Historians, no matter how good they may be, are usually not blessed with the gift of prophecy. The book under review (a hardcover edition was published in 1988) is a straightforward, clearly written, blow-by-blow account of Ukrainian history from its shadowy origins (Subtelny begins with a discussion of the first humans to settle the area who, he claims, had "extraordinarily manipulative hands") to the Gorbachev era. No one will object to the fact that it may be said to be written from the Ukrainian national point of view. Thus, Gogol is presented as a Ukrainian writer, and the princes of Kievan Rus' are addressed by their Ukrainian names (with the Russian and Scandinavian forms given in parentheses). Subtelny is a rather cautious historian who tries to avoid controversy by presenting readers with various historical interpretations, leaving them free to decide which is the most convincing. Thus, for example, his treatment of the "Norman theory" regarding the establishment of the first state in the Ukrainian territory, and his discussion of the nature of the agreement between Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Muscovy in 1654. Naturally enough, the modern period (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) is given by far the most space. There are few footnotes, but a valuable bibliography of works in English is appended. Particularly welcome is a chapter dealing with the formation of the Ukrainian diaspora in the New World. The book is obviously intended for a general audience, and it succeeds in its efforts to provide such an audience with a clear guide to a very complicated story. Once upon a time, historians of Eastern Europe tended to ignore the sizeable Jewish presence in that part of the world. Subtelny does not ignore the Jews, but it must be said that his treatment of their role in Ukrainian history is neither innovative nor sympathetic. They appear in his volume in the standard roles of loyal servants of the Polish regime, of exploiters of the Ukrainian peasantry, of russifiers, and of agents of Soviet Communism. No wonder that, upon occasion, they were subject to

294

Book Reviews

massacres and pogroms. The events of 1648-1649 are explained as a "terrible retribution" for the Jewish alliance with the Polish nobility (p. 124; Subtelny is quoting here from the controversial Polish historian Norman Davies). Nineteenthcentury Ukrainian antisemitism derived in some measure from "the exploitive actions of some Jewish merchants and moneylenders" (p. 277). The murders of 1919 can be explained at least in part by the overrepresentation of Jews in the Communist party (pp. 363-364). Subtelny also insists that the number of Jews killed in the pogroms has been much exaggerated, as has been the role of Ukrainian collaborators with the Nazis (". . . Ukrainian participation in the massacres [during the Second World War] was neither extensive nor decisive" [p. 472]). Of course, Subtelny is not making all of this up. It is true enough that the Jews engaged in commerce, much preferred Polish or Russian to the Ukrainian cultural orientation and therefore had little sympathy for the modern Ukrainian national movement, and that as a largely urban element were more likely to join the Communist party than were Ukrainian peasants. In a brief but useful summation of the Ukrainian-Jewish problem, Subtelny correctly concludes that their relations were governed by mutual dislike resulting from the inevitable clash of interests between two utterly dissimilar groups (p. 278). This said, it is also the case that the author leaves a lot out. It is surprising, for example, that he does not consider the role of Christianity in general and the two major Ukrainian churches in particular in his discussion of the reasons for antisemitism in Ukraine. Nor are we told anything about the development and flourishing of Jewish cultural and religious life in Ukraine. This is a pity, for such a discussion might have gone far to correct what is, in the last analysis, a rather one-dimensional treatment of a highly complex story. There are signs that a new era is coming in the historiography of JewishUkrainian relations. At least one major conference on the problem has been held and more are being planned. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening up of archives in Ukraine and Russia and the establishment of official relations between Israel and Ukraine will doubtless give impetus to new investigations of the Jewish role in Ukrainian history. One may expect that the future histories of Ukraine will contain more nuanced material on the Jews than does Subtelny's worthy study. One also wonders if they will be able to explain why contemporary upheavals in Ukraine, in contrast to previous ones, have not (at least so far) led to violent antisemitism. EZRA MENDELSOHN The Hebrew University

Erhard R. Wiehn (ed.), Juden in der Soziologie. Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre-Verlag, 1989. 350 pp.

When one invites a selected, or possibly random, group of sociologists to a conference on the theme of "Jews in Sociology," perhaps the most interesting result would be to see what meaning they have read into the title. A number of possibilities come

History and Social Sciences

295

to mind. There are sociologists who carry a conscious Jewishness into their work because they function in open societies—for example, Daniel Bell in the United States and S. N. Eisenstadt in Israel. Then there are scholars whose Jewishness and Jewish learning become part of their sociological enterprise, as with Americans Samuel Heilman and William Helmreich. There are sociologists, especially in Germany, who concentrate their sociological activities on the boundaries of social consensus and the possibilities of social protest, because they were themselves marginalized. Examples of this category are Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Then there are sociologists, again mainly in Germany, who cannot escape even repeated self-rejections of their Jewishness because they are permanently tainted by a stigma of biological kinship. Friends and foes alike are determined to impose a Jewishness on men such as Karl Marx and Georg Simmel, baptized sons of baptized fathers, who were and wished to be totally alienated from their Jewish origins, but who are doomed to be tied into mystical traditions of Jewish thought that are read into their work. Finally, there are a few sociologists who, unlike Marx and Simmel, have succeeded in divesting themselves of their Jewishness to a point where they are no longer regarded as "Jewish." Emil Durkheim is a famous example. Erhard Wiehn, who organized a conference on Jews in sociology in 1989, the results of which are published under his editorship in the volume under review, seemingly gave no directions to his contributors. The result is a little surprising. The first three chapters provide a good review of the problem, but make it clear that only Central European sociology and sociologists are to be considered. Following this are nine additional chapters dealing with a number of prominent individuals, and members of the Frankfurt School. Also included are twenty-seven illustrations, featuring Martin Buber (three times), Weber (twice), Simone Weil (twice) and wholly undiscussed scholars such as Edmund Husserl, Franz Oppenheimer, Karl Mannheim and Max Scheler. The editor opens the discussion with a long introduction in which some central issues of the relationship between Jews and modern sociology are explored. He uses a technique he has employed in some of his other publications: pages and pages of quotations and citations from a very wide range of material linked together by a few connecting sentences. The result is erudition and breadth of view, but a core argument that is difficult to follow. Nevertheless, the classificatory system that is used to link Jewishness and sociology is of considerable interest and might repay a more systematic application. Wiehn suggests seven categories, 1) outsider: affinity and marginality; 2) intellectual: spirituality and creativity; 3) non-conformism: innovation and revolution; 4) prophets of salvation: monotheism and universalism; 5) social criticism: humanism and messianism; 6) sociologists: radicalism and rationality; and 7) futurist: reality and potentiality. It is still necessary to show how and why some or all of these categories apply to Jews and what their Jewish roots might be. Perhaps even more perplexing is the question how Jewish social and intellectual traditions are supposed to have been transmitted in circles that have distanced themselves very deliberately from all things Jewish and who are now said to draw on just these traditions. Marx is linked with his "Talmudic ancestors" and, according to Werner Sombart (who is disproportionately present in this book), Jews must be good businessmen. The first paper by

296

Book Reviews

Dirk Kasler is very analytical, very sociological and promising in that it raises the right questions about Jews in science generally and in sociology in particular, about the relationship of Judaism to sociology and what ascriptions such as "Jewish" and "sociological" might mean in this context. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg also employs a traditional sociological approach in his examination of Fremdheit and rationality as "Typusmerkmale" in the works of Sombart, Max Weber and Simmel, the "early German" sociologists. Because neither of the terms "Jew" or "sociology" are firmly defined, we come across statements, assumptions and cliches throughout the book that, while well-meaning, are of little value in increasing one's comprehension. Thus, Simmel, "who came from a Jewish family—his father had himself baptized—was a near classic example of an . . . intellectual . . . and brilliant [geistreich] Judaism" (p. 148). Rehberg is especially interested in the perception of Jews by sociologists (another possible variant to add to those categories we have listed). Since the days of Max Weber and his famous (if indirect) call to Simmel to give up any hope he might have entertained of receiving a professorship in Germany, there has been a great deal of interest in and sympathy for Simmel as an early victim of German racism. He is often referred to as a "typical Jewish intellectual," whose vision of the Verschmelzung of the Jews into the German nation was his particular solution for the Jewish question. But the fact is that Simmers conceptualization of a dissolution of the Jews is in direct dynamic conflict with the classic Jewish view of separate and self-aware existence, that he condemned Zionism (p. 151) and even advocated the restriction of entry for Jewish university teachers (p. 190), all of which makes him a hostile voice on the subject of Jews and Judaism. Conscious of the Holocaust, Rehberg defends the Simmel vision but excludes Jewish ritual and Jewish ethnicity from the Verschmelzung to come up with a small, culture-carrying secular group whose affinity with Judaism would in any event be only temporary and nominal (p. 152). For all that, Claus Christian Kohnke offers another chapter on "Simmel as a Jew." Inevitably this has to be a somewhat contrived discussion, which enlightens only through the introduction of a key concept for the German situation. Simmel is said to "be continuously conscious that he was regarded as a Jew"—an analytical category that deserves even now to be tested empirically. The next two papers, by Winfried Lieth and Joachim Israel, are about Buber. Lieth's paper is crisp and nicely constructed, Israel's a bit more controversial in that he credits Buber with introducing fundamental Jewish concepts such as Erlosung-Einheit-Tatidee which, one would have thought, somewhat predate the great philosopher (p. 227). The paper by Israel is also marred by a gratuitous and quite superfluous attack on Orthodox Judaism. Perhaps it is meant as an implicit justification for projecting Jewish values only through the secular eyes of a Gershom Scholem and a Buber. A paper by David Frisby on Siegfried Kracauer fails to explore the briefly mentioned relationships with Franz Rosenzweig and Nehemia Nobel, which would have added a Jewish connection to the slight sociological content. Similarly, Michael Ley's paper on Emil Julius Gumbel is valuable as a chapter in the study of antisemitism, but adds nothing to the main theme of the book. It does, however, illustrate once again the weakness of Simmel's Verschmelzung idea when set against the antisemitic charge of Zersetzung. It ought to have been stressed that classic

History and Social Sciences

297

Jewish separatism has a value in its own right. We might outline this issue briefly as follows. According to Marxist theory, every individual has to complete a transition from natural wo/man to social wo/man and that this transition can be fostered or hindered by the social and economic conditions in society. Judaism stipulates that between the natural and the social wo/man lies a cultural identity, a group factor without which the transition to social wo/man is not possible. Therein lies the notion of separatism that runs through Jewish history, inspiring both admiration and hostility. Detlev Claussen's paper deals with members of the Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer. Jewishness is not mentioned in the first half of the paper. Instead, emphasis is placed on the notion of an internalized exile and the argument that, before Auschwitz, members of the Frankfurt School saw their Jewishness as an ethnic or social factor, whereas after their return to Germany, their theoretical and political perceptions were deeply influenced by the past. It is difficult to understand why Maja Wicki's paper on Simone Weil is included here. Any sociological connections are tenuous, her Jewishness, very briefly mentioned, amounting to no more than that she considered Judaism as a food that would make her sick. The last major paper, by Johan Goudsblom (an autobiographical essay by the book's co-editor, Reinhard Bendix, concludes the volume), deals with Norbert Elias, who saw himself as an outsider, a man who had to wait a long time before he and his work were properly acknowledged. There is not a great deal to link Elias' work to the central theme of the book, but that is not to say that such links could not be made. This reviewer has always maintained that a study of Jews in sociology must deal not only with sociology as articulated by persons of Jewish origins but also with problems and issues in the Jewish intellectual tradition, examining and comparing, where possible, the various orientations of classical Judaism and of modern sociology. One of Elias' original ideas is a case in point. If there is a link of some kind between Jewishness and sociology, it can be tested by comparing Elias' "Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation" with Jewish thought on related themes beginning, for example, with the talmudic discussions on derekh erez and continuing with Saadia Gaon's "Rules of Conduct" and the medieval Sefer Hasidim, all of which concern themselves in some way with Elias' problematic. If influences can be identified, we could then comfortably link Jewishness and sociology. All in all this volume, with all its tendentiousness, is certainly a good read, even if it is not a good book. It says much about the book that apart from Reinhard Bendix, who identifies himself as a Jew, the ethnicity of all other contributors is not made explicit. JULIUS CARLEBACH Hochschule fur Jiidische Studien, Heidelberg

Language, Literature and the Arts

Glenda Abramson (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Jewish Culture: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 853 pp.

This weighty tome appears to have much in common with that familiar genre of books dealing with "the Jewish contribution to civilization." We love to leaf through them, pausing here and there to exclaim in delight as yet another famous figure is revealed to possess what is sometimes called "Jewish origins." Here they all are again (well, not all, as I shall point out below), those Jews of talent, sometimes of genius, without whom, one might well imagine, modern Western civilization would hardly have come into existence. Converts and descendents of converts are present along with those who remained within the fold, thus enabling us to bask in the reflected glory not only of Philip Roth, Philip Rahv and Marc Blitzstein, but of such weightier figures as Heine, Marx, Mahler, Wittgenstein and Mendelssohn (Felix). Most compilations of this kind have come into the world in order to demonstrate how wrongheaded the antisemites are when they claim that the Jews are a sterile, unimaginative race. The Blackwell Companion to Jewish Culture eschews such currently unfashionable apologetics. Moreover, its editor's programmatic introduction informs us that the volume aims not so much to detail the great Jewish contribution to modern, non-Jewish, western culture, but rather to examine specifically Jewish culture, which includes the activities of ". . . those personalities whose Jewishness is, in some way, overtly or covertly, brought to bear on their work, those whose work shows internal evidence of it and in some way refers to or reflects it" (p. x). An important advantage of this approach is that it allows for a large number of general articles, written by an impressive array of experts, on such subjects as Jewish music, Jewish art, Jewish dance, Jewish philosophy, Jewish education, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and the various religious tendencies within modern Jewry. Very striking, and extremely useful, is the prominent place accorded to Jewish culture in Israel, reflecting the ever-growing role of Hebrew-speaking Jewry in the Jewish creative world. Nonetheless, the bulk of the volume is devoted to short biographies of distinguished individuals, and here problems arise. What, exactly, does our editor mean when she says that all those whose Jewishness "in some way" influenced their work should be included? In what way? An examination of the contents reveals that, despite her best intentions, there is no logical principle of selection. Woody Allen is given a fairly long write-up, but not Lenny Bruce, who is merely mentioned in passing in articles on "Jewish humor" and "Jewish comedy." It is impossible to 298

Language, Literature and the Arts

299

understand why the Polish violinist Henryk Wieniawski (the son of a convert) deserves a special article, while the Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim (born a Jew, a convert, and an important figure in the history of nineteenth-century European music) does not. If we are on the subject of violinists, where is Leopold Auer, yet another convert who, despite embracing Christianity, went out of his way to promote the careers of many famous Jewish performers? Durkheim the sociologist is in, but Mannheim the sociologist is out. Why? It can hardly be said of Roman Jakobson, the great Slavic linguist, that his omission is justified because his Jewishness had no influence on him, since he did some work on Yiddish. And maybe (who knows?) Bernard Berenson's aesthetics was shaped by his Lithuanian Jewish origins. He, too, despite his early interest in Yiddish literature and his late attraction to Zionism, is among the missing. It must also be said that even many important figures in the history of specifically Jewish culture are missing. I could not help noticing that this is particularly true of Jewish historians—no Jacob Katz, no Shmuel Ettinger, no Meir Balaban, no Yitshak Schipper. The Slonimsky family, which produced a great maskil, a celebrated Polish poet and a brilliant musicologist, is ignored. All this is rather difficult to justify. Nor is it clear why certain Jewish politicians with little to do with "culture," Jewish or non-Jewish, are given space. What exactly is David Ben-Gurion doing here? And if he is here, why is Nahum Sokolow omitted? Scientists, as a previous reviewer has pointed out, are almost entirely missing (except, of course, for Einstein).1 Having said this, I should point out that the biographical entries, as well as the general articles, are generally well written, informative and accurate. Of course, not everything pleases. The article on "dance, Israeli," manages to avoid mentioning the names of Rina Shenfeld and Gurit Kadman, while the article on "dance, Jewish contribution to," is a mere list of prominent dancers of Jewish descent. It includes, to my surprise, the name of Anna Pavlova, who, we are told, is ". . . variously said to have been christened, to have had a Jewish mother, and to have confided to impresario Sol Hurok that her father was Jewish" (p. 160). The entry on Modigliani states, not too confidently, that "he seems to have remained fiercely proud of his origins. . ." (p. 524). To which one might add, with Hamlet, "Seems, madam? . . . I know not seems." It is extremely strange to identify Ber Borochov as a "Yiddish scholar" (p. 105) and to claim that there were "pales of settlement" in Europe (p. 160). Surely the article on Islam and the Jews, which makes much of the Muslim world's anti-Jewish animus, should have pointed out the role of the Ottoman Empire in absorbing the Jewish exiles from Spain. The writer Max Brod is referred to as "Austrian" while the musician Moscheles is said to be "German-Czech." Both were Jews from Prague. Rabbi Abraham Kook is said to have been born in Latvia, a country that did not exist in 1865. It is claimed, wrongly, that the Socialist Bund represented the "majority of Polish Jewry" (p. 826). One could go on. But these are trivial matters. It is of greater importance to note that current political and cultural events in the Jewish world have influenced our editor. "Zionism" gets a long article, but "Bundism" does not. Chaim Weizmann is here, but Vladimir Medem is missing. Orthodox Jewish figures receive their due, but some prominent Jewish "integrationists" do not. Where, for example, is Louis Marshall? Where is Lucien Wolf? Is there not a certain tendency here to identify

300

Book Reviews

with the "winners" in Jewish history—these days the Orthodox and the Zionists? But it is hardly surprising, and probably inevitable, that such a major compendium reflects realities on the Jewish street. Then, too, it may be too much to expect from this volume a stisfactory explanation (if one exists) for the tremendous impact of Jews on virtually all aspects of modern western culture. It is a tribute to the editorial board that this "question of questions" is the subject of much speculation, some of it enlightening, by the contributors. All in all, this is a highly attractive volume, beautifully printed and containing many good illustrations. It will doubtless weigh down many a coffee table and delight many a bar mitzvah. But it also deserves a place in serious libraries. How many will be able to afford it (at £49.95 a copy) is another question. EZRA MENDELSOHN The Hebrew University

Note 1. Hyam Macoby in the Times Literary Supplement, 3-9 August 1990, 828. There are, however, articles on "Jews in biomedical research" and "Jews in medicine."

Harold Bloom, The Book o f j . New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. 335 pp.

In recent years, literary critics have taken it upon themselves to save biblical texts from incipient oblivion among English-speaking "common readers." The strategy employed by the critics is to demonstrate that biblical narrative conforms to the norms of modernist literature. The writings of Pound, Proust and Joyce are brought into play to set the standard. In the hands of commentators such as H. Schneidau, Robert Alter and Gabriel Josipovici, the biblical texts fare well in relative terms. However, the price of the success of the literary hypothesis is the diminution of the texts' richness. In general, literary critics have ignored the trenchant polemic presented by Meyer Steinberg, who argued that the literary hypothesis distorts the fact that biblical writings may be storytelling but also contain epistemological and theological concerns. The most recent example of the distortion of the biblical texts is presented by Harold Bloom. In an ironic regression to an old (in which the divine name YHWH is used) hypothesis, Bloom seeks to disassociate the so-called "J" text from the rest of the biblical narratives. The justification, according to Bloom, is that the J strand is different from the other biblical narratives by being "secular" rather than religious. When Bloom uses this denotation, he understands the term to mean that the J texts are subsumed under the category of art and are meant to be read as art. The question that arises immediately is: How does one read the biblical texts differently from Shakespeare? Is Shakespeare, an acknowledged literary genius, not a religious writer? Can there be an art that is not religious? Existentially, what are the features that distinguish the one from the other?

Language, Literature and the Arts

301

The denotation of J as "secular" raises doubts about Bloom's credibility as a political philosopher, interpreter of biblical texts and aesthetician. Bloom, along with other like-minded commentators, expresses a commonplace misconception in his definition of secularism. He fails to recognize that the secular is not the antithesis of the religious. The opposite of religious is profane. Secularism is a religious orientation that in fact is drawn from the biblical perspective. Spinoza was the first explicit secularist. He was the preeminent thinker in the European context to boldly explicate the secular-religious program of the biblical texts, drawing from the biblical texts the religious basis of constitutional monarchy and constitutional democracy. Secularism is a platform that exalts the dignity of persons, placing its faith in the ability of individuals to live with propriety and grace without the violent or coercive intervention of the state. The secular worldview is fundamentally egalitarian in that its faith in the individual person is the basis of its vision of community. For community to be possible, each person must be endowed with equality and the ability to exercise the freedom necessary to fulfill the human task. No person in a secular society is privileged over and above others. Government is the guardian of those rights necessary for the individual to realize himself as a person within the community. The biblical texts that provide the inspiration for this worldview are secular, but in the religious sense. These are not issues that interest Bloom. His preoccupation is in debunking the crudest notions of what the religious can mean. The religious in Bloom's work is reduced to false piety, mystification and authoritarian appropriation of meaning. The religious is equated with the feelings associated with harmless sentimental greeting cards and, in sinister fashion, with totalitarianism. Bloom throughout this book expresses some interesting and appropriate insights about the biblical texts and their relation to culture. Invariably, however, he draws inadequate conclusions from his reading. He understands that much of the doctrine and dogmas of organized religion are not borne out by a close reading of the biblical texts. Bloom perceives the imposition of doctrine and dogma on the biblical texts by Christianity and what he calls "normative" Judaism. For Bloom this was a conspiratorial strategy to suppress the literary value of the J strands of the composite texts. This complaint translates into the proposition that the God of J and the God of the Bible, and hence the God of Christianity and Judaism, are not the same. The insight is partially correct but the deduction is wholly false. The biblical texts do reflect the struggle between the institutional appropriation of the texts and the liberating biblical message. The struggle is brought into bold relief by the brilliance of the redactor. Further, the struggle enriches the religious and literary qualities of the texts. According to Bloom, J is not interested in religious, moral or metaphysical issues. Bloom seeks to eradicate the attributes that are essential to our humanity. J may or may not make explicit a worldview or a moral perspective or a stance on God, but these are by definition present at least implicitly. In fact, J's relationship with God is central to J and to Bloom's exegesis of the text. It is J's extravagant picture of God that so enchants us. Nonetheless, Bloom insists that J—in his words, "the supreme literary artist"—is concerned only with the ironic, defined as the exploration of the incommensurable.

302

Book Reviews

Bloom claims that his contribution to biblical scholarship resides in his description of J's identity and cultural milieu. According to Bloom, J lives in a moral and political vacuum that Bloom identifies positively, not with irony, as the Solomanic enlightenment. Not only is J a member of the Solomanic court, but J is a woman. Bloom's disarming defense of this position is that nothing can be proven to establish that J is a man. Further, all judgments about the biblical texts are speculative and therefore anything goes. Nonetheless, Bloom expends an enormous quantity of energy in defending his case. There is no point in arguing the pros and cons of the thesis. There is simply no way to decide the gender of the authorship of J. But the case is not particularly original. The argument has been made before from the richer perspective of biblical criticism by Richard Elliot Friedman in his Who Wrote the Bible? (1987). Bloom's reading of the book of J is more traditional than he would acknowledge. He is not the first to point out the outrageous humor of the texts, the impulse to punning wherever possible, and the anthropomorphic conception of an awesome if somewhat bumbling and pompous God. But what is different in Bloom's account is his denial that J's characterization of God and human existence bear any metaphysical or theological import. Once again Bloom accepts tacitly the most vulgar conception of what the metaphysical means. He understands metaphysics to reside in irrelevant abstract transcendent principles rather than in the real existential grounds of the problems of living. It is precisely J's understanding of creation, God's relationship to humanity and the biblical conception of paradoxical freedom that is authentically metaphysical. Although Bloom is quick to point out that J's conception of humanity is monistic rather than dualistic and that this insight into humanity in the creation story is of profound originality, he recognizes nothing of theological value in these existential concepts. Finally, his defense of J as an ironic observer of life's incongruity blinds him to the fact that J's account of creation is more than a mere gem of a story. It is a narrative that expresses metaphorically the human coming into consciousness and recognition of the paradoxical nature of freedom. By abstracting J out of the composite text, Bloom's insights lose the complex awareness of the redactor. Bloom points out rightly the ways in which God fails to understand the paradox of freedom, but without giving equal weight to the human failure that is also expressed in the text. At no point does he recognize the redactor's radical notion that the partnership between God and persons is a mutual learning experience. Bloom's work discredits the biblical texts and literature as well. He saps literature of all moral and prophetic content, reducing it to disinterested and false ironic commentary. His irony fails to encompass the notion of deception and selfdeception that makes great literature noble and makes the biblical texts the grounds of all existential knowledge. BERNARD ZELECHOW York University

Language, Literature and the Arts

303

Joseph Cohen, Voices of Israel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. 231 pp.

This book is part of a relatively new phenomenon in the field of contemporary literary studies that deals with the placing of a particular corpus of literature within the context of what can be referred to as world literature. This branch of scholarship is also relatively new in that it relies exclusively on works in translation for both its primary and secondary sources, and it is thus obviously restricted by the availability of translated texts. After reading Joseph Cohen's intelligent study of Israeli literature, my initial skepticism regarding this approach has changed: despite its inherent and acknowledged limitations, it offers fresh insights into texts. Cohen's lack of knowledge of Hebrew denies him free access to important critical works and as yet untranslated original texts. To compensate for these disadvantages, he complements his critical essays with interviews with the writers themselves. The result is a more balanced view of the works, and an unusual double-angled presentation for readers. The book contains critiques of five Israeli writers, all belonging to the generation of the New Wave and all still in the prime of their creative careers. In his introduction, Cohen sets their works against the background of their predecessors, the Palmach generation, whose writing was (compared with the New Wave) simplistic in aims and techniques. With the establishment of the state of Israel, the hitherto shared ideological and social center dissipated and the New Wave writers took on what Cohen refers to as a "realistic stance." More significant perhaps is the fact that the writers of the New Wave moved marginalized characters of society to the central stage in their fictional world. Cohen points to the extent to which these writers have espoused Western literary tradition and employed its techniques while still retaining specifically Israeli characteristics. This interesting phenomenon is not unique to the New Wave writers; ever since modern Hebrew literature arose in Europe in the nineteenth century, it drew part of its inspiration from the surrounding intellectual environment. More emphasis should have been placed on the extent to which Hebrew writers drew from their own rich Jewish sources. Cohen singles out Einstein's relativity theory, which frees space and time from the linear rigidities of Newtonian absolutes, and insists that this theory was the one that was particularly adapted by Israeli writers. This is an original observation, though I am not convinced that such a theory is especially prominent, nor that this breakdown of causality and indeterminacy is in operation at all times in the texts. The first author to be introduced is Yehuda Amichai, who has been writing poetry, as well as prose, since 1955. Cohen notes that Amichai's writing can be seen as an ongoing quarrel with God, and that in his poetry in particular he identifies his father with God. This is true, but Amichai can equally be regarded as a love poet par excellence. Moreover, there are other motifs of equal importance in his poetry, such as childhood, war, death and the city of Jerusalem. The next writer to be analyzed is A. B. Yehoshua, who, as Cohen points out, raises in his prose some piercing questions regarding the very survival of Israel in a tone of ever-growing existential despair. Cohen follows Yehoshua's invocation of Faulkner and points out that both writers demonstrate the national and personal impact of the loss of love within the

304

Book Reviews

family unit. Interesting though the comparison is, one wonders if it provides a deeper insight into the texts. However, the fine analyses of Yehoshua's stories offer non-Hebrew readers a remarkably balanced view of his work. The interview with Yehoshua is particularly interesting since it touches on issues concerning Israel and its relationship with Jews in the diaspora. Yehoshua regards the diaspora as the great failure of the Jewish people and sees the Holocaust as a consequence of it. Following the chronological order of his meetings with the authors between 1984 and 1986, Cohen next introduces the American-born poet T. Carmi. The main focus of analysis is on poems from Carmi's collection "The Brass Serpent," whose affinity with the poetry of D. H. Lawrence in particular is discussed at length. Cohen observes that Carmi's poetry "thematically reflects the modernist approach in its emphasis upon loss, its sense of resignation, its laconic, and occasionally sardonic view of human failings, especially in love relationships." In his interview, Carmi explains that he tried to fuse the techniques of modern English poetry with the rhythms of spoken Hebrew, and he comments on his conscious and deliberate use of the Kabbalah. Jewish tradition, especially German Jewish tradition, is also a source of inspiration for the next writer, Aharon Appelfeld. In his writing, he reconstructs the lost world of central European Jewry as it existed just before its extermination by the Nazis. Coming from an assimilated European family and a Holocaust survivor himself, his work emerges out of personal experiences. He succeeds in detaching himself from the subject of his writing by using aesthetic distancing, thus emerging as the supreme ironist of Holocaust writing. Cohen shows how Appelfeld continually questions what happens when a catastrophe of the magnitude of the Holocaust is put on the shoulders of one individual. Although the menacing presence of the Holocaust is present in all his writing, he never confronts it directly. In perceptive short analyses of available translated texts, Cohen discerns the main themes in Appelfeld's writing, some of which are Jewish self-hatred, misplaced blame, selfdeception, disillusionment and bitterness. Interestingly, Appelfeld does not regard himself as an Israeli writer, but first and foremost as a Jewish writer. He does not concern himself with life outside the Holocaust and is not a political writer. The same cannot be said about Amos Oz, the last writer dealt with in this book. In his interview with Cohen, Oz stresses that he uses political material in his fictional writing, "not to make a political statement disguised as literature, but as a way of observing the deeper and more mysterious dimensions of human existence and human experience." Thus, political reality provides Oz with the springboard for writing metaphysical and symbolic novels. Cohen offers brief separate analyses of Oz's books, emphasizing the fusing of localized Israeli life with the exoticism of romantic literature, to create "exotic realism." The interview with Oz covers important poetic issues left undiscussed by the previous interviews. Oz analyzes his own creative process and in conclusion comments on strategies of translation, insisting that translation should always avoid any attempt to neutralize the characters. Cohen's study is an important contribution to literary scholarship. It is unpretentious and beautifully written, and the comprehensive bibliography is extremely useful. He places Israeli literature firmly within the mainstream of Western litera-

Language, Literature and the Arts

305

ture, and from his original vantage point, he inspires us to listen with renewed enthusiasm to the exciting voices of Israel. RISA DOMB University of Cambridge

Felix Dreizin, Studies in Judaism: The Russian Soul and the Jew, ed. David Guaspari. University Press of America, 1990. 246 pp.

This book, published (alas!) posthumously—the author died in 1989—deals with the image of the Jew in the mind and work of a number of Russian writers, from great ones of the past (Gogol and Dostoyevsky) to rather mediocre ones of today (Sokolov and Limonov). In addition to these four, Dreizin also includes analysis of the work of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, as well as—a little unexpectedly—"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It seems quite superfluous to insist on the importance of Dreizin's topic, despite its having been covered by many others in the past. It should be stressed, however, that Dreizin not only sums up findings of his predecessors but adds his own contribution as well. As an example, there is his discussion of the Jewish character Isai Fomich Bumstein in Dostoyevsky's "The House of the Dead" (pp. 83-97): the idea of the writer's secret, subconscious autoidentification with his character seems to be precise and poignant. But, paradoxically enough, it is exactly here that this reviewer's doubts and perplexities began to appear. Dreizin affirms: "To Dostoyevsky the world always seemed hostile. By the midseventies it had become fundamentally 'Judaized.' It seems possible to explain this phenomenon partly by Dostoyevsky's paranoid tendencies" (p. 77). This statement may be perfectly correct, but any Jewish scholar is aware that the second half of the 1870s was marked by a sharp rise of so-called social antisemitism all over Europe in general and in the Russian empire in particular. This well-known fact, however, does not interest Dreizin; what draws his attention exclusively is Dostoyevsky's paranoia, i.e. his mental disease. And indeed Dreizin insists elsewhere that "Dostoyevsky's 'organic aversion' toward the Jews may be explained by the intimate needs of his pathological personality" (p. 112). Mutatis mutandis, Gogol is treated in the same way. Such an approach to the problem of antisemitism may be legitimate, but in that case both the title and the subtitle of the book are not fully relevant: it should be "Studies in Psychopathology" (or else "Psychoanalysis") and "The Russian Sick Soul . . ." rather than "Studies in Judaism." Dreizin's knowledge in this last field is really rather limited. He is unaware, for example, of the attitude of Russian Jewry toward Gogol (there are a number of publications in Russian Jewish periodicals, especially those concerned with the fiftieth anniversary of Gogol's death in 1902 and the hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1909—among them the famous article "Russian Tenderness" by Vladimir Zev Jabotinsky). "I leave it to psychoanalysts to speculate about Gogol's Oedipal conflict," Dreizin

306

Book Reviews

notes (p. 51); and it is precisely psychoanalysts who should most appreciate this book. It is a pity that the foreword, written by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere of the University of California, Davis, does not present such an appraisal but rather confines itself to a concise retelling of the scope of Dreizin's work and "a few personal comments about the author" (p. xiii). For Rancour-Laferriere seems to be the main source of Dreizin's psychoanalytical inspiration: no less than five of his titles appear in this book's bibliography, as opposed to only three by Freud. As it is, Rancour-Laferriere's conclusion that this is a "pioneering book on a fascinating but neglected topic" seems to be a noncommittal eulogy, not a real appreciation. He also could have rendered his late friend a real service by helping David Guaspari edit the text. Apart from minor mistakes (e.g., well-known Soviet literary critic Boris Bursov being renamed Burtsev), the main textual defect of the book is the unbearable load of quotations: too many and absurdly long, accounting for some onequarter of the book's length. The editor's first duty was to lighten this burden. To sum up: Dreizin's book is not without a certain interest for Jewish readers and scholars, but it does not belong in the realm of Jewish studies. At the very beginning of his chapter on Solzhenitsyn, Dreizin states: "The main object of analysis in this chapter is a certain kind of Russian mentality . . ." (p. 153). This statement applies to the book as a whole. SHIMON MARKISH Geneva University

Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish. Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990. xix + 205 pp.

Now under a more alluring title, this is the "forthcoming Aspects of Yiddish" to which Benjamin and Barbara Harshav referred readers in the introduction to their American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (1986). In large measure it takes the form of an expanded version of that introduction, now extending to something like four times the original length. The fact that much of the material will prove familiar to readers of that excellent anthology need not, however, be regarded in any way as a defect, since the arguments bear restatement and Harshav now has the space to amplify his discerning analyses in much greater detail. Once more the central concern is Yiddish modernist poetry written in the United States, in particular that of the Inzikhistn (Introspectivists), above all Arn Leyeles and Yankev Glatshteyn. Harshav sees these poets as occupying a singular position at the intersection of many traditions, and while he is fully aware of all that they owe to their Jewish heritage, it is their essentially American qualities that he chooses to emphasize—going so far as to describe their work as an "unjustly neglected branch of American literature, a kaleidoscope of American experience and art entombed in yellowing crumbling books, in the muteness of its own dead language" (p. 163). His tone is consistently elegiac, and he makes it clear that he finds little consolation

Language, Literature and the Arts

307

in the preservation of the language itself, which he sees as having ceased to be the vehicle for a viable, intelligent culture, having receded to a "premodern, basically oral existence among its surviving speakers and in several orthodox religious communities" (p. xiv). It is not so much the ailing of the Yiddish language that exercises Harshav as the imminent extinction of a refined literary culture. His main preoccupation is rescuing the achievements of American Yiddish modernist poetry from an undeserved oblivion. To this end, he has undertaken the daunting task of equipping the general reader with the manifold prolegomena required for an informed appreciation of the ephemeral brilliance of the Inzikh movement. Harshav's approach is that of the zoom lens: he starts with the broadest possible view of the origins of Ashkenaz and progressively tightens his focus until one is left with a close-up revealing the fine detail of individual Introspectivist poems. By disregarding the boundaries between linguistics, social history, folklore, semiotics and literary criticism, Harshav is able to achieve a seamless fit between topics one would normally regard as the proper subject of two quite separate books. The earlier chapters are loosely based on Max Weinreich's History of the Yiddish Language (1973; Eng. ed. 1980), and perform the eminently useful function of cogently summarizing Weinreich's arguments concerning the origins of the Yiddish language and its fusion character. What is more, this is done in an elegant and readable prose that will be a delight for those who have attempted to make sense of Shlomo Noble's awkward and obscure translation. For this reason alone The Meaning of Yiddish can not only be recommended to the interested layman for whom Harshav professes to have written it, but also deserves a place on the first-year undergraduate's reading list alongside Otto Best's Mameloschen (1973). This said, it is a pity that Harshav has missed this second chance to point out that Weinreich's Loter-thesis (which posits a Rhineland cradle for the Yiddish language) has lost credence these days, with the newly developing consensus favoring BavaroAustrian territory. One notes as well a certain lack of diachronic perspective in his discussion of the impact of the Slavic languages on Eastern Yiddish. For the uninitiated, the diagram on p. 50, for instance, will prove particularly misleading—it suggests, on the one hand, that Russian and Polish influences have been contemporaneous and of similar magnitude while omitting, on the other hand, the influence of Czech, Sorb and Ukrainian (which are scarcely mentioned elsewhere). In contrast, Harshav is notably successful in conveying the dynamics of the polyphonic subtexts that frequently lurk below the denotational surface of seemingly straightforward Yiddish phraseology. He pinpoints accurately the demographic forces underlying the psychological trauma caused by the internalization of negative stereotypes, and he analyzes perceptively the complex sociolinguistic factors responsible for the fact that Yiddish literary culture often constituted a kind of halfway house between conformist Orthodoxy and assimilation—one that was inhabited by only one or two transient generations. A major element in Harshav's understanding of the historical parameters that made possible the rise of the modernist Yiddish literary sensibility is what he calls the "Modern Jewish Revolution," or the synergy of intellectual, political and industrial developments in the early 1880s that suddenly propelled the inhabitants of the

308

Book Reviews

Pale of Settlement into the modern world, leading a disproportionately large number of them to play an important role in the European and American avant-garde movements. The closer Harshav's ideological analysis approaches its chosen goal, the more valuable his insights become. He presents a useful perspective of the intertwined history of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, showing very clearly how the anomalous lacunae of the one were often filled by the other. He offers a lucid exposition, furthermore, of the apparently zig-zag course run by Yiddish literature as a result of its attracting such a high proportion of its writers from earlier involvements in Russian, Polish, German and even English literature. In particular, Harshav traces the manner in which Yiddish literature solved the problems of creating a modern novel form in a society largely devoid of private, individual vicissitudes by going back to the traditions of the pre-realist novel, especially the skaz or discursive style of, say, Gogol's Rudyj Pan'ko; and how, in so doing, it paradoxically took a leap straight from the preclassical to the stream of consciousness—from Cervantes or Sterne, as it were, to Kafka or, alternatively, from Gogol to Belyj. In this connection, it is of course important to bear in mind that Yiddish writers before the First World War had a necessarily myopic view of the development of Yiddish literature, since whatever literary education they themselves had received was in the context of other literatures. Moreover, the earlier Yiddish texts began to be (re)published only from the 1920s onwards, largely as a scholarly response to the preceding literary achievements, and many of them did not become accessible until after the Second World War. Harshav rightly stresses the relative autonomy of Yiddish poetry in America. True, the Inzikh poets shared with contemporary Yiddish writers in Eastern Europe many of the same Russian and German influences, but they were also open to the impact of the English Imagists and Vorticists. The American poets, moreover, all had in common the fact that they had left the old world, or di alte heym in their early twenties or thereabouts, having had time to absorb the expressive resources of the language but with their literary sensibilities as yet unformed. They were young enough to be radically innovative, but already too old to assimilate fully into the dominant English-language culture. They differed from the continental Expressionists in their resolve to represent the vibrant exterior world as reflected in the kaleidoscopic associations generated within the individual psyche, and to do this in a unique, often free-verse form sensitive to the stirrings of each impression. Their aims and achievements frequently had more in common with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound than with the Khalyastre, Gottfried Benn or Vladimir Mayakovsky. Just how distinctively "American" the Introspectivists were to become is well illustrated by Harshav's sensitive exegesis of Glatshteyn's "1919" (published in 1921) with its transatlantic reflection of events in Europe and its characteristically sober and antinostalgic tone. Between the wars, the readership for the slim volumes and little magazines in which this refined, elitist verse appeared was naturally somewhat restricted.The poets, meanwhile, honed a new poetic language that later gave them the power to articulate the common grief of the Holocaust, which brought them back to the center of Jewish society. A more private tragedy then ensued as the disappearance of the readers was followed by the final ebbing away of the words

Language, Literature and the Arts

309

themselves. Harshav concludes his imaginative study with Glatshteyn's profoundly sad elegy for the language: mir hobn shoyn bald ongevorn ale verter. di shtamlmayler vern ot antshvign.

... un ash vert zeyer meyn. (Soon we'll have lost all the words. The stammer-mouths are growing silent.

... And ash becomes their meaning.) HUGH DENMAN University College, London

Vivian B. Mann (ed.), Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. xxii + 354 pp.

Scholarly interest in Italian Jewry has been more than proportionate to the comparatively small size of that community, and for good reasons. Throughout their more than twenty-two centuries in the "Island of God's Dew" (i-tal-yah), Jews have created a rich culture that amounts to what one might term "the Italian way of Judaism." This beautifully laid-out volume reconstructs a social and intellectual history of the Jews in Italy through the images and interpretation of fine works of art. The publication served as a catalog of the exhibition organized by the Jewish Museum in New York in 1989-1990. That exhibition included 339 different items or groups of items from such diverse countries as the United States, Italy (including the Vatican), France, England, Chile and Israel. It demonstrated in exemplary fashion the rich variety of means through which the Jews have succeeded in their quest to preserve their particular culture, whether for the codified purposes of collective Jewish life or as a free expression of individual feelings and persuasions. The items selected also showed how various forms of artistic expression can provide a prism through which the unique experience of Italian Jewry can be reconstructed and explained to a wide audience. The volume opens with a foreword by Tullia Zevi and a preface by the late Primo Levi, followed by two comprehensive historical essays by, respectively, David Ruderman on the ancient period and the Middle Ages, and Mario Toscano on the modern and contemporary periods. The curator, Vivian B. Mann, presents an overview of the major aspects of the arts in Jewish Italy, followed by five essays dealing with specific aspects of creativity: "Jewish Art and Culture in Ancient Rome" (Richard Brilliant); "Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts from Italy" (Evelyn Cohen); "Jewish Ceremonial Art" (Dora Liscia Bemporad); "Modern Jewish Artists" (Emily Brown); and "Hebrew Poetry" (Allen Mandelbaum). These are fol-

310

Book Reviews

lowed by the annotated catalog of the exhibition, which permits full appreciation of the manifold materials employed in Jewish cultural expression: stone, metal, clay, glass; manuscripts, printed books, works on paper, parchment, vellum, leather, wood, ivory, textiles, bronze and brass, silver and gold, jewelry; and finally paintings. Biographies of painters and sculptors, a glossary and a bibliography usefully complement the volume. Two lines of investigation intertwine through text and images: one more generally sociohistorical, the other more particularly artistic. They do not always seem to go hand-in-hand, as the nature of art is far more autonomous and timeless than specific events of history. Nonetheless, a distinctive cultural identity of Italian Jewry clearly emerges. Through the three main chronological divisions of the ancient period, the city states and ghetto periods, and the modern period, from the Risorgimento to the resistance, Italy's Jews are described in their various chronological and geographical settings. These include the more ancient layer of Roman times and a continuous and uninterrupted ingathering from the more disparate lands until our days: from the ancient Mediterranean civilization basin, the medieval German lands, Spain and Portugal after the expulsion and more recently, Muslim North Africa and the Middle East, and Central and Eastern Europe. These distinct components of Italian Jewry, and the common product of their interaction in Italy, successively merged into the broader history of Italy. Italy's general experience was itself quite multifaceted, ranging from the early Roman era of independence and cultural and political dominance, through extended periods of conquest and submission by other powers; from long periods of political fragmentation and internal conflict to the final emergence of the unified national state in the nineteenth century. What this meant for the general identity of the Italian people and society is not easy to summarize. It surely included much individualism, great creativity, openness, the ability to absorb and refine different contributions coming from the outside; but not necessarily an equally well developed civil and political conscience. To which Italy, when there were so many, did the Jews belong? Jews were in the delicate position of a small minority in a society that was markedly polyethnic and yet unified by the matrix of Catholicism. In spite of, and sometimes because of discrimination, Jews were often among the forerunners of modernization and the champions of social mobility, the voluntary or involuntary promoters of a blending and mutual enrichment of different local and regional cultures. How did the world of Jewish art reflect this? Fine art could serve either as an escape from the sense of being accepted by the outer, non-Jewish world—i.e., rejecting its language and symbols—or as proof of being accepted, in which case there was a faithful identification with the wider Italian national culture. The evolving answer to these questions is most revealing. Over the course of ancient and premodern times, Jewish arts in Italy are pervaded by a predominance of genuine Jewish feelings and content, while the forms of expression, often mutated, point to acculturation into the artistic milieu of the majority. Given the richness and excellency of Italian artistic craftsmanship in general, this produces artifacts of unparalleled beauty and quality. In terms of their content, modern and contemporary forms of art mark a substantial departure: pristine Jewish symbols

Language, Literature and the Arts

311

tend to occupy a declining place among all forms of expression while more individual perceptions of surrounding society (often at the introspective level), class identity (mostly bourgeois) and alienation tend to become predominant. Indeed, after the Emancipation, Jews were often at the forefront of Italian culture and society, faithful interpreters of the spirit of unified Italy. These art works transmit little trace of human suffering, perhaps because the poor do not leave behind much artistic legacy. They are, then, the faithful expression of highly cultivated, quite elitistic minorities within the minority. It is only in the more recent art works that societal injustice is more explicitly represented—when the artist's suffering is too great to be concealed any longer. As if to tear down illusions and to revise the myth of the "good Italian," the exhibition closes with the tragic period of Nazi-Fascist persecution and Jewish resistance. The final impression of this exhibition is one of lingering intellectual and artistic gratification. Yet one may speculate about the ultimate meaning of cultural and communal continuity, wondering how the distinguished spiritual and aesthetic accomplishments of the past fit in with the more blurred and indistinct Italian Jewish reality of the present. MIRIAM TOAFF DELLAPERGOLA Center for the Study of Italian Jewry SERGIO DELLAPERGOLA The Hebrew University

Leonard Prager, Yiddish Culture in Britain: A Guide. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990. xiv + 754 pp.

This book, the fruit of decades of work, appears at a time when Yiddish as a spoken language is dying in Britain (as elsewhere) while at the same time Oxford University has become the academic center for Yiddish studies in Europe. True, Yiddish culture in Britain pales in comparison to the United States; after all, no major Yiddish writer ever made England his permanent home. But as Prager demonstrates, Yiddish was alive and influential in the island kingdom for a long time, and not only in London. Many Yiddish writers lived there for a time, and numerous works of English literature were translated into Yiddish. The Yiddish theatre had its day, and visiting foreign troupes could find an appreciative audience. An unusual feature of Yiddish life in Britain were the weekly literary Sabbath afternoon meetings (Literarishe shabes nokhmitogs) that took place for many years at the initiative of the London Yiddish poet A. N. Stencl. They continued after his death in 1983, and are still going on today. Yiddish also lived in the synagogue and house of study. The author tries to cover this world as well, although he occasionally stumbles when confronted with traditional texts. The "guide" is organized in the form of a dictionary preceded by an introduction. The dictionary includes people (writers, actors, missionaries, and what-have-you), places, titles of books and plays, songs, concepts, movements, etc. It is especially

312

Book Reviews

useful for some lesser-known information it provides on plays performed, songs, and British writers in Yiddish translation. Cross-references are plentifully supplied. The bibliographic information is as complete as circumstances allowed and includes locations for the rare items. This large and somewhat amorphous volume is, of course, not without its faults. In our opinion the introduction makes too much of a claim for the respectability of Yiddish and does not give the reader a real summary of the place of Yiddish in Britain—admittedly a difficult task. The borderline between Yiddish in general and Yiddish in Britain is a problem in many entries as well. Prager, wishing to be complete, includes persons such as the present writer, whose only connection to the subject is occasional participation in the Oxford Yiddish symposia. In some cases, such as the "middle rebbe" of the Lubavich movement, no connection with Britain is apparent at all. There are a number of typographical errors and references not followed up. Possibly unavoidable are inconsistencies of entry; for example, some hagadot are under hagodo, most others under seyder. Moreover, the author has expended much effort in correcting the spelling, transcription and sometimes even vocabulary of his sources by adding in brackets the form currently preferred by linguists. Scholars do not need this, and other readers will find it confusing. Prager's labor of love, though imperfect, is a treasure trove of interesting and useful information. It is a serious contribution to the ever-expanding research on Yiddish. AVRAHAM GREENBAUM University of Haifa Dinur Institute, Hebrew University

Shalom Sabar, Ketubbah: Jewish Marriage Contracts of the Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum and Klau Library. Philadelphia and New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1990. xx + 417 pp.

The erudition, precision and insightfulness that go into the cataloguing of manuscripts, books, paintings and works of art can be a blessing for researchers. In the best of these works, the attention to details often provides a basis upon which future study is possible. Catalogues of Jewish ceremonial art have appeared since the end of the nineteenth century, when the interest in and collection of Jewish artifacts began to emerge. In many cases, as a result of the dislocation and destruction of Jewish life in the twentieth century, these catalogues remain the sole guide to the cultural tradition they represented. Yet it is only in the last generation that editors of catalogues of Jewish art have recognized the value of placing fully documented and researched descriptions of the cultural objects before the public. Ketubbah by Shalom Sabar does exactly this, unveiling an important collection of 271 ketubot that spans several centuries and countries, particularly excelling in its Italian examples. Ketubbah opens with an historical overview of the Jewish marriage contract,

Language, Literature and the Arts

313

tracing its usage among Jews from the fourth or third century B.C.E. and commenting on the earliest decorated fragments from the Cairo genizah in the eleventh century. Keenly aware of the social function attached to the ketubah, Sabar pays special attention to the role it played in the public image of Jews in different countries, in particular among Sephardic communities. Reaching its peak in Italy (where more than half of this collection originates) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the illuminated ketubah served a function apparent in other media of Italian-Jewish creativity—it allowed Jews in the ghetto to rise, momentarily, above their abject physical surroundings and identify with the cultural and social world beyond the ghetto. By commissioning lavish embellishments in their ketubot that were drawn to a large extent from the Italian cultural sphere, patrons of these objects were able to engage the attention and admiration of Jews and gentiles alike. By placing the ketubah within its social and cultural context, Sabar reinforces a hypothesis advocated by the doyen of the history of Jewish art, Franz Landsberger, who claimed that with the breakdown of the community structure a distinct decline in the creation of individualized ketubot set in. In other words, the emancipation and gradual embourgeoisement of Jewish life in the nineteenth century reduced the ketubah's social functions and, consequently, the individual's readiness to expend great sums of money to individualize a marriage contract. Such a phenomenon occurred as well with other Jewish ceremonial objects, pointing to changing patterns in attitudes toward the public sphere of religious worship. Only in contemporary times do we see a return to the previous situation, though for different reasons. But the essence of this book is the catalogue itself. The cataloguing method employed attests to the author's appreciation of the intersecting factors in creating Jewish art. Ketubbah is divided according to countries and cities, prefaced in most cases by a brief overview of the ketubah's historical developments, iconographic peculiarities and points of special interest. A description of the particular ketubah follows. Here Sabar combines a precise concern for minute details—allowing him to correct many inaccuracies in previous attributions and dates—with an excellent command of changing iconographical images and textual allusions. His interests range from the social significance of the changing customs for selecting the wedding day and the amount of the dowry to distinguishing unique ketubot from the more mundane. Though the work celebrates the heyday of ketubah production in Italy, its coverage of contemporary works is no less rewarding. The American examples are a case in point: here one can see the changing social patterns mentioned above. Standardized printed ketubot, often bilingual, dominated the trade for most of this century, but since the 1960s an increase in individualized contracts has proliferated, expressing an effort to bestow upon the marriage ceremony greater individual meaning. A smattering of these new works by contemporary Jewish calligraphers points to their assimilation of traditional iconography with modern decorative patterns, and a rejection of the former bilingual text. Aramaic is once again "in." All in all, Ketubbah is a superbly produced volume of Jewish art. Though one can only regret that illustrations of the less interesting ketubot are not included (even passport size would have been sufficient), many others are reprinted in color. The

314

Book Reviews

Jewish Publication Society should be congratulated for setting a high standard for the publication of Jewish art work. And Shalom Sabar deserves special praise for producing a catalogue that treats art and history as intersecting elements, addressing both minutiae and general phenomena. This is the catalogue raisonne that the field of Jewish art has been waiting for. RICHARD I. COHEN The Hebrew University

Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. xv + 314 pp.

Israel Zangwill, Anglo-Jewish writer and politician (1864-1926), has been badly served by history as well as by literary historians. In his heyday, Zangwill's fiction had a large international readership, his plays were performed in London's West End and New York's Broadway, his lectures could fill Carnegie Hall with an audience of four thousand—and he was a serious thorn in the side of the World Zionist Organization. In his later years, however, Zangwill was already regarded as a strangely old-fashioned figure; soon after his death, he was quickly forgotten. There have been two full-length books on Zangwill's literary work (as well as two unpublished doctoral dissertations) but the best-known account of Zangwill to date, Joseph Leftwich's rambling 1957 biography, has done little to restore the tattered reputation of his subject. Joseph Udelson's Dreamer of the Ghetto will certainly replace Leftwich's volume and should do much to encourage renewed scholarly interest in Zangwill. One of the main reasons why Zangwill's worldwide standing went into such a sharp decline is that, throughout his lifetime, he made a series of disastrous choices. His international fame as a novelist was secured with the publication of his "ghetto" fiction, especially Children of the Ghetto (1892) and The King of Schnorrors (1894)—books that critics have agreed are among his most accomplished works. As early as Ghetto Comedies (1907), however, Zangwill stopped writing on Jewish themes, choosing instead to incorporate into his dramas (which replaced novels as his primary literary form) more "universal" issues. But aside from his success in popularizing the idea of America as an ethnic "melting-point" in his 1908 play The Melting-Pot (which President Theodore Roosevelt saw on its opening night in Washington), Zangwill's drama proved to be a doomed enterprise, a fact that sadly became apparent to him only in the last few months of his life. Zangwill made similar ill-fated choices with regard to his political commitments. In 1895, at the age of 31, he met Theodor Herzl in London for the first time and chaired Herzl's maiden address to an English-speaking audience on the issue of Zionism. In the following years, Zangwill was one of the leading, if not the leading, Herzlian Zionists in England. Despite this early influence, Zangwill chose to split the World Zionist Organization in 1905 over the "Uganda scheme," forming the rival

Language, Literature and the Arts

315

Jewish Territorial Organization to pursue this and other territorial options. For the next two decades he was to waste much time and energy on fruitless work for this organization. Just as Zangwill thought wrongly that his universal drama and generalized novels would speak to more people than his "ghetto" fiction, he miscalculated that a more "practical" land would be achievable in contrast to the impossible dream, as he saw it, of a Jewish Palestine. The great strength of Dreamer of the Ghetto is that, far from shirking the many contradictions in Zangwill's literature and politics, Udelson takes these fundamental ambivalences as the starting point for his study. It is, he argues, the unresolved conflict in Zangwill between the universal "melting pot" and the "ghetto" particularism that defines him. Conflict took many forms. On the one hand, he appeared the "epitome of the well-heeled Victorian gentleman," living in East Sussex near Rudyard Kipling, writing novels modeled on those of either Thomas Hardy or Jerome K. Jerome, and plays not unlike those of George Bernard Shaw. At the same time, he devoted much of his abundant energies to "saving" East European Jewry from persecution, and to propagating his version of Jewish nationalism. Where Udelson is especially convincing is in his detailed discussion of Zangwill's early writings in order to show how the "universal" and "particular" aspects of his personality were uneasily intertwined. Thus, one of the central characters in Children of the Ghetto, the daughter of a pious Jew, enjoys reading the New Testament and asks "why do I feel good when I read what Jesus said." Udelson shows that, by the time of his influential "English Judaism" (1889), Zangwill was attempting to combine what he called in this essay the "scientific morality of Moses and the emotional morality of Christ." This synthesis was taken to its apogee in Zangwill's important Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898) where, in a series of historical portraits of heterodox Jews—such as Benedict de Spinoza, Ferdinand Lassalle and Benjamin Disraeli—Zangwill (as Udelson rightly states) makes the "radical claim that the most fruitful contributors to world civilization are its heretics." Where this account of Zangwill is sometimes weak is in Udelson's inability to understand contextually the conflicting sides of Zangwill's life and work. He notes, for instance, that Zangwill intermarried at about the same time as he became a Zionist activist. This, as David Vital has shown, was perfectly consistent with Zangwill's extreme political Zionism, which aimed at creating a nonparticularist national homeland that would be "Jewish" only through the preponderance of its Jewish population. Far from treating Zangwill's Jewish nationalism with "whimsy," as Udelson claims, Jewish historians have come to see it as an important expression of the purest form of Herzlian Zionism. More importantly, while Udelson has a number of background chapters on the "sociopolitical" and "literary" settings of Zangwill's life and work, they are by far the weakest sections of the book. One of the reasons why Zangwill's Christological expression of his Jewishness caused little reaction in the Anglo-Jewish community (a mystery to Udelson) is that it was a commonplace of Anglo-Jewish self-representation that went all the way back to Grace Aguilar more than half a century before. Udelson correctly points to Disraeli as an important influence on Zangwill in this regard, but much more could be said about Matthew Arnold's all-important use of the term "Hebraism" as well as the

316

Book Reviews

work of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, to name but two unacknowledged influences on Zangwill's universalizing philosophy. Nonetheless, Dreamer of the Ghetto has, at long last, made it possible to begin to place Zangwill in both his British and Jewish cultural and political contexts. BRYAN CHEYETTE University of London

Religion, Thought and Education

Jerold S. Auerbach, Rabbis and Lawyers: The Journey from Torah to Constitution. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990. xix + 249 pp.

Lawyers were conspicuous leaders of American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century. "As late as the mid-1880's, the voice of American Judaism was the voice of its rabbis," Jerold Auerbach notes, but "between 1900 and 1915" Jewish legal authority was transferred "from rabbis to lawyers" (p. 93). The imperative to "Americanize" the millions of East European Jewish immigrants created distinctive tasks and opportunities for Jewish lawyers, who enjoyed "privileged access to the rhetoric and rituals of American patriotism" that sharply distinguished them from the rabbis who had already lost much authority as a result of the dynamics of Reform Judaism (p. 94). Louis Marshall and Louis D. Brandeis were the most powerful of the lawyers who assumed leadership during this period. Prominent among their successors were Felix Frankfurter, Julian Mack and Joseph M. Proskauer. Rabbis and Lawyers analyzes the role of these men and some of their rabbinical allies—especially Stephen S. Wise—in creating a distinctive American Jewish identity keyed by alleged similarities between traditional Jewish values and those of the U.S. constitution. These men favored affirmations of Jewishness that fit comfortably within the American polity, and they urged Jews to demonstrate their overriding loyalty to their country, the United States. The most sound contribution made by this book is the detailed and carefully documented story it tells of the struggle of two generations of American Jewish lawyers to formulate and to act upon a distinctive program for Jewish life in America. It is no surprise to learn that American Jewry's historic accommodation with American political culture was orchestrated by Marshall, Brandeis and Frankfurter; but Auerbach, by considering these leaders and their closest followers in their capacities as lawyers, sharpens our understanding of that accommodation. "Marshall always felt more comfortable with the Jewish question as a struggle 'to secure equal rights' than as an expression of national identity" Auerbach notes (p. 120), and it was in keeping with Marshall's vision that the "ultimate source of legal authority" for American Jews was "relocated" from the Torah to the Constitution (p. 122). Auerbach shows that his cast of characters was remarkably inventive in its constructions of what it means to be Jewish. He has no trouble demonstrating that the political culture of traditional Judaism, as available to both German and East European Jewish immigrants of the late nineteenth century, was strikingly different 317

318

Book Reviews

from the Enlightenment-defined, Protestant-flavored political culture of the United States. The inventions of Brandeis especially, but also of his successors down through our own day, consisted of the construction of continuities between these two traditions, enabling many to regard the United States as a "promised land" and the liberal-democratic politics of the American Progressives and New Dealers as a fulfillment of "Jewish values." But for Auerbach, this inventiveness is no cause for congratulation. On the contrary, Auerbach believes that American Jewish identity has been built upon betrayals of "normative Judaism," an entity that had been "shaped by historic attachments to land and law (to say nothing of God") (p. 205). Rabbis and Lawyers is a persistently conservative book that privileges the inventions that brought "normative Judaism" into existence amid historical contingencies of the remote past, and judges negatively the inventions of modern Jews amid the historical contingencies of their own epoch. Auerbach's Torah is all too static, and so, too, is his Constitution: between these virtually timeless sets of imperatives, he locates the suspicious artifice of the American Jewish leaders who, acting in time and place, tried to reconcile the two and to create something new. The process of becoming American "required the radical modification, if not complete renunciation, of the most distinctive and enduring commitments within Judaism, to the sacred law and holy land" (p. x). Although Auerbach tries to disavow "a fundamentalist reading of Jewish texts and traditions," he treats as authentic the "claims" that "Jewish history" itself "asserts," and treats as "fanciful" the "reconciliation with the American experience that American Jews have so often proclaimed" (xi). In Auerbach's analysis, alleged conflicts between "Americanism" and "Judaism" turn out to be genuine, enduring and—for the person of integrity— unavoidable, while alleged continuities turn out to be "imagined" (p. x). The work of the inventors, Auerbach would have us believe, amounts to a sellout. Brandeis and his ilk gave up real Jewishness in return for social acceptance by American gentiles. Sometimes Auerbach is petty in his prosecution of this line of argument. He mocks Proskauer's Anglophilia interests as "gourmet, club member, horseback rider, and world traveller" (p. 188), and he tweaks columnist Anthony Lewis for not carrying his ancestral name of Oshinsky (p. 21). In his least admirable moments, Auerbach is a scold, acting in the manner of a committee on un-Jewish activities. He seems to enjoy moments of social embarrassment as experienced by Jews who tried to get along with members of the Anglo-Protestant establishment. Auerbach finds it "revealing" of Frankfurter's ordeal of civility that he stood in his underwear to receive President Roosevelt's call notifying him of his nomination to the Supreme Court (p. 231). In an epilogue dealing with the period since 1948, Auerbach attacks Charles Silverman and others who have emphasized the security and accomplishments of Jews in the United States during recent decades. Here, and throughout Rabbis and Lawyers, Auerbach displays his concern that what is significantly Jewish about Jews has been lost as the barriers against full participation in American life have fallen. Auerbach is far from the first to worry about the negative effects of emancipation and its aftermath, but he does little to justify this concern in the contemporary context. This book is strongest when dealing with specific episodes in the careers of

Religion, Thought and Education

319

the individuals Auerbach has actually studied. It is weakest when Auerbach holds forth on the cosmic dilemmas of modern Jewry. On these dilemmas, there are many voices more eloquent than Auerbach's. Rabbis and Lawyers might have become a richer book had Auerbach given some attention to the ways in which America itself was changed by Brandeis, Frankfurter, Wise and the other people he studies. If the leaders of American Jewry before 1945 were too eager to forgive the United States when it failed to live up to its own Enlightenment ideals, they still managed to do a great deal to advance the cause of such ideals within American society. It is a mistake to measure the accomplishment of these leaders—as Auerbach comes close to doing—by the failure of the United States to respond appropriately to the Holocaust, and by the failure of what Auerbach calls "normative Judaism" to win uncritical acceptance among American Jews. Brandeis and his coworkers helped diminish the scope of racism and ethnocentrism in America. By reinforcing the most universalist elements of America's self-image and challenging Americans to act more decisively and consistently on behalf of the ideals proclaimed by the Constitution, the leaders of American Jewry contributed substantially to the climate in which "pluralism" and "multiculturalism" have been accepted in recent years. Auerbach needs to measure this contribution more carefully before he judges so severely the men and women who recognized the promise of America for Jews, and who had the courage to embrace the Constitution and redefine the role of the Torah. DAVID A. HOLLINGER University of California, Berkeley

Shimeon Brisman, A History and Guide to Judaic Encyclopedias and Lexicons. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1987. 502 pp.

Bibliography is a key element of any serious scholarly study of a topic, and in the field of Jewish studies this volume by Shimeon Brisman will be an indispensable guide. Until now, users of Jewish encyclopedias and lexicons had two major difficulties in finding information on a given topic: they were not always aware of what reference books were available, and it was not always clear to what extent a given work could be relied upon. With this guide in hand, these two issues no longer constitute a problem. The book is arranged topically under the broad headings of general works, Bible, Talmudic-Rabbinic, Judaism, the Holy Land-Israel-Zionism, Biographies, Modern Jewish Authors, Jews in the Arts and Sciences and Diaspora Communities. Each chapter has a general introduction followed by chronological lists and summaries according to relevant subheadings. Unfortunately, the table of contents does not indicate these subheadings. Thus, a reader who casually glances at the book does not realize that lurking beyond the innocent-looking heading of "Encyclopedias and Lexicons of Modern Jewish Authors" is a fine listing of dictionaries of pseudonyms and separate lists of works on Hebrew and Yiddish writers; or that the heading

320

Book Reviews

"Judaism" covers separate lists of general works and works on customs and folklore, concepts, and Kabbalah and Hasidism. In short this book is richer than a reading of its table of contents would indicate. The chapters are introduced by short essays that deal with the history of the genre and Brisman's evaluation of the various works. These essays are footnoted and often refer to critical reviews of the volumes discussed. In many respects, these introductions are a valuable contribution to modern Jewish intellectual history, or to be more precise, to the history of Jewish publishing in the modern period. Oddly enough, for all of the works in English on modern Jewish writers, almost nothing has been written on the personalities—not to mention the economics—of Jewish publishing. Brisman's introductions make fascinating reading; perhaps someone will pick up where he has left off and give the topic of publishing a full-scale treatment. A guide to encyclopedias and lexicons, like any other guide, cannot avoid evaluations of the works presented. Brisman does not evade this responsibility. However, the line between criticism and belittling is often a narrow one. One of the pleasant characteristics of the book is the way in which Brisman adheres to high standards while at the same time being understanding of individuals who produced major works without the benefit of foundation grants or backup teams. The History and Guide to Judaic Encyclopedias and Lexicons belongs on more places than the reference librarian's shelf. It is a book that almost every beginning graduate student in Judaica would find well worth reading, and I daresay that others as well would profit from it. Many more Jewish encyclopedias and lexicons exist than one might imagine—more than three hundred at my rough estimate. However, many have not been well distributed and are not well known. As a result, much tedious research work can often be avoided by using Brisman's work to track down some of these relevant printed aids. Serious courses in Jewish bibliography could thus incorporate the book to great advantage. At the same time, it should be remembered that Brisman limits himself to works that are explicitly encyclopedias and lexicons. For instance, when discussing the Tosafist commentaries on the Talmud, he mentions only lexicons of Tosafists— which are outdated—and not recent books on the topic, notably E. E. Urbach's Bd'alei hatosafot, which is fully indexed and thus provides fuller and more up-todate information on each individual Tosafist than do any of the lexicons. Alternative sources of information should always be kept in mind. Nonetheless, when used judiciously, this volume is an extremely valuable reference guide. The volume, it should be mentioned, is also very attractively laid out and printed. SHAUL STAMPFER The Hebrew University Shaye J. D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein (eds.), The State of Jewish Studies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. 186 pp. This volume is based on a conference of the same name hosted in May 1987 by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. At the time, the marriage of the topic and

Religion, Thought and Education

321

the venue must have seemed appropriate. The JTS had just celebrated its centennial. What nicer way of acknowledging that landmark than by taking stock of the academic study of Judaism, to whose current growth and enrichment the faculty and graduates of the institution have made—and still make—prominent contributions? The opportunity was not fully exploited. On the whole, this book is a disappointment. That reaction, I hasten to point out, is not the fault of the individual authors of the ten articles and six shorter "responses" of which it is principally composed. Suitably adorned with numerous bibliographical references, their contributions are uniformly erudite and adequately comprehensive. Nevertheless, the sum is far weaker than its component parts. Given the array of talent at their disposal, the editors could have been expected to have produced a far better collection. Their failure to do so must be attributed, prima facie, to their own neglect in not clarifying their purposes and conceptualizing their terms of reference with the necessary rigor. The heart of the problem lies in the volume's organization. It avoids constructing categories of discussion that might generate (or even permit) systematic analyses of innovative directions in Jewish studies. Instead, editorial policy has been to play safe. In true Wissenschaft style, separate chapters are devoted to biblical studies, ancient Judaism, medieval Judaism, modern Jewish history, modern Jewish literature, Jewish art, and modern Jewish thought—essentially, albeit not entirely, a nineteenth-century agenda. This arrangement is open to three criticisms. First, simply on its own (limited) terms, it is incomplete. Even disciplines considered central by earlier generations are here consigned to virtual oblivion. Jewish legal studies provides a striking instance. Occasional passages in the book (e.g., part of Steve Katz's "response") do note the quite remarkable changes that this field has witnessed in recent years—in the backgrounds of the scholars involved, their research techniques and their results. But contributors are denied the scope to develop such themes. Ivan Marcus, in what is altogether the most sensitive of the articles, consequently has to compress his own survey of current studies of Jewish jurisprudence into just fourteen lines, and even then to limit himself to the medieval period, as dictated by the brief of his paper. Second, there is the failure to encourage attempts to gauge the respective impacts of the modern Israeli and diaspora experiences on both the themes and concerns of contemporary Jewish scholarship in all its manifestations. This, surely, is a cardinal issue, not least because of its implications with regard to the existence of a true community of scholarship across the entire field. Do (or can) Israeli and diaspora students of Judaism frame their questions in similar terms and on mutually intelligible lines? Only portions of the exchange between David Roskies and Gershon Shaked on "Jewish Literary Scholarship after the Six-Day War" come to grips with the question. Otherwise, its treatment is —quite frankly—timid. We are given no account of recent academic approaches to the study of the state of Israel itself (whether as a sociological, political, military, religious or legal category) or to the emergence of the new Zionist ideologies of the post-Begin era. All we are allowed are brief—and necessarily incomplete—reflections on some, mostly older, Israeli historians (principally by Paula Hyman) and some recent diaspora reactions to classical Zionism (discussed by Neil Gutman in the terms framed by Arnold Eisen's 1986 work,

322

Book Reviews

Galut). The effect is lopsided. Potential readers would be better served were the book entitled: "The State of Jewish Studies as Seen (Largely) from the ITS." Even then, it could hardly escape its jaded hue. Herein lies my third—and most serious—concern: the manner in which the editors skirt the thematic and methodological transformations affecting the field that they purport to survey. True, their introduction does acknowledge that Jewish studies has now become "normalized," in the process drawing on the richness of other academic disciplines. But they have not gone on to invite systematic or coherent analyses of that phenomenon. Hence, their book really obscures some of its most vibrant manifestations. Admittedly, it may not be easy to recruit people to survey interdisciplinary topics with a broad brush. But one would have hoped for at least one "synoptic" paper on newer research techniques and subjects (perhaps instead of the article by Jaroslav Pelikan on "Judaism and the Humanities: Liberation from History," which—for all the author's esteem—seems curiously out of place). As it is, contributors are left to accommodate such themes as best they can within the outmoded straightjackets of their given mandates. The results are frustrating. Occasional references to feminist studies, computers, cultural anthropology, literary criticism and sociology—this last surely warrants a paper of its own—flit across the pages of several papers (again, Marcus' in particular). But the overall treatment is so disjointed that it cannot possibly stimulate, let alone satisfy, whatever curiosity might otherwise have been aroused. A good index might perhaps have rectified some of these faults. But the one supplied here is truly appalling. A ragbag of names and subjects, it does not constitute a useful guide to the thematic contents of the volume. Neither does it serve as a preliminary bibliographical aid. Presumably, parsimony dictated the selfproclaimed decision to index only authors named in the text, and not those cited in the endnotes. But this is bad economics, since the savings in cost are patently outweighed by the price of ridicule. Do any intrinsic criteria justify the fact that while the names of Edward Gibbon and Winston Churchill do grace the index, that of (for example) Lee Levine—a scholar himself closely associated with the JTS, and whose work is recognized in a footnote to Shaye Cohen's article on "The Modern Study of Ancient Judaism"—does not? Altogether, then, a disappointment; The State of Jewish Studies does justice to neither its subject, its contributors nor (not least) the institution by which it was sponsored. STUART A. COHEN Bar-Han University Robert G. Goldy, The Emergence of Jewish Theology in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 149 pp. Robert Goldy's very slim volume (ninety-five pages of text, thirty-four of notes) fills a useful niche in describing the flowering of Jewish theology in the United States in the period following the Second World War. Goldy is concerned with the "new

Religion, Thought and Education

323

Jewish theology" as represented in the work of Will Herberg, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Emil Fackenheim and Joseph Soloveitchik. He sees these figures as belonging to a distinct theological generation (the "third generation"), with a "mindset uniquely its own," that rejected religious liberalism in favor of a God-centered theology rooted in divine revelation. By the middle of the 1960s, Goldy argues, the new Jewish theology had become a "dominant intellectual force within American Judaism," with Herberg, Heschel, Fackenheim and Soloveitchik serving as "mentors of a new generation of Conservative, Reform and Orthodox theologians" (p. 5). In situating the new Jewish theology in its specific historical and intellectual context, Goldy stresses a number of factors. Most important was the Second World War, which made a shambles of liberal optimism and opened the way for an existentialist-based crisis theology ready to account for the reality of human evil. The war was also important in bringing to the United States Jewish and Christian "refugee scholars and theologians who represented new ways of thinking in religion" (p. 3). On the Christian side, this led to a postwar revival of Protestant theology, which in turn produced models of theological discourse oriented toward neo-Orthodoxy and existentialism. Similar models, this time specifically Jewish, emerged in the 1950s when the writings of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig began to appear in English translation. Finally, Jewish theological discourse was facilitated by the "establishment of prominent Jewish journals that served as important media for theological discussion and debate" (p. 4). Goldy is concerned not only with "how Jewish theology came about and why it took the direction it did," but also with "what major Jewish theologians regarded as the nature and function of their theological enterprise" (p. 6). In dealing with the latter area, he pays particular attention to the writings of Will Herberg, who played a key role in the emergence of the new Jewish theology, although he is virtually forgotten today. As an ex-Communist who found his way to Jewish faith through an exposure to the ideas of Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Herberg was sensitively attuned to the religious needs of the hour. His avowedly existentialist theological program called for a "postmodern return to traditional faith, one which superseded orthodoxy and liberalism, traditionalism and modernism, in a higher synthesis or 'third' way." While eschewing fundamentalism, Goldy observes, Herberg insisted that divine revelation and not secular reason be the "arbiter in matters of religion—the source from which theology derives its knowledge, the basis on which it establishes its propositions, and the criterion by which it measures the correctness of its assertions" (p. 61). While Goldy's discussion of the new Jewish theology is informative as far as it goes, it does not really go far enough. Absent from the volume is a systematic exposition and critique of the substantive theological positions developed by Herberg, Heschel, Fackenheim and Soloveitchik (the last three thinkers are disposed of in a single twenty-page chapter!) This is more than a missed opportunity; it is a fundamental impediment to Goldy's thesis that these figures constitute a theological generation. It does not suffice to speak in broad general terms about a shared "outlook, consciousness, or mode of thought." What is needed—and distinctly lacking in The Emergence of Jewish Theology in America—is a serious grappling with theological particulars.

324

Book Reviews

My own reading of the theological record is rather different than Goldy's. As I see it, the great divide in American Jewish theology in the period after the Second World War is not between liberalism and neo-Orthodoxy, but between denominational and postdenominational patterns of thought. Viewed from this perspective, Heschel and Soloveitchik, together with Mordecai Kaplan and a number of Reform thinkers, represent establishment positions. It was Fackenheim, joined by the likes of Jakob Petuchowski, Steven Schwarzschild, Eugene Borowitz, Seymour Siegel and Michael Wyschogrod, who broke out of the denominational mode and set Jewish theology on a new course. To this day, the truly interesting work in American Jewish theology is conducted outside the framework of denominationalism. DAVID SINGER American Jewish Committee

Robert Gordis, The Dynamics of Judaism: A Study in Jewish Law. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. x + 244 pp.

Over the past two decades, quite a number of general surveys on Jewish law have been written. These books have now become a genre of their own, with most of them attempting to demonstrate to the reader, among other things, the dynamism of Jewish law and the Jewish religion. Robert Gordis makes this a major theme of the volume under review; although the title speaks of dynamics and not dynamism, the book portrays both. What we really have before us is a detailed discussion of Judaism in its broader sense, not only as it is seen through the prism of Jewish law. Presented here is the mature thinking of a scholar and religious leader who has been one of Conservative Judaism's foremost spokesmen for more than sixty years. Gordis integrates in this volume much of what he has written over the past four decades, along with personal insights and experiences that have spanned most of this century. Echoes of the outstanding preacher from the pulpit almost always accompany the reader. The book is a joy to read. What is most unusual about this volume, as compared with other works on Jewish law, is the prominent place given to the Bible as a source of Jewish law. In most works of this kind, it is the Talmud and post-talmudic literature that is given prominence—and rightly so—with the Bible playing a secondary role. However, Gordis' constant integration of the biblical with the postbiblical sources throws new light on the importance of the Bible itself in the development and understanding of Jewish law and Judaism. This may sound obvious to some, but to anyone familiar with the traditional way of thinking about Jewish law and Judaism, Gordis' approach is refreshing and eye-opening. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that, besides being a master of the law, Gordis is also a biblical scholar who has published important works in the field of biblical commentary and Bible studies. In spite of Gordis' Conservative philosophy, which he does not attempt to con-

Religion, Thought and Education

325

ceal, much of what he has to say in this volume can be accepted without compunctions by anyone who is an open-minded Orthodox Jew. Not everything, of course, but quite a lot. This alone is a major achievement. Gordis' philosophy, as it emerges in this volume, can be summarized as follows: The historical experience of the Jewish people has been unique. The secret of this phenomenon lies in its religious tradition, in which halakhah is the key element. Gordis perceives a perpetual ideal of justice and mercy guiding the Jewish people throughout the ages that is based, according to the author, on three events of biblical times: the Egyptian experience of bondage and liberation; the period of wandering in the wilderness following the Exodus; and the exposure to the teachings of the Prophets. Dispersed throughout the volume are numerous insights, small nuggets of gold that more fully develop the general theme of the book. Here are some of these "minor profits:" "The Prophets had enunciated the principles of righteousness; the Rabbis sought to embody them in life through the law" (p. 4). "However unpalatable it may be to confess it in a secular age, it is clear that the Jewish religion, beyond all its other functions, is the guarantor of the Jewish future . . . the major threat now is the nonviolent, ongoing process of assimilation in all its forms and degrees" (p. 7). "The Halakhah is the prose of Judaism, the Aggadah its poetry" (p. 68). "To understand the Halakhah it is essential not to restrict ourselves to limited sections of time and space but to study its entire three-thousand year history. Since our concern is not antiquarian but contemporary, we should not be content with a scholarly exploration of the past but should utilize all the insights achieved, in order to illumine current issues that cry out for solution" (p. 128). "That women's issues require so much attention is not at all astonishing, for our century is witnessing the last great movement of liberation affecting more than half the human race" (p. 129). And finally, Revolutions are never neat and rarely bloodless. Even when they are successful they never completely cure the ills they come to remedy, and they frequently create new problems. Future historians may well decide that the greatest revolution of modern times was not the disappearance of the old colonial empires, or the Communist challenge to the democratic order, or the Nazi onslaught on civilization, or even the advent of the technological age, but the radical transformation in the status of women (p. 145).

While granting mysticism and asceticism its place in Judaism, the author rightly criticizes the vogue of bestowing upon mysticism such an important role in the history of Judaism. This current practice is undoubtedly due to the personality and scholarship of Gershom Scholem, but objective observers should not go overboard, as did the editors of the Encyclopedia Judaica when they allocated three columns to Pharisaism, six to Jewish philosophy, twenty-eight to the Talmud, one hundred to the Bible—and 165 to the Kabbalah (pp. 31-35). In his discussion of the primacy of ethics in Judaism, Gordis points out a fact that has generally been overlooked. In the central liturgy of Yom Kippur (the 'AL het that is repeated eight times during the day), forty offenses are cited—and these are all ethical sins, not even one being a ritual transgression (p. 67).

326

Book Reviews

The author scathingly discredits what he calls a new doctrine of infallibility— da'at torah ("the true meaning of the Torah")—which has become prevalent in right-wing Orthodoxy and which, he argues forcibly, is contrary to traditional halakhic thinking (pp. 82-83). He also discusses what he calls the decline of the creative impulse in modern halakhic circles, another phenomenon that goes against the grain of historical halakhic development (p. 92). A forceful, honest, moralitybased discussion of the 'agunah, or "chained wife" question is one of the high points of this volume (pp. 156-163), as is his two full chapters on women's status and role in Judaism (Chapters 9 and 10). No volume, not even a book such as this, is without some faults. I admit that what I see as weakness may be due to my own subjectivity, but I am sure that at least some of my criticisms will also answer to objective criteria. As noted, one of the most positive aspects of this volume is its extended reference to the Bible. However, it sometimes seems that the author goes overboard in his enthusiasm for the biblical connection. I cannot really agree with his statement that "the mounting concern regarding war and peace, nuclear weapons and total annihilation, as well as the issue of nationalism and its relationship to the international community, finds its basis in the biblical text and its varied interpretations" (p. 14). Gordis doesn't stop here but goes on to say that one can learn something from Scripture concerning such a vast array of topics as women's rights and obligations, the future of the family, the relations of the sexes, the mutual attitude of parents and children, social justice and racial equality. And this is not a full list (ibid.). In his chapter on the basic traits of the Jewish tradition, Gordis makes a general statement that "the thinker has both the right and the duty to evaluate the various elements in the tradition and to determine which are worth preserving and cultivating and which are best minimized or set aside" (p. 15). There should have been a caveat here to indicate that this statement is based on the Conservative outlook and that it is not a general traditional view. Again, when discussing minhag, or custom within the halakhic framework, he refers to mixed seating in some synagogues as "the American custom," thus granting it the halakhic-legal power of a recognized custom within the halakhic process (p. 119). Orthodox readers would hardly agree. The most blatant example of Gordis' equating normative halakhic Judaism with Conservative practice is in his chapter on women's role in religious life (Chapter 11). I could go on pointing out ideas or statements here and there that are, in my view, mistaken. But this would be nitpicking. All in all, the volume under review is an admirable work, written with elegance and verve, that combines scholarship, homiletics and the honest outpouring of the author's heart with both a true love for traditional Judaism and some apprehension about its future. SHMUEL SHILO The Hebrew University

Religion, Thought and Education

327

Mendel Piekarz, Hasidut polin bein shetei hamilhamot ubegezeirot 5700-5705 ("Ha shoa") (Ideological Trends ofHasidism in Poland During the Interwar Period and the Holocaust). Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1990. 473 pp.

As in his previous works Studies in Bratslav Hasidism (1972) and The Beginning of Hasidism (1978), Mendel Piekarz's study of the last three generations of Polish Hasidism is characterized by new, often striking, interpretations and rich source material, but is always tempered by an awareness of the limitations of the sources at his disposal. The present work, which deals with the rather neglected subject of Hasidic thought in recent times, covers a wide variety of themes: the rejection of religious "radicalism" and the retreat to the heteronomous bases of religion in the last generations of Polish Hasidism; trust in the Sages and absolute submission to da'at torah as a bulwark against all innovations; the trend toward separation from the nations of the world and closing oneself off from outside influences; new interpretations and emphases in the concept of the Chosen People; the idea of the Tzaddik in a troubled era; Hasidic views of galut, the Land of Israel and antisemitism in the interwar period; and a representative sample of contemporary Hasidic reactions to the Nazi Holocaust. A partial listing of sources and an index round out the volume. The basic thesis of Hasidut polin is that early Hasidism held out the radical ideal of an ever-expanding spiritual-experiential realm that eventually extended to all aspects of the life of the individual, even such ostensibly mundane activities as business, eating and drinking, or sexual relations. As a reaction to spiritual and historical crises of Polish Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Polish Hasidism moved away from the original Hasidic view and adopted a conservative posture that emphasized the heteronomous aspects of religious faith and submission to rabbinic authority. In this way, the leaders of Hasidism attempted to halt the inroads made by secularism even within the Hasidic camp. This conservative trend deepened and accelerated in the interwar period, as growing antisemitism and the apparent success of secular Zionism demanded some explanation by the representatives of a Hasidic and rabbinic elite that claimed for itself practically infallible insight. Much of the ideological framework built up in the last three generations of Polish Hasidism would face the ultimate test in the unprecedented horrors of the Nazi Holocaust; in the opinion of the author, it was found wanting. Limitations of space allow us only a few comments on this impressive work of scholarship, which deserves a wide readership. First, we should not lose sight of the pioneering nature of Piekarz's book, especially the author's use of dozens of hitherto largely unexplored books, pamphlets and collected correspondence of rebbes. Beyond the sheer volume of material, the researcher on later Hasidism must struggle with (mostly sermonic) Hasidic material that is characterized by quotation, paraphrase of earlier sources and stereotyped language, attempting to find influences, subtle changes and variations in nuance in a system of thought where change is incremental and often hardly noticeable. Piekarz is to be commended for taking on this daunting task in the first place.

328

Book Reviews

While I agree with Piekarz that any understanding of interwar Polish Hasidism must perforce rest on an in-depth analysis of the views of major nineteenth-century figures, the book suffers from a distinct imbalance, since the subject promised by its title encompasses only about half of the work. Moreover, the author occasionally lapses into overly emotional, nostalgic or polemical language that detracts from the scholarly task at hand (see, for example, pp. 19, 181, 231 and 243). A more fundamental criticism relates to Piekarz's major thesis. On the one hand, I question his unqualified portrayal of early Hasidism as radical, especially in the light of Ze'ev Gries's recent work, which points to conservative elements even in the first generations of the movement. The author's discussion of developments of major concepts in Hasidic thought also raises many questions. In the absence of direct quotations or source citations, any attempt to prove intellectual dependence remains speculative, no matter how clear such dependence seems with the benefit of hindsight—for example, Piekarz's attempt to trace the roots of the doctrine of da'at torah (which I find not altogether convincing). Beyond this, laments about the decline of religious faith in comparison with earlier generations have characterized Jewish literature for centuries, and certain expressions may be no more than a stereotyped term employed by sermonizers with no particular contemporary significance. While Piekarz himself recognizes this danger in connection with such terms as "birthpangs of the Messiah" (p. 261), one wonders whether his sources use other terms in a similar manner. The section on the Holocaust is simultaneously impressive and disappointing. It opens with a intriguing two-part methodological excursus on the use of the term Shoah and on the use of testimony literature as a historical source. Piekarz demonstrates how, in successive editions of their memoirs, both religious and secular writers systematically filtered out all sorts of negative observations about Jewish behavior, and how fictional material eventually became assimilated into historical works as actual historical testimony. This chapter should become required reading in any course on the Holocaust period. The strength of this methodological introduction, however, renders the discussion of Polish Hasidism during the Holocaust all the more disappointing. The author seems all too interested in citing examples of disreputable behavior by religious Jews or in assigning blame to Hasidic leaders who, in his opinion, lulled their flocks with messages of consolation while they themselves fled abroad to safety. He fails to provide a satisfactory overview of the era, and in contrast to earlier sections of the book, the chapters on the Holocaust seem more like fragments rather than a full-blown discussion of the topic. Much of the ground covered by Piekarz in these chapters has already been discussed in depth by Pesach Schindler1 and Nathan (Nehemiah) Polen2 in their doctoral dissertations, neither of which is mentioned here. On the basis of Piekarz's analysis, one is hard put to understand the survival into the post-Holocaust period of most of the ideological framework that he himself outlines. The after-the-fact "correction" of uncongenial events cannot suffice as an explanation for the continued existence of this worldview; a much more subtle philosophical and sociological process would seem to be at work.

Religion, Thought and Education

329

These criticisms aside, Hasidut polin is stimulating, thought-provoking, sometimes even enraging, but always well worth reading. GERSHON C. BACON Bar-IIan University

Notes 1. Peter (Pesach) Schindler, Responses of Hasidic Leaders and Hasidism During the Holocaust in Europe, 1939-1945, and a Correlation between Such Responses and Selected Concepts in Hasidic Thought (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1972; recently published under the title Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust in the Light of Hasidic Thought [Hoboken: 1990]). 2. Nathan Polen, Esh Kodesh: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymos Shapiro in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1939-1943 (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1983).

Jonathan Sacks, Arguments for the Sake of Heaven: Emerging Trends in Traditional Judaism. North vale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 1991. 274 pp.

Arguments for the Sake of Heaven demonstrates that Jonathan Sacks—the new Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth—is a learned, sophisticated, articulate and sensitive exponent of Orthodox Judaism. His main argument is that world Jewry has reached a watershed. The corrosive effects of modernity that estranged the majority of Jews from classical rabbinic teachings have by now, he feels, lost their strength. This raises the possibility of Jewish reconciliation and renewal under the banner of traditional Judaism. Crucial to Sack's position is the view that premodern Judaism approached differences of opinion, even over fundamental issues of law and faith, as "arguments for the sake of heaven"—hence the title of the book. While debate and dispute may have been heated and even acrimonious, there was an underlying assumption that the very process of arguing over what God's word meant for a particular society at a particular time was itself a meritorious act. Dissent generally did not lead to mutual delegitimization, political power plays or schism. And the broad latitude given to the expression of opinion ensured that Judaism, exposed constantly to new currents of thought, generated from within itself the legal and philosophical tools to address them. The onset of modernity constituted a sharp break with the Jewish past. The realistic possibility of entering the mainstream of European society, combined with the persistence of antisemitism, created a crisis of identity for many Jews whose fathers had taken Judaism as an uncomplicated fact of life. New Jewish ideologies developed out of this confrontation, the two most successful of which were Reform Judaism and secular Zionism. Sacks skillfully delineates the three main traditionalist responses to the challenge of modernity and traces their fortunes down to the present. The two most open to

330

Book Reviews

modern currents, he finds, have fallen on hard times, while the third, which defied those currents, is flourishing. The school of thought associated with Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) enthusiastically accepted modern culture while maintaining strict allegiance to Jewish law. "One could take part in the modern world without religious compromise," notes Sacks, but he shrewdly adds that the Hirschian synthesis created a "divided selfhood," a "lack of integration between the Jew as Jew and as secular citizen [that] has haunted modern Orthodoxy to the present day." A second position, the religious Zionism of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook (1865-1935), sought, in contrast, to reintegrate the life of the religious Jew by sanctifying the secular, something Kook felt could be accomplished only in a revived Jewish state. Indeed, there is today a Jewish state where all aspects of life are "Jewish." Yet the secular dimension of life in Israel has not been, and shows no signs of becoming, sanctified. Only what Sacks calls "the strategy of resistance" has succeeded in insulating Judaism from modern forces—but at a high price. Developed by hasidic leaders and by Rabbi Moses Sofer (1762-1839) in Hungary, this approach, writes Sacks, is nothing less that "a conscious, deliberate, and voluntary withdrawal from secular society," what is called today haredi Orthodoxy, which is attracting the admiration, and in some cases the allegiance, of children of Hirschians, religious Zionists, and even non-Orthodox Jews. Sacks is deeply ambivalent about the triumph of the "resistance" model. On the one hand, he acknowledges that its assessment of modernity was accurate: secular modes of thought are not neutral as regards religion, but downright subversive. To survive, traditional Judaism had to reject out of hand many significant aspects of the modern worldview. Yet the "resisters"" success created a new problem. By writing off the rest of the Jewish community in order to preserve the tradition, they choked off "argument for the sake of heaven." Alternative opinions were no longer (as in premodern times) legitimate options to be discussed and debated, but anathema whose authors should be shunned. The strain of postmodern Orthodoxy that prospered most, then, needs to talk only to itself: hence the notion that halakhah, Jewish law, is monolithic, admitting of no nuance or ambiguity. Sacks believes that this situation may be changing for the better. He sees many signs that non-Orthodox Jews—secularists, Reformers, and others—are reclaiming their Jewish identity and may be willing once again to find their places within the spectrum of traditional Jewish life. But this can happen only if the Orthodox recognize the new situation, relax their siege mentality, and show a willingness to discuss—"for the sake of heaven"—what Judaism has to say about contemporary issues that have so far been swept under the halakhic rug, such as women's rights, social justice, war and peace, the environment, and attitudes toward non-Jews. This "renewal of Torah in the life of Jews," will bring with it "the renewal of the Jewish people." Arguments for the Sake of Heaven is so stimulating and sophisticated, and so far superior to what passes for "Orthodox" scholarship today, that one hesitates to criticize. Yet Sacks may be unrealistically optimistic about contemporary Jewish life. Are non-Orthodox Jews today ready to live within halakhic bounds, even of the

Religion, Thought and Education

331

least rigid kind? True enough, the memory of the Holocaust, the reality of the state of Israel, and the new respectability of ethnic identity have led many Jews toward a revived Jewish identification; and it is also the case that religious ritual is enjoying something of a revival in non-Orthodox circles. Yet at the same time, non-Orthodox movements are moving further away from tradition in the areas of determination of Jewishness in cases of mixed marriage, gender equality and gay rights. The late Jakob Petuchowski—who spent decades teaching Reform rabbinical students— charged that Reform Judaism was nothing but "a 'Jewish' form of institutionalized secularism," and that the other non-Orthodox groups were not far behind. And is Orthodoxy prepared to accept once again an "argument for the sake of heaven" model of halakhic discourse? On the contrary, the mechanistic model of Jewish law that posits one true answer—usually the most stringent—for any halakhic problem continues to gain ground. Jonathan Sacks has written a brilliant book. One can only hope he is not too disappointed if it changes nothing. LAWRENCE GROSSMAN The American Jewish Committee

Eliezer Schweid, Toladot hehagut hayehudit bameah haesrim (A History of Jewish Thought in the Twentieth Century). Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1990. 387 pp.

Although this work is actually the second part of the author's earlier A History of Jewish Thought in Modern Times (1977), it can profitably be read as an independent work. The first book dealt with the development of Jewish thought from the Middle Ages up to the beginning of the modern Zionist movement. In the present work, the author (a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University) focuses on the main directions of Jewish thought in the first half of the twentieth, century. He does not include writings on the establishment of the state of Israel and the Holocaust, presumably because Jewish thinkers have not yet been able to deal significantly with these extraordinary events. Schweid makes clear the sense in which the Jews continued to experience the processes of modernization begun earlier, while confronting new events that were unprecedented and far-reaching in their consequences in the twentieth century. If the crisis of the 1880s was occasioned by waves of pogroms in Eastern Europe, the rise of racial antisemitism in Western Europe, mass immigration and the collapse of the traditional Jewish way of life, then the first decades of the twentieth century were marked by events no less traumatic: the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the spread of Communism, the rise of Fascism in Spain, Germany and Italy, the Second World War. These events brought about such profound changes that intellectual landmarks of the earlier generation were swept away and the need arose for a thorough reexamination of values and assumptions. If in the nineteenth century most Jews were still affiliated with the traditional structure of the Jewish kehilah, in the twentieth we find Jews increasingly organized on the basis of ideological parties

332

Book Reviews

and organizations based on national, religious and class interests. Jews, in the main, were now integrated to some extent in the larger non-Jewish society, and the Jewish kehilah was now perceived as an institution offering a particular Jewish service. Even more significant than the collapse of the old kehilah structure was the weakening of the family, long considered the main transmitter of Jewish tradition. In the United States, Jews realized, for the first time in their history, that, if they wished they could totally disappear as Jews (without converting to another religion). Jewish identity had become a purely voluntary matter. Schweid captures the difference between the two situations for Jewish thought in his comparison between Nahman Krochmal and Ahad Ha'am. The former tried to demonstrate that the perceived changes in his time were in reality developments that posed no threat to basic Jewish values; there was continuity, he argued, and the core values remained. Ahad Ha'am, however, spoke of the "parting of the ways," of the stark alternatives that confronted the Jewish people: survival or destruction. Fundamental existential questions requiring practical decisions faced the Jewish people at the beginning of the twentieth-century—whether to reject the dispersion and return to the motherland or to remain in the lands of the diaspora; the choice between different conceptions of Jewish identity, national and religious; the issue of different forms of social organization; the question of opposing concepts of Jewish culture, its languages, methods of study and transmission; and the pivotal issue of the role of religious faith in contemporary Jewish experience. Instead of presenting an analysis of the major Jewish thinkers in chronological order, Schweid organizes his history on the basis of the aforementioned fundamental issues, bringing to bear the special approaches of different thinkers in each of these areas. Here Schweid is at his analytic and comparative best, peppering his presentation with unsuspected similarities, subtle distinctions and illuminating generalizations. As an Israeli-educated philosopher, Schweid gives ample attention to the thought of the nationalist writers. With the insight born of a thorough knowledge of their work, he traces the contributions of such thinkers as Ahad Ha'am, Micah Berdyczewski, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Natan Birnbaum, Yosef Hayim Brenner, Y. L. Gordon, Theodor Herzl, Moses Hess, Moses Leib Lilienblum, Nahum Syrkin, Shaul Tschernichowsky, Yehezkel Kaufmann, Peretz Smolenskin and Berl Katzenelson. In dealing with "professional" philosophers such as Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Schweid properly concentrates on their role as Jewish thinkers. Most gratifying is the attention Schweid gives to the religious aspect of the thought of the period. He states that the key to an understanding of the different positions taken on the main issues by these different thinkers is their personal attitude toward religious faith. In previous generations, kefirah ("disbelief" or "denial") was usually the view one attributed to one's religious rival. Thus, early Reform rejected tradition in the name of a new "religious truth." However, in the twentieth century, Jews forsook their ancestral faith in the name of a "truth" that rejected all religion on the grounds that—even when not repressive—religion, with its supernaturalism, was simply irrelevant to questions of truth. But a profounder kefirah, according to Schweid, is to be found in the works of Bialik, Berdyczewski and Brenner, who follow Niet/sche in affirming that the place

Religion, Thought and Education

333

once occupied by God in man's heart will always remain empty, filling him with despair. For intellectual Jews in the past, philosophy represented competition with, and frequently a substitute for, religion. In the twentieth century, however, philosophy was of little help to Jewish thinkers. Systematic philosophy on the order of Kant and Hegel had gone out of style. The success of science could no longer be adduced as supporting the truth of any particular philosophy. The competence of human reason in metaphysics and historical speculation was in serious question. Thus, for Jews who had given up their religion there was no longer the alternative of philosophy to anchor values, justify morality or motivate people toward the good. The goal of Jewish thinkers in the nineteenth century was to reconcile the theoretical aspects of Judaism with the universal, objective truths of humanism. They assumed that the basic values of Jewish morality were identical with the regnant philosophic outlook. Coming from traditional Jewish backgrounds, they perceived such a reinterpretation both as bringing Judaism to its highest development and as true emancipation. Thinkers such as Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig did their major work in the field of general philosophy. Therefore the very focusing of their philosophic interest, however belatedly, upon Jewish sources was in itself an effort of self-discovery. Existentialist philosophy, which had become popular, suited the Jewish thinker who wished to explore his Judaism. For existentialism accepted the individual with all of his particularity and subjectivity as the starting point for an inquiry into the human condition. In effect, doing this sort of philosophy was a process of teshuvah, of return. Schweid sees teshuvah as the main theme characterizing even those religious thinkers who never left Judaism, such as Y. Y. Reines, Avraham Yitzhak Kook, Abraham Joshua Heschel, H. Zeitlin and Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Through insightful empathy, these religious thinkers were able to penetrate the intellectual and psychological problematics of those alienated from their God and their people. Jewish thinkers today are wrestling with the questions raised by the Holocaust and the state of Israel. Schweid may be right that the key to many of our questions may lie in a resolution of the fundamental issues confronted by Jewish thinkers at the beginning of the century as they stood at their "parting of the ways." By its very proximity, the period covered by this book—the first half of the twentieth century—distorts perspective and renders historical judgment difficult. Nevertheless, Eliezer Schweid's contribution is easily one of the most balanced, incisive and illuminating of its kind. SHUBERT SPERO Bar-IIan University Kenneth Seeskind, Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. 246 pp. Jewish academic studies tend to be defined in an autonomous way relative to the larger intellectual and disciplinary areas of instruction. There are historical reasons

334

Book Reviews

as well as theoretical concerns why this should be the case. For example, periodization in the history of the Jews is different from that provided by traditional European historiography. Similarly, Jewish theology and biblical studies have agendas that are disparate from the nearly all-pervasive implicit Christian bias in the study of religion. Nonetheless, there is a loss involved in the isolation and autonomy that Jewish studies seems to require. Jewish life and culture do not take place in an isolated, hermetically sealed vacuum. As Jacob Neusner observed some years ago, theoretically there is no such thing as Jewish history. Rather we have a history of Jews in a variety of contexts. On some level, the same can be said for Jewish philosophy. Jewish philosophy has not been practiced in isolation. The work of Maimonides, for example, shares the defects and strengths of medieval philosophy in general. With these observations in mind, Kenneth Seeskind's title, Jewish Philosophy in the Secular Age, seems unusually promising. It appears to intimate that the author is prepared to cross the great divide between Jewish and non-Jewish philosophical understanding and speculation in order to present an exposition of Jewish thinking in light of modernity and postmodernity. Seeskind offers an interesting and useful delineation of what Jewish philosophy encompasses. Jewish philosophy is practical rather than metaphysical. Significantly, Seeskind argues that Jewish philosophy acknowledges that all ideas have a past. Further, Jewish philosophical thinking is transcendent. What Seeskind means by this is that Jewish philosophy is messianic and therefore committed to critique. Finally, Jewish philosophy is opposed to the incarnation of the Ideal. This latter point represents traditional Jewish responses to the Christian doctrine of Incarnation. However, questions must be raised about Seeskind's antiembodiment orientation. If Jewish philosophy is practical, a "doing" in the world, how can it avoid embodiment in human action? If Jewish philosophy is messianic, how can it eschew embodiment and simultaneously sanctify the world in the image of God? Jewish Philosophy and the Secular Age is a misleading title. Seeskind does not make clear what he means by secular or when the secular age begins. This is important because his work moves from Maimonides to Emil Fackenheim, with pauses to explore the writings of Kant and Kierkegaard. With such a scope, a clearer conceptualization is necessary. Seeskind is ambivalent about his definition of general philosophy and its appropriate mode of discourse. He begins with the notion that the philosophical canon of truth unites the universal and the eternal. Seeskind implicitly recognizes that his approach hardly addresses the issues faced by Jewish and other thinkers about the perplexity of modern consciousness and the centrality of ambiguity in the conundrum of modern existence. He suspends his traditionalist definition in favor of a modified version of R. Rorty's conception of philosophy as general intellectual work. This concept of intellectual activity embraces, in addition to epistemology, social, ethical and political issues. Throughout most of the book, Seeskind defines theology as being philosophical rather than biblical. He begins his discussion with a defense of Maimonides against the charge of Aristotelianism, justifying Maimonides in terms of his use of a negative theology. Implicitly, Seeskind acknowledges how perplexing Maimonides is. His argument is based on the opening sections of The Guide to the Perplexed. He

Religion, Thought and Education

335

admits that if one places the emphasis on the concluding sections of The Guide to the Perplexed, as Shlomo Pines does, then Maimonides appears to argue for a contemplative intellectualism and theory. Such a conclusion contradicts Seeskind's definition of Jewish philosophy. More seriously, what Seeskind ignores about Maimonides' framework is his acceptance of Aristotelian canons of knowledge. This is important because Seeskind wants to link Maimonides to Kant. The relationship is untenable because much of The Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to the demolition of Greek canons of knowledge. Seeskind's reading of Kant is thoughtful and intelligent. He recognizes the way in which purposeful action (praxis) has primacy in the Kantian scheme, and that Kantian theology is a branch of ethics rather than cosmology or physics. Seeskind claims that Kant's philosophy is thoroughly Jewish because Kant denies the possibility of knowledge of God. To bolster his conception of Kant's work, he argues that Kant, like Jewish thinkers, treats the content of revelation from the perspective of practical reason. Finally, Seeskind correctly points out that Kant does not present a moral philosophy but rather the canons or grounds for morality and human action. Seeskind judges philosophers according to the canon set by Maimonides, Kant, Hermann Cohen and Fackenheim. He is suspicious of existentialism, distrusts Buber and condemns Kierkegaard. Seeskind's treatment of Kierkegaard is instructive and paradigmatic of his arguments. He reads Kierkegaard through biblical exegesis, whereas in the rest of the book he uses philosophical reason. His polemic against Kierkegaard's question about the suspension of the ethical is revealing because it confuses Kierkegaard and Hegel. Seeskind's misconstruction of Kierkegaard's position is directly related to the underlying theme of the book. The suspension of the ethical in Kierkegaard's rhetoric is identified with the "universal" defined by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right. However, Kierkegaard defines morality as the religious expressed within the universal. The universal social sphere is the arena in which religious ethics are brought into play. As such, Kierkegaard does not see the universal as the home of morality. However, by his own reckoning, Seeskind stands for a universalist position. What is important is that his universal is not the same as Kierkegaard's. Seeskind advocates Jewish involvement with philosophical issues. He fears that, because philosophy was originally foreign to Judaism, thinkers will argue that it remains foreign to Jewish thinking. It is for this reason, if no other, that he identifies Kant with a Jewish worldview. For Seeskind, philosophy is essential for Jewish survival. However, he is not blind to the risks that philosophy poses to traditional Judaism. The tension between philosophical and biblical thinking is centered around the reality that philosophical interpretation inevitably raises questions and doubts. Seeskind can avoid his dilemma if he takes seriously his adherence to Rorty's definition of philosophy. As general intellectual work, philosophy is not privileged. Indeed, in a postmodernist framework, all claims of knowledge are understood as relational and partial interpretations of a posited totality. Totality and truth so understood are grounded implicitly in acts of faith. In this light, philosophy poses no threat to Jewish thinking. Rather the Hebrew Bible provides the model for a rela-

336

Book Reviews

tional epistemology, interpretation and conception of history relevant to a secular, postmodern consciousness. BERNARD ZELECHOW York University

Efraim Shmueli, Seven Jewish Cultures: A Reinterpretation of Jewish History and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. xvii + 293 pp.

A remarkable polymath, Efraim Shmueli produced books and studies on a wide variety of periods and fields. Nonetheless, he was especially concerned with his own people, the Jews. According to his translator and daughter, Gila Shmueli, the present volume, "which he considered his most important contribution to the understanding of Judaism, both methodologically and philosophically," was also "the work he valued most." This is the English translation of a work that originally appeared in Hebrew in 1980, toward the end of Shmueli's life. It is clearly a project undertaken out of a profound desire to see the work of a gifted father brought to a larger reading audience. Besides providing a translation of her father's magnum opus, Gila Shmueli has given the English-reading public a fascinating sketch of her father that is in fact essential to an understanding of Seven Jewish Cultures. According to her reconstruction, Efraim Shmueli came from a poor Hasidic family in Lodz; studied, with his father's blessings, in a Zionist-oriented Hebrew gymnasium (a remarkable act on the part of a pious East European Hasid); enrolled for two years at the Rabbinical Seminary in Breslau; attended university lectures in Frankfurt; completed his doctoral dissertation at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Breslau; left Germany for Palestine in 1933; spent thirteen years teaching in the United States at the Cleveland College of Jewish Studies and Cleveland State University; and closed out his life in Israel, lecturing at Haifa University until his death in 1988. In a real sense, Efraim Shmueli lived most of the seven Jewish cultures that he depicts and was in a unique position to describe and analyze these alternative Jewish cultural styles as both insider and outsider. The central thesis of the book is reflected in its title. Shmueli distinguishes "in the history of the Jewish people seven units of acts and events, each charged with its own weight of meanings and symbols, and each a recognizable culture unto itself, unique in its characteristics." For Shmueli, these seven cultures are: (1) biblical; (2) talmudic; (3) poetic-philosophic; (4) mystical, with its later offshoot, the Hasidic movement; (5) rabbinic (meaning the early-modern rabbinic culture); (6) the culture of the Emancipation; (7) the national-Israeli culture. He further proposes a series of ten major points upon which these seven cultures disagreed profoundly. These include human happiness, free will, sin, death, Sinaitic revelation and redemption (for the full listing, see p. 15). Seven Jewish Cultures is not intended as a systematic examination of the seven cultures along the grid provided by the ten major fundamental issues. Indeed,

Religion, Thought and Education

337

nowhere in the book are the seven major cultures spelled out in any detail or with rigorous precision; after being listed on p. 12, they are only briefly adumbrated over the next two pages, whereupon the author proceeds to identify the ten sets of disagreements. These issues are also not presented systematically. In the second and third chapters Shmueli discusses some significant differences in the style of biblical exegesis, providing illuminating observations but no rigorous or systematic clarification of the ways in which each of the seven Jewish cultures has approached the biblical record of revelation. The fourth chapter is devoted to a discussion of the commandments, again with interesting insights but without systematic elaboration. In Chapter 5, Shmueli abandons entirely the effort, offering instead an interesting discussion of three crucial tensions in Jewish history: that between nationalism and universalism; between the Jewish individual and the collectivity; and among the diverse elements constituting a culture. The closing chapters are devoted to changing patterns of Jewish historical consciousness and knowledge. The end result is a provocative and overarching thesis that lacks adequate elaboration, though along the way is a plethora of interesting and illuminating insights on the widest variety of topics. The combination of an embracing system and the failure to systematize it adequately is paralleled by the conjunction of remarkable erudition and pervasive anachronism. While readers must be constantly impressed with the author's encyclopedic knowledge, they must also experience recurrently a step back in time to the early twentieth century or even the century preceding. Note, for example, the opening sentences of Chapter 1: It is with awe and astonishment that we contemplate the wonder of Israel's unbroken existence of three millennia. Rarely did Israel know the taste of political liberty; most often it suffered oppression, persecution, and catastrophes, the likes of which no nation has ever endured. And yet, it has survived in extraordinary dynamism and creativity.

These opening lines could easily have been penned by Heinrich Graetz or Simon Dubnow. Indeed, upon reflection, there is something quaintly anachronistic about the fundamental thesis of Seven Jewish Cultures. So many of the giants of the first stage of modern Jewish historiography—Graetz and Dubnow among others—were beset with a desire to identify the major periods and phases of the Jewish past. It is noteworthy that Salo W. Baron, whom Shmueli defends against the famous strictures of Yitzhak Baer, had a rather different approach. While any effort to study the Jewish past requires some sort of periodization, Baron was far less obsessed with the need for careful delineation of specific historic epochs and their characteristics than were his predecessors. Shmueli seems something of an intriguing throwback to bygone times. Thus, for the contemporary, "professional," university-based historian of the Jews, Seven Jewish Cultures is a book that might be readily dismissed, with perhaps some appreciation for its occasionally illuminating insights. Yet the matter is more complicated, at least for this contemporary, "professional," university-based historian. While the complex structure erected by Shmueli seems problematic to me, I found myself, in the course of reading his work, both attracted by the issues he raised and admiring of the way in which he wrested with them. Put differently,

338

Book Reviews

while I do not find his synthesis satisfying, I am appreciative of his efforts in this direction and for his reminding us of the obligation to balance specialized research with occasional forays into the broad issues of the Jewish past. For the "professionals" to renounce entirely such forays is to abandon this part of the field to those without the requisite training and insight. There is yet one more laudable dimension to the Shmueli enterprise. Seven Jewish Cultures was written largely within one of these cultures, which the author himself identifies as the Israeli-national culture. While a serious effort was clearly made to delineate major patterns of past Jewish creativity, Shmueli's book was also written within a specific context and addressed to some of its salient issues. I was reminded from time to time of Yosef Haim Yerushalmi's critique of the modern Jewish historiographic enterprise and his call for contemporary historians of the Jews to create new symbols for the Jewish present and future. Surely part of Shmueli's enterprise was oriented in just such a direction. Shmueli was a man who was remarkably reverent of the mystical, emancipatory and Israeli-national styles of Jewish culture. Some of the harshest criticism in his book is leveled at twentieth-century Israeli historians, primarily Dinur and Baer, for their perceived lack of empathy for the multiple styles of prior Jewish creativity. For Shmueli, the late-twentieth century attack on the rationally oriented Wissenschaft school led to the emergence of a similarly intolerant historical perspective. His own call is for recognition of the enduring multiplicity of creative styles, for tolerance of diversity within the Jewish fold. Given the particular setting of his work in the contemporary state of Israel, where a number of perspectives on the Jewish past are in effect vying with one another for hegemony and control, this call for acceptance of diversity as a given of prior Jewish experience should not be overlooked, nor should its significance be minimized. ROBERT CHAZAN New York University

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict. New Brunswick, N.J. and Oxford: Transaction Publishers, xxviii + 178 pp.

Myron Aronoff is a political anthropologist with a longstanding experience in research and teaching in Israel. His first book, Frontiertown (1974), was a study of politics in an Israeli development town. The present book aims at a macrosocial analysis of changes in the Israeli political system during the 1980s, set against the background of the broader changes in the country's political culture. The author's principal thesis is that, as the political culture of Israel changed, the hegemony of the Labor party as the dominant part in the Israeli political system declined; however, the transition, in 1977, to a government headed by the Likud—an ultimate consequence of the loss of Labor dominance—did not result in a new hegemony. Despite all its efforts, the Likud failed to establish dominance. Contemporary Israel is therefore culturally and politically deeply divided: there is a plurality of competing Zionist visions that underlie the deep social and political divisions. This thesis is well taken and documented. Aronoff aptly utilizes a number of symbolic events, such as the memorialization of Vladimir Zev Jabotinsky on the hundredth anniversary of his birth (pp. 47-54) and the state funeral of the alleged remains of Bar Kokhba's fighters (pp. 54-60) to demonstrate the manner in which the Likud, under Menahem Begin, sought to manipulate symbols in order to establish its legitimacy and ideological dominance. He also points out how these symbolic events brought to the surface the deep contrasts in historical outlook, political style and goals between the main antagonists on the Israeli political scene, Labor and the Likud. The author follows the process by which Israeli politics became polarized and, as it were, deadlocked in the course of the 1980s as the two major parties and those parties affiliated with them neutralized each other, thus blocking any fundamental decisions regarding burning problems such as the future of the occupied territories. He presents case studies of the two major, and of some more extreme smaller, extraparliamentary movements—Gush Emunim (Chapter 4) on the Israeli right, and Peace Now (Chapter 5) on the left. He shows the impact of these movements on the established political parties, and especially the extent to which the new messianic religious nationalism incites extremism in Israeli politics. Despite the significant changes that he demonstrates, Aronoff maintains that Zionism is still the "root metaphor" informing Israeli politics, although its salience is declining. He seeks to classify the variety of contemporary Zionist visions into 339

340

Book Reviews

three main types, humanist, nationalist and ultranationalist, each of which has a secular and a religious variant (pp. 132-135). While none of these is presently dominant, the author points to the weakening of the humanist and the strengthening of the nationalist type, and warns of the dangers inherent in the ultranationalist one. Despite his worries regarding the trend of Israeli politics, Aronoff finds comfort in the fact that the absence of a dominant party in the present political system indicates its maturing toward pluralism. This is a theoretically and methodologically eclectic work. It draws upon sociological and anthropological theories, but without integrating them into a coherent and systematic framework. It is based partly upon the author's own observations and interviews, conducted primarily in the early 1980s, on newspaper reports (mainly the Jerusalem Post) and on extensive but uneven reading of publications on Israel, primarily those published in the United States. There are few Hebrew sources cited, and—astonishingly for a work on contemporary Israeli politics—no Hebrew dailies. While Aronoff's line of analysis and his general conclusions appear altogether correct to the present reviewer, they are neither particularly startling nor novel. Rather, they express, in a more or less coherent form, a fairly wide consensus among sociologists and political scientists dealing with Israel. The book as a whole, however, strikes one as somewhat superficial, going insufficiently into the depths of both the visions and the divisions of Israeli society. By simply labeling Gush Emunim and other new activist religious movements as variants of nationalist or ultranationalist Zionism, the author misses the profound differences between the original Zionist vision, which was formulated as an alternative to the religious quest for messianic redemption, and the messianic convictions of those who fused novel messianism with activist nationalism. For messianist nationalists, Zionism is certainly not a "root metaphor"; rather, it is integrated into a much more profound and hence—in the view of this reviewer—politically dangerous vision, based on ancient Jewish "root metaphors." The author's style is somewhat heavy and often imprecise. Like many others, he talks of Israelis when referring to Israeli Jews, disregarding the fact that about a sixth of Israel's citizens are Arabs (and these play a very minor role in his analysis). There are many grammatically incorrect sentences. Particularly annoying to this reviewer, the transliteration of Hebrew terms and names is not uniform and frequently faulty. This is strange for an author who, unlike many other non-Israelis writing on Israel, is in complete command of both spoken and written Hebrew. ERIK COHEN The Hebrew University

Bernard Avishai, A New Israel: Democracy in Crisis, 1973-1988. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1990. 420 pp.

I must say that I read this collection of essays as a kind of suspense thriller, even though I knew beforehand just who was the "murderer" and who the "victim."

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

341

Avishai brings us face to face with our not so distant and not so glorious past, and parts of his book, characterized by lucid, intelligent writing, are of real worth. This volume, like the author's The Tragedy of Zionism (1985) has its strong and weak points; but at least in this case the writing is not wrapped in some scientific-historic robe. In spite of his professed political objective, Avishai finds his true metier in the description of events, moods and political analysis that is characteristic of sound journalism. With the aid of this description we are able to reconstruct the most dramatic collective episodes through which Israel has passed since the chaos of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the consolidation of Likud rule. This reconstruction is valuable even if we do not always agree with Avishai's interpretation. It is interesting as well to recall that these interpretations resemble more or less those of the Israeli Left, such that we have an opportunity to contrast the explanations of years ago with what we know today by virtue of hindsight. The first chapter—journalism at its best—returns us to December 1967, when Golda Meir was still the favorite candidate for prime minister (although polls at first showed Labor and Likud running neck-to-neck, each receiving 30 percent of the public's support). Israelis appeared at the time to be moving away from the concepts of "security borders;" only today do we know that such an awakening did not really transpire. In the Palestinian camp, the strength of Yasir Arafat and George Habash reached a pinnacle, and various Israeli coalitions did everything possible to prevent Palestinian organizing, even of the most moderate type. The glitter of the Jordan option looked like gold. Golda in this period, in fact, does not seem so very different from Yitzhak Shamir. Then came the elections of 1969, and it was as though nothing changed, apart from the reinforced power of the National Religious Party, which for the first time added to its electoral platform its opposition to any retreat from "Judea and Samaria." While this book does not practice determinism, the reader is nonetheless pulled along a path that allows no return, from one half turning point to the next, and toward the inevitable creation of "a new Israel" and a "different Zionism" (or "postZionism"). The book describes the transition from the "old Zionism" (the "good" Zionism, in the author's estimate) to a Zionism whose name is either put in quotation marks only or else is termed "neo-Zionism." In Avishai's view, the old Zionism was secular, pragmatic and preoccupied with the moral and social dilemmas faced by the "modern Jew." The new Zionism, which urges a religious-mystical relation to the land, a post-Holocaust cynicism, messianism and millenarianism, is defined by the author as "new pioneering" (p. 334, for example). The most conspicuous representative of neo-Zionism is, of course, Gush Emunim, and its standard-bearers are the inheritors of revisionism. It is no secret that Avishai is not exactly content with this Zionism; yet he has quite simply forgotten what is written in the first parts of his own book, where it is shown that all the elements of an ultranational form of Zionism existed well before Golda's governments, and even before the first euphoric days that occurred in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Avishai also tries his hand at theoretical essays that try to answer why Zionism is or is not colonialism (pp. 179-195). At the same time, he tries to explain why the Palestinian "armed struggle" is not a war of liberation on the model of the FLN in

342

Book Reviews

Algeria. Avishai focuses his claims upon the intentions (and not the results) of the Zionist enterprise, an endeavor that intended to erect an autonomous entity that would not be based upon class exploitation or the exploitation of another people, and that would foster peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs. Moreover, he argues, the Jews have authentic roots in Palestine and are not simply foreign colonials. This analysis is a bit artless and obsolete, but can perhaps be justified in terms of its marketability for a target readership of American Jews. This consideration also holds sway with respect to essays that survey a number of books relating to Palestinian and Arab subjects. An additional essay describes with a certain justified irony the meeting between Israeli figures on the left and moderate Palestinians. In these essays Avishai's views generally seem close to those held by the moderate Israeli Left—an orientation that combines denunciation of Palestinian terror with an effort to be empathic and sensitive to the rights of Palestinians. As far as I am concerned, the most original and interesting essay describes and analyzes the ascent of the periodical Commentary and its group of writers and editors in 1967-1969. From a periodical that can be said to have invented the Jewish-American intelligentsia and at the same time adopted a critical stance toward American society and almost completely ignored Zionism, Commentary became a partisan journal that measured each phenomenon according to the criterion of whether it was "good for the Jews." Unfortunately, instead of explaining why this turning point came about in the mainstream of intellectual Jewish America, Avishai engages in a polemic with his subjects as to what in fact really is good for the Jews. The premise of the book is found in its introduction. Avishai discerns, with justification, the internal contradictions present in the positions of the Israeli Left, which wants separation from the Arabs accompanied by a territorial settlement that would advance both national movements. Avishai hints that this approach is no less racist or ethnocentric than the transfer option of the far Right—this position is even more consistent logically than the meandering view of the Left. Yet, Avishai says, since the existing status quo has led to the transformation of Israel into a Herrenvolk democracy of the Jews, there is a need to come up with a solution different from any that has been presented up until now. Up to this point the present writer concords with Avishai. But what Avishai proposes, in obscure language, is the fundamental democratization of Greater Israel. That is to say, its transformation into a federaldemocratic entity in which affairs will "surpass that end yearned for in the Zionist vision" (which spoke of the redemption of Jews only). In such an entity, democracy signifies equal rights for all, nationalism (be it Jewish or Palestinian) loses its force and the aggressive approach of one side against the other disappears. This is the real solution—for the End of Days. Meantime, in the aftermath of the June 1992 elections, Israel has returned to the "old" Labor pattern; time will tell if these present political changes will bring about a truly New Israel. BARUCH KIMMERLING The Hebrew University

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

343

Aaron Berman, Nazism, the Jews and American Zionism 1935-1948. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. 238 pp.

If American Jewry failed during the Holocaust, that failure may in some measure be attributed to the American Zionist movement, which had come into its own by 1940. Given the balance of forces—a determined sovereign nation state pitted against a dispersed and divided people—the possibility of rescuing European Jewry was limited. But there were opportunities to mitigate the disaster that were missed by a Zionist leadership whose priorities were increasingly shaped both by the notion of establishing a Jewish commonwealth and by the welfare and security of the Yishuv. This much at least the reader can conclude from reading this disturbing book. What were these opportunities? Most leading American Zionists did not support the first partition proposal recommended by the Peel Commission in 1937. Had they followed the counsel of Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, who urged support of partition, the argument runs, there might have been a Jewish national sovereignty in place in 1942, willing and able to welcome the hapless Jews of Europe. It is of course possible to say this only from hindsight, since few in 1937 could envisage the Holocaust. Moreover, fresh from their rebellion in 1936, the Arabs were hardly in a mood to accept even the small Jewish city-state contemplated by the British. Some have argued that the Yishuv's participation in the transfer agreement (haavarah), which permitted wealthy German Jews to transfer some of their capital from the Reich in the form of capital goods, compromised the worldwide boycott movement—the first mobilization against Hitler. But this argument is balanced by noting that the ha'avarah increased the absorptive capacity of Palestine and that, contrary to the views of Edwin Black, the halting of German trade with the Yishuv never remotely had the potential of toppling the Nazi regime.1 Nevertheless, the transfer agreement exacted a price. It antagonized the most militant elements in the community, who did not hesitate to introduce a new word into the already heated anti-Zionist lexicon, "betrayal." There are dozens of other gray areas where one could argue that Zionist leadership proved to be inadequate: their lateness, for example, in recognizing the lethality of the Final Solution and the subsequent weakness of the mobilization effort in America; and the bitter, internecine personal and ideological strife that ultimately interfered with the movement's ability to lead American Jewry. Moreover, the decision to attempt to undo the White Paper of 1939 by political action drew the movement into an unwinnable contest that ultimately misshaped the rescue effort, leaving Zionism open to the charge that it had written off European Jewry when there was still a chance to save lives. This was inevitably followed by the movement's most critical decision of all, that of investing its limited resources not in support of the resettlement of Jews outside Palestine but rather in pressuring an endangered world community to establish a Jewish state. The Holocaust had radicalized sections of the Zionist movement, which in the United States were led by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver and Emanuel Neumann. It was an understandable choice.

344

Book Reviews

The argument that the only solution to the age-old problem of antisemitism, now assuming a radical form that threatened the very lives of European Jews, was to finally gain for the Jews a sovereign nation of their own, was utterly compelling. This reasoning lies behind the Zionists' massive support for the Biltmore resolution in May 1942 and its affirmation at the American Jewish Conference in 1943. But the resolution was a long-range plan that could not come to fruition until 1948. In the interim, it actually separated the two goals it sought to bring together, rescue and commonwealth. The original call to convene an American Jewish Conference by B'nai B'rith did not mention the rescue question; the need for a rescue commission had to be added to the agenda as an afterthought. As Stephen Wise had foreseen, the conference ended any hope for unified American Jewish action. Non-Zionist organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee could not at that time accept the commonwealth plank. In retrospect, none of the positions taken by the Zionists substantiate the charge of betrayal and callousness. Ideologically, they had insisted all along that Jewish life in the diaspora was untenable, and in practice they were virtually alone in manning the rescue apparatus around the periphery of occupied Europe that spirited a handful of Jews to safety. Those people who parachuted into Europe to establish contact with the beleaguered Jewish communities were members of the kibbutzim, which formed the backbone of the Zionist effort in Palestine. But not until it was too late did the Zionists fathom that the Nazis meant to liquidate all European Jewry. As late as 1944, Ben-Gurion and others still assumed that enough Jews would survive to populate the reconstituted homeland. Zionists saw the world through their own rosecolored glasses. It could not be otherwise. For generations to come, historians will argue whether the movement took a wrong turn in 1942, when the commonwealth idea came to the fore. They will have to consider whether a higher priority should not have been given to resettlement elsewhere. They will probably discover that the places considered, British Guiana, Mindanao, the Dominican Republic and hundreds of others—most of them distressingly close to some equatorial rain forest—offered as little hope as Madagascar, proposed by the Nazis as a place for Jewish resettlement. Yet who had more experience in resettling Jews in inhospitable areas? The primacy given to the homeland goal also tended to make rescue only an indirect objective. In 1944, Zionist leaders even rejected as a matter of pride the suggestion of a "temporary shelter" for Jews in Palestine, a notion that grew out of the reenergized Roosevelt rescue effort. Historians may conclude that the linkage between homeland and rescue, which Zionists believed in so firmly, was an illusion. During the Second World War, the two goals actually worked at cross purposes. This is the primary reason why the Bergson group, the only Zionists who dared counsel that the two goals ought to be separated, will continue to draw the interest of researchers. But after the Biltmore resolution, the option of separated goals became increasingly less possible for the American Zionist movement. While Berman's study is not an indictment of American Zionism, neither is it sycophantic. It serves as a natural complement to Dina Porat's recent work,2 whose conclusions about Zionist leadership in Palestine are far more telling and more completely documented. If one overlooks some oversimplifications and minor er-

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

345

rors, Herman's narrative is balanced and lucid. Most important, like Porat's work (which it resembles), Berman has raised the major question with which historians will be grappling—the way in which American Jewry responded to the Holocaust. Part of the answer, dare we say it, has to be found in the disarray and lack of preparedness of the American and world Zionist movement. For this reason alone, Berman's book deserves our attention. HENRY L. FEINGOLD Baruch College

Notes 1. See Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Untold Story of the Secret Agreement Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine (New York: 1984). 2. Dina Porat, The Blue and Yellow Star of David: Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 (Cambridge, Mass: 1990).

Uri Bialer, Between East and West: Israel's Foreign Policy Orientation 1948-1956. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. LSE Monograph Series in International Studies. 291 pp.

The Israel State Archives (ISA) put into effect in 1979 a thirty-year declassification rule for the records of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The ISA also launched its series of Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel, which developed into an annual volume of selected papers on the framing of foreign policy. The coverage started with the last half year of the mandate, using the Jewish Agency Executive and Political Department files in the Central Zionist Archives. The opportunities to reassess the new state's diplomacy in its formative years as enriched by the printed and archival official record have attracted Israeli and other scholars. Uri Bialer, a senior lecturer in international relations at The Hebrew University, set out to evaluate Israel's politics toward the U.S.S.R., the United States and their respective allies in the first eight years of independence as seen by the policymakers in Jerusalem and by informed Israelis. Unlike the Public Record Office (London) and the National Archives (Washington), the ISA has not yet been allowed by the government to open the files of the remaining ministries. Resourcefully, Bialer has supplemented the available ISA evidence by probing into Ben-Gurion's copious, though only marginally rewarding, diary at Sedeh Boker and, with richer returns, the unpublished papers of the labor parties, which then dominated Israeli politics. At the time of the unfolding events, the thrust of the American and Soviet diplomatic strategies toward Israel as well as Israel's response were generally known. Contemporary analyses had to rest on evidence in the public domain, mainly the official records of the UN (then intimately entangled in the unfolding drama), the detailed coverage in the media (of variable value) and the public

346

Book Reviews

statements of the engaged officials and ministries. The author's contribution lay potentially in reexamining the strategy of nonalignment on the basis of the declassified official papers of the nascent state as it became entrapped in the rising worldwide tension and rivalry of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. That, after all, inescapably conditioned their behavior toward the Middle East. The author devotes two-thirds of his space and attention to Israel's relations with Moscow and the Soviet bloc. That he does well. His research underscores the sophistication of Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett and his coterie of Kremlinologists and East European experts, most of them trained on the job. Their insights into Soviet strategy toward Israel and the Arab states and the diplomatic style under Stalin and in the opening phase of the successor regime were largely on the mark. Bialer reviews in detail how the U.S.S.R., to ensure against any British return to the former mandated territory, eased restrictions on aliyah from Eastern Europe (then the primary source of immigration) and on trade, including the export of arms and ammunition by Czechoslovakia. With the Soviet Union itself barter deals were struck, notably the exchange in 1953-1954 of citrus for petroleum, then Israel's basic source of crude oil. Among the olim were Soviet spies, as claimed at the time by London and Washington, denied by Jerusalem, but confirmed by Foreign Ministry records. The two most rewarding chapters focus on the details of the rocky political cooperation with the Soviet Union and the much more friendly relations with Prague—on Soviet indulgence—up until Moscow abruptly suppressed them. By contrast, Bialer passes over lightly the U.S. and its major allies, Britain and France. The free, largely open and often contentious allied diplomatic interplay on the Middle East, if anything, was even more complex at times than that among members of the Soviet bloc, which Moscow had kept on a tight leash. If the author had delved systematically rather than only sporadically into the papers on Israel in the Foreign Relations of the United States, he would have discovered why the rapport with Washington in the first Eisenhower Administration had cooled. Bialer might then have also found it essential to examine less superficially the rich archives on the Middle East at the Public Record Office covering the years of his book. It was in Eisenhower's first term that he and Secretary of State Dulles progressively reversed American and British roles in the Middle East until finally, in the 1956 Suez crisis, Britain turned over its "responsibilities" for the defense of Western interests in the region to America's custody. Here lay much of the explanation for the Republicans' striving for "evenhandedness" regarding the Arab-Israeli dispute. It resulted, for example, in funneling arms into Iraq while directing Israel to apply to Canada for the procurement of military planes. Here also lay answers to the discovery by Israel and France of mutual strategic anxieties, as both were being crowded out of Anglo-American plans for safeguarding the Middle East against Soviet penetration. The primal rearrangement of the Great Power postures toward the Middle East inescapably conditioned Israel's foreign policy orientation in the final years covered by the book under review. Yet this receives less than its due share of attention. Still,

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

347

the chapters that explore Israeli-Soviet relations or what the author labels "Red Star over Zion" do make a positive contribution to the pertinent literature. J. C. HUREWITZ Columbia University

Marcia Drezon-Tepler, Interest Groups and Political Change in Israel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. 308 pp.

The political science of interest groups is, to a large extent, an American phenomenon. The underpinnings of such groups have been found in the democratic openness and cultural diversity of U.S. society; the large number of autonomous state and local authorities that provide alternative points of access; powerful legislatures that invite input from interest groups and routinely alter or reject executive branch proposals; weak political parties; a wealthy free-enterprise economy that leaves many decisions in private hands and provides resources for independent groups; and constitutional language that assures the right of the people to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. Classics in the literature include Arthur F. Bentley's The Process of Government (1908) and David Truman's The Governmental Process (1951). Issues on the research agenda include the traits of groups as classified by types of membership, economic sector, policy goals and political style; tendencies of individuals in different income and social categories to affiliate or reach leadership positions; tactics used by groups to present their programs to the public and policymakers; political pressure and corruption; group influence on the policy-making process and policy; and assessments as to whether policymakers submit to interest groups or, alternatively, exploit them for their own purposes. Political scientists who wish to locate and describe interest groups outside of the United States must take account of differences in law, regime structure and political culture. Those working in Israel encounter a centralized regime, a homogeneous society, strong political parties, a Knesset that resembles other parliaments in going along with most cabinet proposals, extensive government responsibility for economic management and social programming along with a defense sector that limits the resources available for other purposes, limited free enterprise and private resources to support independent interest groups, and the lack of a written constitution that might provide a secure legal basis for greater public involvement in policymaking. Organizations emerge in Israel to protest and promote a variety of issues, but a number of the prominent ones join the public sector rather than remain as independent sources of pressure. The Histadrut labor federation is part of the policy establishment by virtue of its linkages with the country's health service, industry, finance, commerce, transportation and agriculture. The Association of Israeli Physicians seems less concerned with health policy than in pressing the wage demands of members who are public-sector employees. The Society for the Protec-

348

Book Reviews

tion of Nature has acquired quasi-governmental status as a provider of school programs, summer camps and other nature-related activities, in addition to its being a voice for conservation and environmental protection. Although Drezon-Tepler might disagree, it also appears that the Manufacturers Association has acquired a permanent role as the representative of Israeli employers in economic negotiations with the Histadrut and the Finance Ministry, and that Gush Emunim has in the past pursued its program of assuring continued Israeli control of occupied territories by winning substantial government aid for its settlements. Drezon-Tepler analyzes the appearance of powerful party, pluralist and corporalist themes in Israel's political history as they have affected relationships between interest groups and policymakers. The main chapters of her book provide case studies of the Manufacturers' Association, the Ihud association of kibbutzim, and Gush Emunim. The book has much useful detail and provocative insights, but it has the feel of a warmed-over dissertation. There is limited treatment either of substantive developments or of the literature since the 1980s. Drezon-Tepler's academic adviser describes the book as "the first systematic exploratory analysis of interest groups in Israel's bewildering political system." He should have been aware of Yael Yishai's Kevuzot interes beyisrael (Interest Groups in Israel), published four years previously. Drezon-Tepler seems more wishful than empirical in seeing an increase in the independence of the Knesset and interest groups. It is difficult to justify her claim that "parties were busy maintaining the status quo [while] groups were pressing for systematic changes . . . after the 1967 war" (p. 37), or that the Knesset became an arena for the increasing expression of individualism, regardless of members' party positions and concerns (p. 40). There is occasional confusion in the theoretical chapters and the case studies. In one paragraph, the author writes that interest groups have "flourished" in Israel, then adds that "groups are purposely tucked away, or they conceal themselves, within the borders of comprehensive, ideological parties" (p. 225). In fact she shows that each of her groups has pursued close relations with political parties and ministries but at times has sought enough independence to deal with other parties and ministers. She claims to "disprove" the control of interest groups by political parties (pp. 47-48), but the more useful idea seems to be that interest groups tend to affiliate with a party or ministry. Some interpretations appear naive. Drezon-Tepler thanks a staffer who "in a grandfatherly way guided me through an interview with the gracious Prime Minister [Menachem Begin]" (p. vii). Then she takes at face value Begin's astonishment at a suggestion that his government coopted Gush Emunim (pp. 211-12), viewing his reaction as an authoritative denial of that suggestion. Israeli television viewers familiar with Begin's style in responding to journalists' questions or exchanges on the floor of the Knesset might wonder if she was misled by his theatrics. IRA SHARKANSKY The Hebrew University

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

349

Sam Lehman-Wilzig, Stiff-Necked People, Bottle-Necked System: The Evolution and Roots of Israeli Public Protest 1949—1986. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990. 213 pp.

First the good news: Israeli citizens have found a way to communicate with political leaders who seem intent upon insulating themselves from the polity. Now the bad news: the chosen mode of communication is inherently negative, short-term, and often includes breaking the law. Lehman-Wilzig's important book, Stiff-Necked People, Bottle-Necked System, attempts to detail and analyze the use of protest in Israel. The major thesis of this work is that the Israeli political system is marked by "systematic political petrification," which has made it very difficult for Israeli citizens to be heard. Being a "stiff-necked" and "oppositionist" people with an unusually large appetite for political involvement, Israelis have—at least since the early 1970s—increasingly turned to protest as their major form of political participation. Based on reports of protest that appeared in the Jerusalem Post between 1949 and 1986, Lehman-Wilzig divides the history of Israeli protest into four periods: acculturation protest (1949-1954); extraparliamentary quiescence (1955-1970); recrudescent mature protest (1971-1978); and protest normalization (1979-1986). The curve of Israeli protest is shown to resemble a sort of lazy "S." It starts with a "medium" level of mostly social and economic protests over the severe social problems associated with the early days of statehood, drops somewhat during the period of quiescence, rises sharply in the 1970s, which is marked by much more political protest, and finally levels off in the 1980s. The most important period for understanding the state of Israeli protest today is clearly the 1970s, during which the yearly rate of protest rose to 122 acts a year, more than three times the rate that was experienced in the previous period. In a sense, it can be said that the Israeli "Sixties" actually took place in the 1970s, inaugurated perhaps by the tremendous amount of publicity given to the Black Panther demonstrations in Jerusalem. Lehman-Wilzig offers a number of explanations for this change. First, some of the frustrations that had been kept in check during the War of Attrition may have been let loose when that conflict was over. Second, the age of television had a dramatic impact both on the visibility of protest and in teaching Israelis some important lessons about the extensive use of protest in other countries. Finally, the author suggests that television may also have increased the level of "relative deprivation" felt by Israel's working class. It is surprising, however, that the author does not deal with one of the most important changes in this period: the dramatic rise in political discontent among Israelis. In the continuing survey of the Israeli Institute for Applied Social Science Research, Israelis have been continually asked to grade the government's performance in dealing with the "present situation." In 1967, only 8 percent of the population expressed dissatisfaction with government performance. The level of discontent rose consistently from that time, reaching a high of 81 percent in 1977, when the Labor Party was voted out of power. Although there have been some ups

350

Book Reviews

and downs since that year, the figure remains close to that extraordinary level until this day. Political discontent has been shown to be one of the major reasons for protest, and there can be little doubt that the dramatic rise in the use of direct action in Israel is related to the Israeli polity's increased disaffection. The author is to be commended on his use of a wide variety of sources and methodologies for studying this issue. The book includes an imposing archive of newspaper articles, survey data, and both historical and cultural analyses. LehmanWilzig has done an impressive job of integrating these materials to provide a valuable tool both for researchers interested in the more general topic of protest and those more specifically concerned with political behavior in Israel. Nevertheless, there are a number of methodological problems, two of which must be addressed because they serve as the empirical base for two of the central arguments being made. The first concerns the percentage of Israelis who participate in "protest acts." Lehman-Wilzig claims that about 22 percent of all Israelis have participated in protests, a higher figure than in the five Western countries where the question has been studied in a systematic manner. Lehman-Wilzig compares his own survey results about Israel with those in the book Political Action by S. M. Barnes and M. Kaase.1 Unfortunately, the two sets of questions are not comparable and there is good reason to suspect that the Israel figure is inflated. For one thing, Lehman-Wilzig includes in his list of protest acts the use of "political strikes," an item that was never mentioned in Political Action. It would be hard to find an Israeli who hasn't participated in some type of strike, and I suspect that even political scientists would have trouble deciding what was and was not a "political" strike. In addition, the survey by Lehman-Wilzig asks if the respondent had ever participated in a protest act (which would include, for example, the period of the British Mandate) whereas the authors of Political Action asked about the "last ten years." Israelis do indeed exhibit a good deal of protest, but the exact figure tends to vary according to how one asks the question. The second problem concerns the measuring of protest success. Lehman-Wilzig argues that, despite the fact that the vast majority of Israelis (including those who have actually participated in protests) believe that direct action is successful, they are wrong. He claims that protest in Israel is, for the most part, futile. He bases this pessimistic conclusion on the answers of ten Israeli "experts" who were asked to rank the degree of success of twenty-eight protest campaigns during the years 19791986. The question of how to measure protest success is a very difficult one, and there is no straightforward method for comparing the success of a group such as Peace Now protesting against the war in Lebanon with that obtained by El Al workers who wanted to continue flying on the Sabbath. Nevertheless, in addition to the serious questions one might raise about the representativeness of the protests chosen for analysis, one must ask just what makes these people experts. There is every reason to believe that most of their information comes from the news media, which—as the author himself points out—is notoriously bad at reporting the outcome of such campaigns. It would be interesting to know how much each of these experts actually remembers about these various protests. I, for, one would be more likely to take the word of those who actually participate in protests. Even if they are somehow

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

351

deluding themselves, a sense of achievement would surely be one indicator of success. Notwithstanding these problems, Lehman-Wilzig provides us with a useful contribution to the study of Israeli political culture. His research offers an unprecedented analysis of the form and content of Israeli protest since the beginning of the state and serves as yet another reminder of the need for political reform in Israel. The extensive use of protest by Israelis is no substitute for genuine political participation. The latter is characterized by the availability and use of a variety of institutionalized channels for open political communication between the elected and their constituents. The development of such channels is one of the hallmarks of a truly mature democracy. GADI WOLFSFELD The Hebrew University

Note 1. S. M. Barnes and M. Kaase (eds.), Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverly Hills: 1979).

Charles S. Liebman (ed.), Religious and Secular: Conflict and Accommodation Between Jews in Israel. Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, Ltd., 1990. xviii + 238 pp.

The studies in this collection were undertaken at the initiative of the Avi Chai Foundation, whose focus is on "increasing the understanding and sensitivity in Israel among Jews of different levels of religious commitment and observance." To this end, the foundation commissioned a group of case studies on Israeli society that would offer "anecdotal insights into the dynamics of religious/non-religious relations." The studies in themselves are carefully documented, persuasively argued and clearly written. Whether they will serve the broader purpose of attenuating growing tension between groups with conflicting views of Judaism is another matter. These essays fall under a number of rubrics. Three focus on community settings. Amnon Levi examines "Anglo-Saxon" haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) in Jerusalem who bring with them a tradition from abroad of living with minimum friction in a non-haredi world. The evidence indicates that their children are socialized into the prevailing norms of Israeli-born haredim, which are less accommodating. Naomi Gutkind-Golan surveys mixed communal settlements. She focuses on those located on the West Bank, highlighting the ones that have made an ideological commitment to coresiding with people of differing religious convictions while at the same time stressing that her study concerns "a minority within a minority." Ephraim Tabory provides a detailed picture of observant Jews in a nonobservant neighborhood of North Tel-Aviv. These individuals, too, have made a conscious choice to live side-

352

Book Reviews

by-side with those who have a very different lifestyle. They make considerable compromises, for example, when nonreligious Jews attending the synagogue on Shabbat to celebrate a bar mitzvah behave in violation of accepted practice. Many of these religious Jews, Tabory notes, doubt whether their children will maintain the same balancing act that has been important to them. Two articles deal with political groups. Asher Cohen documents the special efforts made by some religious and nonreligious Jews to work together within the Tehiya party in the interest of a shared, strongly nationalist ideology. In a contrasting piece, Tamar Hermann and David Newman analyze why the religious "peace camp" functions as a separate organization that maintains only minimal ties to the majority, secular peace movements. Another two papers discuss the media. Amnon Levi gives an overview of the haredi press, its internal developments and its changing relationship to secular society. Samuel Heilman examines the reaction of the secular press to the haredi parties' successes in the 1988 elections. He stresses the stereotypic views of haredi society, claiming that newspapers appeal to what their readers want to "hear," and thus do not attend to important distinctions within the broad religious community. Golan-Gutkind provides an in-depth study of the public controversy in 1984 over the opening of a Petah Tikvah movie house on Friday nights. Her analysis shows the interlinking of two levels of understanding: the basic cultural and religious opposition (kulturkampf) between secular and religious Jews, and the political maneuverings within each group that result in specific incidents of conflict or compromise. Leonard and Sonia Weller chart unknown territory in their exploration of marriages between religious and nonreligious spouses. They argue that such marriages are more widespread than commonly believed, and point to a variety of strategies of living together. Yisrael Wollman surveys various organizations which, through informal education, seek to bring about greater understanding between the religious and secular. He compares the ideologies, educational methods and scopes of activity among the different groups. Charles Liebman provides both an opening statement that "introduces the main cast of characters" in the book and "some final reflections" that make more explicit some of the themes emerging from the papers. As stated, the broader purpose of the volume is to contribute to improving relations between religious and nonreligious Jews in Israel. Perhaps this explains why it contains no reference to historical research (of which the contributors are fully aware). The lack of attention to this scholarship is not only a matter of footnotes, but reflects a weakness of the overall approach; issues of relationships between religious and secular Jews cannot be appreciated without serious attention to history. When we are introduced to the "cast of characters," it is done in terms of current beliefs and behavior patterns—with little attention to the ways in which contemporary groups and their forms of observance evolved. The term haredi meant something different in the 1930s than it does today; how did this come about? The division of Jews into dati and to dati (religious and secular) did not always exist in Jewish history and is not central to the life of many diaspora communities. When immigrants from Middle Eastern countries (who are grossly underrepresented in the

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

353

essays) came to Israel in the 1950s, this distinction was foreign to them. What has been involved for them in accepting the Israeli categories (with historic roots in Europe) and discarding their own religious outlooks? Even (or perhaps, particularly) the issue that prompted the volume—the growing tension between religious and nonreligious in recent decades—is not subjected to analysis. The dynamic and changing characteristic of religious life is thereby overlooked, or perhaps denied. Throughout many of the papers, there occur statements attributing characteristics to Judaism as if it were an unchanging entity. The last paper, on efforts to enhance understanding between religious and nonreligious, is symptomatic in this regard. Taking the two categories as given (even while citing different positions on the mix of Judaism and humanism), the author concentrates on educational matters and never raises the question of whether reified Judaism itself might change. Some of the people active in these programs might be scandalized by the comparison with parallel efforts to bring about greater understanding between Arab and Jewish youths. There, too, the frustrating conclusion is often reached that no matter how "successful" the educational techniques employed, little change takes place unless there is change in the wider situation. In his introduction, Liebman points out that Conservative and Reform Judaism are not discussed because of their small number of followers in Israel. Yet, as mentioned, the study of "mixed" communal settlements focuses on a very small minority. The two religious categories of Conservative and Reform, however, challenge the very definition of Judaism (and often its relation to politics) in Israel. In addition, these movements struggle with some of the problems discussed among the "bona fide" religious—e.g., Conservative synagogues overwhelmed by secular Jews attending a bar mitzvah. Excluding them from discussion may be justified on statistical grounds, but an approach truly prepared to rethink issues of religion in Israel should accord them some attention. Today it is common, particularly in field studies, for social scientists to make some personal data available to their readers to aid the latter in judging the investigators' approach to complex human data. Most of the contributors to the volume may be designated as "modern Orthodox," and many are associated with Bar-Han University. They have much to gain if secular Israelis learn to distinguish between ultra-Orthodoxy, which rejects both Zionism and modernity, and those religious Israelis who choose to live with modernity and are committed to the Jewish state. Several of the articles implicitly bemoan the fact that secularists lump the two categories of Orthodoxy together, but Bar-Han University itself is the product of a historical compromise with ultra-Orthodoxy in that it does not train rabbis— potential educators and role models—imbued with a modern Orthodox outlook. Thus, the studies under review, sober, methodical and informative though they be, fail to reflect critically on the conditions of which they are a part and which, wittingly or unwittingly, they serve to perpetuate. HARVEY E. GOLDBERG The Hebrew University

354

Book Reviews

William Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds.), Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. xvii + 428 pp.

Any international conference devoted to a major and controversial event such as the Suez crisis of 1956 is a welcome initiative, for it may be expected to deal with that question from all possible points of view. Considering the fact that the Suez crisis is still an emotionally charged issue, it must be said that the two conferences forming the basis for this volume were a success. Notwithstanding, the role of Israel is not alloted the attention it deserves. The contributions by Shimon Shamir and William Roger Louis, excellent though they are, do not provide the necessary wider backdrop to the crisis. Louis admits that it was not the Anglo-Egyptian settlement of 1954 that led to the 1956 crisis but rather the Palestinian question, the Baghdad Pact, the Czechoslovakian arms deal, the financing of the Aswan High Dam project and Prime Minister Anthony Eden's distrust of Nasser. Shamir's discussion of "Project Alpha"—a plan for partitioning the Negev to create a direct territorial link between Egypt and Jordan—throws light on the principles of British policy toward Israel, especially that of its chief architect, Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh, the undersecretary of the British Foreign Office in charge of Middle Eastern affairs. As Shuckburgh himself admitted in his published diaries, his preconceived ideas against Israel were grounded in the pre-Second World War period. Unlike his father—who, as the permanent undersecretary of the Colonial Office, did not allow personal feelings to influence the process of decisionmaking—the son tended to let emotional considerations prevail upon him. First, he overestimated the capability of his government to pressure the United States into supporting Project Alpha. Second, he even proposed annexing part of the Galilee to Jordan and the internationalization of Jerusalem in addition to the annexation of the demilitarized zones by Syria and Jordan. Shuckburgh's major proposal was to cut Israel off from the southern Negev. It was the U.S. State Department that showed more sensitivity to Israel's ability to survive when it presented its own suggestions for borders. Shuckburgh's lack of realism did not stop here. He also erred in not realizing that Nasser could compromise neither with regard to the Negev nor in the matter of the Palestinian refugees, both because of the essence of his messianic, pan-Arab leadership and because his leadership was based on emotional anticolonialism. Shuckburgh suggested the use of threats or bribery against Nasser—even assassination. Shamir believes that Shuckburgh did not even consider whether his plan to create an overland bridge between Egypt and Jordan might undermine regional stability. Furthermore, he erred in his assessment of Soviet Russia's penetration of the region, not connecting it to the U.S.S.R.'s series of pacts with Third World countries, and he failed to recognize the intensity of anti-Western feeling in the Middle East. Shuckburgh measured every issue by one scale only: the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel, he believed, was on the brink of collapse—an assessment with which the British ambassador in Tel-Aviv agreed. Keith Kyle's treatment of Israel is surprisingly restrained. He, too, relates that the

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

355

U.S. Ministry of Defense predicted the collapse of Israel within six months, and informs us of the idea of replacing Nasser with a friendlier head of government. It is surprising that Kyle takes seriously the possiblity of armed conflict between Israel and Britain, which would have resulted from an Israeli penetration into Jordan. From our present-day perspective, it would seem that this was no more than a contingency plan. Unfortunately, Kyle's article lacks analysis of the facts he presents. On the whole, the British involvement in the crisis is given unsatisfactory treatment. Eden remains an unsolved puzzle, though Albert Hourani thinks that Eden believed the Egyptians were not true Arabs, but a mongrel race. Another article, by Lord Beloff, deals with the consequences of the crisis on the Conservative party. He discerns three different positions within the party, but does not elaborate upon them. Yet his conclusions are enlightening: as a result of the Suez crisis, the Conservative party not only recognized the dominance of the United States in world affairs but also ceased to view itself as an imperial party. The British Commonwealth receives somewhat exaggerated attention in this volume. S. Gopal, for example, devotes an article to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. According to Gopal, Nehru did not think highly of Nasser's intellectual capacities, was taken by surprise when the Suez Canal was nationalized and openly supported Nasser only after hostilities began. In another article, Peter Lyon correctly concludes that the Suez crisis was only a marginal issue for the commonwealth. J. D. B. Miller puts forward an interesting contention that the Australian prime minister's aggressive support of Britain resulted from a tradition of animosity toward Egyptians developed by Australian soldiers during the First World War, and also from their identification of Egypt with Communism. Finally, M. G. Fry overplays Canada's role in the crisis, although he does present examples of its independent stance. The contribution by Maurice Va'isse is most important for an understanding of French policy, but leans too heavily on diplomatic documents, with the result that we learn nothing of how French public opinion influenced the decisions of political figures. Va'isse logically concludes that, as a result of the crisis, France underwent a reorientation in its foreign policy that was manifested in its giving priority to Europe in the post-Suez period. Furthermore, tension increased after the crisis between the army and the government, greatly weakening the Fourth Republic. In Algeria, the FLN moved toward greater extremism, speeding up the end of the Algerian war. The only Israeli participant in the volume who deals directly with the Israeli role is M. Bar-On, who limits himself to one issue: the "Sevres Collusion." Though he was very close at that time to the protagonists in the affair (he was an important aide to Moshe Dayon, then Chief of General Staff), Bar-On's contribution is commendably free of myths. He admits that David Ben-Gurion was sensitive to global considerations, but not to the need to cooperate with colonial powers. Bar-On seems to imply that the Israeli prime minister was irrevocably committed to the assumption that the United States would support Britain and France under all circumstances. Actually, in 1955, Ben-Gurion opposed a preemptive campaign against Egypt, though in the summer of 1956 he was convinced to change tactics when he realized it might be possible to get rid of Nasser. Bar-On is at his best when he describes

356

Book Reviews

Ben-Gurion's fear and distrust of Britain, agreeing with the French foreign minister that it was exaggerated. Ben-Gurion, according to Bar-On, also overrated Britain as a world power. But it may be that he similarly overestimated the strength of France. From a historical perspective, and especially after the turnabout in French policy toward Israel after the Six Day War, has not the time come to admit that the alliance with France was a conjuncture? Israel really needed the continued support of a greater power than France. It is also a pity Bar-On does not share with us what role he believes the United States and the Soviet Union played in Ben-Gurion's considerations. The great disappointment of the volume are the Arab contributors, the most outstanding of whom—Arnin Hewedy—filled a senior position in Egypt in 1956. This most likely explains his lack of criticism of Nasser and the fact that his article is by no means free of the myths of the 1950s. (As an aside, one may ask: If Nasser was so strongly defended at the conference, why did Eden not receive the same type of treatment?) The fundamental flaw in Hewedy's article is that he does not deal with Nasser as an ideological leader but rather portrays him as a rational statesman for whom the arms deal was a way to escape from the Baghdad Pact and thus thwart Israeli aggression. Without, of course, impinging upon the positive image of Nasser, Hewedy claims that the Egyptian leader refused to give credence to intelligence reports about an imminent invasion, believing that an attack could occur only during the first week after nationalization of the Suez Canal. Like Hillal Dessouki, Hewedy thinks that Nasser was a naive statesman, especially vis-a-vis his military staff, believing, for example, that Israel would not join in an attack for fear of appearing dependent upon the support of Britain and France. Nasser also misunderstood the U.S. policy, believing it to be fully coordinated with that of Britain and France. Notwithstanding, Hewedy's conclusion that it was the Czechoslovakian arms deal that ignited the Suez crisis is more reasonable than the one proposed by Hourani, who claims that it was Ben-Gurion's aggressiveness—specifically, his goal, dating back to the 1930s, of achieving military superiority—that caused the events of 1956. Hourani, unfortunately, is unable to discern between the will to survive and aggressiveness. Finally, R. Khalidi, as expected, is a priori committed to myth. The Suez crisis, he claims, did not result from Egyptian provocation but rather from Israeli aggressive strategy. It appears that Khalidi has misunderstood Sharett's diaries, since he did not read them in the original Hebrew. In any case, the decision to go to war was taken after Sharett had left the political scene. In the final tally, it was the policy adopted by the United States that influenced the outcome of the Suez crisis. Two contributors deal with this broad topic. R. R. Bowie contributes but little to our understanding of the motives that lay behind the decisions taken by American statesmen, notably President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He does not treat the Suez crisis within the larger background of American global policy. Taiwan and Quemoy, it should be borne in mind, were burning issues at that time, not to mention the Soviet invasion of Hungary. J. C. Campbell deals with the Hungarian question, concluding that there was no connection between the two crises; Britain and France had decided on their policy before the Soviet invasion. Campbell believes that the Soviets refrained

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

357

from using missiles only because of an American counterthreat to launch a massive reprisal. The contributions by two economic historians, Roger Owen and Diane B. Kunz, are to be commended. Overall, Owen seems to give Nasser higher marks than he deserves. Owen argues that the Egyptian president was not motivated by ideological aspirations (as Shamir believes) but rather by a practical vision of Egypt as a future industrial power. Kunz claims that, in view of the complete economic dependence of Britain on the United States since 1945, it is still a puzzle how the British decided to attack Egypt without prior agreement with the United States. A further and more honest evaluation of the Suez crisis apparently awaits not only the declassification of additional archives, especially those of the Arab states and the Soviet Union, but also the passage of more time from the events themselves. Another conference, after thirty more years have passed, will probably ensure this. JOSEPH HELLER The Hebrew University

Peter Y. Medding, The Founding of Israeli Democracy 1948-1967. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. viii + 235 pp.

"In theory, your country ought not to exist," a puzzled American political scientist once told his Dutch counterpart, Arend Lijphart, when confronted with the paradoxes of the Netherlands—a society deeply divided by religion and ideology, yet a stable and well-functioning democracy. Israel, likewise, constitutes a puzzle— perhaps an even greater puzzle—for political scientists. The first puzzling element is how an Israeli democracy survives at all. Israel is the only new state among twenty-one states identified by Lijphart as democratic in his well-known text Democracies that has remained continuously democratic since the late 1940s. And yet almost all of the citizens of Israel come from countries in Eastern Europe, North Africa or the Middle East where democracy was weak or unknown. By what processes of socialization and acculturation have Israeli citizens come to be attached to democratic norms? How is their allegiance to democracy to be explained? Democracy in Israel, moreover, has been established under extremely adverse conditions—massive immigration, severe social dislocation, considerable ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity and, above all, a continuous security threat since the founding of the state—a threat to its existence such as hardly any other nation in the world has had to face. How, then, has democracy survived in Israel? These are the questions that Peter Medding implicitly raises in his valuable book on the founding of Israeli democracy. It is a pity that he does not quite manage to answer them. What he does do, however, is to present the basic historical and political science material that are necessary in providing the answer. The Founding of Israeli Democracy 1948—1967 is the first of two volumes on the political history of modern Israel. The year 1967 is seen by Medding as a watershed

358

Book Reviews

in Israeli politics, since it was in that year that Israeli political leadership was found wanting. During the crisis following President Gamal Abd el-Nasser's blockage of the Straits of Tiran, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was quite unable to decide how Israel ought to react. For the first time in the history of the state, Mapai was forced to give up control of the Ministry of Defense, which was handed to Moshe Dayan, the Rafi leader, who only consented to take it on condition that a national unity government, including Menahem Begin, was established. Not even Israel's stunning victory during the Six-Day War could wipe out the image of irresolution displayed by Mapai leaders in the crucial days before the hostilities had begun. Israel's victory reopened the territorial issue that, before 1967, even Herut seemed to have come to terms with. Mapai, in consequence, found itself no longer able to determine the political agenda. Israeli politics was entering into a new world. The period until 1967, however, can be characterized as the "founding period" of Israeli democracy, such a period being defined by Carl Friedrich as one "during which the political order is established, fundamental decisions are taken about who shall govern, and in what manner, and choices are made from among a variety of possible alternatives." In Israel, the founding period was characterized by two remarkable factors carried over from the Yishuv. The first was that "in the beginning there was the party"—a party (Mapai) that created a society, rather than the other way round. The second striking feature was that labor preceded capital. In most Western societies, labor as a political instrument arose as an organized response to the power of capital. In Israel, however, the process was reversed. As David Ben-Gurion had foreseen, it was the institutions of labor that created capitalism, in part so as to have a force that, dialectically, they could oppose. These two, in a sense perverse, phenomena, created Israeli democracy; for it was in the Yishuv that the basic focus of loyalty was formed, not to the state that did not then exist, but to the party or the political movement. Indeed, much of Israeli political life in its early years constitutes merely a formalization and institutionalization of conditions already existing in the Yishuv. Medding provides an excellent political history of the founding period of Israeli democracy, written not so much from the point of view of the historian as that of the political scientist, and with an awareness of the explanatory theories that political scientists have developed to account for various democratic configurations. Thus his book has a double value. It is not only an authoritative history of the political parties in Israel during the first twenty-five years of the state, but also an attempt to place Israel within the framework of comparative political science; and in this, too, it is eminently successful. The main feature of the Israeli political system in its early years was strong executive dominance. How was it secured? One answer, put forward by Ahdut Ha'avodah leader Yitzhak Ben-Aharon and scholar Anita Shapira, is that it derived from the striving by Ben-Gurion for personal power and unlimited authority. Shapira has gone so far as to compare Ben-Gurion to a Lenin who used the machinery of parliamentary democracy to establish a "guided democracy" bearing some resemblances to that established in the peoples' democracies, in which the party became almost a rubber-stamp for the decisions of the leader. Medding rejects such an interpretation, which for him "completely misses the

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

359

central significance of the institutional and democratic character of Ben-Gurion's leadership" (p. 213). Medding sees Ben-Gurion as the archetype of a Weberian political leader, guided by principles of political responsibility and majority decision-making. It was, indeed, Ben-Gurion's leadership style which made so important a contribution to the development of majoritarian political structures in Israel, but this was achieved by working through party—not, like Lenin, by using party to establish dictatorial rule. Mapai, therefore, never became an extension of Ben-Gurion's personal power; he always had to win its support through the force of his argument and the quality of his vision. In later years, in the aftermath of the Lavon affair, Ben-Gurion, unlike Lenin, lost control of his party; in 1965 he failed to defeat Mapai, and was forced to watch Eshkol maintain himself in power with the aid of the machine that he, Ben-Gurion, had created. Ben-Gurion's success, therefore, was paradoxical. He created strong democratic institutions that later turned against him. But there is a further paradox. For, as Medding points out, the very success of Mapai "at instilling in Israeli society the general, public, and universal values of mamlakhtiut [statism] undercut its own partisan, socialist-Zionist and pioneering values, and as a result it lost its ideological distinctiveness" (p. 222). Labor created the very conditions through which, after 1967, it could be superseded. The political system created by Ben-Gurion rested in large part on a sense of deference towards leadership, and was made possible by the achievements of Israel's founding fathers. That deference would in any case have disappeared as one generation succeeded another; but the process was speeded up by the indecision of Eshkol in 1967, and later by the errors of the Israeli leadership in the period leading up to the 1973 Yom Kippur war. The Founding of Israeli Democracy takes its place as the most important study of the first twenty years of Israel's domestic history to have appeared in English, and the first major attempt to place the remarkable experience of Israel within the framework of the comparative analysis of democratic states. It will be of interest to students of Israel and to political scientists for many years to come. VERNON BOGDANOR Oxford University

Ritchie Ovendale, Britain, the United States, and the End of the Palestine Mandate 1942-1948. London: The Royal Historical Society and The Boydell Press, 1989. 332 pp.

The main conclusion of this well-researched and concise monograph is that Palestine's fate was shaped to a large extent by Anglo-American relations in the last seven years of the Mandate. The main feature of this relationship was a growing American involvement in the affairs of Palestine, an involvement that affected British policy even more than, or at least as much as, the situation in Palestine itself. The Americans were as eager as the British to find a solution but failed to introduce

360

Book Reviews

any new magical formula for the deadlock; in the end, they left the Palestine tangle, unsolved. In Ovendale's view, their involvement made matters worse: they refused to coordinate their policy with the British, thus tying the latter's hands whenever dual-power pressure was deemed necessary to advance the peace process. The Jewish side benefited from this state of affairs, while the Arab Palestinians became its main victims. The Anglo-American alliance suffered, in the final analysis, only slightly from this shambles. The problem with the thesis is one of emphasis. The two powers certainly played a cynical and mostly incompetent part in Palestine diplomacy in the period covered by the book. But especially toward the end of the Mandate, the local actors were far more important in deciding Palestine's future, since they needed very little encouragement to seek the destruction of each other and were doing their best to utilize the outside powers for their own purposes. In this game of power, as Ovendale's book shows, the Jews had the upper hand, particularly through the good services of the pro-Zionist lobby in Washington. Yet Ovendale fails to juxtapose this with an analysis of the Arab activities vis-a-vis the outside powers. True, the Arab League did very little compared to the Zionist lobby, but it was active and it did have its delegation in the United Nations. The "culprits" in Ovendale's book are indeed the pro-Zionist Jews in Washington. Although his description and analysis of their intrigues and policies is vivid and undoubtedly the best part of his book, he seems to accord them too much attention and importance. Like Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin's biographer, Ovendale adopts almost without critique the British Foreign Office's exaggerated view of the Zionist lobby's strength and its ability to determine American policy in Palestine. He contributes to the debate by pointing out that a suspicious attitude toward the lobby was not Bevin's alone, but had also been harbored by Anthony Eden. Both British foreign secretaries regarded American Jewry as capable of seriously undermining the Atlantic alliance. Ovendale does not tell us whether this was a realistic depiction or antisemitic paranoia, but he does seem to share this attitude. The book begins with an analysis, one of the best I have read, about the way the Zionist lobby won Harry Truman to its side in the last months of 1944. In the following chapter, Ovendale lucidly and convincingly describes the hesitations and internal debates within the British administration about the fate of the Mandate during this same period. Under the influence of Lord Halifax, his ambassador in Washington, Prime Minister Winston Churchill wished to hand the Mandate over to the United States. It was Harold Beeley's realpolitik, combined with a consensual rejection by all the Foreign Office's experts on the Middle East, that convinced Churchill to drop the suggestion. Unfortunately, Ovendale does not define Washington's position regarding this idea. Ovendale next reviews the emergence of the Anglo-American Committee, its significance and impact on the conflict in Palestine. Up to the establishment of the Committee, he discerns a large degree of uniformity in the positions of the State Department and the British Foreign Office. But with Truman's growing commitment to the Jewish aspirations in Palestine, especially during the proceedings of the Committee, the countries' positions became irreconcilable. The book's main shortcoming, its lack of Jewish sources, is evident in these two

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

361

chapters. Ovendale does not, for instance, dispute Bevin's allegation that the displaced persons in Europe were intimidated by the Zionists to opt for Palestine as their coveted destination. This is one of the most important questions about the era under review, yet it does not receive full attention in this book, perhaps because most of the research to date has been published in Hebrew only. Ovendale does, however, put the Palestinian issue in its proper regional and global context. One tends to forget that Palestine was one of many problems troubling the declining British empire and the emerging American one. For the United States, the major postwar issue was the need to confront Communism, which led to two different approaches with regard to Palestine. Officials at the White House felt that conceding to the Jewish aspirations would be the shortest and safest way of solving the Palestine problem, thus enabling them to concentrate on the Cold War issue. Their counterparts in the State and Defense Departments, however, sought the allegiance of the Arab world and viewed with apprehension the president's proZionist policy. On the whole, however, U.S. policy-making was clearer and more consistent than that of the British, which was marred by a complex and unworkable structure unsuitable for a shrinking empire. Truman's pro-Zionism led to a direct confrontation with Bevin over the fate of the Jewish D.P.s in Europe. It led to the American decision to back the AngloAmerican Committee's recommendation to authorize the immigration of 100,000 refugees to Palestine. Infuriated and despairing of further joint ventures, Bevin decided at this point to try and act alone. His new policy, supported by the Morrison-Grady Commission of Anglo-American experts, advocated the cantonization of Palestine into four provinces: two British (the Negev and Jerusalem) and Arab and Jewish autonomous cantons that would be supervised by a British Advisory Council. On this episode in Anglo-American relations (Chapters 5 and 6), Ovendale is at his best and most novel. He has little doubt that the pro-Zionist lobby succeeded in changing Truman's initial support for the plan through tactics ranging from demonization of the British, and Bevin in particular (p. 134), to outright "blackmailing" of Truman (to use the author's terminology) in the form of threats to defeat him in the next election campaign (p. 149). In July 1946 the British were informed that the Morrison-Grady plan was unacceptable to the White House. What ensued was one of the ugliest chapters in Anglo-Jewish relations. The British army in Palestine, angered already by the blowing up of the King David Hotel, embarked on punitive actions in its attempt to stop illegal immigration. Meanwhile, Bevin met with "dovish" Zionist leaders such as Nahum Goldman and Berl Locker and in October 1946 invited representatives of both Arab and Zionist parties to a conference in London to discuss the canonization plan. Arthur Creech Jones, a known sympathizer of the Zionist cause who did not conceal his support for partition, was appointed as the British Secretary of State for the Colonies in order to lure the Jews to the conference. Ovendale describes in detail Creech Jones's policies in Palestine, which ultimately led to the British decision to refer the Mandate to the U.N. This chapter, which also deals with Truman's declaration of support for partition and the effect this declaration had on U.S.-British relations, is somewhat confused and repetitious. In the following chapter, Ovendale analyzes more fully

362

Book Reviews

the British motives for leaving Palestine. Although there is little new here, Ovendale's presentation is concise and clear. The effects of self-imposed limitations in a monograph that concentrates on Anglo-American relations with regard to Palestine become apparent in the last chapters of the book, in which Ovendale details British policies in the last days of the Mandate. Readers desiring a more complete picture of the last fifteen months of the Mandate should refer to other publications, such as those of Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris and Mary Wilson. Ovendale's stress on Anglo-American policymakers' attempts to coordinate their policy towards Palestine is missing in some of these works, and thus complements them. As for the bulk of the book, although not everyone may agree with the prism chosen by the writer, he undoubtedly makes his points lucidly, and his analysis will certainly benefit specialists and scholars of the area and era. ILAN PAPP£ University of Haifa

Anita Shapira (ed.), Haapalah: measef letoladot hahazalah, haberihah, haha'apalah usheerit hapeleitah (Haapalah: Studies in the History of Illegal Immigration into Palestine 1934-1948). Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1990. 433 pp.

The historiography of the haapalah serves as a sort of prototype for the historiography of the Yishuv (Jewish settlement) in Eretz Israel. The accepted terminology, which is loaded with pathos—consider the very word haapalah with its connotation of struggling to reach the summit—expresses the ideological and emotional involvement of those who examine the subject. Ha'apalah has gradually replaced the concept of "illegal immigration," referring to Jewish entry into the land without permission of the authorities. Haapalah, in contrast, harks back to an episode that, at the time, was clearly defined as to duration, methods and leading actors. The accepted time period was from 1934 (when the first ship of organized haapalah arrived) until 1948 (when the establishment of the state of Israel ostensibly permitted free entry into the land). As for methods, the immigration was organized by the political establishment and generally carried out by means of ships that avoided the British mandatory authorities' blockade of the coast. Two types of heroes were identified with the haapalah: the blockade-runners (ma'apilim) themselves— nameless masses—and the emissaries (shelihim) from Eretz Israel who organized it. Leaders of the Yishuv, who made the haapalah central in descriptions of the ethos of the Zionist enterprise, did not wish to rely upon future historians to do justice to the subject. Thus, they entrusted the story of the haapalah to the country's establishment, people who were part of its various political movements. In the Labor movement, Bracha Habes was commissioned to write the first book summarizing the topic. She had already written about two other important subjects, the

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

363

history of the second aliyah and the life of Ben-Gurion. Her book Parcel hashearim (The Gate Breakers) (1957) was published by the Israel Defense Forces; two years later, the revisionists published their own version, Af 'alpi (Despite It All) by Haim Lazar-Lita. In these books, heroes of the ha'apalah were political figures such as Shaul Avigur (head of the organization for Aliyah Bet, who was put in charge of the ha'apalah by the Yishuv's organizing bodies), Yehuda Arazi, Ada Sereni, Ehud Avriel, Aryeh (Lova) Eliav, Venya Hadari, Yossi Hamburger and Ike Aharonovich. Their importance was reinforced when they began to publish their own memoirs; what is noteworthy is that very few of the ma'apilim did the same, perhaps because the ha'apalah was a relatively insignificant episode in the context of all the other hardships they had undergone. Nonetheless, as transformed into a powerful myth, the ha'apalah was treated in poetry, fiction and even cinema. Ari Ben-Canaan, the protagonist of Leon Uris's Exodus (1960), became a worldwide hero. He was no immigrant but rather a suntanned sabra, a kibbutznik, a farmer and a fighter; and on his broad shoulders he carried the nameless ma'apil. These first books about the ha'apalah contain little discussion or analysis of problematic issues. The tales of the Struma and Exodus are told, for example, with no real treatment of the difficulties these ships encountered in running the British blockade. Thus, it remains unclear just how and why the Struma sank, Such issues as who was the central authority for the Aliyah Bet office, who decided how the md'apilim were to react in confrontations with the British and how the maapilim were chosen are also ignored. Only about ten years ago did the haapalah become the basis of broader academic interest with the launching of an interuniversity project under the energetic leadership of Anita Shapira of Tel-Aviv University. The committee initiated twenty-two studies, and its first collective product appears in this selection of research papers. The book's outstanding achievement lies in the fact that we finally have not only ha'apalah, but maapilim as well. To be sure, most of the articles still focus on organization—with the resulting stress on emissaries and organizers—but even these studies deal as well with the immigrants themselves. The most fascinating articles are those that abandon the traditional subject of heroics on the high seas. Raya Adler-Cohen's research is especially noteworthy, an examination of the wartime correspondence between Hedva Rossek, a Hashomer Hazair activist in a small Polish town, and Nathan Schwalb, the Hehalutz emissary in Geneva. From these letters there emerges a sad and gripping picture of daily life in Poland during the Holocaust. Another moving article, written by Irit Keinan, deals with the encounter between the survivors and the first shelihim. According to Keinan, the emissaries had a negative perception of the refugees even before their first encounter with them, and alienation between the two groups increased the doubts and reservations regarding the refugees' chances of successful absorption. Keinan takes a bold stand, arguing that the initial descriptions of the survivors expressed not only the elitist attitude of Israeli heroes encountering miserable Jews who went "like sheep to the slaughter," but also disdain and even apprehension that the survivors would be a bad influence on the Yishuv. David Shapira contributes an interesting article on immigration during the period of British military rule that immediately followed the First World War. Yehiam

364

Book Reviews

Weitz examines a perennial question of Zionist politics: why did the United Kibbutz Movement's emissaries leave Europe immediately with the outbreak of the Second World War? Did they choose to flee, or had they no choice under the circumstances? As might be expected, Weitz has no clear-cut answer; the subject remains, as he puts it, "an open wound." Ronald Zweig's article deals with the topic of the restoration of Holocaust victims' property immediately after the war, and reveals that discussions on the subject began even before the state of Israel was established. The articles describing illegal immigration attempts by Jewish refugees beyond the frontiers of Ashkenazic Europe are particularly significant. Shlomo Shaltiel, who uncovers a pre-Holocaust attempt to get Jews out of Bulgaria, adds a new and important perspective on the question of privately-organized ha'apalah. In an interesting study of the ha'apalah of a specific community— 1,200 Jews from Sfax in Tunisia—Haim Sa'adon reminds us how little is known about illegal immigration from Moslem countries. Shifting the focus of research from Israeli heroism to the Jewish refugee, as is the case in most of these articles, is a necessary step in broadening the discussion on illegal immigration. The geographic framework, for example, needs to be expanded beyond Europe and also beyond the concentration on immigration by sea. More attention should be paid to Africa and Asia, as well as to overland immigration routes. It is also time to work on a broadened chronological framework. Illegal immigration began before 1934 and did not end when the state was established; even after 1948, Jews sought to enter Israel secretly. Apparently the book's editor did consider the issue of expanding the boundaries of discussion: although the English subtitle reads Studies in the History of Illegal Immigration into Palestine 19341948," the Hebrew subtitle—"A Collection on the History of Rescue, Escape, Illegal Immigration, Survivors, and Refugees"—sets no limits as to time, organization or method. It is to be hoped that the ha'apalah project will continue to publish volumes illustrating the implications of this Hebrew subtitle. ZEEV TZAHOR Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Sasson Sofer, Begin: An Anatomy of Leadership. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. 305 pp.

Biographies of political leaders make fascinating reading. Particularly interesting are biographies of contemporary political leaders, since they often present the first comprehensive account of their lives and constitute an initial step in the process by which "history" judges them. By relating a leader's political career to the historical era in which it unfolds, and by portraying his or her life from childhood to maturity, the biographer is in a position to provide a perspective. What struck me about Sasson Sofer's extensive, well-researched biography of Menahem Begin is that the leader whose life and career is described here differs in no way from the Begin we have known during his years in office. The wide

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

365

information we receive on the man, from his early childhood through his activities as Betar leader in Poland, commander of the Irgun in Palestine, head of the Herut opposition for three decades and finally as Israel's prime minister from 1977 to 1983, does not alter his image. Wherever and whenever we meet him, we encounter the same faulty conception of reality and the same lack of control over the environment. Whether on the beach of Kfar Vitkin handling the Altalena affair or in the prime minister's office in Jerusalem conducting the Lebanon war, he remains ever the propagandist, the maximalist, the propounder of ideas and espouser of principles who is dragged along by facts and situations created by his subordinates. Even the sense of mystery created by Begin's voluntary solitude after his resignation fades away as we learn in this biography that there is nothing new in Begin's being "moody, rising to the heights of exultation and sinking into deep depression" (p. 234). The true mystery concerns not Begin but his supporters. While opponents such as David Ben-Gurion always feared Begin's personality and leadership style, the admiration he enjoyed among his associates survived all challenges. Consider Begin's escape from Warsaw. In 1939 with the German conquest of Poland, the leader of Betar fled from the city, leaving behind thousands of rank-and-file members. While experiences of this kind haunted Jewish leaders after the war, Begin's political career was not affected (although the claim that he was certain he was fulfilling his duty had been contested at first by his colleagues). Nor did Begin's strange behavior in Russian captivity in 1940 raise many eyebrows. During the summer of 1940, his mood is described as having been "extraordinary" (p. 10). At a time of great crisis, Begin found himself in Vilna, unable to exert any authority. Imprisonment by the NKVD was thus a profound relief, and he took pleasure in an experience that was by nature traumatic. However heroic his behavior may have seemed to him and to fellow members of the "fighting family," Sofer is right in noting that this event throws light on Begin's personality. The thorough polishing of his shoes, for example, the treatment of his captors with chivalrous courtesy, were the kind of empty gestures that characterized the man. Indeed, the reliance on gestures rather than on action characterized Begin's behavior throughout his life. Even the act considered by him to be the most important of all, the proclamation of revolt in 1944, is seen by Sofer as motivated by a conception "not necessarily connected to the political circumstances of the 1940s" (p. 64). To Begin, the revolt had symbolic—almost metaphysical—meaning. He had a deep, almost mystical belief in the sovereign right conferred upon every nation to achieve independence. The war against the foreign conqueror derived from this; strategic and political considerations took second place. The best and most important part of the book is the author's analysis of Begin's conception of reality together with his historical views, international orientation and strategic and political perspectives. The book is, in fact, written more as an essay in the history of ideas than as a conventional biography. Sofer believes that Begin had a totalistic, romantic conception of reality: "By its very nature, such a view of reality as a single entity does not concern itself with details; it alters the context of facts and events, at times disregarding them completely. Instead of a detailed perception, Begin saw only generalized patterns that recur again and again" (p. 99). This

366

Book Reviews

analysis leads the author to reject the commonly held conspiracy thesis concerning the war in Lebanon. According to this thesis, propounded mainly by Begin's aides, the prime minister played the role of the pathetic hero who was gulled and led astray by his defense minister, Ariel Sharon. But Sofer believes that Begin's basic worldview and his decision-making methods make the war in Lebanon comprehensible without recourse to the conspiracy thesis. The point is well taken. Having been presented with the major features of Begin's thought—his lack of concern with details, his highly stereotyped image of nations, his generalized, simplistic and analogical historical thinking, his weakness for impractical ideas and his military obsessions—the reader can hardly avoid wondering whether the Lebanon war was not as much Begin's as Sharon's. Nor can one avoid the disturbing thought that, in the matter of the war in Lebanon, Begin has once again escaped the judgment of those he led; although no leader, it seems, can escape the judgment of history. MICHAEL KEREN Tel-Aviv University

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

Raphael Z. Aaronson Bar-Han University, 1991 "Tokhnit halimudim hahadashah bamikrah leveit hasefer hamamlakhti-dati: hafalatah vehagormim hamashpiim 'al hahafalah" ("Curriculum for the State Religious Schools: Its Implementation and the Factors Affecting It") Yacoub Haider Abdulrahman Golden Gate University, 1991 "United Nations' Role in the Palestine-Israeli Conflict 1947-50" Ilan Asia Bar-Han University, 1992 "Haimut hayisraeli-beriti besheelat hanegev, 1947-1956" ("The BritishIsraeli Conflict over the Negev, 1947-1956") Amira Avishai Columbia University, 1991 "Culturally-Disadvantaged High Achievers in Israel: University Professors Born in Moslem Countries" Uri Bar-Joseph Stanford University, 1990 "Out of Control: Intelligence Intervention in Politics in the United States of America, Britain and Israel" Neima Barzel University of Haifa, 1991 "Yisrael vegermaniyah 1945-1956: hitpathut yahas hahevrah vehamedinah beyisrael legermaniyah beikvot hashoah" ("Israel and Germany 1945-1956: Development of the Attitude of Israeli Society and State Toward Germany in the Wake of the Holocaust") Devora Barzilai The Hebrew University, 1991 "Habayit haleumi hayehudi bahashivah uvcfasiyah hamedinit haberitit bashanim 1917-1923" ("The Jewish National Home in British Thought and Practice During the Years 1917-1923") Sheri Beckerman-Weisz Adelphi University, 1991 "Daughters of Ruth: A Study of the Relationship Between Object Relations, Locus-of-Control, and Conversion to Judaism in Intermarriage" Sharon Rae Bender Loyola University of Chicago, 1992 "Soviet Immigrant Jewry in the Chicago Area (1960-1980): Enculturation and Education" Aryeh Ben-Tov Tel-Aviv University, 1991 "Peulot hazelav haadom habeinleumi lehazalat yehudim behungariyah bamilhetnet haolam hasheniyah" ("Rescue Efforts of the International Red Cross on Behalf of Hungarian Jewry During the Second World War") 367

368

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

Nancy E. Berg University of Pennsylvania, 1991 "Israeli Writers from Iraq: Exile from Exile" Yitzhak Berger New York University, 1991 "The Orthodox Jewish Woman: A Study of Cultural Conflict and Psychological Stress" Yisrael Bialostotsky The Hebrew University, 1991 "Shikum hayishuv hayehudi befolin aharei hashoah {1944-1950)" ("Rehabilitation of the Jewish Community in Poland After the Holocaust [1944— 1950]") Shimshon Bichler The Hebrew University, 1992 "Hakalkalah hapolitit shel hozaot bitahon beyisrael" ("Political Economics of Defense Spending in Israel") Berta Stein Bienenstock New York University, 1991 "Analysis of Jewish Religious Observance in Nazi-Occupied Europe During World War II" Linda-Renee Bloch University of Texas, Austin, 1990 "Communicating as an American in Israel: The Immigrants' Perception" Sherry Helene Blumberg Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles, 1991 "Educating for Religious Experience: An Analysis of the Definitions of Four Major American Theologians and the Implications of Their Thoughts for Jewish Educational Curriculum and Practice" Edward Breuer Harvard University, 1990 "In Defense of Tradition: The Masoretic Text and its Rabbinic Interpretation in the Early German Haskalah" Ludger Brinker University of Massachusetts, 1991 "From Immigrant Brownsville to the World of the New York Intellectual: A Study of Alfred Kazin's Autobiographies" Yaakov Burot The Hebrew University, 1992 " 'Ruah hakodesh bekerev aheinu beashkenaz': temurot beyahadut germaniyah lenokhah tahalikhei shinui kalkali, hevrati ufoliti baraikh besof hameah hatesh'a ^esrei" ('"The Holy Spirit Amidst Our Brethren from Ashkenaz': Transformations in German Jewry in the Face of Economic, Social and Political Changes in the Reich at the End of the Nineteenth-Century") Robert Thomas Byrnes University of California, Los Angeles, 1990 "Drowned Men and 'Degenerate' Jews: Myths of the Fall in James Joyce's Ulysses" Miri Calelson Bar-Han University, 1991 "'Izuvim metaforiyim bashirah haivrit hahadashah; 'iyun mashveh beshirat Bialik—shirat Fogel" ("Metaphoric Configurations in Modern Hebrew Poetry: A Comparative Study of the Poetry of H.N. Bialik and D. Fogel") Joseph Ivan Chernick California School of Professional Psychology, 1991 "Living With Death: Death Anxiety and Adaption in Old Age Among Auschwitz Survivors and Jews Who Fled Nazi Germany"

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

369

Atay Citron New York University, 1989 "Pageantry and Theater in the Service of Jewish Nationalism in the United States, 1933-1946" Helen Kalson Cohen Harvard University, 1990 "Caught in Between: When Jewish Home and Jewish School Tell the Child a Different Story" Raanan Cohen Tel-Aviv University, 1991 "Hahitpathut hapolitit shel 'arviyei yisrael barei hazbaatam lakeneset beahat'esrei mdarakhot behirot 1948-1984" ("The Political Development of Israeli Arabs as Reflected in the Voting Patterns in Eleven Knesset Elections, 19481984") Raya Cohen Tel-Aviv University, 1992 "Solidariyut bemivhan hashoah: peilut hairgunim hayehudiyim haolamiyim bezheneva, 1939-1942" ("The Test of Solidarity During the Holocaust: Activities of the International Jewish Organizations in Geneva, 1939-1942") Yonatan Cohen The Hebrew University, 1992 "Kivunim nivharim beheker hapilosofiyah hayehudit bizmaneinu: hashlakhot letikhnun limudi" ("Selected Directions in Contemporary Jewish Philosophy: Implications for Curriculum Planning") Eugene Abraham Cooperman New York University, 1991 "Turco-Jewish Relations in the Ottoman City of Salonica, 1889-1912: Two Communities in Support of the Ottoman Empire" Makram Izzat Copty University of Texas, Austin, 1990 "Knowledge and Power in Education: The Making of the Israeli-Arab Educational System" David De Priese Tel-Aviv University, 1992 "Tenuat hapo'alim beheifa, 1919-1929: mehkar bahistorlyah shel po'alim 'ironiyim beerez yisrael hamandatorit" ("The Workers' Movement in Haifa, 1919-1929: Historical Research on Urban Workers in Mandatory Eretz Israel") Eliezer Domka The Hebrew University, 1992 "Yehudei Hamburg (1928-1933): kehilah be'itot mashber" ("The Jews of Hamburg: A Community in Times of Crisis") Pamela J. Dorn Indiana University, 1991 "Change in Ideology: The Ethnomusicology of Turkish Jewry" Shaul Dudakov The Hebrew University, 1992 "Hasifrut haantishemit berusiyah bameot hatesh'a 'esrei vehaesrim vehaperotokolim shel ziknei ziyon" ("Antisemitic Literature in Russia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and the Protocols of the Elders ofZion") Abraham J. Edelheit City University of New York, 1992 "The Yishuv in the Shadow of the Holocaust: Palestinian Jewry and the Emerging Nazi Threat, 1933-1939" Jeremy B. Edlow New York University, 1989 "The Theme of Escape in the Novels of Aharon Appelfeld"

370

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

John Morris Efron Columbia University, 1991 "Defining the Jewish Race: The Self-Perceptions and Responses of Jewish Scientists to Scientific Racism in Europe, 1882-1933" Massoud Ahmad Eghbarieh University of Maryland-College Park, 1991 "Arab Citizens in Israel: The Ongoing Conflict with the State" Ellen Eisenberg University of Pennsylvania, 1990 "Jewish Agricultural Colonies in Southern New Jersey: The Process of Migration, Settlement and Adaptation" Steven Frank Epperson Temple University, 1991 "Gathering and Restoration: Early Mormon Identity and the Jewish People" Sheila Erlich New York University, 1990 "The Relationship of Holocaust Reference Group Involvement, Jewish Identification, Holocaust Identification and Self-Esteem in Survivors of the Holocaust" Shmuel Feiner The Hebrew University, 1991 "Hahaskalah beyahasah lahistoriyah: hakarat he'avar vetifkudov betenuat hahaskalah hayehudit 1782-1882" ("The Haskalah and its Relationship to History: Acknowledgement of the Past and its Functioning in the Jewish Enlightenment 1782-1882") Sharon Mary Franklin-Rahkonen "Jewish Identity in Finland"

Indiana University, 1991

Reena Sigman Friedman Columbia University, 1991 '"These are Our Children': Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 18801925" Tuvia Frieling The Hebrew University, 1992 "Ben-Gurion veshoat yehudei eiropa 1939-1945" ("Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust of European Jewry, 1939-1945") Allen Glicksman University of Pennsylvania, 1990 "The Psychological Weil-Being of Elderly Jews: A Comparative Analysis" Nili Rachel Scharf Gold Jewish Theological Seminary, 1990 "The Transformation of Images and Structures in the Poetry of Yehudah Amichai" Robin Claire Goldberg Northwestern University, 1991 "Imagining the Feminine: Storying and Restorying Womanhood Among Lubavitch Hasidic Women" Leib Louis Greenberg Tel-Aviv University, 1992 "Tenuat hd'avodah hayisraelit bemashber: 1957-1970, hakalkalah hapolitit shel hakesharim bein mapai, hahistadrut vehamedinah" ("The Israeli Labor Movement in Crisis: The Political Economics of the Links Between Mapai, the Histadrut and the State, 1957-1970") Ron Greenstein University of Wisconsin, 1991 "Settlement Resistance and Conflict: Class, Nation, State and Political Discourse in South Africa and Palestine/Israel to 1948"

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

371

Fernando Javier Guerra University of Michigan, 1990 "Ethnic Politics in Los Angeles: The Emergence of Black, Jewish and Latino and Asian Officeholders, 1960-1989" Lea Fridman Hamaoui City University of New York, 1991 "Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in the Representation of the Holocaust" Arye Hecht Bar-Han University, 1991 "Darekhei *avodat hakeneset beyisrael: peulatah besugiyat yahasei hashilton hamerkazi vehamekomi" ("How the Knesset in Israel Works: A Case Study— The Relation Between Central and Local Government") Michael Bruce Herzbrun University of Rochester, 1991 "The Transfer of Religious Values from Father to Son: Father Support and Religious Communication in the Jewish Community" Esther Herzog The Hebrew University, 1992 "Sugiyot veyahasei koah-telut bemerkaz kelitah shebo 'olim meetiyopiyah" ("Issues in the Power-Dependency Relationship of Ethiopian Immigrants in an Immigrant Absorption Center") Moshe Hoch Bar-IIan University, 1992 "Hatarbut hamusikalit bekerev hayehudim tahat hashilton hanazi befolin (1939-1945)" ("Jewish Musical Culture in Poland Under the Nazi Regime [1939-1945]") Reed Holmes University of Haifa, 1990 "Joseph Smith, Jr. and George J. Adams: Gentile Dreamers of Zion" Ariel Horovitz The Hebrew University, 1991 "Yehudei arazot haberit, hahevrah vehamimshal haamerikayi mul shoal yehudei eiropah 1942-1944" ("American Jewry, Society and the U.S. Administration and the Holocaust of European Jewry, 1942-1944") Patricia Hurshell University of Washington, 1991 "When Silence Speaks, When Women Sorrow: Rue and Difference in the Lamentations for the Six Million" Gadi-Yigal Ham The Hebrew University, 1992 "Hakamat hasokhnut hayehudit hamurhevet 1923-1929" ("The Establishment of the Enlarged Jewish Agency, 1923-1929") Edward Richard Isser Stanford University, 1991 "The Probable, the Possible, and the Ineffable: Anglo-American Holocaust Drama" Ephraim Kahana University of South Africa, 1991 "Israel's Changing Policy Towards South Africa, 1948-1988" Esther Karson California School of Professional Psychology, 1989 "Borderline Phenomena in Children of Holocaust Survivors" Diana Keller The Hebrew University, 1992 "Hahinukh hamamlakhti vehahinukh hamamlakhti-dati kishtei maarakhot id-

37i

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations iyologiyot" ("State and State-Religious Education as Two Ideological Systems")

Laura Alter Klapman Northwestern University, 1991 "Sectarian Strategies for Stability and Solidarity: A Theory for the Remarkable Durability of the Lubavitch Movement" Avraham Kuber The Hebrew University, 1992 "Dinamikah shel hakhraah zevait bemilhamah: misgeret taiyoretit venituah hamikreh kayisraeli" ("Dynamics of Military Decision-Making in Times of War: The Theoretical Framework and Analysis of the Israeli Case") Rachel Kollender Bar-Han University, 1992 "Mekomah shel hamusikah baliturgiyah shel 'adat hayehudim hakarayim beyisrael" ("The Role of Music in the Karaite Liturgy in Israel") Alvin Irwin Lander University of Toronto, 1990 "Social Spending Attitudes Among Canadian Jews: An Empirically-Grounded and Phenomenological Approach" Ira'Leifer Adelphi University, 1990 "The Relationship Between Religious Involvement and Anxiety Among Jewish College Students" Avigdor Levenheim The Hebrew University, 1991 "Hanhagat hakehilah hayehudit haneyologit shel pesht bashanim 1914-1919: maamadah ufiilutah bazibur hayehudi" ("Leadership of the Neolog Jewish Community of Pest During the Years 1914-1919: Its Standing and Activities Among the Jewish Populace") Mordechay Lior University of Haifa, 1992 "Jacob Nunez Cardozo uFrancis Lewis Cardozo: yehudim ushehorim bidrom karolina bameah hatesh'a 'esrei" ("Jacob Nunez Cardozo and Francis Lewis Cardozo: Jews and Blacks in 19th Century South Carolina") Marcia Sachs Littel Temple University, 1990 "The Anne Frank Institute of Philadelphia, the First Interfaith Holocaust Education Center: A Critique of its Educational Philosophy and History, 19751988" Kevin Joseph Lourie Brown University, 1990 "The Negotiation of Orthodoxy: An Ethnographic Study of the Assimilation Strategies of Religious Soviet Jewish Immigrants to Israel" Miriam R. Lowi Princeton University, 1990 "The Politics of Water Under Conditions of Scarcity and Conflict: The Jordan and Riparian States" Yehuda Lukacs American University, 1989 "Sub-rosa Peace: The Dynamics of Israeli-Jordanian Functional Cooperation, 1967-1988" Sheng-Mei Ma University of Indiana, 1990 "The Holocaust in Anglo-American Literature: Particularism and Universalism in Relation to Documentary and Fictional Genres"

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

373

Ruth Jacknow Markowitz State University of New York, Stonybrook, 1990 "My Daughter, the Teacher: Second Generation Jewish Teachers in the New York City Public School System, 1920-1940" Mahmud Masalhah The Hebrew University, 1992 "Hakesher bein hevdelim tarbutiyim levein hahashivah hayeziratit bekerev ziirim yehudiyim vearaviyim beyisrael" ("The Connection Between Cultural Differences and Creative Thinking Among Jewish and Arab Israeli Youth") Rafael Medoff Yeshiva University, 1991 "American Zionist Leaders and the Palestinian Arabs, 1898-1948" Esther Meir Tel-Aviv University, 1992 "Mediniyut hasokhnut-hayehudit umemshelet-yisrael besheelat ^aliyat yehudei Irak, 1941-1950" ("Policy of the Jewish Agency and the Israeli Government Concerning the Aliyah of Iraqi Jewry, 1941-1950") Tziporah Melitz Jewish Theological Seminary, 1990 "A Theoretical Model for the Construction of a Normative Philosophy of Modern Jewish Education as Applied to the Theory of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik" Nahum Menahem The Hebrew University, 1991 "Yahadut suriyah ulevanon bein haleumiyut haaravit vehatenuah haziyonit (bein shetei milhamot haolam)" ("Syrian and Lebanese Jewry, Arab Nationalism and the Zionist Movement Between the Two World Wars") Sybil E. Montgomery Rutgers University, 1991 "The Integration of Jews by Choice into the Philadelphia Jewish Community" Malka Muchnik Bar-Han University, 1992 "Hevdelei lashon bein gevarim levein nashim ba'itonut haivrit" ("Language Differences Between Men and Women in the Hebrew Press") David Nathan Myers Columbia University, 1991 '"From Zion Will Go Forth Torah': Jewish Scholarship and the Zionist Return to History" Morton Herman Narrowe Jewish Theological Seminary, 1990 "Zionism in Sweden: Its Beginnings Until the End of World War I" Evan Stewart Nelson University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1991 "The Dynamics of Interfaith Marriage Involving Jews" David Neuhaus The Hebrew University, 1992 "Dal kemashkit politi ukhme'orer politi 'a/ hayei hadat shel haaravim beyisrael mi!948 ve'ad 1989" ("Religion as a Political Suppressor of or Catalyst for the Religious Life of Israeli Arabs from 1948 until 1989") Yvonne DeCarlo Newsome Northwestern University, 1991 "A House Divided: Conflict and Cooperation in African American-Jewish Relations" Paul Pesenti Seton Hall University, 1990 "Family Values and Psychological Adjustment Among Female Italian and Jewish Immigrant Nursing Home Residents"

374

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

Dianne Marks Plotkin University of Texas, Arlington, 1990 "A Historiographic Analysis of a Survivor's Narrative: The Story of Leo Laufer" Avraham Polovin Bar-Han University, 1991 "Tahalikhei hisardut shel tat kevuzot bamaarekhet hakibuzit" ("Survival of Sub-Groups in the Kibbutz Society") Sondra Rappoport The Union Institute, 1991 "Coping and Adaptation to Massive Psychic Trauma: Case Studies of Nazi Holocaust Survivors" Mordechai Regev Tel-Aviv University, 1991 "Boo shel hawk: mashmaut, hitmodedut umivneh bisdei hamusikah hapopularit beyisrael" ("The Coming of Rock: Its Significance and the Process of Its Becoming a Part of the Israeli Popular Music Scene") Yitzhak Reiter The Hebrew University, 1992 "Hawaqfhamuslemi birushalayim bitkufat hamandat" ("The Muslim Waqf in Jerusalem During the British Mandate") Hillel Resnizki Bar-Han University, 1991 "Yesodot metafiziyim uvituyim bapoetikah hasiporit shel Agnon, Yehoshua uBorges: 'iyun mashveh" ("Metaphysical Elements and their Expression in the Narrative Poetics of Agnon, Yehoshua and Borges: A Comparative Study") William Harris Ressler "Jewish Socialization and Psychological Well-Being"

Yale University, 1991

Yohanan Ron Bar-Han University, 1993 "Hamusikah hakelit shel Yosef Tal: signon vehashkafah omanutit" ("The Instrumental Music of Yosef Tal: Style and Artistic Outlook") Barbara Lee Rosoff Rutgers University, 1990 "Student Motivation to Learn in the Conservative Jewish Supplemental School" Bilhah Rubinstein Bar-Han University, 1991 "Kabalah ufoetikah bayezirot shel Yehoshua Bar-Yosef veYizhak Bashevis Singer" ("Kabbalah and Poetics in the Works of Yehoshua Bar-Yosef and Isaac Bashevis Singer") Jeffrey K. Salkin Princeton Theological Seminary, 1991 "Appropriating a Liturgical Context for Bar/Bat Mitzvah" David Dor Salomonica University of Pittsburgh, 1989 "Gush Emunim: Faith Transformed into a Political Social Movement" Clarise Sharrock Samuels Rutgers University, 1990 "Surrealism in the Holocaust: An Inquiry into the Epistemological and Ideological Structure of Paul Celan's Language" Aliza Savir New York University, 1991 "The Jerusalem Post: An Analysis of the Relationship Between Ownership and Editorial Content"

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

375

Mindy Schimmel University of Chicago, 1990 "How Israeli-Palestinians Construe Their Identities" Robert Samuel Schine Jewish Theological Seminary, 1990 "Jewish Thought in Flux: Max Wiener (1882-1950)" Claude Guy Schleuderer University of Georgia, 1990 "Issues of the Phoenix: Personality Characteristics of Children of Holocaust Survivors" Gerda Charlotte Schmidt University of Pittsburgh, 1991 "From Turmoil to Unity: Martin Buber's Efforts Towards a New Type of Jewish Community, 1897-1915" Mark Mitchell Serels New York University, 1990 "A History of the Jews of Tangiers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" Chaya Shaham The Hebrew University, 1991 "Hashpd'at shirat Alterman hamukdemet (1938-1944) 'al hashirah ha'ivrit hazeirah midor hapalmah ve'ad havurat 'likrat' (1942-1955)" ("Influence of Alterman's Early Poetry [1938-1944] on Hebrew Poetry from the Generation of the Palmach Until the Time of the 'Likrat' Group [1942-1955]") Glenn Richard Sharfman University of North Carolina, 1989 "The Jewish Youth Movement in Germany, 1900-1936: A Study in Ideology and Organization" Norton David Shargel Jewish Theological Seminary, 1990 "Ludwig Philippson: The Rabbi as Journalist—An Anthology of His Writings with an Introductory Essay" Karen Shawn New York University, 1991 "The End of Innocence: A Literature-Based Approach to Teaching Young Adolescents About the Holocaust" Moshe D. Sherman Yeshiva University, 1991 "Bernard Illowy and Nineteenth Century American Orthodoxy" Vicki Shiran City University of New York, 1991 "Political Corruption: The Power of the Game—The Case of Israel" Yoav Silbert Tel-Aviv University, 1992 "Megamot behitpathut histaderut hamorim, 1903-1913" ("Trends in the Development of the Teachers' Union, 1903-1913") Peter E. Silen The Wright Institute, 1991 "Value Conflict and Complexity of Thought: American-Jewish Attitudes Towards Israeli Militancy in the Occupied Territories" Cheryl A. Silverman Columbia University, 1989 "Jewish Emigres and Popular Images of Jews in Japan" Mark Silverman The Hebrew University, 1992 "Hahinukh bakibuz hadati mireishito 'adyameinu: historiyah veidiyologiyah" ("Education in the Religious Kibbutz from its Inception Until the Present Time: History and Ideology")

376

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

Cipora Sivan Bar-IIan University, 1992 "Shirat Yaakov Steinberg" ("The Poetry of Jacob Steinberg") David Aaron Sklar The Union Institute, 1990 "A Phenomenological Investigation of the Hasidic Experience: An Analysis of Philosophic, Religious and Psychological Dimensions" Sharon Kay Smith Brigham Young University, 1992 "Elbert D. Thomas and America's Response to the Holocaust" Nechama Leah Sorscher Adelphi University, 1991 "The Effects of Parental Communication of Wartime Experiences on Children of Survivors of the Holocaust" Zahara Szasz Stessel New York University, 1991 "Jewish Life in Hungary: The History of Abaujszanto" Robert Phillip Tabak Temple University, 1990 "The Transformation of Jewish Identity: The Philadelphia Experience, 19191945" Susan L. Tananbaum Brandeis University, 1991 "Generations of Change: The Anglicization of Russian-Jewish Immigrant Women in London, 1880-1939" Susan Tedmon University of Pennsylvania, 1991 "Collaborative Acts of Literacy in a Traditional Jewish Community" Edward Sheldon Treister University of Houston, 1991 "School Mission and School Success: A Case Study of a Jewish Parochial School" Madelaine Ruth Tress New York University, 1990 "Religion and the 'Secular' State: Israel Since 1973" Katharina von Kellenbach Temple University, 1990 "Anti-Judaism in Christian-Rooted Feminist Writings: An Analysis of Major U.S. and West German Feminist Theologians" Duane Leroy Vorhees Bowling Green State University, 1990 "The 'Jewish Science' of Immanuel Velikovsky: Culture and Biography as Ideational Determinants" Barbara Eidelman Wachs Jewish Theological Seminary, 1990 "A Pre-Curricular Study of Students' Attitudes Toward Family and Jewish Values as Reflected in Classroom Responses to Rabbinic Tales" Mark Stuart Wiener Columbia University, 1990 "Dial-a-Daf: An Innovation in Talmud Study" Donald Scott Will University of Denver, 1990 "The Dynamics of the Settler State: A Comparative Study of Israel and South Africa" David Wurmser Johns Hopkins University, 1990 "The Evolution of Israeli Grand Strategy, Strategy and Tactics and the Confluence with Classic Democratic Philosophy"

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

377

Leor Yahalomi University of Pennsylvania, 1991 "Promoting International Cooperation as a Strategy for Economic Development: A Case Analysis of Israeli and U.S. High-Technology Partnerships" Moshe Zimmerman Tel-Aviv University, 1992 " 'Kez hamitos : haderama ha'ivrit be'ikvot milhemet sheshet hayamim" ('"The End of Myth': Hebrew Drama in the Wake of the Six-Day War")

Studies in Contemporary Jewry X Edited by Jonathan Frankel Symposium—Reshaping the Jewish Past: History and Historians STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM, Small Forays, Grand Theories and Deep Origins: Current Trends in the Historiography of the Holocaust ISRAEL BARTAL, "True Knowledge and Wisdom": Thoughts on Orthodox Historiography DAVID BIALE, Modern Jewish Ideologies and the Historiography of Jewish Politics SHMUEL FEINER, Nineteenth-Century Jewish Historiography: The Second Track JOSEPH HELLER, From Mythological to Scientific Historiography: Research on the Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine PAULA HYMAN, The Dynamics of Social History ROBERT LIBERLES, Post-Emancipation Historiography and the Jewish Historical Societies of America and England DAVID N. MYERS, Was there a "Jerusalem School" ? An Inquiry into the First Generation of Researchers at the Hebrew University

Essays ELIAHU FELDMAN, The Rothschilds and the Russian Loans: Jewish High Finance and Jewish Solidarity ZALI GUREVICH and GIDEON ARAN, "Hamakom": The Mythology and Phenomenology of the Land of Israel EMMANUEL SIVAN, The Life of the Dead: Sabras and Immigrants YEHIAM WEITZ, Changing Conceptions of the Holocaust: The Kasztner Case . . . Plus review essays, book reviews, and a listing of recent doctoral dissertations 378

Note on Editorial Policy

Studies in Contemporary Jewry is pleased to accept manuscripts for possible publication. Authors of essays on subjects generally within the contemporary Jewish sphere (from the turn of the century to the present) should send three copies to: The The The Mt.

Editor, Studies in Contemporary Jewry Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry Hebrew University Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel

Essays must not exceed thirty-five pages in length and must be double-spaced throughout (including indented quotations and footnotes). Reviews must not exceed one thousand words per book.