Hebrew Literature, American Zionism and more.

There are two ways to create and study an “ethnic” or a “national” literature: One is to focus on the group of writers and works who identify themselves as being of that people, and look at the diversities and common threads between them. The other is to identify the common thread that binds these writers together, and exclude examples which do not fit the thread, defining them as “outside the people,” or in some other way “diseased.” There are flaws to both approaches. In the first, the boundaries can become overly fuzzy as to what constitutes a literature properly belonging to that people. The second can gravely distort facts for the sake of intellectual purity, in the attempt to draw a fixed and stable boundary where none exists.

To begin with the ancient world: Inbari rightly asserts that polytheism should be viewed better as monism, diverse embodiments of a single cosmic power. However, his astounding assertion that there is no “story” to be found in that eternal, static absolute is completely false. The sources for much of ancient Indian monism, the Upanishads, are told almost entirely through narrative. Stories are told to illustrate philosophical principles; principles are enunciated through the frame of narratives. Moreover, ancient Indian literature is replete with “testaments” of encounter between personal gods and human beings, as well as between human beings and monistic principles. It is clear that Inbari has not read much of ancient Indian literature carefully. Current literary debate about the status of “history” and “historical consciousness” in India takes place at a much subtler, and more interesting, level.

Moreover, to assert that, contrary to the biblical authors, Indian authors harbored a love for philosophical abstraction and individualism entirely ignores a huge genre of Indian texts, of which we can name only a few. The Indian epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (ten times the size of the Bible) narrate the exploits and duties of dynasties and kings; the Indian text of the Arthasastra outlines the world of ancient Indian politics and bureaucracy. All of these are classics in Indian literature; Inbari would do well to read them before he makes claims to Hebrew uniqueness.

There are indeed fascinating comparisons between biblical literary technique and that of its non-biblical counterparts which students of comparative literature and religion are now exploringׁabout the relationship between narrative and philosophy (both powerfully present in the literatures of ancient worlds); about the role of etymologies and punning; about the role of dynasty and lineage; and so forth. These themes are not the misleadingly generalized ones that Inbari engages; they are based on careful, linguistically informed, reading of other cultures’ texts.

What about texts closer to the Bible than those of India or Greece? Inbari’s assertion about pagan narratives (and the lack thereof) contradicts without basis the findings of the last two centuries of research on the history of the Hebrew Bible. More specifically, it ignores the Bible’s relation to the cultures of the Ancient Near East—and especially to the textual and narrative traditions of neighboring cultures. Inbari’s assertion that “pagan texts” are about the individual, but the Bible is about the spiritual and material restoration of the Jewish polity in the land of Israel, can only work when one completely ignores the connections between the Bible and the other literatures of the Ancient Near East.

Yet Inbari’s article is more concerned with the contemporary Israeli literary scene, and it is best to turn now to the contemporary period. Decrying the “melancholy that has dominated Israeli literature since 1967” (an assertion that would shock the very large readership of contemporary Hebrew fiction), and blaming that “melancholy” on the New Left, the student revolts, the sexual revolution, and the wave of protests against the Vietnam War, Inbari calls for a return to what he describes as the “historical, national, deed-based… prose” of the Bible.

The only writer who escapes Inbari’s censure, and seems to model this national, deed-based biblical prose, is S.Y. Agnon. According to Inbari, Agnon was the only author writing in the Hebrew language in the twentieth century who produced anything that can be properly called a “Hebrew literature.” Agnon meets Inbari’s requisite standards of purity because his stories are in a “closed, ‘communal’ and particularist style, which stands in marked contrast to the universal communicativeness to which the artistic, individualistic Western narrative aspires.” Contrasted with Agnon’s “traditional” style is that of Yosef Haim Brenner, which is “intemperate, impatient and at times frenzied…Unlike Agnon’s language, which is infused with tradition, Brenner’s language is choppy, detached and chaotic.”

But all of this goes unmentioned. For Inbari, it is Brenner, not Agnon, who is the most widely emulated of Israeli authors, and as today’s Israeli authors disappoint Inbari, they are part of the “decades-long process of alienation from the Hebrew poetic tradition.” It is the tradition of Brenner and the ensuing “alienation” which must be blamed. Agnon himself would have strenuously objected to the Agnon-Brenner dichotomy. Agnon survived Brenner by fifty years and never expressed anything but the highest regard for the older and more revolutionary writer. This dichotomy is a modern expression of the earlier dichotomy posited by the author, mentioned above: Between the “national content” of the biblical narrative and the “individualistic, anthropocentric worldview” of the Greeks and other ancient societies.

Inbari is right to care about literature, Hebrew identity, and the creation of a vibrant, muscular Hebrew literary tradition. He is right to focus on Hebrew literature in its relationship to the cultures surrounding it. He is dangerously wrong to create the lengthy series of false dichotomies and generalizations which supposedly help to distinguish Hebrew literature from others. Our points are best punctuated by the testimony of Inbari’s supposed exemplar, S.Y. Agnon. In a 1962 address in Jerusalem, Agnon spoke of his literary influences, and of his love for the world storytelling tradition. He enumerated for his listeners some of his favorite authors. First among them was Homer.

Arguments about the poetics of Hebrew literature through the ages are legitimate, and can be fascinating. But why change the accepted terms? In order to make the case that authors should write in the spirit of biblical poetics, there is no need to claim that any other writing is not “Hebrew.” The Greeks created the tragedy and the comedy—but neither Shakespeare’s tragedies nor Moliere’s comedies can plausibly be called “Greek literature.” Similarly, if Greek authors were to begin writing poetry in the spirit of haiku, readers would pick up on the literary influence, but who would say it was not Greek literature? As opposed to instrumental music and visual art, which are defined purely in terms of their style, literature has a language, which profoundly influences the way its works are disseminated and by whom they are read. Inbari plays down this seemingly technical point, redefining the terms in order to build his case for a “Hebrew poetics.” Whoever does not accept its rules presumably takes the name of Hebrew literature in vain.

The first realization of Hebrew poetics, according to Inbari, is the Bible. Most of the Bible consists of “historical, national, deed-based narrative prose: “Historical,” in that it depicts a sequence of events causally linked, “national,” in that it describes the history of a people, incorporating the people’s most important, unique figures; and “deed-based narrative prose,” in that it offers a clear plot and emphasizes actions rather than description. This genre, according to Inbari, was chosen because it is the most appropriate for delivering the monotheistic message of the Bible. And indeed, two-thirds of the Bible does comprise the sort of prose Inbari is describing. Almost all these passages of prose depict episodes in the history of the people of Israel; and perhaps this is the most appropriate genre for a monotheistic message.

Yet the Bible possesses other qualities which Inbari ignores. Monotheism, for example. “Historical, national, deed-based narrative prose” is a literary quality, while monotheism is part of the book’s actual content—an intellectual quality. Inbari maintains that the literary form was selected as part of the monotheistic revolution since it best corresponded to the message of the latter; ultimately, however, Inbari seems to care much more about the means than the monotheistic ends. To him, the most important thing about Hebrew literature, including the Bible, is its poetics, not its ideas.

Along with the idea of one God, of whom no sculptured image may be made, other ideas also are central to the Bible, and could have plausibly gone into the definition of “Hebrew literature”: God’s hand in history; his authority over man; man’s obligation to heed him; the covenant with the Jewish people (not just any ordinary national historical development), and God’s special relationship with them throughout history; revelation as a possible element in the relationship between man and God; reward and punishment; free will, and with it man’s ability to fall and rise, to move away from God and to return to him. These ideas are a recurring theme throughout the books of the Bible—in its prose as well as its poetry.

Apparently, Hebrew ideas may be expressed in several ways. As is well known, the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the twelve Minor Prophets, written almost exclusively as poetry, all deliver an unabashedly monotheistic message. Theoretical writing is also capable of delivering such a message, as was the case in both the medieval and modern periods of Jewish philosophy. Even the halachic literature, with its complex legal formulations, delivers these ideas, which are at its very foundation. Anyone who reads Agnon’s “non-Hebrew” books, the Jewish ballads of Saul Tchernichowsky, a considerable amount of the poetry and prose of Haim Nahman Bialik, the comic and tragicomic works of Sholom Aleichem, and many more works of that period, none of which are “Hebrew” according to Inbari, and then reads Haim Sabato’s new novel Adjustment of Sights will discover that psychological literature, like many other genres, can deliver a message infused with monotheism in particular, and with Jewish and Hebrew culture in general.

The answer may lie in Inbari’s understanding of the nature of Jewish identity. According to him, “The nature of Hebrew literature is not simply an academic matter, as its implications reach to the heart of Jewish cultural and national identity. For the essence of Jewish identity is not ethnic, religious, or lingual—but literary.” Our identity is not ethnic, because, according to the biblical account, the Jewish people was made of a number of ethnic streams. It is not religious, because the Jewish religion is nothing but a mass of disagreements. It is not linguistic, because so much of its important literature was written in languages other than Hebrew. Only Hebrew poetics can constitute the basis of our culture, Inbari argues. Yet he ignores the fact that this poetics was abandoned by most of Jewish literature throughout the ages. This includes one-third of the Bible (written as poetry), the codes of Jewish law, the responsa literature, the liturgical poetry of different periods, the poetry of the Middle Ages, modern Hebrew poetry, and the treatises of modern and medieval Jewish philosophy. Even the Mishna and the Talmud, including their narrative sections, do not meet the rigorous demands that Inbari himself imposed when he defined the “historical, national, deed-based narrative prose.” The definition of cultural identity along literary lines, no matter how absurd in the case of the Jews, underlies Inbari’s entire essay.

It is not unreasonable to look at the Bible as the foundation of Hebrew literary culture. Modern Hebrew literature, especially at its early stages, drew much of its richness and depth from the influence of the Bible. This influence is on the wane, and Inbari wants to reverse the deterioration of Israeli literature, offering a literary ideal that draws upon the biblical tradition. But this tradition is infused with entirely religious ideas. Perhaps Inbari has difficulty identifying with this element: Like the young writers upon whom he turns his wrath, Inbari does not feel at home with the religious element of the biblical tradition. He therefore focuses primarily on the Bible’s form, while all but ignoring its content. It would seem that for Inbari, “Hebrew” prose that is based on Christian or pagan elements is somehow more“Hebrew” than the description-intensive Tevyeh the Milkman, or the poetry of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Job.

Truth be told, anyone who cannot accept the entirety of Jewish sources, with the intellectual and spiritual world they entail, but at the same time is unwilling to cast them off, has the option of attempting to understand even those parts he rejects, and then internalizing only that which is meaningful to him. Such selectiveness may dilute the spirit of a culture, but it still maintains a measure of authenticity. Inbari’s solution, however—to choose one poetic element, give it center stage and ignore the rest—is not a reasonable one, for it requires too much in the way of disingenuous acrobatics.

The letter by Mr. Goldman and Ms. Patton contains three arguments against my essay: (i) The contrast I made between biblical prose and ancient Indian literature is, in their opinion, a false one, for Indian literature was no less narrative than the Bible; (ii) they argue that I ignored the connection between the Bible and the Mesopotamian literature; and (iii) they dispute the distinction I made between the poetics of Agnon and that of Brenner, because Brenner and Agnon were good friends, because Brenner was a Zionist, and because Agnon, whom I defined as having a Hebrew poetics, attested that he had been influenced, inter alia, by Homer.

As for the first argument: The ancient Indian literature consisted in its entirety of poetry, from the Vedas and Upanishads to the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Structurally and phonetically, these works are poems in the full sense of the word. They are chanted with a fixed meter (which takes into account short and long vowels) and fixed stanzas (shlokas). The Brahmans sang them. The fact that a part of the literature consists of stories is not relevant to the point raised in my essay. I did not maintain that they were not narratives, but that they were not prose. Poetry can be narrative, just as it can be philosophical or ritual—and the Indian poetry was all of these. This does not make it prose. The Indian epic, like the Sumerian or the Homeric epic, was poetrywith a plot. Of all the narrative texts of antiquity, the Bible, in its narrative sections, was the only text that unfolded its story in prose, without any poetical rhythm or division into stanzas.

This is not the only essential contrast between the Bible and the Indian classics. Take, for example, the voice of the narrator, which I discussed at length in my essay. It is hard to imagine a more striking contrast than that between the impersonal biblical narrator, who represents an anonymous author, and the extreme self-personification of the Indian epic author. Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, was the biological father of all the characters to whom he relates (imagine for a moment that the Bible had been written as a first-person monologue by Abraham). In the same manner, Valmiki, one of the principals of the Ramayana, is the poet who puts his name on this work.

Their third argument, regarding Agnon and Brenner, is a claim about their personal lives, and is irrelevant to my claim, which was literary. Does the fact that Brenner and Agnon were friends imply anything about the narrative art of each? I wrote nothing about Brenner the person or Agnon the person; I wrote about their poetics. I showed that the prose of Agnon walked the poetical path that extends from the Bible to the Hasidic tale, and that the prose of Brenner did not follow this path. Typical of their arguments, Goldman and Patton even invoke Homer in a personal, not literary, context. Agnon’s testimony about his sources of inspiration cannot replace an analysis of his works. What is important is not what the author said, but what he wrote. If there is any similarity between the novels of Agnon and the epics of Homer, this pales in comparison with the poetical gulf that separates them: The disparity between prose and poetry, between a broader historical sequence (Agnon) and a focus upon a dramatic moment (Homer), and between national content (Agnon) and one focusing on the tribulations of individuals. (During the time of Homer, the Greeks did not possess a national consciousness, and did not perceive themselves as a “people.” See M.I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (London: Random House, 1999), p. 24.)

Ruth Landau’s letter also makes three arguments against my essay: (i) That “Hebrew literature” is commonly taken to mean literature written in Hebrew, which thereby refutes my argument that it is not the language, but rather the poetics that defines the identity of a national literature; (ii) that I disregarded the non-narrative portions of the Bible (mainly in the prophetical books), and thus presented a tendentious and false selection of the Book of Books; and (iii) that I overlooked the religious content of the Hebrew canon, and therefore my definition of Hebrew literature (“historical, national, deed-based narrative prose”) misses the most important element of our national identity, the belief in God.

As for Landau’s first charge, it is instructive to apply her linguistic standards to literature written in the German language. Some of the greatest authors of twentieth-century “German literature” (Thomas Mann, Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass) were indeed Germans; yet what is one to make of Austrians such as Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, Czechs such as Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke, Swiss such as Max Frisch and Friedrich Durrenmatt, the Bulgarian Elias Canetti or the Rumanian Paul Celan? They all wrote in German, and their works figure prominently in the modern canon of “German literature;” but they share no common national identity (Broch, Kafka, Canetti and Celan, who lived in four different countries, were, moreover, Jews—a fact that further underscores the irrelevance of language to national identity).

The same is true of twentieth-century “Spanish literature,” whose most important figures came from vastly different countries: Argentina (Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar), Colombia (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), Spain (Federico Garcia Lorca), Mexico (Carlos Fuentes) and Peru (Mario Vargas Llosa). This is also true, of course, for what Landau would have us call “English literature”—which must include authors from the United States (William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway), Ireland (James Joyce, William Butler Yeats), Great Britain (Virginia Woolfe, Graham Greene), Australia (Patrick White), Rhodesia (Doris Lessing) and South Africa (Andre Brink). One wonders what Landau would say about writers who abandoned their mother tongue for another language, such as the Irishman Samuel Beckett, who wrote in French, or the Pole Joseph Conrad and the Dane Isak Dinesen, who wrote in English? And what of authors who deserted one language for another in the middle of their literary career, such as Vladimir Nabokov (who rejected Russian for English) or Milan Kundera (who left Czech for French)? An author can choose his language of writing independent of his national identity. Kafka was no German, Marquez no Spaniard, Beckett no Frenchman and Nabokov no Englishman. The touchstone of national identity in literature is not language but poetics. If there is any real meaning to “French” (or “Russian,” or “Irish”) literature, it is rooted in a distinct national approach, possessing discernible qualities, both in terms of the contents with which it
is occupied, and in terms of the literary means it employs. If there is a ‘Hebrew literature,” then its essence is defined by its poetics. That is the subject of my essay.

As for her second argument, about my “disregard” for the non-narrative sections of the Bible: Landau mistakes my claim of a hierarchy of genres for one that would focus exclusively upon narrative prose at the expense of all else. When we approach any heterogeneous system, such as the Bible, in order to identify those aspects which distinguish it from other textual enterprises (such as the Homeric, Mesopotamian or Indian epics), we must ask: What does this literary enterprise have that the others do not? Regardless of its heterogeneity, what distinguishes it? What is its literary innovation? In the case of the Bible, the answer is prose. Narrative prose was invented in the Bible. About two-thirds of the Bible is written as narrative prose, including the most sacred biblical unit, the Books of Moses. In other words, that the Bible is mainly narrative prose is as much a qualitative as a quantitative assessment. As my essay shows, this fact is connected to the very essence of
the biblical revolution: The Bible’s historical-national monotheism can be expressed and imparted only as a historical-national narrative, not as philosophy or poetry.

This does not mean that there was no need for the Bible to include discursive writing (Ecclesiastes, Proverbs), poetical writing (Psalms, the Song of Songs) or visionary writing (Isaiah to Malachi). The question is, rather, what is the basic genre of the Bible, without which there may be no literary significance to all the other genres it includes. The God of the prophets is the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” who “brought us forth from Egypt”; to prophesy, in the Bible, means to speak on behalf of the narrative that is represented in the segments of prose. This is a one-way, subordinate relationship: Prophecy is completely secondary to the narrative story of the Patriarchs, the Exodus and the Revelation at Sinai, while the narrative exists either with or without prophecy.

Regarding the third argument, to the effect that I ignore the religious content of the Hebrew canon: I will be eternally grateful to Landau if she can produce any two Jews who agree with one another regarding this “religious content.” Christianity and Islam have a religious dogma; Judaism does not. Judaism is the boundless enterprise of midrash. Each generation has its commentators, and in each generation the commentators are divided by a joy of creative dispute that is unparalleled in any other national culture. The ideal, established at the time of the Sages, of “increasing disagreements in Israel” is the diametric opposite of dogmatism. The only agreement that Jews enjoy concerning the essence of their “religion” is with respect to the textual canon which is the object of the midrash. “Tora study” does not mean teaching fundamental principles of faith, but rather the endless interpretation of the canon, in accordance with the dictum: “Turn it, and turn it, for everything is in it.” (Avot 5:25) The Judaism of the Lubavitcher Rebbe is not that of Yeshayahu Leibowitz. The Judaism of Rabbi Shach is not that of Rabbi Kaduri. The Lithuanian yeshiva world, the Hasidim, the Conservatives, the Reform, the religious Zionists from the school of Rabbi Kook or Rabbi Reines, the amulet-hawking “Kabbalists,” those for whom Judaism is a sort of folk culture, and the secularists whose Jewishness is a biological-genetic matter—they all are kosher Jews who share no single article of faith. What they share, rather, is textual. Our nation is established by a common text, and our history as a nation is the history of the literature we wrote in the wake of that text. The faith of Maimonides was radically different from that of Judah Halevi, but each drew his faith from the same literary source. “These and those are the words of the living God,” goes the rabbinic dictum, and Maimonides is not to be dismissed in favor of Judah Halevi, nor Judah Halevi in favor of Maimonides. Our national-cultural identity cannot be formulated as a “claim” about the world, God or man, but rather as a continual relationship with the textual sources, regardless of how these sources are interpreted. In a sense, “observance” of the Tora is occupation with it. And this means studying the canon of Hebrew literature, interpreting it, and writing Hebrew literature that follows its path.

The actions of men and women from times past inevitably leave many unresolved questions for those who later try to understand them, and nowhere is this more the case than with regard to the study of wars, which are frequently shrouded by the smoke of battle. Michael B. Oren’s excellent essay, “The ‘USS Liberty’: Case Closed” (AZURE 9, Spring 2000), should be widely read, and not only by military historians, political leaders and scholars researching the critical subject of Israeli-American relations.

I understand that Oren’s essay is part of a comprehensive study on the Six Day War. It is to be hoped that this study will also address the question of whether the Liberty incident had long-range repercussions on Israeli-American relations. The persistent anger of former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, American naval officers and anti-Israeli journalists attests to the complexity and sensitivity of the relations of a small country dependent upon the support of a superpower. Given the ongoing concern over Israel’s arms sales to other countries, and especially in light of the recent flap over the sale of Phalcon systems to China, it is especially instructive to cite a letter written by Winston Churchill to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 (the letter was never sent): “No nation has the right to cause another nation to be so dependent upon it, as the United States wants to cause Britain.” It seems to me that Churchill’s statement is valid with regard to Israeli-American relations as well.

Along with Halpern, readers also raised questions about the nuclear ordnance these planes were carrying. According to A. Jay Cristol, a leading authority on the Liberty incident who interviewed senior officers aboard the carrier Saratoga, from which the planes took off, the carriers were involved in nuclear exercises at the time of the attack and had to respond with the ordnance they had on deck. The fear that the bombs, if used against Soviet targets, would trigger World War III led to the planes’ sudden recall. Indeed, Cristol’s dissertation notes: “Some of the aircraft were armed with ordnance that could not be safely brought back aboard the ship and those aircraft were diverted to Soudha Bay, Crete.”

In other words, Raider is not an impartial historian; he has a politically partisan agenda. On the political battlefield of the World Zionist Congress, Raider seeks to advance Labor’s agenda. Troy notes that while Raider’s book is called The Emergence of American Zionism, it“really only analyzes the emergence of the Labor-Zionist paradigm and the Labor-Zionist establishment in America.” But Troy makes this remark in passing, and then proceeds to treat the book as if it is a serious history of American Zionism. Raider’s book is actually an attempt to rewrite American Zionist history to make it appear as if the Labor-Zionists were a major force in the movement—when actually they were one of the smallest and least significant of the Zionist organizations in the United States during those years and ever since.

Evans also seems disappointed that the realities of American Zionism do not quite correspond to his ideology. Emphasizing the centrality of Labor Zionism in America—or in Israel—does not strike me as “new” history or “old” history, but simply history. The fact is, for better or for worse, the Labor Party dominated Israeli politics for the first three decades of the state’s existence, and still remains a major force. Similarly, as I noted in my review, despite the fact that “the great majority of American Zionists belonged to organizations which were not formally Labor-Zionist, such as Hadassah and the Zionist Organization of America…the ideal of a Labor-Zionist Palestine” dominated “American Jewish conceptions of the Jewish state” for decades. We can bemoan this fact, or we can celebrate it. Nevertheless, however misleading the title may be, The Emergence of American Zionism helps us understand this fascinating anomaly, and Raider deserves credit for a thought-provoking and well-organized discussion.

Azure no. 10, Winter 5761 / 2001

Hebrew Literature, American Zionism and more.