Unsurprisingly, this spirited call to genocide has had Talmudic minds working overtime for millennia. Maimonides, for example, argued in his Guide for the Perplexed that wiping out Amalek doesn’t necessarily mean wiping out the Amalekites; what Jews should target is Amalek-like behavior, the sort of godless vulgarity that is better confronted through compassion and education than by means of violence. Taking a more legalistic approach, the 19th-century scholar Rabbi Hayim Palaggi suggested that even if we took the Torah at its word, it would be very difficult to identify just who should be hauled off to the gallows; with the ancient nations of the world mixed up since at least the time of the Assyrian monarch Sennacherib, we haven’t a chance of correctly identifying precisely whom might qualify as modern-day Amalek.

Still, some won’t stop trying. In 2006, Jack Riemer, an influential Conservative rabbi and a sometime adviser to President Bill Clinton, compared Islamic fundamentalists to Amalek, and Israeli rightists are quick to see hints of the biblical nation in today’s Palestinians. For an extinct race of antiquity, Amalek is alive and well in our imagination.

What we need, then, are new guidelines to handling this most haunting of nations. The genocide question should be easy enough to resolve: In the spirit of Maimonides, let us, too, declare that sinfulness is not biological but behavioral, that sin is best eradicated by means of persuasion and reason, and that violence is rarely the answer. This leaves us with the thornier issue of spotting the Amalekites in our midst. Who might they be? Here’s an attempt at a definition.

The pro-Palestinian protesters who last week interrupted a performance by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at London’s Royal Albert Hall are Amalekites. No matter how righteous their rage or how valid their cause, interrupting Webern’s “Passacaglia” with political slogans is a barbaric act. As a long-time, passionate supporter of freedom and justice for Palestine—the only solution, I firmly believe, for a peaceful and sustainable future for both Palestinians and Israelis—I was deeply dismayed to see these hooligans choose to advertise this worthy cause by drowning out music, the one form of human undertaking capable of transcending the innate vileness of the species. The British concertgoers who, judging from video snippets of the incident, yelled at the protesters to leave the hall weren’t siding with the Israelis over the Palestinians; they were choosing culture and civility over brutality and baseness. Amen to that; progress was never achieved, nor would it ever be, by those willing to tear at the delicate fabric of our joint existence for the sake of political causes, no matter how deserving.

Amalekites, too, are the nine religious Israel Defense Forces cadets who this week stepped out of an auditorium in order not to hear women singing. The performance was part of a mandatory lecture in Bahad 1, the IDF’s officer academy; even though more than 50 percent of current cadets are religious Jews, the nine were the only ones to object to the performance. “Listening to women singing,” they explained to their commander, “is against the halacha.” The commander, Lt. Col. Uzi Klieger, was unmoved. “You’re insensitive and disrespectful to these singers,” he said, according to an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv, “I can’t allow you to become officers. He who is insensitive won’t know how to tell a child carrying medicine apart from a terrorist in Lebanon, and will end up shooting the child.”

Klieger is absolutely right. The Israeli cadets are guilty of the same myopia as the pro-Palestinian protesters in London, namely the inability to understand that dignity and decency must always trump ideological convictions, and that no matter our persuasions, we must all pledge allegiance first and foremost to those things—like music, like conversation—that make us human, that make life worth living.

Refusing to do so was Amalek’s crime. The olden nation, we know from this week’s parasha, was guilty of not fearing God. This, Maimonides helpfully explained, means not necessarily that the Amalekites failed to accept all of God’s intricate strictures—which would mean, in essence, converting to Judaism—but that they failed to obey the Noahide Code, the seven edicts all nations, regardless of their faith, must follow and that outline the most basic principles of human morality by outlawing theft and murder and commanding the establishment of courts of law. Put simply, Amalek’s singular crime was refusing to behave like decent folks. There’s no greater offense.

Let us, then, obliterate Amalekite behavior, not by issuing half-hearted, tepid calls to civility, but by fiercely clinging, even amidst real and bitter conflict, to our standards, our spirit, our rectitude. Me, I’ll begin by sitting down, dimming the lights, and listening to that marvelous Op. 1 by Webern.

Alcalay’s most recent book, “neither wit nor gold” (from then), reminds us that he started off as and remains very much a poet.  To understand what he’s up to, it helps to remember an image from two decades ago, a few lines from his best-known piece of academic writing, the provocative After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. At the beginning of this passionate defense of “impure,” polyglot culture (his model is pre-expulsion Spain), Alcalay cited Maimonides. Following the Jewish sage’s warning that all light is not the same, Alcalay presented his own historical work as a form of dialectics, a constant shuttling between presumed causes and assumed effects:

Untangling the strands of the past—or submitting to their confusing but exhilarating intricacy—cannot simply be an act of recognition, of fitting events into fixed patterns, of just seeing the light. It must begin, rather, by apprehending the sources of light and the present objects they shade or illuminate, and follow with an active, incessant engagement in the process of naming and renaming, covering and uncovering, consuming and producing new relations, investigating hierarchies of power and effect: distilling light into sun, moon, and fire.

Alcalay doesn’t see the complications of the past as a cause for despair but rather as a source of hope. Through thought old relations become clearer, and new ones become bracingly possible.

Alcalay is therefore something of a utopian—I mean this as a compliment—and as with many utopians it is hard to distinguish his radicalism from his conservatism. This comes through most clearly in his poetics, in the way that he puts his creative works together. On the one hand, his book-length albums of borrowed language and surprising juxtapositions identify him as an “experimental” writer, in the fine tradition of modernist  and post-modern literary collagists. (It is a nice but not necessary fact that as a child he played badminton with the monumental avant-garde poet Charles Olson.)

On the other hand, he traces his insistence on quotation back to the medieval Hebrew practice of shibbutz—which, in the words of Hebrew scholar David Yellin, cited by Alcalay in After Jews and Arabs, is “the lighting of a candle from a lamp already lit, or the kindling of flame from a fire already blazing.” In earlier poetry, the original light was Scripture and the first spark was divine. In Alcalay’s work, though, that spark is secular and historical. His poetry aims to retrieve what has been lost to oblivion and, more important, lost to violence. Alcalay’s most impressive poetic work to date, the book-length from the warring factions, is an elliptical meditation on the atrocities committed during the Bosnian civil war of the early 1990s. Alcalay has borrowed most of its language and formulations from documentary sources, and its “I” is very rarely Alcalay himself. And yet this process can yield evocative, haunting results:

do not feel badly because you have lost

sight of this daylight no matter how hard

I try nothing happens today to you alone

those who have reached the place where

death stands waiting have not pointed out

a way to circumvent it I myself grieve when

I look back there into the past it is enough

to make anyone ponder now here at last

we are ready to end this when you start

to leave you must not think back

with regret you always return

garment of brightness

wildnerness

in the midst

of plenty

There are a lot of people here. This scary little passage teems with with I’s and you’s and they’s and we’s. They keep changing places, and the perspective does as well.

That fugal ambition is key to Alcalay’s project. He wants his readers to see from a number of viewpoints and take a number of positions. This necessarily involves seeing himself in the third person, looking at himself from a certain distance. In “neither wit nor gold” (from then), Alcalay has taken various things he wrote during the 1970s—poems, notes, diaries, many reproduced in their original handwriting or font—and made something of a scrapbook from them. He intercuts these rags and patches with photographs of musicians he took during the same period, and he creates a portrait less of himself than of a certain milieu at a certain time.

Beyond the musical references, what gives this book its historical resonance is not so much its details—although they can be telling—as its period style. Alcalay, who is now in his late fifties, comes from New England, and he hung around in Boston, where he seems to have been strongly influenced by the odd mixture of Beat hipness and poetic altitude that marks the work of the underappreciated John Wieners. In a way, the young Alcalay sounds more like a member of a previous generation. He listens to jazz, not rock, to Archie Shepp, not Janis Joplin.

“neither wit nor gold” demands from its reader a good ear for style and a sophisticated ability to jockey between the past and the present. The title poem stands at the book’s threshold, and its archaic diction, a riff on the 17th-century poet Anne Bradstreet’s riff on the Book of Matthew, places you in a historical no-man’s land:

rust and time

nor wit nor

gold abet the

old song’s burden

part prophecy part

longing the hanging

garden a shadowy

dream the world

grows so very old

though once we

too were young

My guess is that Alcalay takes “burden” here in  its musical sense, meaning a refrain or a chorus. He therefore seems to be offering a little apology for the writing that follows. But the present from which he tenders this is also old (or old-fashioned), at least as far as its language is concerned. We are the future—longed for, prophesied—that the past dreamed of and wrote poems about. This future though is also time-bound and never as modern as it thinks. Our present is shot through with the traces of those prophecies and dreams, just as our language bears our history within it.

As a chart of his early poetry’s longings, “neither wit nor gold” points forward to Alcalay’s subsequent career—you can hear what his writing wanted to be and what it would become. It also shows precisely when and where it started. That said, the book doesn’t display the politics that subsequently came to distinguish Alcalay’s career. The poems in this book precede the eight years he spent in Israel in the late 1970s and 1980s and therefore come before his involvement with the Israeli Black Panthers and with Palestinian-rights organizations. They precede his celebration of “Levantine” culture. They precede his work in and on Bosnia. They seem to come before Alcalay himself.

And to a certain extent, that is precisely Alcalay’s point. Although the young poet of “neither wit nor gold” can be sentimental, this is not a sentimental book. The older Alcalay does not seem particularly nostalgic for his previous self. Rather, the capacity to see from another’s point of view that informs from the warring factions marks this book as well. In this case, though, Alcalay is not involved in direct address to a “you,” nor is he trying to imagine another person’s experience. He approaches his experience as if it were somebody else’s. He takes his own poetry, his own notebooks, and his own diaries as documentary evidence of another person’s life and therefore presents them as the index of a different, never-quite-forgotten world.

It is as hard to describe “neither wit nor gold” as it is to describe its author. It is a poetry book that is not exactly a book of poetry. It excerpts very, very badly because every page relies on its context and every poem and fragment, every note and picture, on its neighbors. It depends on its look as much as on its sound. Its title warns us that it lives between negations just as its title’s punctuation tells us that it is made of quotations. But to say that its title tells us all hardly tells the half of it.

“Instead of Dewey,” said the professor, “I suggest Whitehead.”

The historian was distracted. He turned to the old man. “Do you want to translate all of Pliny?”

“We need to translate all of it,” the old man said. “It’s a book from the time of the Second Temple, and it played an important part.”

The professor seemed incredulous. “Did you enjoy all of Pliny’s answers?” he asked.

“I did not enjoy them,” said the old man. “I was disappointed. But he’s the only one we have left from the time of Flavius. It was an entire Jewish world.”

A few more asides were tossed around. Then the gentlemen continued to talk about Pliny. The poet said he agreed with the old man: The Roman philosopher was worthy of consideration. “But it’s not easy to digest all of his work,” he added. “Also, I’m missing Maimonides. Without Maimonides I can’t consider myself educated.” And so it went for hours.

The discussion did not take place in a musty office at some university. Nor was it held at an obscure salon, or among aging intellectuals. The old man was David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister; the professor was Martin Buber, the historian Ben-Zion Dinur and the poet was Zalman Shazar, who a few years later would become Israel’s third president.  They were gathered—along with other intellectuals and politicians—in the prime minister’s office, discussing what they all deemed a matter of great national importance: a government initiative to sponsor the translation of key classical works  into Hebrew.

“You may think I’m a dreamer,” said Ben Gurion, channeling his inner John Lennon, “but the idea has been nagging at me for many years. Ever since the founding of the state I’ve felt that alongside founding a state we must also found a republic of the spirit. … We must provide our generation, in Hebrew, with all of the treasures of the human spirit, as each and every one of us is also a citizen of the world.”

Reading the meeting’s protocol this week, I was touched. Here, after all, was Israel’s founding father, fighting not only for the Jewish state’s physical survival but also for its intellectual well being, as comfortable talking about the Upanishads (he liked the overall vibe, but found the abundance of minor details too cumbersome) as he was discussing U.N. resolutions. Here was the architect of modern Jewish nationhood acknowledging that even in the midst of struggling for a homeland, one must never abandon the affinities that bind one to humanity at large and that span across time and cultures. Hallelujah, I thought, and amen.

And then I read the news. Ben Gurion met with Buber; Bibi Netanyahu, his eventual successor as Israel’s leader, couldn’t even meet with Justin Bieber. Ben Gurion’s government approved funding for a translation of Ibn Khaldun, the great 14th-century Arab historian; Netanyahu’s Cabinet helped pass a bill to defund institutions that teach the Arab point of view on Israel’s establishment.

These are more than mere differences in style. Regardless of political inclinations and ideological convictions, watching Netanyahu at the helm is a painful lesson in the corruption of a formerly great institution—Jewish leadership—which has historically perceived its duties as being simultaneously sacred and concrete, in charge of navigating earthly affairs but constantly fixing its gaze upon the heavens.

It’s an ancient tradition, and it is also the focus of this week’s parasha, which deals largely with the kohanim, or priests. These servants of God, we’re told, cannot come in contact with dead bodies or marry divorced or promiscuous women or serve if they are in any way physically deformed. From a modern perspective, the letter of the law is harsh, but its spirit is profoundly moving: When it comes to leading the people, we must demand no less than severe purity.

One could object, of course, and argue that the priests weren’t truly the leaders of the nation but merely its clerics, a small and separate and holy caste. But much evidence suggests otherwise; when God identifies the Israelites as his chosen people, for example, he commands them to be “a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.” The recurring dichotomies between the worldly and the divine are not incidental. The children of Israel must become not just a kingdom, but a kingdom of priests, not just a nation, but a holy one. Their notion of leadership, therefore, must revolve not only around canny politics and able armies, but also—and primarily—around the spiritual essence through which the Lord had set them apart from the rest of mankind.

A similar discussion is held later on in the biblical story, when the Israelites demand to be governed by a king. The prophet Samuel, the nation’s shepherd at the time, is appalled, but God soothes him. “Listen to all that the people are saying to you,” he instructs Samuel. “It is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will do.”

In the eyes of God, a king is a distraction from the grand vision of Sinai, a vision that imagines the entirety of the populace as holy, the whole nation as priests. But if a king must be appointed, let the people beware, and let the king himself govern only by the grace of God. It is not surprising, therefore, that the bulk of the Bible is dedicated to tales of mighty rulers felled by the Lord after losing their piety: In Israel, being in charge means being holy.

This is a much more momentous task for a contemporary leader to undertake. The exacting rituals described in this week’s parasha and elsewhere no longer apply. But the principle still stands: Every Jewish state must, at least in part, be also a republic of the spirit. Ben Gurion realized this instinctively and worked to disseminate great works of literature and philosophy. It is time for the same spirit to once again stir in the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem.

Miraz, now 68 and living in San Diego, is one of the many Jews watching the current crisis in Egypt with a sense of déjà vu. Before the creation of Israel in 1948, the Jewish community in Egypt boasted 80,000 members. In three waves of immigration—after the 1948 war, after the Suez Crisis in 1956, and after the Six-Day War in 1967—the community has dwindled to its current population of fewer than 40.

Fragments of Jewish manuscripts in the Cairo Geniza, a depository for religious books found in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo, date Egypt’s Jewish community back at least 2000 years. In the 12th century, Maimonides and his family fled Spain and settled in Egypt. Centuries later, Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition found a haven along the Nile. In the late 19th century, the opening of the Suez Canal provided Jews with irresistible economic opportunity as they flocked to Cairo and Alexandria from Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

The upper echelon lived well in pre-1952 Cairo, or the “Paris on the Nile,” as it was called. Residents marveled at the city’s cleanliness, the rich aroma of French perfumes emanating from department stores stocked with European goods, the trees lining the streets heavy with fragrant mangoes and tangerines. Jews thrived. They founded the banks, hospitals, major department stores, contributing to every aspect of Egypt’s modernization. The monarchy sent a delegation to the main synagogues on High Holidays as a sign of respect and solidarity.

After the founding of modern Israel, demonstrations of anti-Semitism abounded, and Jews left Egypt in droves. About half went to the new Jewish state. Others relocated to Brooklyn, settling in the Jewish Syrian community in Midwood. Many still express anger about their own suffering in the aftermath of the last revolution. “We were never treated as real Egyptians,” wrote Yosef Marzouk in an email from Israel. “We were treated as strangers.” At the time of the 1952 revolution, Marzouk, then 23 years old, had just completed a degree in pharmacology at Cairo University. After graduation, he and some classmates went to Alexandria to celebrate. As they sat in a coffee shop along Alexandria’s Mediterranean corniche, they saw tanks drive toward the king’s summer palace nearby; Marzouk fled his homeland for Israel the following year. His brother, a doctor, decided to stay behind, and in 1955, Dr. Moshe Marzouk was executed after being convicted of spying for Israel.

Viviane Franco, now 62 and living on Long Island, wrote in an email that the current protests have brought back terrifying memories of her childhood, like the times she was forced to hide in her family’s Cairo apartment, shutters closed, listening to people on the streets chant idbahu el-Yehud— “Let’s kill the Jews.” Franco’s family immigrated to Naples in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, when she was 18. She has little faith in the current protesters, saying that they are trying to “hoodwink the Americans into thinking Egyptians want democracy.” And she claims that numbness, not terror, is the lasting result of her childhood. “When I heard about the riots,” she wrote, “I didn’t even cry because I felt nothing.”

Miraz’s reaction is seemingly more measured on the surface, but equally pessimistic. “As a Jew who grew up in an Arab country, I know firsthand that Islam can be tolerant and kind to others,” he wrote from Israel, “as long as they are inferior or weak—dhimmi—in their group.”

Other Egyptian-born Jews expressed concern for the fate of the synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, as well as the Torah scrolls and religious articles.

Ita Lezmi, an octogenarian born in Alexandria, has lived in Brooklyn for decades. “Jews were lucky to be in Egypt,” she says. She says her childhood was an idyllic existence, calling life under the British-administered monarchy “sweet, easy, beautiful and magnificent.” Lezmi realizes that such a life came at great cost to others, and she says that the lower class has suffered greatly under Mubarak. “Here’s the situation,” she says. “They’re starving. Mubarak doesn’t give the poor a chance to breathe.” She was one of the few people I spoke with who was hopeful about the country’s future. “Look at this beautiful new generation, how the students stood to protect the museum, the schools, the hospitals. They’re educated. They want freedom.”

Lezmi and her family were expelled from Egypt after the Suez War; her husband was a French national. The family was given 24 hours to leave. “They took the house,” she says. “They took everything.” The Lezmis went to Genoa, Italy, where they “lived like dogs,” she said, before continuing for America.

Desire Sakkal, president of the Historical Society of the Jews from Egypt, based in Brooklyn, was 2 years old during the 1952 revolution and remembers little. But the terror that followed the Suez War remains clear to him. His grandfather, Halfon Safdieh, who would later be chief rabbi of the Egyptian community in Brooklyn, and his uncle, Solomon Safdieh, were beaten in the streets. His father was summoned to the local police department several times on the charge of being a Zionist. Still Sakkal’s father wanted to stay. In 1962, the government confiscated the family’s prosperous business, a button factory. The family fled, living in France for several months before settling in New York.

On one point everyone I spoke to agreed: No matter how much they suffered after being forced out of their homeland, they were happy they were no longer in Egypt.

“When you leave, you are still suffering,” Sakkal says. “But in the long run, it’s a blessing.”

“What kind of life would we have in Egypt? What would we do?” Lezmi wonders. “Thank God for America.”

CORRECTION, February 9: The Sakkals left Egypt in 1962 after their button factory was confiscated, not in 1967. This error has been corrected.

February 15: Sidney Miraz left Israel for France in 1980 and now lives in San Diego. This error has been corrected.

So, I set out solo for the Catskills (Kerhonkson, New York, to be specific) with both anticipation and angst, listening to country music in the car so I could pretend to still have one foot in the secular world that I was temporarily leaving behind.

This is the candid diary of a first-time, ambivalent Limmudnik.

Friday, January 14, 2011

11:55 a.m.: I pull into the Hudson Valley Resort near New Paltz, a hulk of a building with faux classical statues lining the circular driveway, and rush in without my bags to register and get to class. I run to the bathroom for road relief and notice a note on the plastic bottle of dishwashing liquid next to the sink: “Use this to wash your Limmud mug.” I think, When do I get my Limmud mug? Have I already missed the party favor?

12 p.m.: In an L-shaped conference room with a pretty view of snow and trees, Rabbi William Friedman is already teaching: “Creating an Egalitarian Day for G-d.” I try to catch myself up with Friedman’s interesting analysis of Sabbath strictures in Exodus. He posits that Shabbat was the first labor law; we’re commanded to rest so that our servants can. Cessation of work is non-hierarchical. A rabbi in the audience puts it shrewdly: “According to Torah, rest is the context in which equality exists.”

12:50 p.m.: I hurry to Yaffa Epstein’s class on Hillel. Epstein is a 20-something spark plug of a Talmud teacher who speaks very fast. Before sending us off in pairs to study the texts, she asks us to illustrate with our hands the meaning of “chevrutah,” study partner. People tent their fingers, interlock them, or snap their hands open and close like mouths. But Yaffa pounds her fist into her palm saying, “The point of chevrutah is to push us somewhere we can’t get to on our own.”

1:55 p.m.: Many sessions tempt me for this time slot (there are sometimes as many as 10 happening simultaneously), including “How Do We Obtain Forgiveness on Yom Kippur?”; “Can We Get Serious About Meditation Practice?”; “Zionism 101.” I choose sex. Doreen Seidler-Feller, an elegant, silver-haired South African-raised professor who has been associated with the Human Sexuality Training Program at UCLA and counsels a range of couples—including Orthodox Jews—about sexuality, talks about how our “consumerist culture” (texting, IM-ing, Facebook) has changed the “sexual ethic.” She suggests there’s value in turning to Jewish tradition to get us back to genuine relationships and intimacy. I start worrying that my children, now in 6th and 8th grades, will never learn how to interact face-to-face; all they know is text-flirting.

3 p.m.: I have just a half-hour before the official welcome event, and as I run through the lobby to get my bags from the car, I notice the crowd is younger than I predicted. Alongside the seniors and my own 40s-to-50s cohort are hip klatches of people in their 20s and 30s, many with young kids careening around or being pushed in strollers. I find myself for a moment regretting that I didn’t take my children here years ago when they were too young to object. Not only would they have enjoyed it, I can hope (the Limmud day camp looks merry from afar), but they would have grown up with a familiarity of seeing this many Jews gathered simply to learn and hang out: not a bad snapshot of our people. Just as I idealize this, I hear a 4-year-old kvetching about needing more cookies right this minute! I know it’s never so simple.

3:15 p.m.: Schlepping my bags through the lobby feels like a walk of shame: I’ve over-packed and feel sure I look like Tevye’s family carrying all their belongings from Anatevka. When I get to my room, I see it has a view of the Shawangunk Mountains. I try to dismiss the bird smudge on the window because I don’t want to be the snobby New Yorker who can’t handle a worn hotel room. If I were a Zen Jew, I’d just be grateful for the nice view.

3:30 p.m.: I’m not Miss-Join-In, but the enthusiasm in the packed auditorium—there are more than 700 people here—is infectious. This New York incarnation of Limmud (“learning” in Hebrew) began six years ago, based on Limmud UK, which has been in existence for 30 years and draws huge numbers. This conference draws mostly from New York and New Jersey, with a sprinkling of foreigners from the U.K. and Australia. The two co-chairs, 20-somethings who’ve been put in charge of the conference this year, shout, “This is your Limmud!” People cheer. A charismatic facilitator asks us to group ourselves by how many Limmuds we’ve attended, and I make my way over to the largest cluster, the first-timers, which makes me feel less like the conspicuous-rookie-with-too-many-suitcases.

4:30 p.m.: There are rows of unlit tea lights arranged on tables in the lobby and handwritten signs encouraging us to light our own. It’s surprisingly sweet to say a private blessing, and I think of my family, who didn’t make me feel too guilty about leaving them to pursue my Jewish edification. I miss them.

6:30 p.m.: At dinner, I have seating anxiety because I don’t have a friend here. But then I spot Rabbi Jennifer Krause, an old pal and great teacher whom I didn’t know was attending, and she rescues me. Sitting on my other side is Karen Radowsky, the co-creator of Limmud NY, who explains that there are 55 Limmuds in the world, eight in the United States. It’s affirming to hear how it keeps on spawning. The blessings are recited and sung by the entire room; there are long lines for hand-washing, and I gauge how much wine won’t compromise my lucidity before my first talk in two hours. The fish doesn’t appeal, so I eat too much challah.

8:45 p.m.: My first presentation (“Bored Jews in Synagogue,” about the malaise of worship for so many of my peers and our children) is about to begin, and I feel like kissing every person who walks into the room. I had worried that no one would come. More than 50 people attend, and the talk sparks a spirited discussion, including ideas about how to reinvigorate Saturday mornings for many who feel stuck and uninspired.

10:15 p.m.: I hurry to one last session of the day, which is—I’ll use the hyperbolic word—awe-inspiring. Shai Held (from Mechon Hadar yeshiva in Manhattan) is a master communicator and makes text feel rich and crucial. His room is packed. He distributes a sermon by Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav about seeing the best qualities in even people we dislike. So many of Held’s questions are hard for me to confront personally: Do you believe that by seeing the good in someone, you can actually change them? Is there a power in just the effort to look for the best in someone? Nachman’s concluding idea: that true leaders are those who can find “a grain of good”—“some mitzvah”—in every human being. He maintains that this is what it means to lead and move other people: to see them generously. That’s the work of a rabbi. “How can you be a leader of other people and represent them before God if you don’t like them?” Held asks. I raise my hand to ask whether one good act or trait should be enough to redeem someone. Held ventures that Nachman might respond that “Even one little piece makes transformation possible—everyone is ‘tzadakable.’ ” He smiles at the made-up word.

11:30 p.m.: I stop by the “tisch” before going up to bed. Jen Krause had explained to me that it’s a time for people to sit around drinking, singing, “performing” Torah. When I duck my head in, it looks like a Poetry Slam—when a young, long-bearded man finishes rapping, others start humming a hearty niggun, pounding the tables like drunken sailors.

12 a.m.: When I climb into bed, I realize I feel happy. And I find a sweet coincidence when I pick up my book—Jonathan Galassi’s new translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s poetry. I turn to a random page and stumble on lines that echo exactly what I’d stressed in my talk on re-energizing our tradition:

“… how do you constantly
Bring our ancestors to life again;
And let them speak to this dead century
In its haze of tedium?
And, language of our fathers
Silent so long, how is it
We hear you loud and clear and often now?”

Saturday, January 15, 2011

8:15 a.m.: Since when is dipping a tea bag in hot water a violation of the Sabbath? No one I ask at my breakfast table seems to know, but they venture a guess that maybe it’s because the tea changes the water when it enters it, and, indeed, when I go on the Internet later to check (another Sabbath violation) I see that the hot water “cooks the leaves,” and cooking is obviously prohibited. This is all to say that—despite the Sanka (which I don’t count as coffee) and the hotel’s pre-made, room-temperature tea in a pitcher—there is no caffeine to be had at this early hour! Even rabbis are complaining quietly that they’re suffering from withdrawal.

9 a.m.: I’m in the conspicuous minority skipping morning services and sampling a different kind of spirituality: “Nefeshbliss Partner Yoga.” Our mats are close together in a room near the indoor swimming pool, and instructor Becca Rosen asks us to create our own “Kiddush cup” with our hands and get in touch with our “nefesh,” or soul. I leave early because I have to deliver my “Bored Jews” talk a second time in a half-hour, and I’d rather not give my speech sweaty.

1:30 p.m.: Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, who runs UCLA’s Hillel (and is married to Doreen Seidler-Feller, the sex specialist), is like a brilliant mad scientist: so brimming with ideas and information that at times he seems to almost short out. I get hooked on the voltage of his delivery and attend three of his sessions during the weekend. In “Searching for God in Judaism,” he poses the perennial question: Why are Jews less inclined to be connected to God? The thrust of his lesson: Maimonides emphasized that if we learn and accept, as we should, that humans are not God, then we can aspire to godliness in the world.

4:30 p.m.: In the lobby, which has become a hub of snacking and schmoozing, there’s an endless stream of cookies and brownies on trays. After sampling too many, I’m hit with fatigue and go to my room to power nap and do a little of my own yoga without any nefesh.

6:30 p.m.: I drag myself hesitantly to the “community-wide Havdalah” service, and I don’t regret it. Rabbi David Ingber, of Renewal congregation Romemu on the Upper West Side, is a stirring speaker, and his band is rousing, though I don’t join the conga lines. The lit braided candles held aloft around the theater are letting off a lot of heat, and I’m hoping my deodorant is functioning when Nigel Savage of Hazon puts his arm around me to sway. Next thing I know, I find myself clapping my hands over my head to “L’cha Dodi”—something I don’t think I’ve ever done before in my life. I’m aware of feeling both giddy and awkward. If my kids were here, I might actually dance.

7:30 p.m.: Dinner on Styrofoam: I load up a sagging plate of lasagna and spaghetti (Jews and Buffets: A Love Story), preparing to eat on my lap in another Shai Held class—this one on Heschel and Maimonides.

9 p.m.: Lisa Klug’s “Cool Jew” slideshow is a welcome breather from the dense text study. My favorite in her collection of Jew kitsch: a pair of panties that read: “A Great Miracle Happened Here.”

10:30 p.m.: I skip karaoke but catch the end of a tribute to Debbie Friedman. People are standing up to sing her “Mi Shebeirach,” and I watch the tears from the back row, marveling at how this song will be sung in shuls forever.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

8 a.m.: At least the coffee urn is back up and running post-Shabbat.

8:30 a.m.: It’s too early in the morning to parse the Messiah, but Seidler-Feller is his own caffeine as he teaches “Zionism and Messianism: A Passion for Waiting.” I love how he summarizes Maimonides on Messianism: “If it’s worthy of the end of days, it’s worthy of today.” In other words, “Do the work of improving the world right now.”

9:45 a.m.: Another cookie. (Where is the session on “Carbs in the Diaspora”?)

10 a.m.: The second transcendent session of the weekend: Rabbi David Ingber and Joe Septimus on the Afikomen. Ingber’s words on the essentiality of brokenness make me choke up in a way that surprises me. “We all come broken,” he says, “and our brokenness can be that place that allows us to heal.” He posits that every child is a whole matzo, and only through maturity—i.e., breakage–do they grow up. I can’t count the ways this resonates. When I approach him afterward to introduce myself and thank him, he asks if I’m related to David Pogrebin. Yes, he’s my brother, I say, and he describes a literal brokenness: My brother apparently fractured the rabbi’s nose in a pick-up ice hockey game 10 years ago. He shows me where his nose is bent.

11:30 a.m: Ethan Tucker, yet another nimble teacher, is co-founder of the Upper West Side’s Mechon Hadar. Tucker compares the two tellings of Moses and the Rock—one in Exodus, one in Numbers—and asks why this event is credited, fairly or unfairly, with Moses getting barred from the Promised Land. His interesting proposition: Maybe the rabbis pegged this parable as the moment of Moses’ misstep because they had to find some moment of culpability; otherwise we were left with the notion that a righteous person can be punished severely for the sins of others.

1:15 p.m.: Third round of Seidler-Feller: This time, he gives a primer on Islam. My head is starting to explode, and my daughter Molly is texting me to come home.

2:45 p.m.: I give my last presentation, this one on famous Jews and whether a public life is incompatible with an observant one. Many people come and appear to enjoy it, although one man in the audience has such a pronounced, hysterical laugh that it’s ruining the funny lines. I want to hit him. Then I think of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav and try to find the good in this man.

4:30 p.m.: I check out of the hotel a day early. Partly because of my daughter’s pleas, partly because I’m filled up and want to leave sated, not over-saturated. It was enough for now. I head south on the Thruway, but I feel like my Jewish journey—“journey” is such an Oprah word, but it’s apt here—has really only just begun.

Germany will not fade from the Jewish present, nor, indeed, from the Jewish past. When we try today to picture the world of German Jewry, we are most likely to see the pointlessness of it all through the eyes of Franz Kafka and other Jews who once formed the cutting edge of cultural experimentation. In 2005 the Jewish Museum in New York devoted its main exhibition space to the salons of wealthy Jewish women from the late 18th century through the 1940s and their patronage of early Modernist artists—Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Oscar Wilde, and Marcel Proust. The coffee-klatsch and a college education launched the careers of any number of Jewish literary figures, but memories are fading. As a small child I wondered at the writers who stood on my grandparents’ small bookshelf, with magically unpronounceable names—Leon Feuchtwanger, for example, the bestselling novelist of the 1920s whom Hitler dubbed the “number one enemy of the state.” English editions of his novels are hard to scrounge today from used booksellers. The cultural world of German-Jewish assimilation lies moldering in Jewish studies departments.

In truth, there are two stories within the terrible history of Germany and the Jews. One is the story of the German Jews, Europe’s most assimilated community, who contributed to German civic life in vast disproportion to their small numbers. The other story is the meeting of German culture and Jewish religion. This story will never quite fade from Jewish life. Like the medieval Jewish engagement with Greek and Islamic thought, it raises issues that should preoccupy Jewish scholars for generations. It took place far from the glittering salons of the Berlin elite, in yeshiva classrooms and the lodgings of itinerant students. But it continues to have bearing on how Jews might live in the modern world, and its lessons, good as well as bad, will not soon lose importance.

It is still painful for Jews to bring to mind their long encounter with German culture. In the 2009 edition of Yeshiva University’s journal Torah u-Madda, Marc B. Shapiro published a translation of a sermon that the great Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch gave before his synagogue on the hundredth birthday of the German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller in 1859. Hirsch lauded Schiller’s compassion and humanitarianism as Torah values, and quoted at length the poet’s “Ode to Joy,” the one Schiller poem Americans might have read, because Beethoven set its opening stanzas in his Ninth Symphony.

Shapiro’s translation bothered some Orthodox bloggers who objected to any kind reference to German culture. Schiller’s youthful Ode, to be sure, offers a soupy appeal to universal brotherhood that sounds better in his sonorous German verse than in the post-mortem of translation. Schiller wrote, for example,

Rancor and revenge be forgotten!
Our mortal enemy be forgiven!
Not one tear should oppress him,
No regret should gnaw at him.

The above strophe shows how much of the difference between German and Yiddish lies in pronunciation; in Yiddish we would say, rather, “Not one tear should oppress him? No regret should gnaw at him?” With due respect to Hirsch, there is some truth to the remonstration that he conceded too much to the universalism of German philosophy. But the give and take between German Jewish Orthodoxy and the poets of German Classicism was richer and subtler than his Schiller sermon might suggest.

By no accident, the outstanding leaders of what would become the main currents of American Judaism all studied at the University of Berlin during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the sage of postwar Modern Orthodoxy, wrote a doctorate in philosophy and mathematics there in 1932. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the leading voice of Conservative Judaism, finished his doctorate (later published as The Prophets) a couple of years later. The Reform scholar Leo Baeck earned his doctorate under the Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. The future Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, attended classes for two years in the early 1930s. Franz Rosenzweig, who belonged to no denomination but is read by all, had finished a dissertation (still in print) on Hegel and the state before abandoning academic life to lead a school for Jewish adult education.

Apart from Rosenzweig, none of them were German. Berlin was a magnet for Polish Jews like Schneerson, Heschel, and Baeck, and the Lithuanian Soloveitchik, because German Orthodoxy had created an intellectual world in dialogue with secular culture unlike any other since the time of Maimonides. At the center of this world was Berlin’s Hildesheimer Yeshiva, whose rector in the early 1930s, Yechiel Weinberg, led a Polish congregation before earning a doctorate in Hebrew at the University of Giessen. David Lincoln, rabbi emeritus at New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue, met some of the Hildesheimer faculty after they came to Britain as wartime refugees. “My teacher,” Lincoln recalls, “was a traditional Jew with a long beard and forelocks, utterly strict in observance, but he had done a dissertation on Wordsworth.”

Even Franz Rosenzweig, whose attachment to German identity never faded during his brief life, might be counted as an honorary Ostjud. In 1913 he had decided to convert to Protestant Christianity, like any good Hegelian. But Rosenzweig, raised in a secular home, felt that he should convert to Christianity as a Jew, and for the first time attended Yom Kippur services—as it happened, in a shtiebel with Eastern European Jews. The religious passion of the Polish minyan won him over, and he became a baal tshuvah, a Jew who turns to embrace Orthodox Judaism, rather than a Christian.

Judaism’s encounter with Germany took place far from the salons of the German-Jewish elite. The secular achievements of German Jews still astonish: Fewer than a million of them left a giant imprint on science, art, and industry, not to mention the 1914 war effort. In the 1830s, the foremost musician and the foremost poet in this land of music and poetry were, respectively, Felix Mendelssohn and Heinrich Heine—both Christian converts, but prominently identified as Jews. German Jews earned Nobel Prizes in science and Olympic gold medals in saber (after the dueling clubs at German universities excluded them). They built critical sectors of the German economy. Despite his personal anti-Semitism, Kaiser Wilhelm II relied on Walter Rathenau, the Jewish president of General Electric of Germany, and the shipping magnate Albert Ballin, who killed himself when Germany lost World War I. To the extent that German Jews helped build German industry, Hitler was the final beneficiary of their enterprise, and to is hard to suppress the wish that they had done something else.

The story has been told well by Fritz Stern, and Paul Mendes-Flohr and other writers have dissected the German Jews’ tragic identification with their new Fatherland. After World War II, German Jews became the butt of yekke jokes (after the jacket, or Jacke, that they  insisted on wearing even in Israel’s summer heat). “There’s no way Hitler could have lost that war if only he had gotten the Jews on his side,” goes one.

German-Jewish assimilation left little trace. The Reform and Conservative movements are German transplants to America, although in their present form they bear little resemblance to their Teutonic antecedents. The great biblical scholar Solomon Schechter (1847-1915) founded the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1903 as a traditional riposte to Reform Judaism, but his notion of a Jewish law that evolves by national consensus has left a legacy so confused that it is hard to speak of a Conservative Jewish theology. The German roots of Reform Judaism have long since faded.

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Yet what brought our conversation around to the Purim story was not the characters he met while working the checkout desk and then profiled in his memoir. Running the Books is about the two years he spent working at a Boston prison, an experience that helped him do what Harvard could not help him do: Grow up. In addition to recommending titles to inmates, Steinberg taught them creative writing, collected their “kites” (the notes they left for each other on the shelves and in the books), and became more entangled in their lives than an agent of the state probably should. But we had been talking about the other famous Esther—Petrack, of America’s Next Top Model.

Steinberg’s interest in the reality show goes beyond a simple desire to look at beautiful women. He was piqued by parallels between his experience and hers: Both are graduates of Maimonides in Boston, and, until a week ago, both had appeared to be on similar religious tracks. Steinberg had abandoned Orthodoxy as a student at Harvard, right around the same age that Petrack had seemingly abjured her religious practice on ANTM. (Unless she hasn’t.) If Esther remains on the derech, the proper path, she probably won’t be removed from the Maimonides alumni newsletter, as Steinberg was when his book was published. “I loved Maimo,” he told me. “It saved me. I had gone to a shitty Cleveland day school. I arrived by going to Boston. I respectfully disagree with Noah Feldman. I don’t think it was such a radical place.” But Steinberg understands that Maimonides had to distance itself from him for pragmatic reasons, since he does discuss his movement away from Orthodoxy in a few different places in the book.

But don’t confuse Steinberg with another ex-Ortho who has written a memoir, Tablet Magazine columnist Shalom Auslander. Unlike Auslander, he isn’t angry about his upbringing. If anything, Steinberg’s tone, both in the book and in person, regarding his present religious practice (or lack thereof), is wistful. “It just makes me sad that I don’t have Shabbos anymore,” he said. “It’s not guilt. It’s something worse than guilt. I actually believe in God, which is really scary.” He continued: “There’s a whole discussion how the new year and the new month is up to people, but Shabbat is not up to people,” he explained, referring to the populace’s role in determining months and holidays by judging the size and shape of the moon. The Sabbath “just happens regardless of whether we decide to acknowledge it or not. …You either decide to ignore it or not. But there are those moments when you know you’re ignoring it and you know it’s still there.”

Though his practice slipped precipitously after he left Yeshiva University to attend Harvard in order to more easily “get with girls,” he still studies Jewish texts nearly every day. This love of learning hearkens back to the days when he attended a Gemara camp in Israel and took Rabbi Baruch Lanner’s class. “I love Lanner, you can quote me on that. I think he gave a great shiur. I didn’t know him for the bad stuff,” he added, referring to the accusations of sexual abuse of minors and convictions on at least two counts. “He should be judged and put into jail for the crimes he committed. But let me tell you right now, the guy gave a great shiur.”

Maybe if Lanner had shown up in his prison library, Steinberg could’ve steered him to the Sylvia Plath section (which he had considered dismantling so as not to encourage the suicidal ideation of some of the female inmates). But most of the prisoners that Steinberg encountered were not like himself, and that is the basis for some of the criticism regarding his memoir—that it is simply another book in the “white person helps minorities while learning life lessons from them” oeuvre. “There’s nothing I can do about that I suppose,” he said, shrugging. “I’m just who I am and whatever I write or you write or anyone writes, you can get criticized on the basis of who you are.”

Running the Books [Amazon]
Related: Orthodox Paradox [NYT Magazine]

How could I pick something else? As a Syrian Jew, I am named after my mother’s mother. Unlike Ashkenazi Jews, Syrians name their children after their parents, living or dead. Bolisa is an Arabic name that goes back generations in our family, as is Shefia, my mother’s name.

Had the preschool incident been an isolated one, I probably would have forgotten it by now, but as I’ve grown into adulthood, I’ve found it indicative of the general state of Judaism in America, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Ashkenazi tradition. My Ashkenazi in-laws have a collection of Jewish books on their coffee table, books on Jewish humor, cooking, and tradition. I peruse them and find no trace of my culture. Recently, my mother-in-law added a book titled The Sephardim to the pile. While I appreciate her intention, it saddens me that Sephardic Jews (and here I use the term loosely, describing all Jews who lived under Muslim rule) need their own book—that we have to exist outside of the norm rather than as part of the whole.

It’s not enough to define myself as not being Ashkenazi; defining oneself against something means, really, being defined by it. The definition must lie in the presence: I am Mizrahi, literally a Jew from the East, a product of Arabic culture, and I must find a way to know and own my story and preserve it for my children.

Even today, in New York City, some people are shocked when I say I am both Syrian and Jewish. They imagine intermarriage, an illicit love affair, elopement perhaps. I find myself explaining my past and having social conversations that turn into history lessons, especially when I relay all the details: My mother’s grandparents emigrated from Syria in the 1910s. My paternal grandfather escaped to pre-1948 Palestine from Aden, Yemen. There, he met my grandmother, the Iraqi-born daughter of a Turkish mother and a Kurdish father. She and her family had been stuck in Iraq for several years until they could save more money, because the cost of being smuggled into Jerusalem had risen considerably.

Despite this mixture, I identify most with my Syrian side, a result of my parents’ decisions. When I was 9, my mother enrolled me and my three siblings in a Syrian-Jewish day school, where there were two Ashkenazis in my grade. When I was 12, we moved from the mixed Israeli-Sephardic and American-Ashkenazi neighborhood where we lived into the heart of Syrian Brooklyn.

To live in the Syrian community is to be immersed in its traditions, to eat its tangy-sweet meats slow-cooked in tamarind sauce, to speak its Arabic-inflected Hebrew, to sing its Middle Eastern melodies, to dance to the music of the oud, to revere family, and to always have a home open to guests. But it is also to marry young and often forgo higher education to start a family. It can be stifling, and as a young, independent, headstrong girl, I left for college thinking I’d never look back. But as a grown woman, living on the Lower East Side with my Ashkenazi husband and our 2-year-old daughter, I wonder if I’ve lost something. How I can infuse my home with what I love about Syrian culture even as we physically reside outside of it?

If maintaining the heritage is hard, transmitting the history is even harder. At the Syrian-Jewish high school I attended, the Jewish history curriculum—aside from a passage on Maimonides and another on the Damascus Blood Libel—concerned itself with the lives of Jews in Europe, reducing the millennia-old history of my people to a mere footnote. What I know of Sephardic and Mizrahi history is self-taught, the product of months of research while writing a novel. At the same time that I am grateful for all I was able to learn, I’m angry about how far outside the Jewish canon I had to go to find it.

How have Mizrahi Jews fallen so far into oblivion? Where is the record of millennia of history, of Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa since biblical times? The community in Aleppo traces its roots to the time of King David. Documents in the Cairo Geniza prove an unbroken Jewish presence in Egypt for 2,000 years. Until 1948, when Israel was founded, 800,000 Jews lived in Arab countries, and another 200,000 lived in Turkey and Iran. About half later moved to Israel, and the other half were scattered around the world. When the veteran reporter Helen Thomas ended her career by telling Jews to go back to Germany and Poland, I wanted to remind her of the thriving Jewish community that once existed in her beloved Lebanon.

Mizrahi Jews, like my grandparents, started leaving the Levant well before Israel’s creation, and those who arrived in the United States were often shocked by what they found. Ostracism of non-Yiddish-speaking Jews was so pervasive in the early 20th century that it’s noted in an exhibit at the Lower East Side’s Tenement Museum. In a tour called “Living History,” visitors are invited into the home of the Confinos, a Greek-Sephardic family who lived in the tenements in 1916. There, a costumed interpreter portraying 14-year-old Victoria Confino answers questions about her old life in Greece and her new life in New York. When I ask her how she feels about Jewish life on the Lower East Side, she sighs and shakes her head. “They treat us like we’re not real Jews because we don’t speak Yiddish,” she says. “And their food,” she shudders. “They don’t use any olive oil; they fry everything in chicken fat.”

In his excellent book The Magic Carpet: Aleppo-in-Flatbush, Joseph A.D. Sutton recounts the tale of the first Syrian Jews to arrive on the Lower East Side in 1910:

During a mid-week prayer service in an Eastern European synagogue, my father, ritually clothed in taleet, a prayer shawl, and tefileen, phylacteries, was approached by an Ashkenazic congregant. Since he did not understand what was being said to him in “plain Yiddish” the man who had spoken to him asked in evident amazement, “Bist du a Yid?” (“Are you a Jew?”). Similar experiences were common.

Sutton details that Syrians weren’t welcomed to worship with their Ashkenazi co-religionists and soon set up their own congregations on the Lower East Side, first in the basement of the Educational Alliance on East Broadway, then at 48 Orchard Street. As they prospered, and as families grew, they left Manhattan for Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

It’s little wonder, then, that Syrian Jews stick to themselves. The community, now in Midwood, Brooklyn, is often described as an insular enclave. In widely used slang, Syrians play off that early experience by calling Ashkenazi Jews J-Dubs. It’s short for J-W, or simply, Jew, as if to say, “Yeah. We got it. You guys are the real Jews.” They call themselves SY and draw sharp distinction between ours and theirs: language and food, behavior and culture.

Ironically, after eight years of marriage to my husband, and my mother-in-law’s patient insinuations, I probably know more Yiddish than I do Arabic. And though I want to preserve my daughter’s Sephardic heritage, she is also half-Ashkenazi, and that side of her should be celebrated as well.

For now, I think of ways I can keep Middle Eastern tradition alive for her. I’ll show her how to dance to Arabic music at parties, flicking her wrists and shimmying her hips. I’ll feed her grape leaves stewed in apricots, a dish of rice and lentils with caramelized onions. I’ll teach her to stuff filah dough with sautéed spinach and walnuts, folding it into triangles topped with sesame seeds. When Passover comes, she’ll join me in helping my mother and grandmother prepare. We’ll spread grains of rice on the table, inspecting them for hametz, passing them from one woman to the next until they’ve been checked three times and are ready to be served at the seder.

I’ll explain the amulet I pin on her clothes, the hamsika hand-pendant that wards off the evil eye. I’ll recount the story of the Arabic-inscribed Ottoman coin I wear around my neck, the one my great-grandmother took with her before she was smuggled out of Iraq, on foot, at night, through the mountains. I’ll tell her about another great-grandmother, who was employed as a seamstress before marrying in Aleppo. After a long day’s work, she would sit beside her family’s large pool, smoking her narghile. I may worry that mainstream Judaism’s institutions will not teach her her history, but I will tell her the stories of these women, teach her to dance the way they did, to cook their food, and express intense emotion in the handful of Arabic phrases I know. I’ll keep her traditions alive for her. And hope that will be enough.

Paula Sadok, a writer living in New York, has recently completed a novel.

Some further digging into the report (which you can download in full here) reveals the Jews (and the Mormons) acquitting themselves very well, which probably has as much to do with socioeconomics as anything else. And as for those atheist/agnostics, well, who do you really think they are?

• Slightly more Mormons (92 percent) than Jews (90 percent) know who Moses is. Ditto Abraham (87 percent to 83 percent) and Job (70 percent to 47 percent).

• More Jews knew that Martin Luther inspired the Reformation (70 percent) than not only Catholics (42 percent, which makes a certain degree of sense) but than Protestants (47 percent)! C’mon, guys! Oh, and Jews scored a rare victory here over the generally impressive atheist/agnostics (68 percent). Which is ironic, given that Luther was a notorious anti-Semite.

• On the two explicitly Jewish questions, we wiped the floor with everyone else. 94 percent of Jews know that the Jewish Sabbath begins on Friday; next highest are the atheists/agnostics (56 percent) and the Mormons (55 percent). As for Maimonides, 57 percent of Jews knew about him, as compared to 19 percent of atheist/agnostics, 10 percent of nothing-in-particulars, and single digits for everyone else.

• We know more about Mormons than everyone but the Mormons. For more on Mormonism, here is a helpful primer.

• We know more about Islam than everyone else, although Muslims were not among the religious groups counted in the poll (which Pew doesn’t appear to explain).

• Jews and Mormons know the most about atheism other than atheist/agnostics; Jews know the most about agnosticism other than atheist/agnostics

• Jews knew the most about societal questions—politics, science, history, and literature—than anyone but, again, those pesky atheist/agnostics.

Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans [NYT]
U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey [Pew]
Related: Maimonides [Nextbook Press]

I was especially taken with this passage:

A decade later, [Husein] studied psychology and sociology at Bethlehem University. As Husein read Marx, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg, he realized the writers were all Jews. He resolved to learn Hebrew to better understand the Jewish people. By day, he chatted with his Israeli coworkers in a cement factory. At night he read the Bible, first in Arabic—“We were fortunate the Christian Arabs translated it to Arabic,” he said—and then in Hebrew.

It reminded me of one of the techniques that FBI counter-terrorism specialist Ali Soufan used in the course of interrogating an al-Qaeda sympathizer named Abu Jindal (as reported by the great Lawrence Wright).

Abu Jandal was confounded by Soufan: a moderate Muslim who could argue about Islam with him, who was in the F.B.I., and who loved America. He quickly read the history that Soufan gave him and was amazed to learn of the American Revolution and its struggle against tyranny.

Lost in Translation [Tablet Magazine]
Related: The Agent [New Yorker]
Maimonides [Nextbook Press]

Born in Jerusalem to Palestinian refugee parents from Abu Shusha (today’s Kibbutz Gezer, not far from the city of Ramla in central Israel), Husein remembers throwing stones at the Jews who passed through a gate in the barbed wire that split East Jerusalem, where he grew up, from the rest of the city. The wire came down when Israel conquered East Jerusalem in 1967, and Husein met his first Jewish friends. A decade later, he studied psychology and sociology at Bethlehem University. As Husein read Marx, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg, he realized the writers were all Jews. He resolved to learn Hebrew to better understand the Jewish people. By day, he chatted with his Israeli coworkers in a cement factory. At night he read the Bible, first in Arabic—“We were fortunate the Christian Arabs translated it to Arabic,” he said—and then in Hebrew.

Husein sidelined his hobby to raise three children, Khalil, Dalila, and Majd. But about 15 years ago he remembered the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, about whom he had heard a few sentences in high school in Ramallah.

“Maimonides wrote his books in Hebrew letters but in Arabic words,” said Husein. “I discovered I could read Maimonides in his original language. How many Jews can do that?”

Husein, a non-practicing Muslim, said he studied the Jewish people to promote peace and explore his own history.

“The people of Palestine did not all come from Arabia,” he said. “There were people before them, Jews and Christians. Some left, the majority stayed. I don’t consider myself a Jew or Hebrew or Israelite. I’m Arab. But all those people before and after Islam, I consider my ancestors.”

The Rambam, as Maimonides is known, provided an inspiring example of living in multiple worlds. He was born in Córdoba, Spain, in 1135 at a time when Jewish poets modeled their work on Arabic verse. A decade later, Maimonides and his family fled Córdoba to escape death or conversion forced by the invading Islamic Almohades army. Rather than running to Western Europe, Maimonides moved to Morocco and then Egypt. In Fustat, near Cairo, Maimonides was court physician to Sultan Saladdin. As a philosopher, Maimonides worked with his Muslim contemporary Averroes on advancing the writings of Aristotle. But he was also the spiritual leader of Fustat’s Jewish community, and he penned the authoritative codification of the oral tradition, the 14-volume Mishneh Torah. Maimonides died in Egypt in 1204 and was buried in Tiberias, Israel.

“During the very critical period of history—the Crusades—it was a Jew who treated Saladdin himself,” Husein said. “It means the Muslims trusted the Jews a lot.”

In 2002, Husein contacted Nathan Ehrlich, then dean of online studies at Hebrew College in Boston. In a meeting at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, the two realized they were both born in the capital on the same date in 1954. Husein studied by correspondence for two semesters and then got a scholarship to study on campus for his second year. Before he left Boston, Husein bought the abridged Hebrew Mishneh Torah in a discount bin. Unlike Maimonides’ other works, which were written in Judeo-Arabic, the Mishneh Torah was composed in Hebrew.

“I read some pages and said this must be translated because Arabs know nothing about it,” he said. “They know nothing about Jewish thought. We are fortunate to have a book like this that summarizes 14 books.”

Husein translated the book into Arabic on the white plastic table on his balcony, just steps from the official residence of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. To support himself, Husein taught Hebrew part-time at the Ramallah YMCA, and his wife worked in the library of the nearby town of El-Bireh.

Muhammad Husein, 54, in his Ramallah apartment
Daniella Cheslow

The work done, in 2009 Husein called publishers in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. He sent query letters to Palestinian universities and Israeli research institutes. No one was interested. He chalked it up to the content. Arab readers, he said, are hungry for military tales, the biography of Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu, or the life stories of Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl, Menachem Begin, and Golda Meir. Hebrew literature has also found Arab readers; this year, a translation of Amos Oz’s memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness was published in Lebanon.

Publishing Maimonides in Arabic would break that mold by bringing the spiritual foundations of Judaism to an Arab audience, but his book was nearly a thousand years old. Husein said he also translated Martin Buber’s 1956 Hasidism and Modern Man, to offer a more modern work, but no one has bitten on that one either.

In the West Bank, Birzeit University’s philosophy and cultural studies department teaches survey courses on European civilization and thought, but it gives short shrift to Semitic philosophy of any kind. “We have two Islamic philosophy professors here, and they don’t give courses themselves,” said Nadim Mseis, a lecturer in the department.

In the East Jerusalem village of Abu Dis, Al-Quds University has run an Israel Studies program for a decade, where Palestinian students learn the roots of modern Zionism. But the department has little use for a Jewish theological tract. Uri Davis, born in Kfar Shmaryahu in Mandatory Palestine in 1943, is the only Jewish member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council.

“In the shadow of 60 years of occupation, it is rather complicated to establish Jewish studies,” Davis said in a Ramallah meeting. “It’s not a question of lack of interest. You have to defeat apartheid in Israel and remove the occupation before you can even begin to negotiate that kind of study.”

Rachella Mizrachi, of Tel Aviv, lectures at Al-Quds in Arabic about what she terms the “experience of Jews from the Islamic world in Occupied Palestine.” While she mentions the Rambam, Mizrachi said, she focuses on the devastation of those Jewish communities of the Islamic world in the 1950s.

“The destruction of the Arab Jewish communities is another result of the Zionist project,” she said. Asked how her students react, she said, “They understand that the same man who destroyed our culture is the same ethnic group that is destroying their culture.”

Husein’s difficulty doesn’t surprise Mohamed Hawary, a professor of Jewish thought and comparative religions in Cairo’s Ain Shams University. Hawary wrote in an e-mail that an Arabic translation of the six books of the Mishnah were published between 2006 and 2009 but that no one has tackled Maimonides yet.

“Here in Egypt, all of us scholars dealing with Hebrew and Jewish studies are suffering when we want to publish a book,” he wrote. “I think that Mr. Husein can find a Jewish publisher or Jewish center or institution in Israel who believes how it is important to spread Jewish culture.”

Yet Israel has proven to be equally unfertile ground. The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, based in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak, only deals in modern fiction. Tel Aviv’s Moshe Dayan Center for Arab-Jewish Studies focuses on history and politics. At the Jerusalem Minerva Institute, which teaches Arabic to Israelis, director Assaf Golani suggested he could publish the translation, provided Husein does not expect to get paid. At press time he was still examining a sample of Husein’s work.

One option may lie with Intellectual Encounters, a virtual academic community of scholars who study the medieval world of Islam. On the steering committee are Hebrew University rector Sarah Stroumsa, Yale Islamic studies professor Frank Griffel, and Sari Nusseibeh, who is president of Al-Quds University but working on this project privately as an Islamic philosophy scholar. Funding is from the Rothschild Family’s Yad Hanadiv Foundation in Jerusalem.

Academic director Raquel Ukeles said the program will include a course on medieval Islam to be taught at Yale, Al-Quds, Bar Ilan University in Israel, and Tübingen University in Germany. Further, the program’s website will publish translations of important works, and scholars who speak Hebrew and Arabic would be useful. Ukeles, who has traveled to Egypt, Morocco, and Qatar, said, “Everywhere I go people ask me, ‘Can you recommend books about Jewish philosophy?’ ”

“Now that I know about Husein, and if he’s doing good work, I think I can work with him to raise money,” she said.

In 2007, Husein told Hebrew College Today that he wanted to work in Ramallah as a professor or for an organization that advanced the cause of peace. But three years later, the Mishneh Torah has turned into an albatross that has even strained his marriage, he said. He dreams of earning a doctorate in Holocaust or Jewish Studies but has not applied for a Fulbright scholarship that could cover the costs. He needs a job but can’t find one. For now, he has Hebrew teaching gigs from time to time and passes his days reading about the Holocaust on his balcony.

“I am working without any purpose,” he said. “A man lifting stones from place to place.”

Daniella Cheslow is a Jerusalem-based journalist.

The reason shatnez seems resonant to me right now is that I have a kid whose laws governing clothing are as strict as the Torah’s. She won’t wear anything made of wool, denim, khaki, or corduroy. She abhors anything with tight sleeves or a tag in the back. She cannot abide shoulder straps with any lace, appliqués, or detailing that might touch her shoulders. She smites (metaphorically) all halter-tops and any sundress that ties behind the neck. She disdains the narrow crewneck, the turtleneck, the elasticized sleeve, the wide waistband.

But Maxie’s laws are mishpatim, not chukim. Her reasoning is known. She has sensory issues, and all those sartorial items feel horrible to her.

I understand her logic, but what’s the Torah’s? Maimonides theorized that it had to do with pagan priests who wore robes made of a wool-and-linen combo. Heaven forbid anyone confuse us with those guys. Another explanation is that shatnez hearkens back to the offerings Cain and Abel brought to God. One brought flax (the source of linen) and the other brought a sheep (the source of wool), and look how well their story came out. So, uh, let’s not do that.

According to the scholarly Jewish textual resource known as Wikipedia, some people believe that shatnez was based on scientific reasoning. Wool shrinks when it gets wet, and linen doesn’t, so if the fibers were combined it might lead to perspiration and other hygiene issues (I’m unclear on this part). And we Jews are all about the hygiene. Which is why we all have asthma and neuroses today.

Even the derivation of the word shatnez is unclear. One theory holds that it’s a mash-up of three words: shua, which refers to combing raw fiber; tuvi, the process of spinning fiber into thread; and nuz, the weaving of thread into cloth. The Zohar, Madonna’s favorite kabbalistic text, says that shatnez comes from two words: “Satan az,” or “Satan is strong.” Do not mess with Satan by bringing together products that should not go together.

In the Coptic language, spoken in ancient Egypt until the 7th century or so and somewhat similar to Hebrew, shatnez sounds an awful lot like sasht nouz, meaning false weave. A Greek version of the Torah from the era of Alexander the Great translates shatnez as false or adulterated.

For a little clarity (OK, any clarity) on the subject, I checked in with Amy Kalmanofsky, assistant professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary. “No one entirely knows why we have shatnez,” she said, “but it’s obviously related to purity being the ideal. The world is created in order, and order reflects the divine will and the divine universe. Mixtures are chaotic—they introduce unholiness in some way. But the interesting thing is that the high priests wore shatnez, and the curtain in the mishkan, the Tabernacle, was made with wool and linen. In those cases you could say that shatnez was the opposite of unholy; it was indicative of holiness. Only the sanctified people and spaces are holy enough to be draped in it.” In ancient times and today—aren’t the sacred and the profane often awfully close together?

Kalmanofsky mentioned the 1966 book Purity and Danger, by Mary Douglas. It’s a seminal work in social anthropology, looking at the interplay of the sacred, the clean, and the unclean in different cultures. Douglas wrote that the laws of kashrut are about maintaining symbolic boundaries, and the foods that are prohibited are the ones that don’t seem to fall clearly into any category. (Lobsters? Sea insects! Pigs? Why won’t you chew your cud, you cloven-hoofed freaks!) Similarly, shatnez may be just another way to guard the boundaries of purity.

This being America, you can hire people to guard these boundaries for you and shatnez-check your wardrobe. Visit the Shatnez Testers of America web site for more info—you’ll find shatnez alerts (tragic news: Barneys New York’s suits are shatnezville), guidelines for what items need to be checked (the halachic jury is still out on baseball gloves), lists of shatnez-testing laboratories in various countries. Shatnez checkers with special Good Housekeeping Seals of Shatnez can take samples from fabric (apparently without damaging the garment) to send to the shatnez lab, where they’re examined under low-powered microscopes to identify the fibers. Some shatnez-laden clothing can be de-shatnified for a small fee.

But while you can control the shatnez in your wardrobe, you’ll find it’s a lot harder to control your kids’ innate temperament and predilections. No one knows why some kids have sensory processing mishegas. Some people think it’s a construct, not a real thing. You know, like religion.

And as with  religion, when it comes to Maxie, I’ve decided to simply obey her laws. Her big sister’s vile, impure clothes are boxed up and put into storage for my little niece. I buy Maxie loose cotton dresses and leggings, mostly from (tagless) Hanna Andersson and Old Navy. I just discovered a new line of clothing designed by a Brooklyn special-education teacher and fashion lover (with help from her pals, a designer for Calvin Klein and a former designer for Michael Kors and Isaac Mizrahi), aimed at kids with sensory and tactile processing sensitivity. Everything’s made of super-soft cotton, with flat seams, loose collars, veggie-ink-printed labels, and a roomy fit.

Maxie has rules, and I love her, so I deal. And I hope that by dealing, I can keep some of her pain at bay. Shatnez, too, is about keeping chaos at bay. And of course, you never really can. But we all have different levels of tolerance for disorder, and we all have to find our own way in the world.

$95: Approximate hourly cost to have a haredi woman from Brooklyn come to your house to pick lice out of your children’s heads

100: Species of insects the plague of lice in Exodus could have been referring to, since a taxonomy of insects was not actually invented until Aristotle’s time

9,000: Age of head-lice-infested mummy found in cave in Israel’s northern Negev. The mummy’s hair had been glued onto its skull with asphalt as an adhesive; the hair contained lice eggs identical to the kind found in Israel today. 77 CE: Pliny the Elder writes: “Nits are destroyed by using dogs’ fat, eating serpents cooked like eels, or else taking their sloughs [shedded skin] in drink.” Yum.

Circa 1185 CE: Maimonides writes: “It is permitted to kill lice on Shabbat because they are [spontaneously generated] from sweat.”

2004 CE: Menlo Park, California, pediatrician Dale Pearlman develops protocol for treating today’s often-pesticide-resistant lice by smothering them with Cetaphil Gentle Cleanser.

7: Number of Germans infested with head lice invited to live for three weeks at Israel’s Museum of Bat Yam in 2008 in a performance-art meditation on German-ness, Jewishness, and the meaning of parasitism ]]> http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/31722/lice-to-meet-you/feed/ 11 http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/31481/halevi-versus-maimonides/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=halevi-versus-maimonides http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/31481/halevi-versus-maimonides/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:00:42 +0000 Morton Landowne http://www.tabletmag.com/?p=31481 Earlier this month, philosopher Moshe Halbertal and author Hillel Halkin engaged in a spirited tete-a-tete over Halkin’s new biography of Yehuda Halevi at the Moreshet Avraham Synagogue in Jerusalem. The two-hour exploration was wide-ranging, but one of the most intriguing tropes involved a comparison with another Nextbook Press series subject: Maimonides. In fact, Halbertal, a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at the Hebrew University, and author of a recent book on Maimonides, noted that Halevi’s magnum opus, The Kuzari—which takes the form of a dialogue between the pagan king of the Khazars and a rabbi who was invited to instruct him in the tenets of Judaism—can actually be read as a riposte to Maimonides’ own best-known work. It is as if, he said, “the Kuzari was the response to Guide for the Perplexed, before it was even written.”

Maimonides, according to Halbertal, viewed Judaism as the religion of nature, while Halevi saw it as the religion of history. Halevi found inspiration in examples of the breaking of the chain of causality, like the parting of the Red Sea, while to Maimonides the natural world was the main medium of God’s message. As Halbertal put it: “Nature itself is the profoundest manifestation of the divine,” while, according to Halkin, Halevi’s Judaism was “above all, a religion of action; what a Jew thinks is secondary to how a Jew acts.” Maimonides, Halbertal asserted, would find Halevi’s Judaism to be “spectacle dependent,” while Maimonidean Judaism needs no drama. It holds that there is evidence of God in every aspect of the world: “not like the relationship of a carpenter to a table, but more like the sun and the light. The world is God’s shadow; the very existence of God sustains the world.”

From this point, Halbertal then brought up the aspect of Halevi’s philosophy that has turned him into a “darling of the Israeli settlement movement”: his belief in the intrinsic holiness of the land of Israel. In contrast, Halbertal argued, Maimonides would say that the land of Israel is no different in its essence from any other, and that “its significance comes from the events that have happened in it.”

Halkin countered that Halevi was not a racist—that he was talking about “souls, not bodies”—but agreed that, today, “the Israeli dispute about ‘the territories’ is a Maimonidean versus Halevian argument.” However, he added, “one has to understand where Halevi was coming from.” The Jewish circumstance in Halevi’s time was perhaps the lowest in its history: the first crusade had just taken place and there were massacres occurring in Spain and the Rhineland. For someone like Halevi, Halkin argued, these events were inexplicable: “What is going on here? Why are we losing adherents? Why are we under the sway of two ‘upstart’ religions?” To Halevi, Halkin said, no matter how low the Jews’ fortunes fell, they had to feel they were needed. Jews, he believed, were the link between God and humanity. In modern terms it might seem racist but he wasn’t arguing in terms of a master race, Halkin asserted, but was rather “desperately trying to salvage the fortunes of his people.”

But what’s really cool is just what the school was: It’s where Maimonides, the Rambam, worked! The synagogue was built in the 19th century in honor of the Rambam; the religious school is where he worked in the 1100s. I asked Sherwin Nuland, author of Nextbook Press’s Maimonides, for his thoughts. “For centuries after the death of Maimonides,” Nuland told me, “it was common for sick Jews to spend the night in this synagogue, in the hope that the great Rambam would heal them.” And they can again. If they’ve heard about it.

A Synagogue’s Unveiling Exposes a Conundrum [NYT]
Related: Maimonides [Nextbook Press]

At the same time, however, the 17th century is also known, especially in England, as a time of intense religious passion and a new fascination with the Bible. As Nelson remarks, historians have called that period “the Biblical century,” and Hobbes and Locke both discuss the Bible in detail. The major reason for this new interest was, of course, the rise of Protestant Christianity, which taught that God’s will could be known only through the Bible and not through any church or priest. It became crucial, then, to read the Bible in its original form, undistorted by commentary and translation—that is, to read it in Hebrew.

As Nelson shows, it was not unheard of for Christians to study Hebrew before the 17th century. In particular, missionaries would “use Hebrew texts in order to refute Judaism and advance the cause of Jewish conversion.” But the 17th century saw what Nelson calls the “great flowering” of “Christian Hebraism,” as non-Jewish scholars began to study the Tanakh, and even the Talmud and rabbinic commentaries, at universities in Holland and England. The invention of printing, too, played an important role by giving non-Jews access to rabbinical texts for the first time. (The first printed Talmud was produced in 1520-23 by a Christian printer in Italy.)

Nelson argues that it was not a coincidence that Englishmen began to show an interest in republican government, redistribution of wealth, and religious toleration at just the same moment that they were learning more about Judaism than ever before. Rather, they were led to these new, seemingly secular ideas by their research into the laws and government of ancient Israel, as documented in the Bible and interpreted by the rabbis over centuries. “Christians began to regard the Hebrew Bible,” Nelson writes, “as a political constitution, designed by God himself for the children of Israel.” In a sense, then, traditional Jewish ideas—as interpreted, and misinterpreted, by Christian scholars—lie at the very origin of modern politics.

The Hebrew Republic traces a biblical and rabbinic genealogy for several important political concepts that, on their face, would seem to be strictly modern and secular. The first is what Nelson calls “republican exclusivism”—the idea that a republic, in which the people govern themselves, is the only valid form of government. Greek and Roman political theory always treated the republic as just one of several possible options for good government, alongside the equally legitimate monarchy and aristocracy. Why, in the 17th century, did Englishmen begin to argue that kings could never be acceptable rulers, that all sovereignty had to flow from the people?

The standard, secular explanation would turn to Hobbes and Locke, who thought of the state as the product of a social contract in which the people delegate their powers to a ruler for the common good. Nelson shows, however, that the debate on this subject in the 17th century revolved around the example of ancient Israel—in particular, on the passage in I Samuel when the Israelites demand that Samuel give them a king, “to judge us like all the nations.” When Samuel tells God about this, God is clearly displeased: “They have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” Samuel goes on to list all the abuses a king will commit—from conscripting men into his army to seizing land and cattle for taxes—before giving in to the people’s request and anointing Saul.

Of course, Christian readers had always known about this passage. What changed during the “Hebrew Renaissance,” Nelson shows, was that they now had access to the debates about kingship in the Talmud and the commentaries. Particularly influential was the discussion of monarchy in Devarim Rabbah, a collection of midrashic commentaries on Deuteronomy translated into Latin in 1625. “The Rabbis say: God said unto Israel: ‘I planned that you should be free from kings,’ ” the midrash begins, going on to cite a wide variety of verses and commentators:

Rabbi Simon said in the name of Rabbi Joshua ben Levi: Whosoever puts his trust in the Holy One, blessed be He, is privileged to become like unto Him. Whence this? As it is said, “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose trust the Lord is” (Jeremiah 17:7). But whosoever puts his trust in idolatry condemns himself to become like [the idols]. Whence this? As it is written, “They that make them shall be like unto them” (Psalms 115:8).

This midrash, Nelson shows through some impressive textual analysis (in Hebrew, Latin, and English), helped inspire English republicans to the radical new claim that kingship was inherently sinful, because it was a form of idolatry. It was cited by John Milton in his attack on the English monarchy, and it influenced several passages of Paradise Lost. Republican theorists like James Harrington and Algernon Sidney drew on the same rabbinic sources. Even Thomas Paine, defending the American Revolution in Common Sense, was echoing Devarim Rabbah.

Another key text in this debate was Deuteronomy 17:14, where Moses, looking forward to the time when the Israelites have conquered the land of Canaan, says: “When thou art come unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee … and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me.” This, at least, is how the King James Bible translated it. But the Talmud records a debate about whether the Hebrew word “ve-amarta” should be understood as a description—“you will say”—or an imperative: “you shall say.” If the former, then Moses is simply predicting that the Israelites will demand a king; if the latter, he is ordering them to demand a king. Amazingly, Nelson shows, this Talmudic dispute became very well-known among English Christians, to the point that Harrington could refer to it knowingly in an anti-monarchist tract: “The one party will have the law to be positive, the other contingent and with a mark of detestation upon it.” Harrington even cites Gersonides and Maimonides in his discussion.

Nelson’s second and third chapters pursue a similar strategy, showing how Christian readings of Hebrew texts influenced other major political debates. Until the 17th century, even political thinkers who supported a republic had been absolutely opposed to the redistribution of wealth by the government. They were influenced in this, Nelson shows in another passage of wonderful scholarship, by their understanding of Roman history. According to ancient historians, the downfall of the Roman Republic had been caused by the introduction of a law that redistributed lands from wealthy aristocrats to the poor. The lex agraria, as the law was known, stood as a warning to future generations that the state must not be allowed to interfere with private property.

But the Hebraists, turning from Rome to Israel, noticed that the Biblical Jubilee—which held that every 50 years all land must be returned to its original owner—was itself a kind of lex agraria, designed to prevent any one person from amassing too much land. They pored over the minute explanations of the property code in the Talmud, especially in Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah. And they concluded that if the laws of Israel were given by God himself, then they must trump even the example of Rome; redistribution of wealth must be God’s will.

So, Harrington, in the imaginary model society he called Oceana, called for all estates beyond a certain size to be confiscated by the state. His reason, he explained, was that he was following “the fabric of the commonwealth of ancient Israel,” which was “made by an infallible legislator, even God himself.” As late as 1795, Nelson finds an American minister (Perez Fobes of Boston) sermonizing on “the wisdom of God in the appointment of a jubilee, as an essential article in the Jewish policy. This, it is probable, was the great palladium of liberty to that people.” Once again, a seemingly modern principle—redistribution of wealth by the government in the name of social equality—is shown to have Jewish roots.

It is possible that Nelson somewhat overstates the influence that these Jewish sources and examples had on 17th-century thinkers. Did modern thought about government really come from the Bible, or—as seems more plausible—did reformers like Harrington look to ancient Jewish sources to justify their modern ideas, borne of their experiences in war and revolution? As Nelson himself acknowledges, “the encounter between Protestant theorists and Hebrew sources did not take place in a vacuum.” No doubt specialists will be debating the arguments of The Hebrew Republic for some time to come—which is a testimony to Eric Nelson’s profound and original book.

Some historical personalities lived so long and ranged so widely that they pose unusual challenges to biographers. Take Moses Montefiore, who lived from 1784 to 1885 and was among the most prominent men, let alone Jews, of his era. An Italian-born British banker, he made a fortune working with the Rothschilds, was knighted by Queen Victoria, and extended his philanthropic and humanitarian activities from Damascus, Morocco, Romania, and Russia to Jerusalem, where he founded the neighborhood of Mishkenot Sha’ananim. For the first scholarly biography of this towering figure—Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Harvard, March)—Oxford historian Abigail Green chased down sources in nine languages, housed in archives in 11 countries.

* * *

The subject of Tom De Haven’s new book started out from humble Jewish beginnings but has had adventures and wielded influence in even more countries than Montefiore did—and, unlike Montefiore, this guy can leap buildings in a single bound. Our Hero: Superman on Earth (Yale, February) surveys the vast legacy of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s mythic creation not just in comic books but also on television, radio, film, and a hodgepodge of marketing tie-ins (Superman sliced bread, anyone?). Those who interpret the Man of Steel’s Kryptonian name, “Kal-El,” as a nod to Hebrew tradition should note that, as De Haven explains, it was not Siegel and Shuster, but George Lowther—announcer for the Superman radio program, and author of the first Superman novel written in plain old prose—who changed Supes’s birth name from “Kal-L” to “Kal-El.”

* * *

At least as iconic a 20th-century coupling as that of Superman and Lois Lane, the improbable marriage of Marilyn Monroe to the playwright Arthur Miller captivated the world in the mid-1950s—and marked, at least according to some readings, the entrance of Jews into the American mainstream. In The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe (Illinois, March), serial biographer Jeffrey Meyers retells the tale of the playwright and the starlet, focusing on why they got together, what they managed to create together, and why they fell apart.

Troubled and brief as the Miller-Monroe marriage was, a few years cohabiting with Marilyn has sounded a lot like heaven to a surprising number of male Jewish intellectuals. But then everyone has his own vision of paradise, as Newsweek’s religion editor, Lisa Miller, explains in Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife (Harper, March), her ecumenical survey of the idea of an afterlife through history and across religious traditions.

* * *

American Jewish writers fascinated by Monroe included Norman Rosten, Alvah Bessie, and most notoriously Norman Mailer, who published Marilyn: A Novel Biography in 1973. A couple of years later, Mailer met Barbara Davis Norris, a woman half his age who had been raised as a Free Will Baptist in Arkansas and had previously dated another womanizer by the name of William Jefferson Clinton who was destined for national celebrity. In 1980, she married Mailer in his Brooklyn Heights home, taking on the name Norris Church Mailer and becoming his sixth wife. She describes their tumultuous lives together in A Ticket to the Circus: A Memoir (Random House, April).

While his weddings kept him plenty busy, Mailer pursued interests in more than just matrimony: In fact, the greater and more universal the icon, the further he pushed himself to capture it with his prose. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of his Of a Fire on the Moon (1970)—not to mention the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that the book lovingly describes—an enterprising art publisher has packaged Mailer’s text with high quality photographs to produce a volume titled Norman Mailer, MoonFire: The Epic Journey of Apollo 11 (Taschen, April). The 1969 limited-edition copies retail for the appropriately astronomical price of $1,500.

* * *

During the past year, two very different men who represent Jewry at its best and worst, respectively—Maimonides and Madoff—have been the subjects of an astonishing number of books. This month sees the publication of yet another volume about each of them, by a single publisher; the pleasant surprise is that both constitute worthwhile additions to their respective crowded bookshelves. T. M. Rudavsky, an expert in medieval Jewish thought at Ohio State, offers up Maimonides (Wiley, March), a brief, philosophically inclined introduction to Rambam’s life and works. Harry Markopolos, meanwhile, describes his attempts to alert authorities to Madoff’s fraud over eight years  and the SEC’s uselessness in No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller (Wiley, March). According to this persistent whistleblower, Madoff wasn’t just a financial fraudster, but a gangster—his scheme was, as Markopolos says, “a remake of the Jewish mafia of the ’30s and ’40s, with Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. Only instead of using a Tommy gun, Madoff used a pen, a computer, and a set of golf clubs to lure in his victims.” Yes, it’s an overblown and clumsy metaphor, and one wonders if Markopolos might strain his arm a little, patting himself on the back so much. But being on the record against Madoff nearly a decade before the story broke surely earns him the right to some self-righteous rhetorical excess.

What kind of role would Maimonides have played if he were here today—would he be a practicing physician? A policymaker? A bioethicist?

I like to think that every physician is in his soul a bioethicist. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Maimonides would want to be thought of as a bedside physician who used the ethical principles both from Hippocrates and from Judaic beliefs taken from the Torah and Talmud. In addition, as the leading physician of his time, he would have been called upon by government to make his thoughts about health care known to the government.

And what were those thoughts?

Anyone who is ill has not only the right but the obligation to seek medical care. It’s very applicable to the current debate about health care. Maimonides is saying that universal health care is an absolute necessity. Healing is not only urged, it’s obligatory, not only on the part of the patient but on the part of the physician. Each doctor is obliged to treat any patient who comes to him for treatment, he’s not allowed to shuffle him off to another doctor. The doctor, as he saw it, was an agent of God, and providing people with health care was a way of finding God and a way of leading people to the moral life. Had Maimonides been living in our time, we would have had universal health care decades ago, probably during the Truman administration, when it was first proposed. The medical associations, at that point, stood in the way of universal health care, and he not only would not have stood in the way, he would truly have been one of its strongest supporters.

There’s been debate over Judaism’s take on universal coverage: some see the Torah and Talmud as insisting that society take care of the sick, while others put more emphasis on people’s individual responsibility to take care of themselves. Where did Maimonides fall on issues of collective versus individual responsibility?

He would fall on both sides. You are sinning if you don’t take care of your body. We keep hearing about preventive care, and he agreed that living a life that is physically healthy is an obligation, but also that the doctor is obliged to provide care to anyone who needs it. Maimonides conducted his practice irrespective of social status. He treated the courtiers in Saladin’s court; I’m assuming he was on a retainer for that. And then he went home, I think his home was about two hours away, and he treated anyone who came to see him.

Is there anything that indicates whether, within the spectrum of universal health care, he would have been inclined toward a public option?

We can’t say that. He would have been in favor of anything that assured a totality of care for the populace. When he was treating Saladin’s people, he was a physician on salary working for the state who also had his own private practice. He would be in favor of anything that absolutely assured that everybody got care and got the same level of care. He was the leading physician of the Arabic world, and he was treating anyone who came to him the same way he treated the vizier’s family.

The notion that the administration’s health care plan would establish government-run “death panels,” though discredited, has, nonetheless, reframed the debate for some voters as a question of who should be able to determine when a person dies. What was Maimonides’s opinion about how much say individuals, or their families or doctors—humans in general—should have in how they want to die?

It would have been forbidden for a doctor to end a person’s life in Maimonides’s way of thinking, in terms of both Hippocratic ethics and Jewish ethics. He believed that nature was determined in a general way by God, and nature must be allowed to take its course. He would not have believed in some of the unnecessary courses of action we take to keep a person alive on a respirator for no good reason; he would have considered those unnecessary invasions of god’s will. This derives both from the Hippocrates—do no harm—and from the Ten Commandments—you can’t kill anybody. It’s as Jewish as can be.

Poland summons up nightmare images for many Jews; the very word evokes the tragedies of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Warsaw Ghetto. The latter receives long overdue, and nearly exhaustive treatment in The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (Yale, July), by two Warsaw-based historians, Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak. Given the extent and intensity of Jewish suffering on Polish soil in the mid-20th century, no wonder that many Jews associate the country with tsuris or that in Maus, Art Spiegelman represents Poles as pigs, the very trayfest of the trayf.

Yet recall that Jews lived in Poland for an entire millennium, and Jewish culture of various sorts often flourished there. For one example, Alex Storozynski relates, in The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution (St. Martin’s/Dunne, May), how Berek Joselewicz organized the first modern all-Jewish military unit in 1794 at the behest of Kosciuszko, a Polish veteran of the American revolution, to fight for Poland’s independence and for the rights of the weak and downtrodden.

Kosciuszko originally fled to America as a young man after his courtship of an aristocratic girl earned him her father’s disdain. “Pigeons are not meant for sparrows,” the displeased lord opined, explaining his refusal. Is it just coincidence that Brigid Pasulka’s A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, August)—a Jonathan Safran Foer-esque debut novel of 20th-century Polish life—features a protagonist called ”the Pigeon,“ who, in Kosciuszko-like fashion, joins the Resistance in World War II and defends Jews, including his sister-in-law? Perhaps Spiegelman should have represented righteous, Jew-saving Poles as Columbidae in his Holocaust comic.

Gertruda Bablinska, one such virtuous Polish Catholic, served as the nanny of a wealthy Jewish toddler during the Holocaust. When the boy’s father emigrated and his mother suffered a stroke, Bablinska promised to transport her young charge to Palestine; they sailed on the SS Exodus. Ram Oren, author of Israel’s most popular potboilers, spun their story into a 2008 Hebrew bestseller, now translated as Gertruda’s Oath: A Child, A Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II (Doubleday Religious, August).

The boy Bablinska saved, Michael Stolowitzky, is now a 72-year-old New Yorker who has served as President and CEO of the American Tourism Society, which promotes the “understanding and acceptance between cultures” produced by vacation travel. Better that, certainly, than the career path chosen by Max Eisenhardt, a fictional Auschwitz survivor whose ability to manipulate magnetic fields earns him the alias Magneto. The archnemesis of the X-Men, a team of comic book superheroes, and the antagonist in their blockbuster film series, Magneto also stars in X-Men: Magneto Testament (Marvel, June), a graphic novel that compiles a 5-part miniseries by Greg Pak and Carmine Di Giandomenico, that details the villain’s childhood experiences during the Holocaust.

How a survivor responds to his traumas likewise drives British music critic Norman Lebrecht’s second novel, The Game of Opposites (Pantheon, July). Having escaped a labor camp during the war, and then elected mayor of a nearby town, how should Paul Miller respond to the reappearance of the camp commander? Like Magneto’s embrace of violently pro-mutant politics, Paul’s dilemma can be read as a parable for psychological concerns—revenge, forget, or forgive?—always pressing in the real world.

One of the healthiest responses to trauma is to tell one’s story, and few Holocaust survivors have been as prolific in doing so as Elie Wiesel. His most recent publication, Rashi (from Tablet sibling Nextbook Press), is a reflective monograph on one extraordinary exemplar of the Jewish textual tradition. The release conveniently coincides with the publication of the final volume in Maggie Anton’s Rashi’s Daughters trilogy, Rachel (Plume, August). Since 2005, Anton has been applying her zeal for Talmudic learning, and for historical research about everyday life in medieval France, to fiction. Dramatizing the historically obscure experiences of Rashi’s three children, Anton’s trilogy vivifies his life and times, and, together, Anton’s and Wiesel’s books testify to Rashi’s continuing relevance.

As far as textual meetings-of-the-minds between modern Jewish thinkers and medieval ones go, Wiesel on Rashi sets a high bar. One comparably bracing encounter can be found in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Maimonides (B&N Rediscovers, June), originally published in German in 1935—an early precursor to several recent biographies of Maimonides, including Sherwin Nuland’s contribution to the Nextbook series. Heschel—an insightful scholar, sensitive poet, and pioneering Civil Rights advocate—notes that “it was not the codifier and ‘guide’ Maimonides but the commentator Rashi who became the shaper, teacher, and educator of his people.” Yet the achievements of Maimonides still astonish every bit as much as Rashi’s. In addition to his commentaries on the Mishnah, for instance, Maimonides published numerous treatises in Arabic that powerfully influenced the development of medieval medicine, offering advice on healthy living and quick cures for scorpion bites. One such treatise, On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs (BYU, July) has recently been republished in a multilingual, critical edition edited by Gerrit Bos of the University of Cologne, continuing the series that began with the 2001 publication of On Asthma. Similarly detailed editions of Maimonides’ writings on hemorrhoids and coitus, as well as several volumes of medical aphorisms, can be expected in coming years.

Lizzie Skurnick, veteran blogger and author of ten novels for teenagers, does not see herself as following in the footsteps of Rashi or Maimonides. Instead, Farah Fawcett provided a model for Skurnick, or at least for her hairstyle around the time of her bat mitzvah. But in parsing the nuances and resonances of classic young adult novels—including a few Jewish essentials, such as Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, Bette Green’s Summer of My German Soldier, and Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family—Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading (Avon A, July) accomplishes for the preteen literary set more or less what Rashi provided for the Jews’ sacred texts, and a reading guide for a different, but no less perplexed, demographic.

Rosenberg’s aphorism was a way of asserting that this difference was purely formal—that the vocation of the intellectual, as a professional analyst of texts, was essentially the same as that of the Talmudic commentator. As Irving Howe noted in his memoir A Margin of Hope, it seemed fitting that when the immigrant Ivan Greenberg renamed himself Philip Rahv, he chose the Hebrew word for rabbi: as editor of Partisan Review, Rahv became “the chief rabbi,” as Howe put it, “of our disbelieving world.” They may not have believed in Judaism, but the New York Intellectuals were carrying on a Jewish tradition—the tradition of commentary.

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem agreed in seeing Franz Kafka as a kind of Talmudist manqué, and in parables like “Before the Law” Kafka deliberately imitates the Talmud, offering various interpretations of his own text. In a sense even Freud is a commentator, taking the recitations of the patient as his scripture and probing its hidden meanings. And when Jews entered American culture, they produced Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, two of the most important critics of American literature; and Harry Levin, the major interpreter of Joyce; and Harold Bloom, who models his literary criticism on kabbalistic concepts. No wonder that when the American Jewish Committee founded a journal of Jewish American culture in 1945, they named it Commentary.

There is something appealing about the continuity this idea proposes: immigration and the Holocaust might have destroyed our ancestors’ way of life, but when the American Jewish critic sits at the table and examines a text, he is somehow following their example. Yet how can a commentator be said to belong to a tradition that, in fact, he does not possess? Certainly, when you look at the testimony of the great American Jewish critics, none of them link their own activity with any knowledge of the Talmud or rabbinic literature. Irving Howe wrote that his role models were not Rashi and Maimonides but “the fluent wit of Elizabeth Hardwick or the rhetorical plenitude of Alfred Kazin.” Lionel Trilling insisted, “I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing.”

To suggest that, despite their personal ignorance of Jewish tradition, Trilling and Howe—or Benjamin or Brandes—were performing a Jewish role, seems to require us to believe that there is something about the Jewish mind that is instinctively, necessarily drawn to commentary and criticism. But no sooner is this idea stated than it becomes clear how similar it is to the old anti-Semitic belief that Jews are essentially uncreative, only able to manipulate the work that other peoples produce. The most influential proponent of this idea was Richard Wagner, who wrote in “Judaism in Music” that “the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch—not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings.”

This idea is obviously absurd—it would be degrading even to list the Jewish writers, composers, and artists who falsify it. But as Paul Reitter has shown in his excellent book The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, it had a powerful impact on German Jewry, instilling a self-doubt that affected even its greatest minds. Ludwig Wittgenstein once worried in his diary, “Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) I think there is some truth in the idea that I really only think reproductively.” How, then, can Jews take pride in their “mass production of intellectuals,” and see an affinity between rabbinic commentary and modern literary criticism, yet rightly reject the notion that the Jewish mind is restricted to “secondary” activities like commentary and criticism?

For help with this quandary, I turned to the new book Rashi by Elie Wiesel, which will be published in Nextbook Press’s Jewish Encounters series next month. Rashi, of course, is the prince of the commentators: on every page of the Talmud, his commentary appears in the center of the book, on the side closer to the binding. Wiesel’s brief book shows how Rashi—Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak—emerged from the violently anti-Semitic milieu of 11th-century France to become one of the greatest minds in Jewish history. A polymath, a linguist, a mystic, and a rationalist, he applied his genius to producing a vast commentary on the Bible and almost the entire Babylonian Talmud.

Speaking to Wiesel by phone, I asked him whether he believed there was a lineage of the kind Rosenberg saw, from Rashi to secular literary critics and commentators. He was skeptical: “I hope so, anyway. But if the commentator doesn’t know who Rashi was, it’s impossible. What they are doing may be in the same line, but I wouldn’t say it’s a continuation or a result or a consequence.” Nor did he agree that, in some cultural sense, Jews are predisposed to commentary as a literary form: “I as a Jew would like to say that, I would be proud. But let’s be honest—other cultures also have their commentators. What was Pascal, what was Descartes? They are also commentators.”

Wiesel, of course, is a memoirist and a novelist, and so I was particularly interested to see the points of contact between his imagination and Rashi’s intellect. He told me that, while he still reads Rashi today, he does not turn to him for literary inspiration: “I’ve read it and studied it hundreds of times. But does it help my literary endeavor? I don’t think so.”

But perhaps the main thing I learned from Wiesel’s Rashi is that this kind of opposition—between intellect and imagination, commentary and creation—simply does not apply to Rashi. For one thing, the kind of love Wiesel clearly feels for Rashi is deeply personal, as he writes: “And why not say it? I discover I am sentimental. Ever since childhood, he has accompanied me with his insights and charm. Ever since my first Bible lessons in the heder, I have turned to Rashi in order to grasp the meaning of a verse or word that seems obscure…. A veiled reference from him, like a smile, and everything lights up and becomes clearer.”

In the middle section of his book, Wiesel shows how it is that a commentator can leave such a powerful impression of his own mind and sensibility, even when dealing with a canonical text. He does this by offering samples of Rashi’s commentary on the Book of Genesis, from the creation of Adam to the burial of Jacob. What Wiesel shows is that, while we might think of commentary as meaning explication and analysis, for Rashi it is something much more supple and original. Take, for instance, his gloss on the story of Jacob’s deception by Laban, the father of Leah and Rachel:

When he meets Jacob, his future son-in-law, he embraces him. What could be more natural? No, says Rashi: ‘He embraces him so he could go through his pockets which he thought were full of gold coins.’ Laban embraces him also ‘to see if he has precious pearls in his mouth,’ says Rashi.

Clearly, this is not just clarification of the biblical story; it is a creative retelling, adding vivid new details that both heighten the story’s immediacy—we can see Laban peering into Jacob’s mouth—and deepen its characterizations: Laban’s tricking of Jacob, by substituting Leah for Rachel, is foreshadowed in this sneaky embrace. Even when Rashi is focused narrowly on the text, he reads it in an expansive way:

‘And Jacob loved Rachel; and said (to Laban), I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter.’ Rashi’s commentary: Why so many details? Because Jacob felt that Laban was an inveterate liar. He said to him: I will serve for Rachel, but if you think you can tell me that we’re referring to another Rachel, off the street, let me be specific: ‘thy daughter.’ And in case you say you’ll change her name to Leah and Leah’s to Rachel, let me say to you right away: ‘your younger daughter, the youngest.’ But, adds Rashi, in spite of all these precautions Laban betrayed him.

Here Rashi demonstrates the basic principle of his commentary: the belief that, because the text is divine, its words are perfectly chosen and their meaning inexhaustible. It is impossible to say of Rashi, as we might of a secular critic writing about a poem or novel, that he is overingenious, interpreting things that need no interpretation. Today, reading the Bible as the flawed work of human authors, we might not wonder why it refers at one point to “all [Jacob’s] sons and all his daughters,” when in fact he only has one daughter, Dinah; we would simply chalk it up to scribal error. Rashi, however, must see the slip as meaningful, so he advances theories: each of Jacob’s sons had a twin sister, or else they were married and the Bible really means Jacob’s daughters-in-law. Instead of foreclosing possibilities of meaning, Rashi wants to hold them open. To borrow a phrase from Keats, he loads every rift with ore.

The lesson of Wiesel’s Rashi, then, is that while the tradition of rabbinic commentary may lie behind the Jewish intellectuals, it also lies behind Jewish novelists and dramatists and philosophers—perhaps even composers and painters, too. All of them can draw on it, because the kinds of imagination now put to work in all those genres were condensed, in the world of rabbinic Judaism, into a single activity, that of commentary. This was not because of any innate tendency of the Jewish mind, but because of the absolute coherence of the rabbinic worldview. If the Bible is God’s word, then all our human powers are needed to understand it—and, in fact, our powers need no wider field of activity. If the Bible is not God’s word, however, then it is possible to turn those powers to other purposes; what was once coherence begins to look like mere constriction. But even if he is no longer necessarily an authority, Rashi, and the tradition of commentary at whose head he stands, remains a resource for the Jewish—and, as Wiesel notes, the non-Jewish—imagination.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

Brague’s work has been devoted to showing how profound and subtle the thought of the Middle Ages really was. “Against the legend of the dark ages,” he writes, “it will be shown that people never stopped thinking, that in fact medieval people did a lot of thinking, and that many highly refined concepts were shaped during those years”—roughly, the thousand years between the fall of Rome in the fifth century CE and the Renaissance. In earlier books like The Law of God and The Wisdom of the World—translated and published, like this new one, by University of Chicago Press—Brague explored those “highly refined concepts,” introducing the modern reader to the complex ways ancient and medieval people thought about the universe, its Creator, and its laws.

In this new collection of essays, Brague supplements those major works of synthesis with smaller, more targeted studies. Drawing on a wide range of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish texts, Brague sets out to explode some of the clichés and misunderstandings that, he laments, still shape our picture of the medieval world (though much less, arguably, than they once did, thanks to the success of revisionist historians like him). Take, for instance, our habitual pride in the achievements of modern science. In the 16th century, the textbooks tell us, human beings began to wake up to their profound ignorance of the natural world. Instead of relying on the ancient errors of Aristotle in physics and Galen in medicine, they began to ask questions for themselves, to do experiments—in short, to practice science.

There is, of course, a good deal of truth in this story. But Brague offers a different perspective in his essay “Is Physics Interesting?”, whose unusual title announces its novel approach to the subject. For modern people, Brague suggests, physics—broadly speaking, the study of the natural world and its laws—can be intellectually engaging and aesthetically pleasing. But it is not “interesting” in the way it was to medieval thinkers, because we have lost the ability to see the natural world as a reflection of God and of ourselves. Physics is something we use and master, but not something that is interesting in the precise sense Brague means: “What is interesting is what is found between us and ourselves. . . so that we must pass through it in order to get at ourselves.”

But that is the kind of interest that medieval Jewish thinkers found in physics. To Maimonides, nature was the royal road to understanding God: “There is, moreover, no way to apprehend Him except it be through the things He has made; for they are indicative of His existence and of what ought to be believed about Him…It is therefore indispensable to consider all beings as they really are.” Gersonides, the 14th-century French Jewish thinker, went even further, writing that “Human happiness is achieved when a man knows reality as much as he can.” As Brague observes, “This is an idea that admittedly has a modern ring to it.”

As Brague’s citation of these Jewish philosophers shows, the Middle Ages were also a time when thinkers of all three monotheistic faiths were engaged with the same problems and shared the same conceptual vocabulary. In his essay “The Interpreter,” Brague writes that “the history of medieval philosophy—and even modern philosophy—would not have been what it was without a vast movement to transfer knowledge from one language and one culture to another.”

Famously, the Arab world preserved the heritage of Greek philosophy which the West abandoned after the fall of Rome. Averroes—as the West called the great Ibn Rushd, who lived in Spain in the 12th century—“commented on all the available works of Aristotle at least once, and on occasion three times.” “For him,” Brague writes, “Aristotle was the absolute summit of humanity—with the exception, of course, of the prophets.” Even those who believed in different prophets shared Averroes’ views: “his commentator and Jewish disciple Moses of Narbonne went even further, saying that if Aristotle has said something, there is no reason to seek elsewhere.” When a Christian philosopher like Thomas Aquinas read Aristotle, he did so through the lenses of the Muslim Averroes and the Jewish Maimonides.

Brague points out that Jewish translators played a central role in transmitting texts from Arabic to Latin. This was an ironic side effect of the mass emigration of Jews from Spain’s Muslim South to its Christian North, in the 12th century CE, after they were expelled by the conquering Almohad dynasty. These Jews were perfectly equipped to mediate between cultures that regarded one another with distrust—much as the Marranos would do, centuries later, when the Jews were expelled in turn from Christian Spain. One family of exiles, named Ibn Tibbon, produced three generations of translators: Samuel translated Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, while his son Moses translated Aristotle and Averroes.

The Ibn Tibbons are a reminder that, when we speak of the “Islamic world” in the Middle Ages, we are not necessarily talking about either Muslims or Arabs, but rather about a variety of peoples who lived in Arabic-speaking lands, including many Christians and Jews. Indeed, Brague writes that while Muslim thinkers produced an extraordinarily rich philosophical literature, it was Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews who deserve credit for passing that heritage on to Latin-speaking Europe, since the role of Muslims in the work of translation was “nil. They did not actively transmit anything.” The reasons for this are explored in Brague’s essay “Inclusion and Digestion,” where he examines the different ways Muslims and Christians adapted ancient Greek and Latin works to their own purposes.

When Muslim philosophers wrote about Aristotle, Brague shows, they tended to do so by paraphrasing his works, creating new originals: “the text is completely rewritten, the demonstration proceeds more systematically, the exposition is clearer, and examples that are out-of-date or have become hard to understand are replaced by others that are more current and easier to grasp.” The effect is to “digest” the original, divesting it of its foreignness and making it an integral part of Arabic thought.

Because Muslims believed that Arabic was a sacred language, the tongue in which God dictated the Koran, this kind of translation represented a promotion; once a text was available in Arabic, it was no longer necessary to read it in the original Greek. Brague quotes a 15th-century Tunisian writer to this effect: “[The Muslims] took them over into their own language from the non-Arab languages and surpassed the achievements of [the non-Arabs] in them. The manuscripts in the non-Arabic language were forgotten, abandoned, and scattered . . .  . Thus students of the sciences . . . could dispense with all other languages, because they had been wiped out and there was no longer any interest in them.”

Europeans, on the other hand, tended to write commentaries on Greek authors, in which the original text was preserved and explicated line by line. The result was that Aristotle could be approached in his foreignness—he remained an “other” for medieval Europeans, and for that very reason could challenge their assumptions. For Brague, indeed, the noblest definition of Europe is that it is a culture which has always looked outside itself for guidance and inspiration: “The relationship with the exterior is internal to it.” He traces this tendency back to the origins of Christianity, which had just such a relationship with Judaism: “Using the technical term of Jewish exegesis, the New Testament is like a pesher of the Old, which is to say an interpretation that applied the text to the present situation and interprets it.” In this and many other ways, Brague shows, the subtle, often acrimonious interplay between Judaism, Christianity and Islam helped to create the advanced thought of the Middle Ages—a phrase that, after reading Brague’s book, no longer sounds like an oxymoron.

Jen Taylor Friedman. Tefillin Barbie (2007). Plastic, fabric and leather.

Spertus closed “Imaginary Coordinates,” which included both metaphoric and naturalistic maps of the Holy Land by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, on June 20, 80 days ahead of schedule, since “parts of the exhibition” were out of line with “aspects of [its] mission as a Jewish institution and did not belong at Spertus,” according to a museum release. In a conference call with the press that day, Spertus trustee Philip Gordon insisted, “This has nothing to do with censorship.” Howard Sulkin, president of the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, said of the developing news stories about the closed exhibit, “We would like to believe that there will be just a blip about that.”

To follow this show, Spertus could have opted for something tame—shtetl scenes by Chagall or colorful Agam designs—but instead it opened “Twisted Into Recognition: Clichés of Jews and Others,” an exhibit which was co-organized by the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Jewish Museum Vienna. “Twisted” is not as edgy as its predecessor—it has neither videos of a nude woman twirling a barbed-wire hula hoop while standing on Israel’s border, nor a driver asking ultra-Orthodox Israeli pedestrians for directions to the Palestinian city of Ramallah—but it is controversial in its own right, with works like Jen Taylor Friedman’s Barbie doll wearing a tallis and tefillin (Tefillin Barbie), and an installation of sculpted and painted noses by Dennis Kardon (49 Jewish Noses).

Tamir Lahav-Radlmesser’s installation includes samples of pubic hair he collected from friends and acquaintances in response to a 1939 exhibit that Josef Wastl, the Nazi curator of the anthropology department at the Vienna Museum of Natural History, created to demonstrate the racial inferiority of Jews. Wastl’s exhibit included plaster casts of faces and pubic hair taken from 500 “stateless Jews” who were subsequently sent to concentration camps.

Ernst Ludwig Hiemer. Der Giftpilz: ein Stürmerbuch für Jung und Alt (1938)

Perhaps the most controversial work in the exhibit is Der Giftpilz: ein Stürmerbuch für Jung und Alt (“The Poisonous Mushroom: an SS book for Young and Old”), a classroom textbook by Ernst Ludwig Hiemer which had a 1938 print run of 60,000. The Spertus exhibit shows an illustration from the book of four schoolboys, matching parts in their blond hair, looking on with their teacher as a fifth student holds a pointer to a blackboard that features chalk drawings of a Star of David, a hunched man who might be the wandering Jew, and the number six. The caption explains the last symbol: “Die Judennase ist an ihrer Spitze gebogen. Sie sieht aus wie ein Sechser,” or, “The Jewish nose is bent at its peak. It looks like a six.”

Spertus hopes the show will be “stereotype-busting,” and its release assures (perhaps both viewers and board members) that the show “does not intend to deny regional, ethnic, or cultural differences. Rather it explores how stereotypes about these differences are conveyed through images and objects, some of which communicate difficult or even brutal messages.” Yet most reviewers aren’t buying it, nor do they seem ready to forgive and forget the “blip.”

Manya Brachear’s review in the Chicago Tribune called “offending Jewish sensibilities” Spertus’ “new stock in trade,” and quoted Beth Gelman, the museum’s director of education, as saying that she expected some people to be offended, because “learning questions our assumptions.” Time Out Chicago’s Lauren Weinberg began her article with a discussion of the censored show, which she hailed as challenging and beautiful, before panning “Twisted” for being “so rigid that it doesn’t leave much room for surprises.” She wondered why Spertus’ show about stereotypes did not mention the museum’s own censorship.

Weinberg is surely aware that it is rare for any museum, let alone one funded by the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation, to criticize itself in its own exhibit, but she might be on to something in her critique that the show does not even attempt to respond to stereotypes of Israelis. She also questioned why there are “zero mentions of Palestinians” among the clichés of “others” included in the show: The only Muslim representative is Women of Allah: Rebellious Silence, a photograph of a woman wearing a headscarf and holding a gun in front of her face, which is covered with Arabic writing. The photograph was taken by Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, whose work also appeared in “Imaginary Coordinates.”

Howard Zieff. You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s (1967)

As for a question Weinberg did not ask: Why doesn’t “Twisted” tackle stereotypes of Jews by Jews? If the museum really wants viewers “to closely examine stereotypes and clichés, and to reflect on them and discuss them,” wouldn’t it have been fascinating if the show included ads from the Yiddish press at the beginning of the twentieth century which were designed to assimilate Eastern European immigrants? What about cartoons from Jewish newspapers, in which Jews of one denomination denounce other types of Jews? Showing nineteenth-century walking sticks with noses that double as handles, which were later appropriated as anti-Semitic objects, is an important and ambitious move for a Jewish museum, but an institution that is quick to expose others’ stereotypes might try interrogating and exposing its own biases.

The subtitle of “Twisted” promises that the exhibit will explore not only Jews, but “others.” Instead of examining the philosophical and psychological processes of interacting with (and often forming stereotypes of) “the Other,” Spertus narrowly defines “others” simply as non-Jews. Had “Twisted” taken a closer look at the Jewish community, it would have had to address the fact that Jews are hardly homogeneous, and that members of one denomination often see Jews of different nationalities or levels of religious observance as “others,” too.

Before it tries to repent, Spertus needs to identify exactly where it fell off track. Steven Nasatir, president of the JUF/Jewish Federation in Chicago, told the Tribune that “Imaginary Coordinates” was “clearly anti-Israel” and that he was “very surprised” and “saddened” that a Jewish institution would host such an exhibit. Michael Kotzin, executive vice president of the same organization, added that a Jewish museum is the “last place the Jewish community should hear echoes” of anti-Israel sentiments. But if museums should avoid edginess and provocation, one wonders what venues the American Jewish community has set up to hear constructive feedback and new ideas.

Luckily the Jerusalem Post’s Marilyn Henry elevated the discussion with her observation that the censorship “inadvertently performed a great communal service: It opened the door to a long-overdue discussion on the role of American Jewish museums.” Henry recommended that angry viewers either close their eyes or go home. “I, for one, do not see the geopolitical balance of the Mideast shifting because an American Midwestern museum exhibits its map collection,” she wrote. Instead, Henry sees American Jewish museums as “cultural sanctuaries,” which “may be the only open Jewish space in the U.S. where traditional, ethnic, and disengaged Jews can meet with each other and with the larger community.”

Nasatir and Kotzin seem to think of Jewish museums as mirrors that ought to reflect what the community already believes, while Henry sees their potential to look forward. This is surely a struggle for all museums—not just Jewish ones—as they try to prove that their mandate as educational institutions necessitates some pushing of the envelope. Being on the vanguard does not just mean filling an exhibit with pop culture symbols like Tinky Winky (the allegedly gay character from Teletubbies), Aunt Jemima, and Michael Jackson, as “Twisted” does. It is refreshing to see Monty Python’s comical Life of Brian beside Franco Zeffirelli’s sobering Jesus of Nazareth, and Al Pacino’s performance as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in an exhibit that also includes Howard Zieff’s ad campaign, You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s, which shows a Native American man with braids and a feather also wearing a black hat and holding a deli sandwich. But this subject begs for more than just clever juxtapositions of art and kitsch.

With “Twisted,” Spertus had an opportunity to distinguish itself from other Jewish museums, becoming self-conscious and thus vulnerable. Instead, it settled for being just another PR voice for American Judaism, piling up even more evidence that Jews are marginalized and oppressed. Until it manages to grapple more fully and honestly with the provocative topics it raises so promisingly, it will be hard to treat the museum as much more than a $55-million building with a great view of Lake Michigan.

Menachem Wecker is a writer based in Washington, D.C. He blogs about religion and the arts at Iconia.

“Good news,” I said to my wife, Ilana, as the family sat down for Shabbat lunch. “Charles Murray says that you aren’t genetically stupider than me after all.”

She gave me one of those looks that says, “Take your Y chromosome and go to hell.”

“Who is Charles Murray and how does he know about our brains?” she asked sternly.

I explained that Murray is a conservative political scientist who has written a great deal about intelligence. “He co-wrote a book called The Bell Curve that argued that white people’s genes make them smarter than black people,” I told her.

“Is he Jewish?” Ilana wondered.

“No.”

“So how smart can he be?” Ilana asked, dishing out the meat-stuffed celery her mother made us. “Anyway, who said I’m biologically stupider than you in the first place?”

I told her about a scientific paper published by some scholars at the University of Utah which proposes to explain why there have been so many high-achieving Ashkenazim in the arts and sciences over the past millennium. They suggest it was a result of selective breeding; legal restrictions forced Ashkenazi Jews into financial and trade occupations, which require more intelligence than farming, crafts, and manual labor. They had to know math, languages, and be good at analytic reasoning. Sephardi Jews didn’t need those skills.

“Your parents were born in Iraq. So ethnically you are an Oriental or Sephardi Jew. My grandparents were born in Eastern Europe, so I’m Ashkenazi. So according to the guys in Utah, of the two of us, I’ve got the better brain.”

Ilana reminded me dryly that her maternal grandfather had been a successful businessmen and trader in Baghdad before losing everything he had when he fled Iraq and moved his family to Palestine in the 1930s. Her father’s father left Baghdad at about the same time but reestablished himself successfully in Bombay, before losing everything he had when he moved his family to Israel in 1949.

“That article appeared in a very respectable venue, The Journal of Biosocial Science, which gives it great credence,” I pointed out defensively.

“Remind me how your great-grandfathers made a living?” she asked.

“One was a dirt-poor schoolteacher,” I said hopefully. “And another was a dirt-poor storekeeper.”

“And the other two?”

“A baker and a blacksmith,” I admitted. “But no matter. Murray, in a display of scholarly panache, has torn the Utah paper to shreds. He argues that it’s not just Ashkenazi Jews who are smarter than everyone else. Sephardi Jews are smarter than everyone else, too.”

“Where does he say that?” asked my scholarly son Asor, who has honed his reasoning skills by studying for a year and a half at a yeshiva.

“It was in Commentary, which is a magazine read by a lot of very smart Ashkenazi Jews, for example ones that favored invading Iraq.”

My oldest daughter, Mizmor, who with her mixture of choice Ashkenazi and Sephardi genes must have quite a brain, seemed unconvinced. “How does he reach that conclusion?”

“He points out that some Sephardis were hot stuff. Maimonides, for example, and Benjamin Disraeli. And he suggests that selection for sharp brains began much earlier, back in the first century, before the Second Temple was destroyed. That was when Joshua ben Gamla ruled that all male Jews go to school beginning at age six. Ever since then, Jews have been nearly universally literate, compared to other nations.”

“You mean, if I lived before the first century I wouldn’t have had to go to school?” asked my youngest daughter Misgav, for whom the Second Temple Period had just become a golden age.

“They were learning business theory and math and science?” asked Ilana.

No, I told them. The sources around today show that the elementary school curriculum consisted mostly of memorizing the Bible.

“So according to Murray’s thesis, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews should be equally represented in Israel’s universities and top-earning professions.” Ilana said.

“But in reality Ashkenazi Jews make up a solid majority of Israel’s student body, university faculty, and professions, even though Sephardi Jews are a majority in the population,” I answered back.

“So the Utah guys are right?” she asked.

I had to be honest and tell her that over the past three decades, Israeli society has become less stratified between an Ashkenazi elite and a Sephardi underclass, and that as that has happened, the number of Sephardi Jews in universities and white collar professions has increased considerably—even if there isn’t yet full equality.

“So Murray might be proved right, once we cancel out those annoying effects of social and class discrimination?” Ilana asked.

“Israel’s Arabs have also made considerable gains as the country’s society has opened up,” I added, pointing out other explanations for Jewish academic success. “As a minority population, Arab citizens of Israel see education as a key to advancement, just like Jews did.”

“So do my genes make me smarter than everyone else or don’t they?” asked my younger son, Niot.

“That’s open to debate,” I said, “but they definitely make you smarter than Charles Murray.”

For many people chess is more than just a game. The kerfuffle over Vladimir Kramnik’s bathroom breaks during this year’s world championship demonstrated precisely how emotional the game can get.

David Shenk, whose great-great-grandfather was a celebrated player in 19th-century Paris, has spent the past few years writing The Immortal Game, an investigation of chess’s enduring influence. He talks with us about its evolution, and its role in Jewish life and lore from Moses onward.

You write that people know the name Maimonides because it’s on hospitals and schools, but they know so little beyond that.

Most people have the sneaking suspicion that if they looked into it, they would find this esoteric mind to which they can’t relate at all. Of course that would be wrong, and to show that is one of the purposes of my book. There is a lot in his thinking and in his writing that represents the questions, riddles, and conundrums that Jews have been wrestling with forever.

Yes, he seems so modern. He suggests that the idea of Olam Haba, the next world, is spiritual rather than a physical place, for example, that the Torah is allegorical—an idea that particularly appeals to me. But wouldn’t a strictly observant person find these assertions heretical?

He lived at a time, much like our time, in which no one really knew what the world to come was. And he felt that it was his job to give it the form, to give it substance, to say, “Look, this is what it is, and you have to stop thinking of it in earthly ways, you’ve got to think of it in ways that you don’t really understand because you have no conception of this, what this can be like.” And in that sense, you might say it’s modern. My guess is that there have always been thinkers who were inclined in this direction.

We’re looking at the 12th century, and there were no skeptics, and there were no agnostics, and there were no atheists. Everybody in some form or other believed. So, if we’re asking, “Is he a skeptic?” we are doing what I say in the beginning, quoting Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, you know—finding the Maimonides that we need: “distinguishing between what we learn from Maimonides as he would have wanted us to learn from him, and what we make of him because that is what we want to hear, remains an insoluble problem.” We’re putting a modern twist on this.

What do you judge to be Maimonides’ crowning medical achievement?

He was essentially a compiler and a simplifier, and someone who made things accessible—like his crowning achievement in the Mishneh Torah. His books, they’re small volumes, very easy to understand, they can almost be memorized, because of course in those times people did memorize a lot of stuff. Unlike major figures like Avicenna and Rhazes who wrote long, complex, encyclopedic things, he simplified things so that every physician could easily understand it, and it was easy to find what you wanted.

You’ve basically synthesized his life—taking its long threads and making them cohere, which is what Maimonides did with his religious works and medical works. To some extent, you are engaged in a parallel pursuit. Did that process vex you? What was it like while you were in it, if you can recall?

I don’t have his brilliance obviously, he was a towering genius, but I have qualitatively, though not quantitatively, the kind of mind that everything I read, whether it’s medicine or politics or whatever, ends up synthesized. All of my books are essentially what the French call “vulgarisation.” It doesn’t mean the same thing as it does in English, it means kind of something halfway between popularizing and condensing. And that’s what he was a master of. When I read abstruse material, I automatically synthesize it in my mind. Doing the book was second nature; it’s very reassuring to come across a mind like that.

But you say in the introduction that you were skittish at the start.

Was I ever. I didn’t know that this could be done. I really believed that it took a scholar in all of these areas to accomplish it. And it was when I read that little quote from Hertzberg, I thought, how far off can I go? Then I went back to reading, and things began coming together. But I didn’t think I was capable of doing it up until that point.

How familiar were you with Maimonides before embarking on this project?

The way people are superficially familiar with Maimonides, especially if you’re a doctor and you’ve read some of his medical writings, and every once in a while dug into some of the religious writings, specifically the Guide. You read the Guide for two pages and you just want to bang your head against the wall. One thing about the Guide that I’ve never heard anybody mention, but it’s very important—in the 12th century, people wrote in a kind of a code that only the elite understood. It was dangerous to overtly write what you wanted. The goyim were looking, the Arabs were looking. And so even when you were writing in Arabic, there were certain idiomatic ways of expressing oneself. A very scholarly younger friend of mine said to me, “Why don’t people just admit it will never be possible for anybody, regardless of how deeply steeped he is in Maimonides, to understand this, because that kind of coded talk is lost to us.” So although large parts of the Guide will be understandable, a lot of the ultimate message never will.

Was there one thing you learned that most surprised you about Maimonides?

I have come to think of him as a very lonely person. He was intellectually completely alone, and he knew it. Whatever he may have had as disciples or people with whom he was friendly, it made no difference. He was aware that he was distinctive in his time, maybe in any time. Who else would have what it takes to look at the Mishneh a thousand years later and present it to the people in a different form? It’s remarkable. I think there is in such people a loneliness that fills one with awe. He must have felt a certain awe at his own loneliness, at his separation from everybody else.

This must have become more profound after the death of his brother David in 1169. His work as a trader in precious stones essentially supported Maimonides.

Yeah, this was the one person in the world for him. His father, of course, died when he was young, but the brother was the one person that was his link with the reality of the world. One person to whom he could confide, the one person I think that he ever truly loved except for his own son. And that’s gone. I think that was the ultimate, symbolic moment when the loneliness overwhelmed him and stayed that way for the rest of his life.

Maimonides also comes off to me as somewhat arrogant.

I don’t know if arrogant is the right word. There’s a fine line between arrogant and self-confident. When I wrote a small book on Leonardo, I came to the conclusion that there is an occasional person whose mind is nothing like your mind or mine. And no matter how smart we may be, no matter how many Phi Beta Kappa keys are dangling from our noses, there are certain intellects that are far beyond that. They occur once in a while. I am sure Leonardo was one. And the more I think about Maimonides, the more I think he was one, too. It’s hard for me to believe that he didn’t know that. Here he was, having these debates, disagreements with the most important rabbis of the time, and he must have intuited as he talked to them that they couldn’t hold a candle to his thinking patterns.

Let’s talk about the Maimonidean Oath, or Prayer of Maimonides, a kind of medical credo put forth by in the 19th century and attributed to Maimonides but never proven to have come from him. How does it differ from the Hippocratic Oath?

The Hippocratic Oath starts off asking for help from Apollo, but that was just a standard form of oaths. It’s an expression of the separation of medicine from religion. That was the great contribution of the Hippocratic physicians—they were the first people to say sickness has nothing to do with God, or the gods, or whatever.

Now, Maimonides believed that one got sick independent of God, but that God was there, and a doctor could ask God for help. He couldn’t ask God to cure the patient, but he could ask God to give him the understanding that he could cure the patient. If you read that first chapter carefully, I try to put that through all of it, that Jews don’t believe, or didn’t believe in those days, that sickness came from on high and cure came from on high. But what we did believe was that if one got sick, the doctor could ask for the mental wherewithal, the physical wherewithal to cure these people.

Maimonides trod a line: the leader of a Jewish community, but within the Muslim court; a doctor and theologian, but also a diplomat. In your memoir, Lost in America, you write about changing your name, getting into Yale, trying to shrug off the identity that you grew up with. Did you feel any kinship with Maimonides in straddling different worlds?

I’ve actually never thought of it until you said it, but of course you’re right. I was at Yale at a time when there were no Jews, not a single Jewish full professor on the faculty of the medical school. There were people who had been born Jews but who were living as Christians, and there was a very specific quota. It was very hard to be a Jew at that time in this particular atmosphere. And one had to stand on one’s ear to negotiate the passages.

But Maimonides represented the Jewish people to the court of Saladin, and I did not represent the Jewish people, although my classmates all knew I was Jewish. Maybe in a sense I did, because I ate Kosher, there were three of us in the whole bloody medical school. We used to meet at the home of a Kosher caterer three nights a week, Mrs. Wicksman, of blessed memory. On the other nights I would eat at the same greasy spoon where the other students ate, and I’d eat tuna fish and halibut and stuff like that, and everybody knew why.

Did writing this book change the way you think about yourself as a doctor?

I don’t think so. A lot of his attitudes are similar to attitudes I’ve had for a long time. One of them is uncertainty, and the other is the necessity to act with certainty even though the basis for your action is uncertainty. When you’re a doctor, you’re always making decisions based on incomplete information. But you must make them with great authority. That’s what Rambam did. He was a man who realized that a lot is unknown, that a lot is dreadfully uncertain, but in order to achieve his goal, keeping the Jewish people together, he had to function as though everything was certain and he understood it. That’s a situation I’ve been for all of my career, on a much smaller scale obviously, but I admire that kind of thing.

Did this book in any way change your relationship to Judaism?

Well, I’m a funny kind of a Jew. I call myself an observant agnostic, because I go to shul every Saturday. The rabbi knows I’m an agnostic. You know, my colleagues in the shul know I’m an agnostic, but I get carried away by the emotion of the thing. Having been brought up in an Orthodox home, I become the biggest shuckler in the place. And without meaning to, in becoming someone knowledgeable in the biography of Maimonides, I look at myself as a little more a part of the Jewish community of this town than I did before.

As I read your book. I wondered, does Maimonides believe in God or is he a total skeptic? My father’s a professor who writes a lot about Maimonides, and I asked him this question. He said, it’s the great debate: Leo Strauss says Maimonides didn’t believe, he was just playing a political game, and Shlomo Pines says that he was an agnostic, and then Marvin Fox says he was religious. And then there are people who think Maimonides was a deist. What do you think?

It’s a conflict that has been going on forever. Whole books have been written to justify some of the things that he’s said, trying to prove that he is, indeed, a believer. I didn’t think it was appropriate in a book written by a non-scholar to take any sort of stand on that. My first serious contact with studying Maimonides, other than what one does on one’s own, was about 15 years ago when I was asked to address a Yale Hillel function on the topic, Maimonides: Greek or Jew? And at that time, I came down on the side of Greek—that he was a rationalist. And I’m still not convinced that belief was paramount in his mind. What was paramount was keeping the Jewish people together. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that was the ultimate purpose of his life and his writings. It made no difference whether he believed or didn’t. He believed in the Jewish people.

You went to Sri Lanka to help out after the tsunami. Do you see this as being in the spirit of Maimonides?

Oh yeah. The tsunami was Sunday, I left the following Friday. On Thursday night, I called all four of my kids, and I said to my older son, “I’m going specifically because I’m a Jewish doctor.” There is something about the traditional Jewish approach to medicine that says, I am the only one who can do this, this is my responsibility. This is a specifically Jewish thing, the notion that if you find yourself called upon by a patient to deal with their illness, or to treat them, you must treat it as though you are the only person who can do it. It’s a sense of great personal responsibility.

The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me around about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. — Jonah 2:5

So cried out Jonah to the Lord, recalling how he had been “cast into the deep, in the midst of the seas,” before being taken up into the capacious warm body of the great fish. He had done what he could to avoid the impossible task for which he was chosen by a power whose determination was not to be escaped.

And so, too, I cried out to Jonathan Rosen, the general editor of this new series of books on Jewish themes, when I had for several months been immersed in the deep, inky waters of the vast Maimonidean literature, and not yet sighted a whale. I was being suffocated by weeds so densely wrapped about my head that, emulating Jonah, “I cried out by reason of my affliction” and begged to be relieved of a burden for which I had become certain that I was incompetent.

But Jonathan would hear none of it; I was not to be allowed the flight to Tarshish and the release for which I so desperately yearned. Though I bombarded him with the names of scholars who had spent distinguished careers swimming comfortably in the Judaic and Aristotelean seas in which I was being drowned, Jonathan rejected them all. There had been several reasons that I—rather than an acknowledged authority—had been chosen for this mission, he replied to my importunings. He did not want a scholar steeped in the complexities of his subject’s philosophy; he wanted a writer, who might seek out the essence of the man and tell the story of his lifelong journey toward understanding. Mainly what he was seeking, he explained, was an encounter between a contemporary observer and that towering figure from the Jewish past. Is there some common ground on which Rabbi Moses ben Maimon—commonly called by the acronym “the Rambam” but since the Renaissance more often known by the Hellenized appellation—can walk together with a man or woman of today? Are the issues that absorbed him so different from those with which we grapple in our secular era, that his memory can only be iconic rather than meaningful? In the more restricted sense, how does a Jewish doctor of the twenty-first century relate his sense of calling to the legendary Jewish doctor of the twelfth? Is it, in fact, even possible that anyone other than the small cadre of dedicated and deeply learned Maimonidean scholars can discover any sort of intellectual or emotional relationship with that great man of so long ago? Can we in our time recognize in him attributes we see in ourselves, or is he so removed from the experience of a present-day mind that we can only study him, but never fully comprehend who he was? “If Maimonides is lost to you,” wrote Jonathan, “then he is lost to all of us.”

And with those words, I decided to become Everyman. Not yet a bit less fearful of submitting a simplistic, superficial, or error-filled manuscript, I returned—resigned, though still reluctant—to the confrontation with my ignorance. I began reading again, immersing myself once more in the very waters from which I had sought rescue. And like many another drowning man, I one day unexpectedly found a buoyant object to which I might cling, at first desperately and then gradually with an increasing sense that I might yet be saved, and my literary undertaking with me. It came in the form of a single sentence written by one of the scholars whom I had recommended to Jonathan Rosen. In his introduction to Jacob S. Minkin’s 1087 volume The Teachings of Maimonides, the eminent historian Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg had written, “Distinguishing between what we learn from Maimonides as he would have wanted us to learn from him, and what we make of him because that is what we want to hear, remains an insoluble problem.”

I had already begun to perceive through the mists of my vague comprehension that many of the twentieth-century commentators on the Rambam had made interpretations that reflected their own religious or historical worldviews; that hyperbole and hagiography were common; and that an element of the muddling factor that historians call presentism—seeing the events of the past through the prism of today’s values and knowledge—existed in far too many of the books and essays of even the most authoritative biographers. In each generation, scholars have found in Maimonides what they have wished, or needed, to find.

And of course, this last observation describes a state of affairs that is not all to the bad. Much the same might be said of the Bible, of Jewish scripture in general, of historical events and trends, and it is certainly true of the Constitution of the United States or of any other democracy. Particularly in biography, constant reinterpretation can be a source of strength in a body of writing or knowledge, if one can but avoid the presentism and the exaggerating distortions that too often accompany it. As for the subjectivism, that is not in itself necessarily an obstacle, because a degree of subjectivity can only benefit the freshness of commentary. And freshness of commentary is, after all, the hallmark of the Rambam’s contribution to religious thought. All of this was very reassuring to me as I thought over my communications with Jonathan.

Armed with these new realizations, I returned to the work; the present volume is its issue. This book is, quite simply, the outcome of the ancient Jewish dictum that one is not permitted to turn away from a responsibility, though it may prove impossible to bring it to a state of finality. And that, too—the impossibility of ultimate completion—is a good thing for this enterprise, because there will never be a finality in the interpretation of the Rambam’s body of work or of understanding the events of his life, nor should such a thing be sought. Setting aside a bit of remaining trepidation, I continued to read and to study and to ruminate and to discuss with any colleague I thought knowledgeable (and some, chosen quite deliberately for this reason, who were not). In time, the turbulent seas somehow began to calm themselves, although at first ever so slowly. After some months, I really came to believe that I could see just a bit into the mind of the man I had been taught since childhood to revere though so much of him had been unknown or at least obscure to me. With further study came further understanding. Of course, the mind I was seeing into was as much my own as his.

What is presented in these pages is, as Maimonides himself might have put it, a guide for the perplexed—those many like me who have known of Maimonides all of our lives and familiarized ourselves with just enough of him to believe, whether justified or not, that we have some modicum of understanding, but that it is never quite enough. To the majority of us, he has been little more than an honored name. And yet, some of us have frequently recited his Thirteen Principles of the Faith in our synagogues; some of us have had our photographs taken alongside his bronze statue in the Plaza of Tiberiades in Cordoba; some of us have made the pilgrimage to the site believed to be his grave in Tiberias; some of us have attended lectures about him by learned authorities; some of us have tried to learn more by occasionally spending an evening reading directly from The Guide for the Perplexed, and found much of its text well-nigh impossible to comprehend; some of us have pored over the large volume of twentieth-century literature about his teachings; some of us have even ventured into the pages of his Mishneh Torah to clarify a point of Jewish law, without so much as wondering about the man behind the words; some of us have donated funds to support a Maimonides school or hospital; and some of the doctors among us have belonged to a professional group in our communities called the Maimonides Medical Society.

I have done almost all of these things, and yet remained perplexed, needing a guide. The attempt to learn that was involved in producing this volume has been that guide. I have written it in much the same way as Maimonides wrote his Mishneh Torah,a book brought forth to elucidate Jewish law, or halakha, to the Everyman who would read it. It is not a book for scholars. Its aims, like the Rambam’s, are clarity and conciseness; its purpose is to make Maimonides accessible to myself and therefore to others. To understand this little volume of mine, no previous knowledge of Moses ben Maimon or of his era is required, nor of philosophy, medicine, Judaica or academic methods. It is accordingly without references that might distract the general reader; it is completely the product of the understanding to which I have come after a long voyage of study; in emphasis and interpretation, it is without any attempt to avoid a certain level of personal viewpoint and subjectivity; on reaching its last page, each reader must decide individually whether he or she is any closer to answering the questions posed in the third paragraph of these introductory thoughts. I offer my book as this Jewish doctor’s study of the most extraordinary of Jewish doctors.

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