City Girl

There were problems: segregation, slums, crime, redlining, a calcified school system, corruption great and small, but the city and its enlightened citizens, one felt, were strong enough to overcome these miseries. Moses’ high-rise slum clearance, however, was not a solution but a brutal intensification of the problems, as Jane Jacobs argued in “Downtown Is for People.”

I had been working for Doubleday at the time and offered Jane a contract for a book based on her Fortune article, which I had reprinted in a collection of essays called The Exploding Metropolis. Two years later I moved to Random House. Jane moved with me and in January 1961 delivered the manuscript of her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which I read without interruption or emendation. There was little to edit. I would eventually publish all but the last of the several books that followed, many composed on her old Remington, for which she must have laid in a supply of ribbons before typewriters became obsolete.

Editors and their authors seldom form deep friendships for the same reason that psychiatrists and their patients keep their distance: The relationship requires candor that mixes poorly with intimacy. Perhaps because her manuscripts needed little editing and were usually delivered on time, Jane and I were an exception to this rule. We were kindred spirits. She did not use a literary agent. We negotiated directly, book by book, and formed a lifelong intellectual and professional friendship that survived her move to Toronto during the Vietnam War. Together we explored eastern Canada, from the great provincial parks to the mining towns along the permafrost above the tree line and still farther north to Moose Factory at the bottom of James Bay, a once flourishing entrepôt of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where we were surprised to find amid the ramshackle Cree dwellings two Chinese restaurants offering Mets Canadien et Chinois, a relic of the Chinese laborers who built in the 1920s the railroad that terminates there—an example, as Jane pointed out, of how one kind of work leads to another.

We seldom discussed our personal lives. I knew that Jane’s father had been a family physician and her mother a nurse and that she was fond of her brother, John, a federal judge; that she had been born and raised in Scranton, Pa., and had come to New York in 1943 hoping to become a journalist. I was not surprised to learn later from a biographer that she had been a defiant high-school student with a sense of humor and a sharp eye for cant, and a problem for her uninspiring teachers: a contrarian even then. She was rewarded for her candor with poor grades and planned to skip college. She took instead courses in the extension program at Columbia, where she could take only the courses she wanted and would write a book, Constitutional Chaff, that was published by the Columbia University Press, an impressive debut for a self-educated, nonmatriculated, and uncredentialed scholar at the age of 25. The book was a study of the rejected proposals for the United States Constitution. Jane, who was her own best critic, refused to show me a copy and chose not to discuss this first effort.

Like all of Jane’s work, Death and Life is about how human beings by their own devices instinctively create vital communities and how these communities and their economies are subject to corruption or obliteration by ambitious individuals in positions of power, whether well-meaning, vicious, or foolish. Death and Life, and especially her subsequent books, are thus about the dynamics of civilization, how vital economies and their societies are formed, elaborated, and sustained, and the forces that thwart and ruin them. This, rather more than her critique of city planning, I believe, accounts for the continued interest in her work. Her sympathies are with the slow accretion of custom and skills, of social norms and ingenious solutions to practical problems. She was fascinated by how new kinds of work evolve, in vital societies, from older forms, a process often stifled by its own success: for example, how Detroit’s early Great Lakes traders learned to build their own boats, then to make paint varnishes and brass fittings, and eventually master steam-engine technology and metallurgic skills, which led to engines for cars, so that the combination of Detroit’s skills made it the logical center of automobile manufacturing, whose dominance by the 20th century created an industrial monoculture that led to Detroit’s collapse and an irrational, environmentally pernicious national transportation system.

For Benzion, the Arabs are implacable enemies. For me, they are indispensable partners who with their Jewish counterparts might once have created—and perhaps still may find the wisdom to create—a flourishing bi-national state, an exemplary multiethnic enclave within a stable Middle East or, failing that, a two-state solution. If my position underestimates the dark side of human nature, Benzion’s ignores the futility and horror—the sadness—of a military solution. Since our immovable polarity is understood by both of us our discussions of Middle East politics tend to be brief. Our affection flourishes on different ground.

This unlikely friendship began by chance in the late 1970s when my friend Herman Wouk called me at Random House to suggest that I publish a book of letters by Jonathan Netanyahu, the heroic leader of the Entebbe raiders and their only fatality. Herman said the letters were remarkable, and when I read the manuscript I agreed. Jonathan was an articulate and sensitive young soldier whose modest tone hardly comported with his Homeric military exploits. I was struck however by an unexpected apocalyptic note: “any”—not just a, but any—“compromise will simply hasten the end. As I don’t want to tell my grandchildren about the Jewish state in the twentieth century as … a transient episode in the thousands of years of wandering, I wanted to hold on here with all my might.” When these letters were written an Arab-Israeli compromise still seemed barely possible. That this soft-spoken hero should see no such hope was puzzling. I would soon discover the source of his iron determination.

On one of his frequent trips to New York Benzion stopped at Random House to discuss the publication of Jonathan’s letters. The meeting with a proud and grieving father that I had expected to occupy an hour instead lasted most of the afternoon, prompted by my having asked about his own work, which I had been told had something to do with the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492. His answer led to one the proudest moments of my publishing career, the publication some 15 years later of his masterpiece, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain. The 1,400-page work of scholarship overturned centuries of misunderstanding, and predictably it was faintly praised and in a few cases angrily denounced or simply ignored by a threatened scholarly establishment. Dispassionate scholars soon prevailed, and today Benzion’s brilliant revisionist achievement towers over the field of Inquisition studies. The iron will that sustained Jonathan on the battlefield sustained his father in his lifelong campaign to uncover the actual origin and cause of the assault upon the third generation of Spain’s Christianized Jews—the so-called conversos—by the Spanish Inquisition.

I have always considered my work in publishing an extension of my formal education, in which my authors were the faculty and their work my curriculum. Whatever I have learned I have learned from them. The prevailing scholarship of the Inquisition had accepted the word of the Inquisition itself that its aim was to exterminate as heretics the conversos, otherwise known as New Christians or Marrranos, to use Benzion’s favored term. These were descendants of Spanish Jews who at the end of the 14th century had been forced to convert to Catholicism or face death. Now, a century later, the Inquisition claimed that many of these third-generation descendants were secretly still committed to their ancestral Judaism, therefore Catholic in name only and a polluting influence upon true Christians. Thus they could be tortured, dispossessed of their property, and in some cases murdered as heretics. The scholarly consensus accepted these dubious charges as true.

It was this perfunctory acceptance by historians of the perpetrators’ word that attracted Benzion to the subject. Why should the murderers and thieves who led the Inquisition be believed? Benzion’s great achievement is to have shown that the allegations of clandestine Judaism were a pretext. He proves beyond a doubt that by the end of the 15th century all but a handful of conversos were true Catholics, integrated into the mainstream of Spanish society. Many held high positions in church, state, law, and the military, and this was the problem, for these positions were coveted by their envious “full-blooded,” so-called Old Christian, rivals. Benzion shows that the conversos were tortured, killed, and their property seized not for their secret Judaism, for which there is scant evidence, but for their ancestral blood: the inescapable otherness of Jews. Limpieza de sangre—purity of the blood—was the unspoken issue that explains the attack upon the conversos. For the Old Christians these conversos remained a resented alien minority. Benzion also shows that it was King Ferdinand himself who instigated the Inquisition not only to augment royal revenues depleted by his imperial wars but, more significantly, to strengthen his alliance with the Old Christian majority. The conversos were punished not for their faith but for their blood and their achievements.

The significance of this discovery for later generations of assimilated Jews and their racist antagonists is self-evident. The Office of the Inquisition in Spain survived until the 19th century, and its conditions—for example, that a single Jewish grandparent conferred Jewish blood—were later embedded in Nuremberg law. Benzion’s aim however was not to exploit the Inquisition as a warning to assimilationists but to clarify a persistent and profound historical falsification.

As happens often upon the publication of a radical revision of accepted theory the first reviews of Benzion’s book were predictably marked by faint praise and underlying resentment by traditional historians of the Inquisition. Some of this resentment probably arose from Benzion’s impolitic but principled refusal to acknowledge recent scholarship, which simply repeated standard misconceptions. (See, for example, Wikipedia on the subject: “the monarchs decided to introduce the Inquisition to discover and punish crypto-Jews.”) But the tide soon turned. Even before publication Benzion was able to mention in his preface that the “celebrated historian … Cecil Roth, who had stood for the thesis of Marrano Judaism, retreated from his own much publicized position and embraced more or less the same view of the Marranos that I had presented in my studies of the subject.” Then the great scholar Henry Kamen wrote in a lengthy review that Benzion’s conclusions regarding the conversos “which are central to [his] entire argument seem to me wholly convincing.” Professor Bennett D. Hill of Georgetown called the book “the finest study of the Inquisition to appear in this or arguably any century.”

It often happens that book editors who spend years working with an author begin to think of themselves as something more than midwives if less than collaborators. The process requires, in addition to tactfulness, immersion in the author’s subject and care that the narrative is intelligible to nonspecialized readers. The book’s success is the editor’s reward. A greater reward is the learning acquired as the editor becomes familiar with the author’s material. I hope I will not seem presumptuous therefore if I reprint a note sent to me by Benzion on his publication day:

Dear Jason: This is a great day for me and today, more than at other times, I feel the need to tell you that I well remember your instant grasp of my new historical concept, your insightful understanding of its various aspects, and the enormous effort you made in behalf of the book, editorially and otherwise. I cannot make it clear enough how grateful I am to you. My heartfelt congratulations and best wishes.

But it was not an enormous effort, or even an effort at all, but the rarest of pleasures to work with this great scholar and to ignore the vast and immovable political divide between us for the sake of a scholarly revolution and the friendship that followed.

Jason Epstein is the former editorial director of Random House.

Last Friday, the sun set on the year 5769, first in Siberia and Australia, then in China, India, and the Middle East; then 5770 hurtled westward through Africa and Europe and finally arrived in the Americas. In each of these locales, on Saturday morning, Jews praised God in mostly the same words, give or take a little for doctrinal differences. It’s a wide, wide world of Jews: that’s journalist Charles London’s insight, after trekking to Myanmar, Cuba, Bosnia, and Iran, in Far From Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community (William Morrow, October), a paean to Diaspora and the furthest-flung Jews.

Given the continuing mystery of what happened to the ten lost tribes of ancient Israel, after their exile eight hundred years B.C.E., London’s exotic communities may just be the tip of an exotic Jewish iceberg. In The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, September), Zvi Ben-Dor Benite—whose previous book explored the history of Islam in China—recounts the myths and conjectures that have arisen about where all those ancient Jews wound up, including the curiously widespread notions that Native Americans, Mongols, Anglo-Saxons, or Ethiopians descend from one or another of Jacob’s sons.

Of course, some of the experiences shared by Jews across many lands are less than pleasant: in every corner of Europe and beyond, for one prominent example, Jews suffered mightily during World War II. Steven B. Bowman’s The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945 (Stanford, October) suggests that whether they fought in the Greek army, supported the local resistance, landed in concentration camps, or hid in the mountains, precious few Greek Jews avoided grief during those years. The community’s “percentage of loss during the Holocaust was exceeded only by that of Poland,” he notes.

Five hundred miles north, in Hungary, the Holocaust arrived relatively late but with no less tragic consequences. In Gratitude (St. Martin’s, October), novelist Joseph Kertes dramatizes the fate of the Hungarian Jewish community through the wartime experiences of the Beck family. Weaving in a cameo by the famed Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, Kertes, who moved to Canada in 1956 and based the story on a “family anecdote,” represents the speed with which a population of professional, comfortable Hungarian Jews found themselves subjected to harsh persecution.

In The Jewish Husband (Europa Editions, September), Lia Levi tells a roughly parallel story set in Fascist Italy, where Dino Carpi, a classics professor, marries a woman so emphatically goyish that her family name is Gentile. Though he hides his Jewish past, Levi’s epistolary novel tracks the woeful effects of anti-Semitic policies on Capri’s life. The same policies chased the author’s family from Pisa, where she was born in 1931, to Rome, where she now edits a Jewish monthly magazine and writes prize-winning books.

Like Carpi, the Løvin family discovers at the outset of Suzanne Brøgger’s novel The Jade Cat (Overlook, September), as the shadow of Nazism stretches over Denmark at the beginning of the 1940s, that as casual as they might be about their Jewish identity and as assimilated as they may feel, their Jewishness cannot so easily be sloughed off during the Nazis’ genocidal campaign. A prominent Danish author, Brøgger has one single Jewish grandmother, and the novel, unabashedly autobiographical, concentrates on the inheritances of character, courage, and nonconformity from one woman to another.

There’s no need to emphasize only the lachrymose aspects of Diaspora; Jews around the world regularly share many of the same joys, too. Like Hanukkah. As Tami Lehman-Wilzig relates in Hanukkah Around the World (Kar-Ben, September), a book for the internationally minded 9- to 12-year-old in your life, not only do David Lee Roth and James Caan light the menorah, but do so their coreligionists in Samarkand, Uzbekistan; Nabeul, Tunisia; and Sydney, Australia. Rather than latkes this December, why not whip up some of the burmelos that Turkish Jews savor, or the precipizi beloved by Italian Jews? Along with charming anecdotes, Lehman-Wilzig provides recipes for both.

Dallas-based food writer and educator Tina Wasserman targets enthusiasts of just such culinary cosmopolitanism in Entree to Judaism: A Culinary Exploration of the Jewish Diaspora (URJ, October). Proffering gustatory tidbits from settings as varied as Bulgaria, Indonesia, and Algeria, Wasserman recognizes that the vast range of Jewish cookery derives directly from the breadth of Jewish dispersion. With Jews having circled the globe as merchants and played major roles in the spice trade, could there be any culinary tradition that hasn’t at some point been incorporated onto somebody’s Shabbat table?

Perhaps that Jewish legacy of internationalism has even contributed to the remarkable restaurant culture of contemporary New York City. As former New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes notes in Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York (North Point, October), not even culinary metropolises like Paris or Tokyo manage to offer quite “as many national cooking styles, at all price ranges, as New York does.”

Jason Epstein, master editor and pioneer of the trade paperback, has certainly done his part to support fine dining in New York, as well as upholding the venerable institution of the lavish publisher’s lunch. In Eating: A Memoir (Knopf, October), he reveals that one of the perks of editing cookbooks by leading chefs like Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck is getting to dine with them on occasion. Epstein fits no one’s image of a pious Jew—asked by Commentary in 1961 how he felt about his ethnicity, he remarked laconically that while “perhaps it would be good to feel oneself engaged in a highly auspicious tradition . . . I happen not to and don’t feel at one with those who do”—and his commitment to Ipswich clams suggests kashrut runs counter to his personal faith. Yet might not Epstein’s passion for excellent food, acquired largely thanks to his “grandmother’s old world Russian meals with a Yankee accent,” itself constitute a familiar kind of Jewish tradition?