Paul Eidelberg: : Jerusalem vs. Athens: In Quest of a General Theory of Existence. Lanham: University Press of America, 1983.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 14, Nos. 2 & 3, May & September 1986. Republished with permission.

 

“In the history of mankind, two cities stand above all others and vie for men’s souls: Jerusalem and Athens.” To “almost all participants in this conflict,” Jerusalem stands for religion, revelation, and traditional authority whereas Athens stands for philosophy, reason, and freedom of thought. Eidelberg dissents. “These dichotomies are not only superficial; they are a distortion of the truth. We shall present evidence indicating that there is far greater rationality and intellectual freedom in the city of King David and King Solomon than in the city of Plato and Aristotle. We shall show that the Tree of Knowledge, which bore fruit in Athens, cannot survive without the Tree of Life whose roots are in Jerusalem. Indeed, we shall see how the Athenian tree of knowledge, without the Tree of Life, yields madness and death.”

Eidelberg’s claim should not be unthinkingly dismissed. As a student of Professor Leo Strauss he had guidance through many of the most obscure yet important neighborhoods of “Athens.” Fortified by the teachings of logician and Torah master Rabbi Chaim Dr. Chaim Zimmerman, Eidelberg boldly challenges Strauss on Straussian territory: “Unfortunately, Prof. Strauss did not penetrate the esoterics of the Torah or of the Talmud. Had he done so he would have transcended the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns of which he was otherwise the master.” Eidelberg makes the still bolder claim that modern historicism, Strauss’s bète noire, glimpses a truth denied by the best Greek philosophers: theory and practice can ultimately harmonize, and humanity is perfectible. He makes perhaps the boldest claim of all in calling true revelation entirely rational, superior to philosophy and modern science; the Torah contains the means by which human perfection can be achieved. [1] Eidelberg intends to provide a “general theory of existence” based upon a rational understanding of the Torah. In doing so, he intends to show that modern mathematical physics is not the paradigm of true knowledge; the attempt of modern social ‘scientists to use this physics as a model must fail.

Eidelberg writes ten chapters. The first and most complex of these contains the “basic principles” of the “Torah Theory of Existence.” Following Zimmerman, Eidelberg discusses twentieth-century physics, arguing that both quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity disprove the physics of classical Athens but do so by pointing beyond physical existence itself. [2] This tends to confirm the Torah principle that an epistemology based upon “the postulation of any physical or mental existent, process, or law as self-sustaining” and unified is a form of idolatry, the worship of a created thing. Thus the Torah stands against any form of monism, as distinguished from monotheism. Although many scholars contend that there is no Hebrew equivalent for the word ‘nature,’ Eidelberg observes that one of the names of God, ‘Elohim, appears in relation to the multiplicity of cyclical forces manifested in creation. However, these forces do not constitute the self-sustaining nature of the philosophers, the nature of which man is a part; rather, “the universe owes its existence to the ceaseless Will of the Creator.” Another of God’s names, HaShem, appears in relation not to cyclicality but to linear, providential, teleological laws “more fundamental” than the cyclical ‘natural’ laws. This exemplifies the principle of “asymmetric complementarity,” whereby nature and history are ordered by means of dualities, one element of each duality being the stronger. In this case, the physical world has ‘its own’ laws but these are governed, finally, by nonphysical laws. “Judaism’s distinctive task” is “to sanctify the physical world so that the latter is brought into harmony with the nonphysical world.” Far from being a handbook for mystics, the Kabala “embodies knowledge” about “the structure of creation, about the relationship between nonphysical and physical existence,” with scientific and mathematical rigor. Judaism thus avoids “the self-gratification and self-glorification” of the Cainites and the “one-sided asceticism or spiritualism” of the Sethites. Two systems of law—the Finite Halacha (Dinei Adam), governing immediate daily duties, and the Infinite Halacha (Dinei Shamayim), governing “the conduct of individuals and nations throughout history”—combine law, rationality, and morality in a manner Plato and Aristotle would regard with considerable skepticism. But the philosophers are descendants of Esau, “the nations” or goyim, who despite their best efforts inhabit and exploit the physical world and serve egalitarianism. The descendants of Jacob, the Israelites, inhabit the spiritual domain that will master the physical in accordance with Torah principles of hierarchy. Both the descendants of Esau and the descendants of Jacob serve laws that conduce to the perfection of mankind. One might say, however, that the best of the descendants of Esau know that they do not know what they are doing, whereas the best of the descendants of Jacob do know something of what they are doing.

In the second chapter Eidelberg contrasts philosophic pride with Torah anava, usually translated as humility. He observes that Plato’s Socrates ‘forgets’ justice and gentleness in his final enumerations of the philosopher’s virtues. (The word Eidelberg translates as “gentle” is translated as “tame” by Allan Bloom.) He goes so far as to argue (citing the Republic 501a and 541a) that Socrates would have all citizens over the age of ten exterminated, a somewhat harsh reading that allows him to call the ancient/modern dichotomy (epitomized for Strauss in the contrast between Plato and Machiavelli) exaggerated. He also contends that if (as Socrates contends) the unexamined life is not worth living, “it would not be unjust to exterminate those unfit to pursue the philosophic life”—the very ones eliminated from Plato’s republic. But this as it were deadly serious reading of Plato fails if justice is not the philosopher’s virtue or purpose. [3] Eidelberg charges that Plato and indeed all the philosophers deify the intellect and attempt to murder God. This manifests their pride. “Pride of intellect is the human vice par excellence.” The Torah man, who is anav, “does not even regard himself as ultimately deserving any credit for his wisdom or greatness,” for the means of achieving these were given to him. [4] “Judaism is based on gratitude,” gratitude not only to God as the giver of nature’s cyclical laws, apprehensible by the human mind, but the laws of HaShem, inaccessible to the unaided human mind. (Eidelberg denies that this veers into mysticism; Torah laws, once given, “must and can be tested like any scientific theory; by its internal logical consistency and by its power to elucidate nature and history…”) “The man of Torah does not want to make a name for himself; he wants only to sanctify the name of HaShem. To sanctify the name of HaShem requires not the union of wisdom and power, so much as the union of wisdom and anava from which power in the form of just rule and dominion follows.” In this way the judges of the Sanhedrin excel Plato’s philosopher-kings.

In the third chapter Eidelberg writes that “Machiavelli only vulgarized Plato or made public what Plato preferred to remain private.” Plato’s “city in speech” is “founded on force” and “preserved by force unmitigated by fraud yet all serving the quest for truth.” (One must ask, Does Machiavelli’s city serve the quest for truth? If so, is Machiavelli’s ‘truth’ identical to Plato’s?) Eidelberg contrasts the inhumane Platonic founding (whether that described in the Republic or that described in the Laws) with the founding of ancient Israel, and particularly with the efforts of “the most anav man on the face of the earth,” Moses. “Infinitely removed from the idolatry of nationalism and imperialism, Israel, serving only God, would be proud as a nation (Deut. 33:29), yet, at the same time, each individual member of this nation would be, like Moses, anav. This complementarity of humbleness and pride corresponds to a perfect complementarity between the individual and society which is to found only in the Torah of Israel.” Thus Judaism overcomes the tension between the wise individual and the community—a tension best described by Plato. Eidelberg argues that philosophy makes this tension inevitable because philosophy understands cyclical nature only; anava would be irrational in a meaningless, ever-wheeling cosmos. Indeed, what has lately come to be called ‘self-actualization’ “is a fit and all-consuming imperative in such a universe,” as Spinoza more-or-less openly taught. Instead of the tension between the philosopher and the polis Judaism poses a problem, if not necessarily a permanent tension, between the Creator and the created. “How can the Absolutely Transcendent be Immanent?” The problem is “insoluble” by the finite human mind; “mysticism, insofar as it involves a supposed unio mystic with HaShem, is utterly foreign and abhorrent to the Torah,” a denial of God’s transcendence or holiness. We can only know God “indirectly through His works or actions”: through nature, history, and especially through His most illuminating work, the Torah, which “harbors a pure system of symbolic logic” whose rules of exposition are given orally “only to the Jewish people, and then only to those who, through long and rigorous discipline, have mastered the logical system and esoteric wisdom underlying the deliberately disordered teachings of the Talmud.”

The six following chapters include two on history, two on science, and two on what might very loosely be called psychology. In the chapters on history, Eidelberg writes that “the primary historical function of Greek philosophy was to destroy the Greek pantheon, that is, primitive idolatry.” Platonic “rationalism” “identifies Being with being known,” thus deifying intellect. “In the denial of creation ex nihilo is the fundamental conflict between Athens and Jerusalem.” Aristotle’s “empiricism” also deifies intellect by working its way to a “Prime Mover,” defined as “thought thinking about itself.” “A Creator-God would be absolutely inscrutable, an offense to the philosopher’s intellect.” Eidelberg observes that this deification of mind paradoxically “imposes limits to man’s intellectual power and creativity” because it “denies the possibility of man ever achieving a radical power over nature,” the power to “modulate” natural laws. This power “presupposes knowledge of nonphysical laws from which the laws of nature are derived.” The moderns, one might say, absurdly try to use nature to conquer nature. But the only true way to conquer nature is to employ non-natural laws; creativity ‘in God’s image’ rather than the ersatz creativity of self-deifying philosophers, is the promise of Judaism.

In destroying the Greek pantheon, the classical philosophers weakened the polis and encouraged universalism—the conception of “man qua man.” Despite their attempts to conceal this apolitical teaching, the classical Greek philosophers thus served the idea of equality in the sense that all nations could be regarded as equally artificial. As Eidelberg asks, “How is it that ‘nature’ fails to produce one good regime?” Further, this nature fails to produce the sense of obligation needed to sustain a just hierarchy Eidelberg sees that such Torah incidents as Abraham’s binding of his son Isaac and the severe methods employed during the conquest of Canaan might easily be cited if one wished to raise questions concerning the justice of God and the Israelites. Accordingly, he argues that “Abraham’s sacrifice… teaches us that although man is nothing in relation to God, he is the acme of God’s creation.” As for the destruction of the Canaanites, it was done “to stamp out the pagan practice of sacrificing the innocent for the sake of the guilty.” Jewish practice contrasts with the perhaps proto-Machiavellian acts of Plato’s founders. It also contrasts with Christianity, which Eidelberg blames for sanctioning just such a ‘pagan’ sacrifice. “The pagan practice of sacrificing the innocent for the guilty is a form of aristocide,” hence egalitarian. In practice, “by eliminating the coherent and comprehensive system of laws of the Torah, Christianity was forced to adopt the patchwork of laws of pagan nations, laws which could not but conflict with and eviscerate the unguarded teachings of the Nazarene or his disciples. Hence Christianity was and still is compelled to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s, when in truth, nothing in a monotheistic universe belongs to Caesar.” The church/state separation leaves Christianity vulnerable to the separation of morality and politics effected by its enemy, Machiavelli. Eidelberg decries the “sacrifice of intellect” required by the Christian doctrine of salvation by faith. “The Book of Truth requires infinitely more than belief or faith”; it requires acts in the form of observance of the commandments. “The suicide of the mind… is the final consequence of the mind’s deification.”

Modern science provides a different way to this suicide. Chapters six and seven concern ‘classical’ (i.e., Galilean/Newtonian) and twentieth-century physics, respectively. Galileo preserves Plato’s esteem for mathematics but discards the Platonic eidos; “the loss of this upper rung of Plato’s mental hierarchy brings Galileo closer to epistemological democracy.” For in contrast to Plato Galileo believes the universe infinite and irrational, with no natural warrant for distinguishing curved from straight, circumference from center. With this, relativity or egalitarianism “entered cosmology.” Add Galileo’s anti-teleological, subjectivist, and atomistic tendencies, and we see the grounds for an atheistic positivism. Eidelberg calls this an advance, in one sense, because it destroyed “a farrago of Greco-Christian elements which, having fulfilled their historical function of destroying paganism or primitive idolatry, were now preventing mankind from recognizing the only true God.” Newton added an empiricist determinism to this modern brew. Twentieth-century physics in turn counteracted early modern physics. Einstein substitutes a non-materialist determinism for Newtonian mechanics. Eidelberg objects that Einstein’s laws “leave no room for contingency or uncertainty”; Einstein “assumes that the universe exists by immanent necessity and not as a result of the will of a Creator.” Relativity theory not only deifies human intellect but overlooks the necessary incompleteness of any mathematical system—a necessity demonstrated by Gödel. It also contradicts the microphysical indeterminacy posited by another branch of contemporary physics, quantum mechanics. For these and other reasons, Eidelberg can insist that physics now suffers from theoretical disarray, despite spectacular practical successes. He points to the concept of creation ex nihilo as the only remaining solution to the many problems.

Whitehead “admits” the existence of one such problem when he writes that “apart from some notion of ‘imposed law,’ statistical law or ‘the doctrine of immanence provides absolutely no reason why the universe should not be steadily relapsing into lawless chaos.” Eidelberg goes further, following Zimmerman, and asserting that statistical laws “are not self-sustaining” because, if they were the only laws in operation, “the universe would now be in a state of complete entropy.” Contra Einstein, “God does play dice with the world, only the dice are ‘loaded.'” This assertion allows Eidelberg to introduce the claims of chapters eight and nine which concern the human soul as seen in Jews and in non-Jews. Aside from God Himself, what prevents the decline into entropy is human action, insofar as those actions serve God. The human will should serve the divine Will, and the most willful, “stiff-necked” people—the ones best fitted to serve that Will—are Jews. “The creativity of the Jew is sui generis and so abundantly manifest as to require no elaboration.” The Jews is “man par excellence.” The non-Torah world, by contrast, has sunk into deification of, first, the human mind, then the human will. In its ‘pluralism,’ it now deifies even the emotions, a suicide of the intellect comparable to that which Eidelberg imputes to Christianity.

Eidelberg returns to Plato for an explanation of this. He advances a Nietzschean interpretation of Socrates’ last words: “I owe a cock to Asclepius” means that life is a disease, an absurdity. When Socrates “told the Athenians that the unexamined life was not worth living, he was, in principle, condemning Athens (and the bulk of mankind) to death….” (One might reply that if life is absurd, then Socrates in fact condemned the bulk of mankind to life, leaving the philosopher as the one who learns to ‘die.’) “Socrates conquered all his emotions—all save ne, the desire for truth.” Having severed this “emotion” from the others, Socrates effectually unleashes them. The artificial constraints he recommends must eventually fail. Only the “discipline of the Torah” provides the necessary restraints on these innocent but indeterminate forces of the soul. The standards for discipline “cannot be determined by categories of reason nor by logical inference from the facts of experience if only because life is infinitely richer than any set of mental concepts or accumulation of empirical data”—an argument opposed to the philosophers’ contention that no legal system can respond sufficiently to the range of human circumstance. In setting standards, the Torah neither suppresses nor indulges the emotions; it guides them to assist men to fulfill “the Torah program for overcoming the cyclicality of nature and the death principle.” Obviously, unaided human reason cannot know the “Infinite Halacha” on which this overcoming depends. As for “emotions” other than the eros  of intellect, Eidelberg restates the difficulty noticed by Leo Strauss, Stanley Rosen, and others. “It is always the case that the adherent of any reductionist or emotive theory of ideas or mentality runs into the paradox of exempting his thought from its own conclusions—an exercise in self-deification, a sort of parody of the Biblical verse, ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts.'” Unfortunately, these ‘gods’ characteristically lack the gracious restraint of Hashem.

Eidelberg titles his tenth and final chapter “The Conquest of Death.” In the course of advancing a non-Kabalistic interpretation of the Eden story, he offers some hints on how to interpret the Torah. By eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam asserted that he, not God, ‘owned’ the Garden. He thereby subordinated his higher, God-perceiving faculties to his senses or sensuous desires—in the very act of searching for knowledge. In descending to a lower level of existence, man caused tension between his mind and his body, yielding death on the one hand and shame on the other. Had Adam and Eve then eaten from the Tree of Life their misery would have been eternal. As it is, Socrates was right; life, for “anthropocentric man,” is “sickness unto death.” God allowed man to redeem himself by effort, by the sweat of his brow. But “to go beyond the finite, but without leaving the domain of reason, the Kabala of the Torah is necessary.” It can yield a science whose units of measurement “synthesize quantity and quality” and enable man to “create matter,” overcoming the merely natural principle of conservation of energy. Quedusha, the “nonphysical energy” that nonetheless can govern the physical world, “distinguishes and separates Israel from the nations.”

Thought’s enemy, complacency, will find no refuge in this book. Eidelberg makes good his promise to challenge “many cherished convictions, skeptical and dogmatic alike.” In doing so, he leaves one wanting to see more detailed and extensive treatment of his theme. This eros for completion could easily reach an impasse, however. [5]  In order to fully understand Judaism as Eidelberg represents it, one needs instruction in the esoterics of the Torah and the Talmud. To receive this, one must become Jewish—that is, one must decide the issue in advance, at least provisionally. (Else one must become the greatest dissembler in the world.) The Torah master can thus argue that for all practical purposes the Torah master is to the philosopher what the philosopher says he is to the non-philosopher: a man who knows both the true life of the mind and the false life, thus enjoying the advantages over men who ‘know’ only the false.

Does God smile?

 

Notes

1. By “true revelation,” I do not refer to the subjective experience of the prophet, which may or may not be rational, but rather to what the prophet says.

2. See Chaim Zimmerman: Torah and Reason: Insiders and Outsiders of Torah. Jerusalem: “HED” Publications, 1979.

3. Put another way, Socrates can be said to argue, in effect, that those who want justice more than anything else must commit acts of injustice to obtain their end. ‘Do you want justice that much?’ he may be said to ask. Socrates, a lover of wisdom primarily if not exclusively, clearly does not want justice that much.

4. This does not prevent a man of anava from recognizing himself as the wisest of mortals, if this is the fact. There is no merely conventional view of humility, here.

 

Bernard Malamud: The Stories of Bernard Malamud. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.
Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Penitent. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1983.

This review was first published in Chronicles of Culture, September 1984. Republished with permission.

 

Morality is religion’s province. Contemporary secularists do not see this, averting their eyes from the religious sources of their own moralities. Such aversion makes a kind of sense; deprived of any metaphysical foundation, secular morality can only rest on a physical one, and modern physics, chemistry, and biology are morally unpromising. Looked at hard, modern secular moralities dissolve into more or less appealing immoralisms, though many people prefer not to notice. Even ancient philosophers, celebrated or condemned for their teleological understanding of nature—which does support morality—do not claim that nature issues directly in morality. They have too much respect for the moral importance of prudence and custom for that; and both prudence and custom pay their respect to the moral importance of circumstances, and therefore to some extent accident.

Moral commandments animate Judaism. Hebrew has no word for ‘nature.’ Judaism rejects accident for Providence and abhors the misuse of art to produce graven images. Today’s Jews confront men animated by the ambitions of modern science, the art of using nature to conquer nature—a form of human providence. The non-Jews Jews confront are therefore more profoundly un-Jewish than any other non-Jews in history. Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer write very differently, but each responds to the confrontation of Jews with modern non-Jews by upholding the Jewish tradition of moral seriousness.

Malamud has collected 25 of his short stories, all but two of which appeared in previous books. In his preface Malamud writes that literature “values man by describing him”—a remark that smoothly mediates between literary realism and concern for morality. The men and women described here inhabit life’s margins. Retired, poor, grieving, they “suffer from [their] health,” as one of them puts it, a phrase that makes “health” synonymous with being sick. Their vulnerability allows Malamud to illustrate the moral theme that fascinate him: charity, guilt, love, and faith. Mindful that Judaism understands man as created in God’s image, Malamud makes the relationship between man and his Creator an undercurrent in story after story.

In “The Bill,” a married couple who own a store extend credit to a neighbor because “if yo were a human being you gave credit to somebody else and he gave credit to you.” But the man who gets the credit resents them for it, feels guilty, and never pays back his debt. The protagonist of “Black Is My Favorite Color” tries to extend charity and love to blacks, who reject it or fail to return it. “[T]he language of the heart is either a dead language or else no one understands it the way you speak it,” he laments. Nor are non-Jews the only proud ingrates, Jews faultlessly charitable. “The Jewbird” is a parable about Jewish resentment of victimized Jews; in “Man in the Drawer” an American Jewish writer resents the gift of a manuscript from a desperate Jewish colleague in the Soviet Union. Human ingratitude to the Creator of humanity pulses through every book of the Hebrew Bible.

The relation between giver and recipient obtains in the relation between an artist and those who care for art or believe they care. “Rembrandt’s Hat,” one of Malamud’s best stories, features an art historian who thinks of a sculptor, “All I have is good will toward him.” Just so—but good will is not enough. After unintentionally offending the sculptor by comparing the artist’s hat to one in a Rembrandt self-portrait, the historian feels “surges of hatred.” Months of feuding pass before the historian takes another look at the Rembrandt painting: “In his self-created mirror [as distinguished from mirrors held up by historians and critics] the painter beheld distance, objectivity painted to stare out of his right eye; but the left looked out of bedrock, beyond quality. Yet the expression of each of the portraits seemed magisterially sad; or was this what life was if when Rembrandt painted he did not paint the sadness?” The historian also notices a simple fact. He had misremembered Rembrandt’s hat, which does not closely resemble the hat the sculptor wears. Those who would partake of what artists give us must learn empathy, not only judgment; without empathy attention fails, causing inaccurate perceptions and false judgments. The historian reconciles with the sculptor, who wears his hat “like a crown of failure and hope”—failure, because he is no Rembrandt, hope, because he nonetheless aspires to achieve something fine.

But why art, especially from a writer whose religious tradition frowns upon l’art pour l’art, let alone art for other gods than God? “Art celebrates life and gives us our measure,” Malamud writes. The celebration is no more direct in his stories than in Rembrandt’s paintings. Guilt can literally bring death, as in “The Jewish Refugee,” the story of a German-Jewish critic and journalist who believes that his German wife, left behind, was secretly antisemitic. He commits suicide after learning that she had converted to Judaism and was murdered by the Nazis. But Malamud does not join with Nietzsche and his epigones in celebrating life without guilt. “The Death of Me” shows non-Jews who quarrel and who come to hate each other, bringing death to a Jew. “Life Is Better Than Death” ironically portrays a young widow whose love affair ends in pregnancy and desertion. Malamud’s most revealing title plays on a stock expression, “The Cost of Living.” By describing the slow impoverishment and bankruptcy of an old-fashioned grocer, Malamud insists on life’s physical and spiritual costliness. At the same time, precisely by defending Judaism as a defense of God’s gift of life, Malamud answers Nietzsche’s anti-Biblical vitalism, with its charge that belief in God betrays life.

Only a few of his people see what makes life worth its cost: fidelity, that combination of faith and love. “The First Seven Years” depicts the reciprocal fidelity of a man and a woman by echoing the story of Jacob and Rachel. Fidelity between human beings mirrors the even more difficult fidelity between a human being and God. The theme of giving receiving is here, too, as God gives life and the moral standards governing it, forcing men to choose between gratitude and resentment.

Malamud sees both the humor and the seriousness in this. “Talking Horse” concerns Abramowitz, a circus performer who doesn’t know if he’s a talking horse or a man trapped inside the horse, and his owner, Goldberg, who “doesn’t like interference with his thoughts or plans, or the way he lives, and no surprises except those he invents.” “The true pain,” Abramowitz says, “is when you don’t know what you have to know.” He comes to suspect that “Goldberg is afraid of questions because a question could show he’s afraid people will find out who he is”: “Somebody who all he does is repeat his fate.” The exceedingly human Abramowitz demands his freedom and gets it. He struggles part of the way out of his horse-body and becomes “a free centaur,” neither beast nor Goldberg.

One of the few characters whose profession Malamud declines to tell us is Mendel, the loving father of an idiot son. Dying, Mendel wants to get his son on a train to California, where he can live with a relative. Ginzburg the ticket collector blocks them; his faze terrifies Mendel, who dares to struggle for his son. “Ginzburg, staring at himself in Mendel’s eyes, saw mirrored in them the extent of his own awful wrath. He beheld a shimmering, starry blinding light that produced darkness. Ginzburg looked astounded. ‘Who, me?'” God recognizes his own cruelty because he can see it reflected in the eyes of a human being, His most notable creation. Only then he shows mercy, lets the son be saved. A Bible commentator or critic would attempt to explain the story of Abraham and Isaac and God, but Malamud responds by telling another story—the same story with an explanation coded in.

Salvation and freedom obsess Singer’s protagonist as well But whereas Malamud’s stories express opinion indirectly, requiring interpretation, Singer allows the protagonist of his novel to speak almost directly for Singer. The opinions expressed contradict, even denigrate, the opinions of the dominant ‘culture’ of our time. This may account for the book’s unusual publishing history.

The Penitent appeared in serial form in 1973, then as a book one year later. Farrar, Straus & Giroux published it in English in 1983, surely an unusual delay in view of the author’s prestige. According to the dust jacket copy, although “the novel was immediately recognized by its readers as one of Singer’s most serious, and perhaps finest, works,” some critics “predicted that it would never be translated” from the original Yiddish “because of its inwardness.” “Inwardness” is a euphemism for Jewishness, which was the real offense. And this was not the Jewishness that accommodates itself to the world and meets with toleration from all but the worst antisemites. Singer presents us with a Jew who speaks for the Judaism that spurns the ways of this world, the ways of the goyim, and he insists that we listen to this Jews respectfully. Singer is right to insist. With his protagonist, Joseph Shapiro he shows a contemporary man rediscovering lost faith in God and writing a Jeremiad in the aftermath of that rediscovery.

Shapiro briefly recalls his early life as a young ‘progressive’ from a Polish rabbinical family. In Hebrew shapir means attractive—handsome, lovely. Shapiro is both attractive and attracted to the attractive. After surviving World War II, he married, came to America, and made his fortune in real estate. “When a person makes a good deal of money but lacks faith, he begins to concern himself with one thing: how to squeeze in all the pleasure possible.” Adultery follows; “the loose female has become the deity of America.” In an indirect way, so does tolerance for the violent crimes of those who want quick gratification: “In America, as in Sodom, the perpetrator went free and the witness rotted in jail. And all this was done in the name of liberalism…. Everyone knows this, but try talking about it and you’re called the worst names.” His life eventually causes Shapiro to suffer spiritual and physical nausea. His nausea resembles the ‘existential’ kind Sartre described, borrowing from Nietzsche, but with it leads Shapiro to a conclusion very far from the Parisian Left Bank: “All modern philosophy has a single theme: we don’t know anything and cannot know anything…. But to what did this lead? Their ethics weren’t worth a fig and committed no one to anything. You could be versed in all their philosophies and still be a Nazi [recall Heidegger] or a member of the KGB [perhaps Kojève?].” The likes of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty would object to this, but with how much justification?

Shapiro left wife, mistress, and business, flying to Israel. “The Jew in me suddenly gained the courage to spit at all the idolatries.” He saw many of the same idolatries in Israel. Looking at books and posters in Tel Aviv, he thought, “Yes, the Enlightened have attained their goals. We [Jews] are a people like all other peoples. We feed ourselves on the same dung as they do.” Communism offers no better ‘culture’ than capitalism does, and it adds tyranny. At a leftist kibbutz portraits of Lenin and the antisemite Stalin hung in the “Culture House.”

Shapiro contrasts modern ‘culture’ with the learning attained in a Hasidic study house in Jerusalem. He goes so far as to charge that “All the heroes in worldly literature have been whoremongers and evildoers,” citing Anna Karenina, Raskolnikov, and Taras Bulba. “Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Geothe’s Faust, right down to the trash aimed at pleasing the street louts and wenches, are full of cruelty and abandon.” To those who would reply that the Old Testament contains its share of vice, Shapiro agrees. “The Scriptures were a great beginning, an enormous foundation, but the Jews of the Scriptures were, with ew exceptions, still half Gentiles.” The Talmud offers a more refined spirituality. “The Jew has attained his highest degree of spirituality only in the time of the Diaspora,” and today’s genuinely religious Jews are “Jewry’s greatest achievement.”

Shapiro sets his new way of life against that of a young woman he met on the plane to Israel. Priscilla, “ashamed of [her] Jewishness since childhood,” engaged to be married to another secularized Jew, quickly seduces Shapiro. They meet again after several months in Israel. The last two chapters consist of a dialogue between them. Priscilla argues for atheism. As with all such arguments, hers logically justifies no more than agnosticism. Shapiro replies that morality requires choice, and that her choices imply humanism, which “doesn’t serve one idol but many idols,” all of them eventually destructive of the very pleasures they promise. Even if the Jewish God is an idol, the morality He commands brings no such self-destruction to those who obey it. Morality leads to faith, not the other way around.

In the “Author’s Note,” written for this edition, Singer writes that he “cannot agree with [Shapiro] that there is a final escape from the human dilemma” because “a total solution would void the greatest gift that God has bestowed upon mankind—freedom of choice.” But Shapiro never claims that his solution is total, that he has escaped from the human dilemma, as distinguished from the modern one. He explicitly insists on the Evil Spirit’s power and doggedness. A more telling criticism begins with noticing that morality finds support in non-Jewish religious practices also. If the quest for moral strength leads us to more than one path, we are not by any means ‘back where we started,’ but we are given pause, reason to think.

There is also a practical difficulty. When it comes to faith, Shapiro insists, “the deeds must come first.” To put it in Aristotelian terms, a soul that has not been habituated to perform decent actions (by performing such actions, usually in obedience with parental command) will never think its way toward first principles; even in Christianity, which teaches that God in His power may knock even the most ardent sinner off his high horse, there are souls that resist unto death. Shapiro’s highly spiritualized Judaism rejects the political and military aspects of Judaism seen in ancient and modern Israel. He praises the Diaspora because it removed Jews from the responsibilities and temptations of ruling, saying that “when it suits the Evil Spirit, he can become a fervent Zionist, a burning patriot.” Thus Shapiro speaks in the accents of martyrdom. Pacifist Judaism resembles pacifist Christianity in this way. Here Singer’s charge of escapism would hit with force. Shapiro could reply, with other pacifists, that ‘God will fight for us,’ if not in this world then in the next world, or in this world on the day of the Messiah. Paradoxically, this faith that begins with practice, with morality not faith or theory, ends by dismissing the practical. Singer might reply, again with all serious pacifists, that radical dependence upon God is the supremely practical thing, and that he has not dismissed ‘the practical’ but only what is practical in the eyes of a world that despises Jews and Judaism.  Having overcome that world spiritually, he will rest in the belief that the right kind of spirituality overcomes the world.

Singer concludes: “The agonies and the disenchantment of Joseph Shapiro may to a degree stir a self-evaluation in both believers and skeptics. The remedies that he recommends may not heal everybody’s wounds, but the nature of the sickness will, I hope, be recognized.”  Throughout their careers, Singer and Malamud have served as careful diagnosticians, not merely as makers of refined entertainments.

Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin: Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Originally published in Chronicles of Culture, June 1984. Republished with permission.

 

The authors identify “the first recorded reference to Jews in non-Jewish sources” as a report an Egyptian king caused to be written 1200 years before Christ. “Israel is no more,” it boasts. Israel has proved somewhat more resilient than this early critic estimated. The futility of Jew-hatred, which has a history more or less as long as the recorded history of Jew-hatred itself, results primarily from the strength of Jews. Those strengths cannot originate in unrefined nature, for no one imagines Jews to be physically stronger than others, and few today posit an innately superior Jewish intellect. They must come from Judaism itself, from the Covenant with God.

Traditionally, Jews have regarded this source of their strengths as the real object of Jew-hatred. But, as the authors observe, many contemporary explanations of anti-Semitism explain the haters without serious reference to the hated. Scapegoating, economic envy, prejudice, and psychosis may account for some things about anti-Semites, or they may not. What such explanations do not tell us is, why the Jews? They lead us to Jean-Paul Sartre’s conclusion, duly cited here, that Jews were invented by anti-Semites.

The authors defend the traditional understanding that Jew-hatred is about Jews, not merely about hatred and haters. Judaism invokes anti-Semitism, a variant of evil, in at least three ways: by challenging the validity of the non-Jews’ god(s), laws, and national allegiance; by exhorting Jews to act to change the world, not only contemplate it; and by teaching the chosenness, or divine election, of Jews. The authors also make a fourth, much more dubious suggestion. “As a result of the Jews’ commitment to Judaism, they have led lives of a higher quality than their non-Jewish neighbors”; better educated, more temperate, more charitable, with stronger families, Jews provoke resentment. The evidence presented that Jews do enjoy such advantages may convince, but without evidence that non-Jews somehow recognize these advantages the argument fails. Mein Kampf (for example) contains no hint that Hitler resented Jewish virtues, or even recognized them as such. The dilute antisemitism we all see and hear asserts Jewish peculiarity and inferiority, except in anything involving money. Fortunately, this quality-of-life argument disappears from the book after it is made.

The book’s second half contains a survey of Western religions and ideologies, in chronological order, showing their relation to the three plausible provocations to antisemitism. The authors contend that Judaism differed from the ancient religions by insisting on its validity for all peoples, denying the imperial relativism André Malraux praises when he writes, “Rome welcomed into its Pantheon the gods of the defeated.” Furthermore, they say that ancients who disliked the contemplative universalism of the early philosophers could scarcely tolerate the active universalism of Jews, and the doctrine of chosenness exasperated even the sturdy Tacitus.

Later religions imitated Jewish universalism and therefore opposed Judaism all the more vehemently. “If Judaism remained valid, then Christianity was invalid. Therein lie the origins of Christian hatred of the Jews, the most enduring Jew-hatred in history.” A Christian must reply that Jesus teaches hatred of sin and love of sinners—including alleged ‘Christ-killers.’ Insofar as one follows Christianity, one cannot accept the Jewish rejection of Jesus as Messiah, the Jewish rejection of the Gospel. But a Christian cannot extend his rejection of these aspects of Judaism to a hatred of Jews themselves and remain fully Christian. That many Christians sin by making just that extension remains undeniably true and far from trivial.

Islam, equally universal and far more sanguinary, presents a more menacing face than Christianity, especially today. Nonetheless, the authors agree with contemporary Arab publicists who contend that Muslims, over the centuries, have nonetheless treated Jews better than Christians have done. The further claim of such publicists, that Muslims have treated Jews well, does not withstand serious examination. The authors observe that Yemen, the one Muslim country never colonized by the West that harbored Jews, presents a reasonable “test case.” Yemen fails that test, as it featured religiously sanctioned stonings, laws compelling Jews to dress as beggars, and the forced conversion of Jewish orphans. The latter two practices survived as late as the 1940s, when Jews solved the Yemeni ‘Jewish problem’ by emigrating to Israel.

Modern political philosophy resulted in that popular thought-system, or ideology, called ‘the Enlightenment’ by its publicists. Also universalists, Enlightenment partisans offered what is figured as Jewish emancipation in exchange for assimilation, the abandonment of Judaism. Many of the philosophes, including Voltaire and Mirabeau, attacked Judaism; a few did not. This suggests that Enlightenment antisemitism was not entirely accidental. “Most modern Jews, themselves secular, have believed that the demise of religion would lead to the demise of antisemitism. Yet the twentieth century, the most secular century of history, has been the most antisemitic.” Neither has it been especially enlightened. The authors concede that “No violence accompanied Enlightenment antisemitism,” but observe that both inheritors and critics of the Enlightenment—the former mostly on the Left, the latter mostly on the Right—added anti-capitalism to anti-clericalism on the list of encouragements of Jew-hatred. “By the twentieth century, virtually every popular ideology in Europe wanted the Jews to disappear.”

The authors sensibly avoid claiming that earlier antisemitisms caused the Holocaust. “Over the preceding decades and centuries essential elements of Christianity, Marxist and socialism, nationalism, and Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought had ruled the existence of Jews to be intolerable. In the final analysis they all would have opposed what Hitler had done, but without them Hitler could not have done it.” After combining post-Enlightenment, ‘scientific’ racial antisemitism with the ‘cultural’ antisemitism of Richard Wagner and German nationalist antisemitism, Hitler concluded that the final solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ is not to convert the Jews but to kill them.

World War II destroyed the extreme Right as a world power. The Holocaust shocked citizens of the commercial republics comprising what is considered the West—heirs of Christianity and the Enlightenment—into abandoning much of their antisemitism. It is perhaps a measure of the differences between the religion and ideology of the West and those of the East—Islam and Marxism-Leninism—that partisans of the latter pair have if anything intensified their antisemitism. Anti-Zionism, “the first form of Jew-hatred to deny that it hates Jews,” adds hypocrisy to the antisemites’ ragbag of cherished vices. (“In the Museum of Religion and Atheism in Leningrad, an exhibt about Zionism and Israel designates the following as anti-Soviet Zionist material: Jewish prayer shawls, tefillin (phylacteries), and Passover Haggadahs.”) While the authors can hardly be accused of fostering complacency about any source of antisemitism, they insist that the principal threats to Jews today no longer come from the Right but from the Left and from Muslims allied with the Left. They argue that efforts to counteract antisemitism should be focused there.

Of five “possible response[s]” to contemporary antisemitism, the authors reject assimilation as an accommodation to evil. They regard Zionism as worthwhile but limited because Israel remains “the most hated country in the world.” The central and most controversial response, seeking converts, is apparently dismissed: “As Judaism does not hold that it is the only way to God… missionizing is neither necessary nor desirable.” Fighting antisemitic outbreaks by political and other means they judge effective only in regimes of liberty. The final and preferred response is to “affect the values of non-Jews” by disseminating “ethical monotheism”: “The Jewish role is not to bring mankind to Judaism, but to universal moral law.” In this way Judaism, which provokes antisemitism, can also overcome it.

This paradoxical claim needs elaboration. The two basic principles of ethical monotheism are that “ethics need God”—that is, no ethical system can survive without a theistic metaphysical foundation—and that “God’s major demand is ethics.” Ethics without God yields relativism, which yields defenselessness against the secular fanaticisms of Left and Right. “God without ethics” yields just such fanaticisms, and religious ones as well—”crusades and Qaddafi.” Allegedly divine or substitute-divine prerogative (“God” or “History”) inflame ambition, denigrate moderation, invite carnage.

To distinguish between “universal moral law” and Judaism while calling both variations of “ethical monotheism” requires a careful definition of both ethics and God. The doctrine of chosenness, the third of the three plausible Jewish provocations to antisemitism, becomes crucial here. The authors quote Yakov Malik, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations in 1973, who cited this doctrine as ‘proof’ that Zionism is racism. If public opinion polls are accurate, they show that even Americans view the claim of chosenness with suspicion, even though it is clearly enunciated in the Bible. The authors contend that chosenness does not entail superiority or privilege but obligation and suffering, that anyone who converts becomes a Jews and thereby becomes chosen.  One may find a resemblance here to the Christian doctrine of grace or even, much more remotely, to the Marxist doctrine of ‘class consciousness.’

Chosenness is where Judaism and “universal moral law” can collide. Antisemitism “is ultimately a hatred of higher standards,” the authors write, a vague formulation that comports well with “universal moral law.” If Jew-hatred is hatred of people insofar as they partake in Judaism, and if Judaism teaches that some people choose God and that God chooses some people, impersonal laws or “standards” do not constitute absolute reality. Chosenness means not only God-as-standard, a Platonic or neo-Platonic god, but a God Who chooses. This after all is the only possible basis of the claims that “ethics need God” and that “God’s major demand is ethics”; choice and ethics are inseparable. Not any choice, but the right choice: Judaism requires the God and the chosen people of Judaism. Upon reflection, then, the authors’ rejection of “missionizing” turns out to be less than convincing—unless they prefer “universal moral law” to Judaism. If so, it is difficult to see what they mean. Many religions hold up high moral standards, so hatred of such standards cannot explain antisemitism.

Indeed, law does not necessarily imply a lawgiver in the traditional sense. Modern scientists, who act on principle as if atheism were true, seek ‘laws of nature,’ a nature without purpose. In a book that contains a discussion of antisemitism ranging from Abelard to Zeno and from antiquity to the present, it is astonishing that there is not a single mention of Spinoza. A philosopher has described Spinoza as “the greatest man of Jewish origin who had openly denied the truth of Judaism and had ceased to belong to the Jewish people without becoming a Christian.” What Spinoza became, of course, was a proponent of universal natural law—not to be confused, in his case, with universal moral law. He is the first modern antisemite of Jewish origin. He leads political philosophers farther along the road that leads to Marx’s class consciousness as a replacement for chosenness and grace. As with so much antisemitism, this too has been futile.

Why the Jews? does not finally answer its own question. To do so would be to account for God and for rebellion against God. Judaism itself does not ‘account for’ these. It praises and condemns; it asserts, refusing to suggest that human beings can explain the fundamental. We can explain some things partly, however, and these authors do better in that than most of their contemporaries. They do so by taking Judaism seriously in terms resembling its own terms instead of terms imposed by its enemies. We begin to understand antisemitism only if we rediscover the terms of Judaism.