A Jewish composer who cannot write Jewish music, who loves Jewish melodies but isn’t sure what makes a melody Jewish: these paradoxes, Loeffler shows, were not confined to the exotic Avshalom. They were at the very heart of Jewish thinking about music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And Loeffler, a musician who is also a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, proves that debates about music were, in turn, at the heart of Russian Jews’ attempts to understand their place in the world. Combining the disciplines of history and ethnomusicology, and working with archival sources in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, Loeffler gives substance to his claim that “Jewish musicians, with … their struggle to prove that a Jewish ‘national music’ existed and to determine its proper sound … produced some of the most interesting and heretofore overlooked expressions of Russian Jewish identity.”

The tendency to overlook music in the writing of Jewish history goes back a long way, Loeffler writes—all the way to Simon Dubnow, the pioneering Russian Jewish historian. While Dubnow called for the study of all manner of Jewish sources, from government archives to tombstone inscriptions, he specifically omitted folk music from his purview: “I have not named Jewish folk songs in the list of sources, for the simple reason that we practically have none, at least, none with historical significance.”

This insistence that the Jews had no music of their own was a commonplace of late-19th-century discourse, ironically shared by Jews and anti-Semites. To Richard Wagner, in his notorious essay “Judaism in Music,” it was axiomatic that Jews could not create truly original music, because they were interlopers in European culture. To Jewish nationalists, on the other hand, the music most characteristic of Ashkenazi Jews, from wedding dances to Hasidic melodies, was suspect because it had features in common with the music of neighboring Slavic peoples. In 1915, the Jewish composer Lazare Saminsky launched what Loeffler calls “one of the most important chapters in the history of modern Jewish culture” when he published an essay arguing that only liturgical music was genuinely Jewish—indeed, he believed it could be traced back to the era of the First Temple—while all secular and folk music was a mere import, “little more than ‘Polish folk dances,’ ‘altered versions of German and Ukrainian folk songs,’ and borrowings from ‘Oriental music.’ ” Saminsky employed the disturbing, pseudo-biological rhetoric of the period when he declared that such folk tunes “cannot become the embryos for the growth of national-musical organisms.”

To an age that saw folk music as both a legitimation of national identity and the basis for high art—as in the work of the Czech Dvorak and the Finn Sibelius—the apparent absence of a Jewish musical tradition was both a cultural problem and a political one. It was especially strange because, famously, a huge proportion of Russia’s best musical performers were Jews. One of the central subjects of The Most Musical Nation is the fate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which was founded in 1861 by Anton Rubinstein, a baptized Jew who was one of the century’s most famous musicians. Very quickly, the conservatory became a magnet for Jewish students. Not only was it one of the only educational institutions in Russia not to have a Jewish quota, but its graduates enjoyed legal privileges otherwise unattainable for most Jews—for instance, the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement.

As a result, by 1913, Loeffler writes, more than 50 percent of the school’s students were Jewish—this at a time when other universities set a Jewish quota of 3 percent. Isaac Babel, in his famous story “Awakening,” bitterly criticized the mania of Jewish parents in Odessa for turning their children into violin prodigies: “Our fathers, seeing no other escape from their lot, had thought up a lottery, building it on the bones of little children.” Yet there was no denying that, for the winners of this Jewish musical “lottery,” the prize was enormous. Violinists like Jascha Heifetz were world famous, and Loeffler writes that the “line of Jewish violin prodigies eventually became … arguably the single most important phenomenon in the modern history of the classical violin.”

Yet even at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, myths of Jewish creative sterility circulated freely. In an anecdote of his student days, the composer Mikhail Gnesin—who would go on, in Soviet times, to write the first piece of music commemorating the Holocaust—recalled being told by a professor: “among my students, I have had a seriously large number of Jews … they shine fantastically, they perform superbly in the course, technique comes very easily to them. And yet when they leave school they immediately harden, their brains just shut down. They cannot create anything original.”

No wonder, then, that it was students from the St. Petersburg Conservatory who joined together to launch the Society for Jewish Folk Music, an organization dedicated to researching, publishing, and performing the Jewish music that was alleged not to exist. They built on the work of Joel Engel, another central figure in Loeffler’s book, who was one of the first people to study Jewish folk music seriously. Engel was passionate about Jewish music precisely because he had grown up knowing little about Judaism: “I transcribed and studied Jewish melodies not because I was Jewish, but much more the opposite—the more I worked with them, fell in love with them, the more Jewish I became,” he said. In 1912, Engel and the writer S. An-sky launched the landmark Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Expedition, traveling through the Pale of Settlement to record Jewish folk music and culture before it was lost to modernization. Tellingly, Loeffler writes, when Engel and An-sky tried to converse with their coachman, their Yiddish was so bad he would only reply in Ukrainian. Like so many Jewish intellectuals since, they were in search of a Jewishness they no longer possessed.

The work of Engel and the Society helped to popularize Jewish folk music—though, as Loeffler shows, some of the alleged folk tunes were actually published compositions of fairly recent vintage, which had spread so widely that people thought they were traditional. It also helped to inspire new art music by Jewish composers, such as Joseph Achron, whose popular “Hebrew Melody” for violin and piano is the only piece Loeffler subjects to detailed musical analysis. But the work of these Jewish musicians, like that of the Hebrew and Yiddish “culturists” Kenneth Moss wrote about in his recent book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, was cut artificially short by the advent of Communism. The surviving members of the Society for Jewish Folk Music dispersed to Israel and the United States, or continued to work under the very different conditions of Stalinism. “In all three places,” Loeffler concludes, “it was primarily the memories, the memoirs, and the reflections on the past that took the place of the music itself.” But then, as The Most Musical Nation shows, the music itself had never been extricable from the thoughts, hopes, and fantasies its listeners imposed on it.

The most popular of these videos, however, and in a way the most extraordinary, are those that record the Rebbe’s farbrengens—the ceremonial gatherings in which his followers would eat, drink, and sing with him. What is striking about these scenes is their extreme ordinariness. Here is the Rebbe, an old, frail man, gingerly chewing pieces of bread and taking sips of wine. The setting, a large room in Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, in Brooklyn, is modest at best, wood-paneled like a basement rec room. There is none of the pomp with which religious leaders are ordinarily surrounded—no vestments, altars, or processions. Yet the way the Hasidim chant the niggun—“ve’samachta be’hagecha,” “you shall rejoice in your festival,” a line from the Book of Deuteronomy—and the way they are absorbed in the Rebbe’s every movement, leave no doubt that in this little corner of Crown Heights, if anywhere, holiness is taking place. For what else is holiness than the utter conviction that holiness exists?

To many Jews, this conviction is also the scandal of Lubavitch—or Chabad, as it is often called, using the Hebrew acronym for the school of Hasidic thought to which the sect belongs. To most people, Chabad means two things: its far-flung network of emissaries, or shluchim, greeting Jews in the most remote places and urging them to light holiday candles or wear tefillin; and its belief that Menahem Mendel Schneerson was the Messiah. Both of these things give Chabad a prominence in the Jewish world far out of proportion to its actual membership. In The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Princeton University Press), their much-debated new biography, Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman estimate that the total number of Lubavitcher Hasidim is around 40,000—“about ten thousand in Crown Heights, five thousand in Kfar Chabad [the Lubavitch settlement in Israel], and perhaps another twenty-five thousand worldwide, including about three thousand shaliach families.”

In other words, Lubavitchers make up about one quarter of 1 percent of the world Jewish population. Yet it would be hard to find an engaged Jew, of any denomination or none, who does not have an opinion about Chabad, usually a strong one. Many admire Chabad for its institution-building, the devotion and selflessness of its emissaries, and its bold representation of Judaism in the public square—whenever a huge menorah is illuminated somewhere, from Washington to Moscow, it is usually a Lubavitcher who built it. That is why so many Jews who are not Orthodox, and sometimes not even particularly observant, praise Chabad and help to fund its activities.

Yet many of those same Jews are acutely embarrassed by the notion, which swept Lubavitch in the years before Schneerson’s death, that he was actually “Melech HaMoshiach,” King Messiah, sent by God to redeem the world and the Jewish people. Still more alien is the belief, clung to by a small but vocal minority of Lubavitchers to this day, that because the Rebbe was the Messiah, he could not actually die—that he is now simply hidden, waiting for the moment when he can return to earth. One of the illustrations in The Rebbe shows the wall of the synagogue adjacent to 770 Eastern Parkway, where a large cornerstone has been removed: It was defaced by Hasidim who objected to the inscription, which referred to the Rebbe as being “of blessed memory.”

You do not have to look very far, on websites and discussion boards, to find Lubavitchers who are sick of being associated with the delusions of the meshikhistn, as the Schneerson messianists are known. Yet it is impossible for Chabad to decisively repudiate them. The notion that the seventh Rebbe was the Messiah, or would be instrumental in bringing the Messiah, and that we are currently living in the period known as ikvot meshicha, “the footsteps of the Messiah”—that is, the end of days—is too deeply ingrained in Lubavitch thought and practice.

Messianism, of course, has always been one of the central concerns of Hasidism. In the 18th century, the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, wrote that he had actually spoken with the Messiah face to face, during one his mystical ascents, and asked, “When will you come?” The answer, as the Besht recorded it, was that redemption would arrive “when your teachings are publicized and revealed to the world and your wellsprings will be spread to the outside.” But it was not until Lubavitch was transplanted to America, during the Second World War, that this metaphorical injunction became the basis for an extremely practical kind of Jewish missionizing.

Every time a Jew lit Shabbat candles or wrapped tefillin, the Lubavitcher Rebbe taught, he was helping to spread the wellsprings, drawing closer to God and hastening the Redemption. It didn’t even matter if these symbolic Jewish acts sprang from, or led to, a deeper sense of commitment and observance, since the Rebbe’s “radical view,” as Heilman and Friedman write, was that “the deed itself is what counts not the motivation.” In this way, Lubavitch developed a uniquely American messianism, pragmatic and action-oriented, in which a secular Jew hurrying through Times Square could stop for a few moments at a Chabad “mitzvah tank” and make his contribution to the coming of the Messiah. “Getting Jews to perform these mitzvahs,” as Heilman and Friedman put it, “was a first step in cleansing the Jew of his non-Jewishness, releasing the spark of holiness from the captivity of impurity.”

As cloistered as Chabad seems to be, in its Crown Heights precincts, Heilman and Friedman argue that the movement, and the Rebbe in particular, had an acute sense of the needs and possibilities of American life for Judaism. The Rebbe was sending his shluchim to the most remote spots on earth, calling them to a life of service and sacrifice, at the same time that President Kennedy was launching the Peace Corps, in the early 1960s. Chabad focused its missionary activities on the universities just as the postwar baby boom brought millions of new students to campus and as the counterculture radically expanded the range of spiritual possibilities for young people. (It is no coincidence that charismatic, media-friendly Jewish figures like Shlomo Carlebach and Shmuley Boteach started out as Lubavitch emissaries to colleges.) And Chabad’s embrace of technology feels distinctively American, even when it uses high tech for surprisingly atavistic purposes. It is customary, for instance, for pilgrims to the grave of the Rebbe to leave written prayers, in the conviction that he can intercede with God to answer them; but if you can’t get to Queens, you can send your prayer by fax.

Lubavitch does not officially believe that the seventh Rebbe is still, somehow, alive; but 16 years after his death, there is still no eighth Rebbe. And Schneerson’s presence—on videos, in books, in the memories of his disciples—still dominates Lubavitch, both practically and theologically. Friedman and Heilman quote a Chabad video featuring a woman who had never met the Rebbe when he was alive, but saw footage of him after his death: “I was just at my first farbrengen,” she said, as though the Rebbe’s virtual presence was no different from his physical one.

The absolute centrality of Menachem Mendel Schneerson to Chabad helps to explain the hostility that Heilman and Friedman’s book has aroused among Lubavitchers. The latter half of The Rebbe is devoted mainly to the way Schneerson shaped Chabad’s public activities—the mitzvah campaigns, the high political profile (President Reagan once sent the Rebbe a birthday message), and of course the messianic activism. Starting in 1951, when he inherited his father-in-law’s position as Rebbe, Schneerson’s life was effectively dissolved in Chabad’s life. Childless, far from his few surviving relatives, surrounded by disciples who worshipped him, he had no one who could relate to him in an ordinary, personal way. The only exception was his wife, Chaya Moussia, the daughter of the Sixth Rebbe; but she was intensely private, and Heilman and Friedman give the sense that she more or less relinquished her husband to his followers.

The controversy comes mainly from the first half of the biography, where Heilman and Friedman suggest that, as a young man, Schneerson was tempted by the wider, secular world and resisted the call of Lubavitch. The evidence for this thesis is necessarily circumstantial. It took a surprisingly long time for Mendel, as the authors call him, to marry Yosef Yitzhak’s daughter, as if one or both of them were hesitant about the match. After the marriage, the couple did not live with the sixth Rebbe, in Latvia, but went to Berlin and then Paris, where Schneerson studied engineering. Heilman and Friedman make much of the idea that Schneerson’s short beard and (relatively) modern dress embarrassed his father-in-law, and imply that he lived too far from local synagogues in Berlin and Paris to pray regularly.

What emerges, not quite explicitly, from all these details is the portrait of a young man struggling against his destiny. Heilman and Friedman argue that not until Schneerson fled France for New York in 1941—rescued from the Nazis, along with most of the Lubavitcher elite, thanks to pressure put on the State Department by American Jewish leaders—did he finally give up his “dream” of living a less-cloistered life. It is this contention that many Lubavitchers have disputed, mainly on the grounds that throughout the 1930s, even as he lived away from the Lubavitch court, Schneerson was deeply immersed in Hasidic study. (See, for instance, the hostile but impressively knowledgeable critique by Chaim Rapoport, “The Afterlife of Scholarship.”)

There is a strong case to be made that, even when Schneerson was living farthest from the Lubavitcher world, his mental universe remained thoroughly Hasidic. What is undeniable is that as late as 1950, when Yosef Yitzhak died, Mendel seemed to resist becoming the next Rebbe. The sixth Rebbe’s other son-in-law, Shmaryahu Gourary, had been far more involved in the institutions of Chabad and looked like a more obvious successor. Not until Schneerson’s brilliance and charisma became undeniable did the Lubavitchers press him to become their leader.

Heilman and Friedman’s account of the day Schneerson finally agreed to become Rebbe is brilliantly dramatic. For a year after the sixth Rebbe’s death, quiet jockeying and lobbying among the Lubavitchers had pitted Schneerson against Gourary, with the former continually refusing to declare himself a candidate for the leadership. Finally, on the anniversary of Yosef Yitzhak’s death—the 10th of Shvat, on the Jewish calendar—Schneerson “arose to offer a Torah talk, sicha.” But a sicha was different from a ma’amar khsides, “a talk filled with Chabad philosophy and thought that is recited in a distinctive and unmistakable singsong … and which in Lubavitcher practice can only be offered by a rebbe.” Before the talk began, some Hasidim had privately asked Schneerson to give a ma’amar khsides, which would imply accepting the role of Rebbe, and he had refused, snapping, “stop this nonsense.” But as he spoke, “one of the oldest Hasidim present” called out “venimtso kheyn veseyhl tov, der rebe zol zogn khsides”: “may we find grace and good wisdom, and would the Rebbe offer khsides.”

At this cue, Schneerson paused, then resumed his talk “in the special singsong associated with such addresses,” Heilman and Friedman write, “at last offer[ing] the ma’amar khsides for which so many had been waiting and which he had undoubtedly prepared in advance. The drama of this vocal transition was unmistakable.” Indeed, the whole episode is like nothing so much as the moment in Julius Caesar when Caesar refuses the crown that the people keep begging him to accept. The comparison brings out the unselfconscious elevation and dignity of the scene at 770 Eastern Parkway. In the minds of those present, the selection of the new Rebbe was literally of cosmic importance, and it is nothing but this certainty of significance that makes history out of happenings. Without it, the grandest, most lavish spectacles—even coronations and inaugurations—feel self-conscious, stagy, insincere; with it, the affairs of a tiny sect in an old house in Brooklyn become the stuff of history.

***

One might say, then, that the Rebbe was always a virtual figure, just as much when he was physically present as now, when he can be seen only on a screen. Significance and holiness and power are, after all, virtual qualities: They cannot be touched or measured, but they can always be perceived by those who consent to their existence. The woman who spoke of viewing a video as being in the Rebbe’s presence was, perhaps, just speaking metaphorically. But the difficulty, when it comes to religion, has always been knowing when a metaphor stops being a metaphor.

Some people speak to the dead for guidance, even though they know they are really just speaking to themselves; others speak to the dead and believe the dead can hear, even if they can’t respond; some believe they are receiving messages from the dead, through signs or omens or the words of a medium. If you leave pidyones, written supplications, on the Rebbe’s grave, are you still acting metaphorically, or have you crossed the existential line that separates acting-as-if from genuine belief? Is it ever possible to cross that line, or does all belief carry with it suspicion of mere acting—and is that self-suspicion the reason why some people become fanatics, meshikhistn, to prove to themselves that they are finally, completely in earnest?

In this way, the scandal of messianism leads inexorably to the scandal of faith itself. If you believe in God—in an omnipotent and actual God, not the euphemistic God of rational and liberal theology—then you must believe that it is possible for God to speak to us, to intervene in our world, to change history. Indeed, if you are an Orthodox Jew or Christian or Muslim, you believe that God has already done these things, a long time ago, though he has inscrutably stopped speaking directly to mankind. It must therefore be possible, in principle, for God to redeem this world—to send the Messiah. And that means that it must be possible, in principle, for a man who claims to be the Messiah actually to be right—even though every previous Messiah, from Bar Kokhba to Jacob Frank, has turned out to be a false one.

To live messianically, then, is to live at a tremendously high tension, in the belief that the Eternal could always be just about to break into the temporal. In modern, secular Jewish literature, the great anatomists of this tension emerged in German-speaking Europe in the 1920s and 1930s—that is, at the historical moment when European Jewish life was at its breaking point, when it had to be either redeemed or destroyed. Out of this crisis came Franz Kafka, who wrote paradoxically that “the messiah will come on the day after he has arrived … not on the last day, but on the very last day”; and Walter Benjamin, who concluded his last essay, written shortly before his suicide in 1940, with the words: “every second of time [is] the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem became the greatest modern scholar of Jewish apocalyptic mysticism, including that of the false Messiah Shabbetai Zevi.

Franz Rosenzweig, author of The Star of Redemption, was the philosopher-theologian of this crisis moment. In Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (Columbia University Press), his densely brilliant new study of the Rebbe’s mystical thought, Elliot R. Wolfson aptly quotes Rosenzweig on the function of the false Messiah: “The false Messiah is as old as the hope of the genuine one. He is the changing form of the enduring hope. Every Jewish generation is divided by him into those who have the strength of hope not to be deceived. Those having faith are better, those having hope are stronger.” Those having faith are better: Rosenzweig outrages reason in that phrase, deliberately so. It takes strength to resist the temptation of believing in a false Messiah, but to risk belief, he suggests, takes something even rarer—the willingness to be wounded and disappointed, the willingness to be made a fool of. For if no one is willing to believe in this Messiah, false though he may be, how will anyone be found to believe in the Messiah, when he really comes? And “no one knows,” Rosenzweig writes, “whether this … will not happen even today.”

Menahem Mendel Schneerson grew up in a very different part of the Jewish world than Rosenzweig or Benjamin, but he was part of the same generation. Born in the Russian empire in 1902, to a family with an old Lubavitcher pedigree, he lived through the string of crises that devastated Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the 20th century: Tsarist pogroms and persecutions, the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, Stalinism, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and finally the Holocaust. If, as Gershom Scholem writes in “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea,” messianic predictions in Judaism are born in “an equal degree from revelation and from the suffering and desperation of those to whom they are addressed,” it is no wonder that the Jews of Schneerson’s generation should feel themselves to be living in “the footsteps of the Messiah”—a time, Scholem notes, in which “dread and peril of the End form an element of shock and of the shocking which induces extravagance.”

Given the magnitude of the catastrophe, in fact, one might wonder why Lubavitcher messianism—which was already taking shape, Heilman and Friedman show, in the 1920s, under the Sixth Rebbe—did not command a wider Jewish appeal. Why does the cult of Menahem Mendel Schneerson seem like a freak of Jewish history, when earlier messiahs, from Bar Kokhba to Shabbetai Zevi, convulsed the entire Jewish world? The answer, perhaps, is that by the time the “King Messiah” movement came into its own, in the early 1990s, Jewish messianic longings had long since been siphoned off into other channels. Communism, to which so many Jews looked for redemption in the early 20th century, had long since proved a dead end; but the creation of the State of Israel had given Jews, especially American Jews, a new focus for their love and longing.

No wonder, then, that Heilman and Friedman see the Rebbe’s relationship with the State of Israel as especially fraught and complex. On the one hand, Chabad built a large settlement in Israel—with the help of the state’s third president, Zalman Shazar, who had grown up in a Lubavitcher family—and Schneerson became an influential figure in Israeli politics (Rabin, Begin, Sharon, and Netanyahu all made the pilgrimage to 770). He saw the reclamation of Eretz Yisrael—including the Occupied Territories—as a sign of divine providence and was dead-set against any move to give up land for peace (except for the Sinai desert, which had no covenantal significance).

Yet Heilman and Friedman also argue that Lubavitch was in competition with Zionism, which it saw as a “false Messiah [that] was going to steal the faith of the Jews that Lubavitchers had been worrking so hard to arouse.” In particular, they write, Schneerson envied the prestige of the Israeli army and used several rhetorical techniques to try to claim it. His “mitzvah tanks” were meant to be spiritual equivalents of the IDF’s conquering tanks, just as his mitzvah campaigns were versions of military campaigns. At times Lubavitch sought to missionize Israeli soldiers, promising that troops who wore tefillin would be divinely protected and strike terror into their enemies. At the end of the Yom Kippur War, Heilman and Friedman write, Schneerson went so far as to advise Moshe Dayan to invade Syria and take Damascus, “based on mystical and Kabbalistic texts” that supported this step.

This kind of rivalrous grandiosity was a sign that, as Heilman and Friedman write, the Rebbe came to “see himself as controlling events not only in Israel but also in many other places in the world.” In 1990, the Rebbe’s followers claimed that he had predicted Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War. He even advised Israeli Lubavitchers not to equip themselves with government-issued gas masks, since he was certain no Scud missile could harm them. The fall of Communism in 1989 was another vindication of the Rebbe, the destruction of Lubavitch’s oldest and bitterest enemy.

Such world-historical events served to raise the emotional temperature at 770, where the Rebbe was approaching his 90th birthday. In the natural order of things, he could not live much longer. Yet for almost half a century—since the very first talk he gave upon becoming Rebbe, in 1951—Schneerson had been insisting that the Messiah would come in his time. The theme of that inaugural speech had been the mystical power of sevens, a stock subject in Jewish mysticism. “All who are seventh are most beloved,” Schneerson quoted, and it was lost on no one that he himself was the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe. Every year on the same date, the 10th of Shvat, he would repeat the talk, which Heilman and Friedman call “a key text in Lubavitcher mythology and messianic theology.” (You can hear a selection of it, with subtitles, here.)

How, then, could the blessed seventh generation possibly give way to an eighth? As Schneerson came closer to his end, his messianic proclamations took on a more urgent, even desperate tone. “Everything necessary for the redemption has been completed,” he said in August 1991. The Jewish year 5752, which began in 1992, was the year when “the world would become united under the flag of the Messiah.” His Hasidim took the cue, preparing the famous yellow flag with a crown that became the logo of the Moshiach movement. No one, perhaps, believed more trustingly than a man named David Nachshon, an Israeli Lubavitcher who visited 770 in 1991. As Heilman and Friedman describe the scene, on Shabbat, April 20, Nachshon held up a bottle of liquor “and, standing before the Rebbe, announced that with this drink they would all toast the Rebbe our righteous Messiah who would redeem them on the next Sabbath at the rebuilt Holy Temple in Jerusalem.”

Here, if anywhere, was the man Rosenzweig described as having faith. Was he “better”? Should we not feel pity or contempt for him, imagining his plight on April 27, when the Temple was not restored and the Rebbe was not magically transported to Jerusalem? (A replica of 770 Eastern Parkway was built there, so that he would feel at home when the relocation happened.) Or should we, perhaps, feel anger at the Rebbe, the charismatic leader who encouraged his followers to believe of him what should never be believed of any human being? As the frenzy built among his Hasidim—as they displayed banners with his picture calling him Moshiach, and ran ads in the New York Times declaring “Moshiach Now,” and signed petitions begging him to declare himself the Messiah—Schneerson could have put a stop to it with a word. He never did.

But does this mean that the Rebbe actually believed he was the Messiah? On the evidence of his words and actions, as analyzed both by Heilman and Friedman and by Wolfson, it is hard to give a clear yes-or-no answer. It would be easier to understand Schneerson, and to judge him, if he were simply a pretender—if he told people he was the Messiah, knowing full well that he wasn’t—or simply deluded—if he straightforwardly knew that he was the Messiah, in the way that psychotics know they are Napoleon or Jesus Christ. But he was too good and sincere to be the former and too realistic and intelligent to be the latter.

The truth seems to be that, like his humblest followers, the Rebbe himself was waiting, in a state of intolerable expectation, for the Messiah to be revealed—and he was unable to rule out the possibility that the Messiah would turn out to be himself. The genuine bewilderment this caused comes across in the harangue he delivered a few days after Passover in 1991, when once again the Messiah had failed to come—despite the tradition that the final Redemption would take place in the same month, Nisan, as the redemption from bondage in Egypt. “How can it be,” he asked his followers, “that you have not yet succeeded in this time of grace to actualize the coming of the righteous Messiah? What else can I do so that the Children of Israel will cry out and demand the Messiah come, after all else that was done until now has not helped since we are obviously still in exile.” He concluded, “I have to hand over the task to you: Do all you can to bring the righteous Moshiach, mamesh.”

The last word, which Heilman and Friedman leave untranslated, is Hebrew for “in fact,” “really,” “actually.” It became part of Schneerson’s standard refrain in calling for the Messiah, as Elliot Wolfson shows in greater detail. (In general, Wolfson has much more to say about the content of Schneerson’s thought and writing, while Heilman and Friedman focus on the events of his life and the organizational growth of Chabad.) Let the Messiah come “tekhef u-mi-yad mammash,” Schneerson said again and again—“immediately and without delay in actuality,” as Wolfson translates.

The redundancy and insistence of the phrase speak very movingly of the urgency of Schneerson’s desire and capture the feeling that Walter Benjamin also communicated—that any single instant could be the gateway for the Messiah. Wolfson quotes Schneerson’s words from February 1990: “Let it be your will that by means of all these things we will merit in all of Israel, immediately and without delay in actuality, immediately without delay in actuality, immediately and without delay in actuality, the true and complete redemption.” With each repetition of tekhef u-mi-yad mammash, the moment is bid to hold still, the gate to swing open. One can imagine the same words coming from the pilgrim in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” who spends his entire life sitting in front of an open door, waiting for the doorkeeper’s permission to enter.

The Kafkaesque turn in that story comes at the moment of the man’s death, when he is told that “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you.” But it is left deliberately unclear whether this means that he should have seized the opportunity that was destined for him—say, by forcing his way through, despite the doorkeeper’s warnings. For isn’t forcing redemption the great temptation and sin of those who can’t wait patiently for God? Wolfson quotes Rosenzweig’s indulgent view of those who believe in false messiahs but in The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig is sterner about those he calls “Tyrants of the Kingdom of Heaven”: “The fanatic, the sectarian … far from hastening the advent of the kingdom, only delay it. … The ground prematurely cultivated by the fanatic yields no fruit. It does that only when its time has come. And its time, too, will come. But then all the work of cultivation will have to be undertaken afresh.”

Mamesh means “in fact”; but it is also made up of the letters mem, mem, shin, which are the initials of Menahem Mendel Schneerson. By so insistently linking this word to the coming of the Messiah, Schneerson seemed to be confirming that he himself was the one the Lubavitchers were waiting for. Once, Heilman and Friedman write, he added “that he meant mamesh ‘with all its interpretations’ ”—a typically elusive confirmation. So elusive, in fact, that Wolfson bases his book on the hypothesis that Schneerson not only didn’t think he was the Messiah, he didn’t even believe the Messiah was coming at all.

To turn from headlines like these to Jewish Theology in Our Time (Jewish Lights), a new book of essays by professors and rabbis associated mainly with the Reform and Conservative movements, is to see the dilemma of liberal Judaism in a starkly ironic light. In Bnei Berak—and, for that matter, in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Crown Heights—are thousands upon thousands of Jews who not only know with utter certainty just what Judaism is and what God wants from them, but are willing to defy the powers of the earth to do it. Meanwhile, the contributors to this book—edited by the rabbi of Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue, Elliot Cosgrove—can barely even use words like God and Judaism without a blizzard of explanations and qualifications.

“God,” writes Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of rabbinic studies at American Jewish University, “is the dynamic that makes for novelty, innovation, complexity, and growth.” Similarly, Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum writes that “divinity is the radical force that moves the entire cosmos.” Such a God, quite obviously, cannot be the God who walked in the cool of evening in the Garden of Eden, or spoke to Moses out of a burning bush. Eitan Fishbane, assistant professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, confesses that “I could not believe in the God of heavenly transcendence, the highly anthropomorphic deity of classical Judaism.” And if, as Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky agrees, “The character in the Bible is not God,” then everything the Bible tells us about the covenant between God and the Jewish people is equally incredible: “[W]e cannot imagine that only Israel … possesses the covenant with God.” Rabbi Or N. Rose is still more explicit: “I do not believe that the Jewish People are God’s chosen people.”

All this is quite reasonable, and I am inclined to agree with it myself. But then, I am not in the unenviable position of having to make these denials and scruples the basis for a Jewish theology. To be fair, dogmatic theology has never been the primary expression of Jewish thinking about God, the way it has been for Christianity. When we think of the great Jewish teachers, they are rarely theologians like Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, but rather commentators like Rashi or mystics like the Baal Shem Tov.

Certainly, when the contributors to Jewish Theology in Our Time describe what they are doing, they are very reluctant to use the word theology, which implies that human beings are capable of making some kind of true statement about God. For almost all of them, this is not just a hopeless goal, it is not a goal at all; God, in these pages, is not a being to be described but a process to be experienced. As Kalmanofsky puts it, “Theology is discourse about God. Religion is the human, social response to transcendence; systems of ideas, tales, and behaviors that help us keep faith with our deepest spiritual experiences.”

The book is dedicated to the proposition that it is possible to have religion, in this pragmatic, metaphorical, experiential sense, without theology. “For many of us,” Rabbi Leon Morris writes, “contemporary theology is less about what we know to be true and more about religious ways of organizing and conceiving the world.” That the contributors force themselves to make this distinction honestly is the most appealing and honorable quality in the book. They are unable to build their Judaism on propositions they cannot genuinely believe are true. And their reason, schooled in secular history and science, makes them unable to subscribe to even the most basic traditions of Judaism—for instance, that God gave Moses the Torah on Mount Sinai, or that God promised the Land of Israel to the Jewish people.

Benjamin Sommer, professor of Bible at JTS, uses a gentle euphemism when he describes “the Bible as Israel’s reaction to divine revelation.” But a reaction is not a revelation, and it gives the Bible no greater authority than, in Sommer’s words, “midrashic collections, medieval commentaries, and modern scholarly works, not to mention questions asked last Saturday morning by a worshiper at a synagogue’s Torah discussion.” Any earnest attempt to grapple with the sacred is, by this definition, sacred.

This points to one of the two minimal affirmations that these theologians are willing to make: that there is something in our experience of the world that compels us to use the language of divinity. “We know,” writes Fishbane, “that there is radiance and redemption beneath the surface of our experience. That glow is the hidden light of divine presence, concealed there from time immemorial.” Should you reply that you do not “know” this, or if you acknowledge the phenomenon but decline to describe it in terms like “radiance and redemption,” you are probably an atheist or agnostic, and there will be nothing at all in Jewish Theology in Our Time to dissuade you from a strictly secular interpretation of experience.

But say that, like these writers and the majority of human beings, you do have an intuition of divinity in the world. This may be the basis for religion, or perhaps spirituality. But is it a basis for Judaism? To put it more sharply: Do the traditional texts and practices of Judaism have any claim on a Jew, or is she just as free to define her beliefs by drawing on Christian or Buddhist sources, or for that matter secular ones (art, music, literature)? “Some of us,” writes Rabbi Michael Marmur, “are in search of a new way of expressing our sense of commitment and responsibility, our yearnings and principles.” But must that “syntax and vocabulary,” as Marmur describes it, be a Jewish one?

Here, again, the contributors are maximally diffident. Fundamentally, most of them seem to agree that Judaism is not a better or truer description of man’s relation to God than any other faith. Being Jewish is not a commandment but a choice: “For me, the prospect of abandoning Judaism is inconceivable,” Marmur writes, with a tacit emphasis on the first two words. When the book’s contributors use the language of Judaism, it is because they find that language the most available and authentic.

In fact, what distinguishes this generation of liberal Jewish theologians from its predecessors is a renewed interest in the language of classical Judaism. Many of the contributors to Jewish Theology in Our Time use talmudic allusions and kabbalistic imagery to express their very contemporary concerns. The spiritual attitude of total resignation described by Rabbi James Jacobson-Maisels, in “Non-dual Judaism,” strikes me as essentially Buddhist, yet he phrases it in Hasidic language: “As the Baal Shem Tov describes it, our resistance to the difficulties of life merely multiplies our suffering, but when we respond to pain with compassion and acceptance our suffering becomes joy.” Marc Shapiro sounds like an 18th-century Deist when he writes, “I personally am comfortable removing God from almost everything that takes place in the world,” but he prefers to trace this idea to Maimonides.

In his afterword, Cosgrove expresses a certain degree of surprise at the book he has produced. He notes that certain subjects that might be expected to feature in contemporary Jewish theology—“the Enlightenment, Shoah, or establishment of the State of Israel”—go practically unmentioned here. But that is because these writers do not see it as part of their task even to touch on subjects like providence and theodicy. The existence of evil can present a theological problem only if you believe that God has the power to restrain or permit evil, and the God we see in these pages has no such power. It follows that this God would be extremely hard to pray to in times of need. A useful sequel to Jewish Theology in Our Time, in fact, would be accounts from these rabbis of how their theology works in a pastoral setting. When comforting a mourner, as when organizing a protest, it is probably much easier to be able to say, “God will rule for all eternity”—which doesn’t, of course, make it true.

A Hebrew map (with the Mediterranean in the foreground) from a 1698 Haggadah published in Amsterdam.
CREDIT: Courtesy of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

In the writing of history, there are no innocent decisions—especially if you are trying to write a compact book about a huge, complex, and polarizing subject, like Michael Brenner’s A Short History of the Jews (Princeton). Brenner, a professor at the University of Munich whose book was published in Germany two years ago, is writing for an audience—Jews and non-Jews alike—who want “just the facts.” Yet every decision about what constitutes a fact, and which facts are important, is laden with assumptions and helps to shape the story in particular ways. Take, for instance, the most basic decision of all: Where does the history of the Jews begin?

The first datable reference to the people of Israel comes in the 13th century BCE, on an Egyptian stele erected by Pharaoh Merenptah to celebrate his military victories. By a too-perfect irony, the inscription reads, “Israel is wasted, its seed exists no more.” Start the story here, and the history of the Jews becomes one of resistance and unlikely survival—over and over again, this people would falsify predictions of its destruction.

If you follow traditional Jewish sources, on the other hand, the story would have to begin with God’s promise to Abraham, from Genesis 17: “And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” This origin makes the Jewish story one of chosenness and covenant (it is here that God commands Abraham to circumcise his sons, establishing the b’rit milah), with a special emphasis on the Land of Israel. Or else you could see the beginning of Jewish history in God’s giving of the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai, when the people first took on themselves the responsibility of the Law: “And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient” (Exodus 24). Then the story of the Jews would be the story of Torah—Jewishness would be defined as Judaism.

All of these moments are mentioned in the first chapter of Brenner’s book. But the early extra-biblical evidence is too fragmentary, and the biblical evidence too mythical, to be a reliable basis for a historian. Not just the patriarchs and Moses, but much later biblical figures are almost certainly fictional: “The heroic deeds of the Judges, David’s powerful kingdom, Solomon’s resplendent temple—none of these can be supported either by archeological excavations or extra-Biblical sources.” For Brenner, Jewish history properly begins with the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, followed by the exile in Babylon and the rebuilding of the Temple some 70 years later by Ezra and Nehemiah. This series of events transformed the Israelites, subjects of a small Near Eastern kingdom, into Jews, members of a far-flung religious community. “Being a ‘Jew’ or ‘Judean’ did not just mean belonging to an ethnic group with a territory; it was now also a designation that included inhabitants scattered from Babylonia to Egypt who were all adherents of a specific cult—of a religion.”

As Brenner writes, the belief that the Babylonian exile marks the real beginning of Jewish history is not a new one. (Josephus, the Roman-Jewish historian of the 1st century CE, was the first to suggest the difference between Israelites and Jews.) But in Brenner’s hands, this starting point serves to underscore his vision of Jewish history as primarily a struggle about and against assimilation: “The better part of Jewish history would play out between these two poles, attachment to the old homeland and loyalty to the new one,” he summarizes. This focus surely owed something to his German perspective, since it was in Germany, from the late 18th century until 1933, that the problem of assimilation most dominated Jewish consciousness, with the most dramatic and tragic results. And while Brenner’s subject includes all of Jewish history and geography, it is the modern period and the Central European context that provide the center of gravity for A Short History of the Jews.

The question of how to preserve a Jewish identity while functioning in a non-Jewish society is not strictly a modern one. Brenner makes this point eloquently with an illustration of a seal made in Babylon in the 6th century BCE, which reads “belonging to Yehoyishma, daughter of Shamash-shar-usur.” “Conceivably,” Brenner explains, “the father, who had already been given a Babylonian name as a result of acculturation, wanted to give his daughter a Hebrew name as part of a return to Jewish roots.” (In general, the illustrations in the book are superb—many are taken from Haggadahs throughout the ages, succinctly demonstrating the unity-in-variety of Jewish experience.)

The ancient tension between Jewish and non-Jewish identities could sometimes issue in violence, as during the Maccabee rebellion of the 2nd century BCE. Yet as Brenner points out, while we think of Judah Maccabee as the restorer of Jewish independence against Greek domination, here again names tell a more complicated story. The first generation of Hasmonean kings, Judah’s brothers, were called Yehonatan and Shimon; the next generation were called Aristobulus and Hyrcanus—Greek names, and a sign that Hellenism was an unavoidable presence in Judea.

The situation of Jews in the Greco-Roman period can remind us of the situation of Jews in modern Europe and America—the parallel is often drawn by those warning Jews against getting “lost” in a seductive surrounding culture. But things were very different in the roughly 17 centuries of Jewish history between the fall of the Temple and the beginnings of Jewish emancipation in Western Europe. This was the period in which Jewishness was defined by rabbinic Judaism, with all its variants, mystical offshoots, and heresies. During most of this time—which was, after all, the majority of Jewish history—assimilation was not a temptation because it was not a possibility: Jews could not enter into the surrounding Christian and Muslim worlds and still remain Jews. There was certainly no monolithic Jewish culture during this extended period, but there were many Jewish cultures, from Rashi’s France to Shmuel haNagid’s Spain to the Baal Shem Tov’s Poland.

And it is this heart of Jewish history that A Short History of the Jews has least interest in. Brenner does not have a lot of space to work with, and he necessarily summarizes and abbreviates a great deal; but still, it is notable that it takes him only 60 pages to get from the destruction of the Second Temple, in 70 CE, to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, in 1492. By comparison, his chapter on the Holocaust alone fills almost 30 pages. This is understandable—the Holocaust is the event that looms largest in contemporary Jewish consciousness. But a book that explains the Nuremberg Laws in more detail than the Mishneh Torah is surely offering a distorted picture of the substance and achievement of Jewish history.

It is the result, however, of a perspective on Jewish history that sees it as culminating in emancipation—a term that itself implies that the loss of Jewishness is the price of the entry or re-entry of the Jews into world history. In this 400-page book, we reach Moses Mendelssohn on page 167, and from then on the vicissitudes of the Jews in Western Europe are the main story. Brenner does not neglect Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and America; but his grasp of American Jewry, in particular, is much less sure (it is certainly not a good sign that his chapter on contemporary American Jews is illustrated with photos of Leonard Nimoy and Bob Dylan). In America and in Israel, which Brenner treats very briefly, the classic model of frustrated Jewish assimilation has been overturned, because each country offers Jews a way of being modern without ceasing to be Jewish. Perhaps it’s a sign of this epochal change that A Short History, for all its reliability and informativeness, feels a little old-fashioned.

Does it work? And what exactly happens on those tours? These are two of the questions that Kelner, a professor at Vanderbilt University, sets out to answer. Kelner himself went on a similar “Israel Pilgrimage” in 1987, sponsored by the Conservative movement’s United Synagogue Youth, and to write this book he tagged along with several Birthright tour groups and conducted surveys of participants. The anecdotes he shares from these trips make up the richest, and often the most revealing, parts of Tours That Bind.

But as an academic sociologist, and a practitioner of “tourism studies,” Kelner is concerned not to sound simply personal and anecdotal. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the nature of the academic monograph, Tours That Bind is for long stretches highly abstract and theoretical, with much translating of fairly straightforward ideas into conceptual jargon (e.g.,“Premised on the actual placement of physical bodies in tangible locations, tourism’s materiality ensures that the conceptual distancing of tourist and toured can never be absolute”). Not, plainly, a book for a general audience, it still offers some intriguing insights into a phenomenon of considerable importance in the American Jewish community.

At the heart of Kelner’s inquiry is a suspicion that must be shared by many people who hear about Birthright, and probably many people who go on it: Is it a kind of indoctrination? The very fact that the program is free for participants—funded by individual philanthropists, community groups, and the Israeli government—makes the question plausible. [Editor’s note: Tablet’s parent organization, Nextbook, Inc., has partnered with Birthright in the past and may do so again in the future.] Everyone knows there is no such thing as a free lunch: Is the price of this one adherence to a particular political line? “In light of the common assumption, shared by proponents and detractors alike, that state- and community-sponsored tours of Israel are a means of enlisting Diaspora Jews as partisans in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Kelner asks, “should we not expect the [tour] guides to ignore Palestinian points of view, to present only the Israeli government’s perspective, and to discourage tourists from expressing dissent?”

Kelner’s answer is no, and for several reasons. First, he shows, the program guidelines emphasize that Birthright trips—which, though funded by Birthright, are organized by other groups, especially Hillel—are meant to be educational experiences, not political ones, and the tour guides seem to take this seriously. In fact, Kelner shows, much of the value of a student’s experience depends on the personality and principles of the guide she is assigned. He tells the story of one guide, Ra’anan (all the names in the book are pseudonyms), who takes a group of young people to the “separation wall” that divides Jewish and Arab areas near the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem. The Israeli guide goes out of his way to explain both the Israelis’ perceived need for the wall, to stop suicide terrorists, and the Palestinians’ justified resentment of it. “The reality today [is] that if I’m an Arab farmer,” Ra’anan explains, “I want to go to my plantation, I need to go through a security checkpoint because of the security fence that those Israelis built to me.” (Here, as throughout the book, Kelner reproduces speech literally, both Israeli grammatical mistakes and the torrential “likes” used by the Americans.)

Still, Kelner observes, this admirable even-handedness exists within the fundamentally Jewish and Israeli orientation of the tour. The students hear about Palestinian grievances from Ra’anan, not from a Palestinian who is actually affected by the separation wall. In general, Kelner writes, they are introduced to many facets of Israeli life—nature preserves, army bases, discos, restaurants, beaches—but hear about Arabs only in the context of “the conflict.” As he puts it, “even in the most balanced of scenarios … when the discourse paints both Israelis and Arabs in shades of gray, the experience of Israel, and Israel alone, occurs in 3-D Technicolor with Surround Sound.”

This is less a criticism than an observation of the nature of Birthright tourism. More intriguingly, Kelner writes about the way Birthright revises, and in a sense contradicts, traditionally Zionist ways of thinking about the land of Israel. As he explains in his first chapter, there is an old Zionist tradition of using experience of the land to inculcate Jewish patriotism. In the Yishuv, an important rite of passage for young pioneers was tiyul, a rigorous hiking expedition “premised on the idea that yedi’at ha’aretz, ‘knowing the land of Israel,’ would breed ahavat ha’aretz, ‘love for the land of Israel.’ ” “Tiyul,” Kelner writes, “was not so much an act of teaching information about the land … as it was an act of sacralizing the homeland”—and also gaining familiarity with a terrain that might one day need to be fought for.

It is a long way from tiyul to the kind of activities Kelner shows us in his anecdotes about Birthright tours. The difference is not simply that American Jewish teenagers, at least the ones he writes about, are not interested in rigor, preferring to travel on air-conditioned buses and shop for souvenirs. It is that the whole premise of Birthright is opposed to the classical Zionist idea that Jews, to flourish as Jews, must settle in the Jewish State. Birthright trips are round-trip, not one-way; as Kelner provocatively puts it, “since the program’s inception, it has funded the departures of almost 200,000 Jews from the Jewish state.” Really, the tours are not Zionist enterprises but “diaspora-building” ones, meant to increase Jewish consciousness among American Jews once they return to America.

For this reason, Kelner spends a good deal of time observing the interaction of tour participants with one another, not just their responses to their Israeli guides. What he finds is not surprising, but it is still a little discouraging: Like all American teenagers, American Jewish teenagers tend to be ignorant about the world and saturated with pop culture. For all his neutrality, Kelner can’t help sounding annoyed when he hears students respond to an Israeli’s talk about the Palestinian intifada with jokes about “the enchilada.” If Birthright programs do not indoctrinate students with any one belief system, the book suggests it is at least partly because they aren’t paying enough attention.

Like most teenagers, too, Birthright tourists are also clearly more interested in sex and drinking than in politics and religion. Kelner notes that the programs are practically designed to encourage hooking up, among the participants and between Americans and Israelis—especially American women and male Israeli soldiers, during the “cross-cultural peer-to-peer encounters known in Hebrew as mifgashim.” (Female soldiers, Kelner observes, are not nearly as interested in the male tourists.) No wonder it has earned the nickname “Birthrate Israel”—which is, come to think of it, not a bad description of the program’s ultimate goal.

As a writer—and, it would appear, as a man—Hitchens is relentlessly extroverted: He defines himself by his obsessions and crusades, by the fights he picks. Unwittingly, however, Hitch-22 raises a question that must haunt our encounters, not just with Hitchens, but with all intellectuals who deal with large issues of politics and religion. It is not difficult to address oneself to controversies, or to come up with opinions about them, or even to defend those opinions eloquently. Certainly it is not difficult for Hitchens, who has become famous for doing these things. Since he started his career as a leftist journalist and activist, in the late 1960s, there have been few public issues about which he has failed to have, and state, an opinion. The bulk of Hitch-22 recounts these crusades, from his work as an Oxford student for the International Socialists (a Trotskyite, anti-Soviet faction) to his behind-the-scenes advocacy, in the 1990s, for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

But an opinion is only as valuable as the person who holds it—and how can anyone bring wisdom to bear on public questions when he avoids private thought? To paraphrase a source for which Hitchens has notoriously little use: What does it profit a man to gain a whole worldview, if he loses (or forgets about) his soul? “I would often rather have an argument or a quarrel than be bored, and because I hate to lose an argument, I am often willing to protract one for its own sake rather than concede even a small point,” Hitchens admits. He calls this the “ ‘down’ side of one of my happier skills,” his skill at debate, which he has lately employed in humiliating clergymen around the world. What he does not consider is that that skill may itself be “unhappy”: Socrates distinguished between philosophy, which is the love of wisdom, and sophistry, which is the ability to argue convincingly, even for bad purposes. To a vocational arguer, what matters is arguing, not understanding (especially when, as Hitchens says, he is obligated to produce 1,000 words of clean copy every single day). That’s why it seems almost too perfect that Hitchens should have been invited to the Vatican, during the canonization hearings for Mother Teresa, to serve as a freelance Devil’s Advocate—the one job in which argument is intentionally divorced from wisdom.

In fact, Hitchens is at his best arguing in the negative, which is why his best-known views are his hatreds—of Mother Teresa (a pious fraud), Henry Kissinger (a war criminal), Bill Clinton (a liar), and God (all of the above). Hitch-22 suggests that Hitchens’s preference for the role of scold and scourge has biographical origins. He was born in 1949 to ill-matched parents: His father, Eric, was a commander in the Royal Navy, a veteran of World War II, taciturn and conservative in a familiar English style. His mother, Yvonne, was imaginative and socially ambitious, as exotic as her name: “my shell-like ear detected quite early on a difference between this and the various comfortable Nancys and Joans and Ethels and Marjories who—sterling types all—tended to be the spouses and helpmeets of my father’s brother-officers.”

The marriage would eventually come to a sad end—the only real personal sadness that Hitchens describes in the book. When he was in his early twenties, his mother left his father for another man, and Yvonne and her lover ended up committing suicide together at a hotel in Athens. Christopher was the one responsible for flying there and claiming the body. As it happens, this moment of supreme personal tragedy coincided with a political upheaval, and he spent much of his time in Athens interviewing dissidents who had been tortured by the Greek junta. “With Yvonne lying cold? You are quite right to ask,” Hitchens writes. “But it turns out, as I have found in other ways and in other places, that the separation between the personal and the public is not so neat.”

It would be easy, perhaps too easy, to read this as a flight from inwardness into the public realm, where Hitchens is far more comfortable. At the very least, it seems clear that his vocation was a way of synthesizing the warring legacies of his parents. His mother, he writes, wanted nothing more than for him to rise socially, to have the glamorous life that a Navy wife never could. That is why she insisted on Christopher being sent to private school and eventually to Balliol. Writing has done the trick in this regard: So many famous names are dropped in Hitch-22 that it stops being a vice and becomes a technique of self-portraiture. The names fall into two categories, literary (James Fenton, Salman Rushdie, Robert Conquest) and political (Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Chertoff, opposition figures from Argentina to Cyprus). Yet even the most intimate of these friendships, with Martin Amis, is characterized mainly by laddishness and word games: Hitchens devotes a surprising amount of time to recounting the results of a game where “fuck” is substituted for “love” in famous titles. No doubt there is real intimacy also, but Hitchens is uninterested in recording it, or unable to. Certainly there is next to nothing in Hitch-22 about his romantic life, his marriage, or his children.

From his father, whom he respectfully calls “the Commander,” Hitchens takes the other imperative of his work, that writing be a kind of fighting. Many of Hitchens’s fans on the left were surprised when he came out in favor of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. They wouldn’t have been if they had realized how much he honors his father’s experience fighting a just war, and how often in his career he has sought occasions for honorable aggression. He is haunted by his failure to experience combat, and though he dwells on moments when his life has been in danger—reporting from Belfast and Sarajevo—he fears “that I lack the courage to be a real soldier or a real dissident. I have seen just enough warfare and political violence to know that, while I was pleased not to ‘crack’ at first coming under fire, I could never be a full-time uniformed combatant or freedom fighter, or even war correspondent.”

This shame is the subtext of the most powerful section in Hitch-22, where Hitchens writes about a young American soldier named Mark Daily, who was killed in Iraq in 2007. Daily, Hitchens learns, was motivated to join the Army by reading his fire-breathing articles in support of the war; Hitchens even learns, from the soldier’s parents, that Daily “tried to contact [him] from Kuwait or Iraq.” He records feeling “hollow,” a “deep pang of cold dismay.” It is the rare moment when Hitchens experiences a profound responsibility for the opinions he shares so readily.

One other ancestral legacy did not reach Hitchens until he was an adult. As he has written before, he learned in his thirties that his mother’s mother, whom he had known as Dorothy Hickman, was Jewish, her maiden name Levin. Yvonne had concealed this part of her ancestry from her husband and children, presumably in order to make things easier for herself socially. The revelation of his Jewish background came too late to shape Hitchens’s identity in any profound way: “I had to ask myself what Jewishness had meant to me, if anything, when I was a boy. I was completely sure that it meant nothing at all until I was thirteen, except as a sort of subtext to the Christian Bible stories.”

The main effect of “being a Jew” (as he puts it, though this is true only in the legalistic, matrilineal sense) on the adult Hitchens, it seems, has been to make him subscribe to the most clichéd view of Jewishness as perpetual dissent. “Wasn’t there still something in this age-old identification of the Jew with the subversive? If so, good,” he writes. Being a Jew becomes another credential of contrarianism, even though Hitchens’s own story is a perfect demonstration that contrarianism is a character trait, not a Jewish cultural or genetic imperative. Certainly it does not give him any new sympathy with the state of Israel: “I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history.”

“Our” is useful here, rhetorically, giving a Jewish tincture to anti-Zionist opinions formed long before Hitchens learned that one of his four grandparents was Jewish. But many of Hitchens’s other opinions have changed over the years, and his current views—about the need to defend democracy, and the overwhelming danger of Islamic totalitarianism—seem to point in the direction of a change of heart here, too. It would not be at all surprising to hear Hitchens, in five or 10 years, arguing that the defense of Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah is a moral imperative. Already, he shows, the divergence of his views on the Middle East from Edward Said’s led him to lose Said’s friendship. What is certain is that, whatever it may be, Hitchens will have an opinion—after all, as his hero Voltaire once put it, c’est son métier.

It was not hard to find the common theme that connected all these allegations: A small group of Jews, working together and inspired by a sinister Jewish mastermind, had taken over the American government and was using its power to serve Jewish ends. In other words, the neocon myth—which began on the hard left but found subscribers on the isolationist right as well and became almost commonplace in Europe—was a 21st-century reprise of some old and very unpleasant ideas about Jewish power. It was not uncommon, five or six years ago, to hear warnings about the neoconservative “cabal”—a word with a long anti-Semitic history—or to find critics of the Bush Administration demonstratively making lists of its Jewish members.

There were many possible rebuttals to this kind of insinuation: for instance, that while there were prominent Jewish neoconservatives in the Bush Administration, the actual decision-makers—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld—were neither neocons nor Jewish; or that many other leading neoconservatives were Catholic; or that the vast majority of American Jews are liberals who oppose the neoconservative agenda. But just as sunlight is the best disinfectant, so the best response to myths and rumors about neoconservatism is the truth about neoconservatism.

That is what Justin Vaïsse provides in his very intelligent and well-researched new book, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Harvard University Press). More than a few books have already been written on this subject, and parts of the neoconservative story have passed into legend. The reader who once again encounters, in Vaïsse’s opening pages, the cafeteria at City College in the 1930s, where the Trotskyists of Alcove 1 debated the Stalinists of Alcove 2, might well heave a sigh; and it is possible to be less than fascinated by the finely discriminated stages of the ideological evolution of Norman Podhoretz.

But these things turn out to play a smaller role in Vaïsse’s book than in many studies of neoconservatism, because he is not primarily interested in what he calls the “first age” of the movement. This period, starting in 1965, was when a recognizable neoconservative tendency began to split off from the larger group known as the New York intellectuals. Those intellectuals, from Lionel Trilling to Irving Howe to Irving Kristol, shared a common background—they were mostly poor, first-generation American Jews, born in Brooklyn and the Bronx, who came of age during the Great Depression. And they shared a common political trajectory, from their early Marxist radicalism, through disenchantment with Stalinism and the Communist Party, to the anti-Communist liberalism of the 1950s.

Neoconservatism of the first age, as expressed in the work of Kristol, Podhoretz, and others, can be seen as the New York intellectuals’ response to the upheavals of the 1960s. Originally, it focused on domestic issues—in particular, criticism of the New Left, the counterculture, the Great Society’s welfare programs, and affirmative action. As Vaïsse writes, “the original neoconservatism of the 1960s had nothing to do with the muscular assertion of American power or with the promotion of democracy. It even took no interest in questions of foreign policy.”

This neoconservatism marks an important chapter in both American and Jewish-American intellectual history. But it would hardly be of compelling interest to a European political scientist, or a European reading public (Vaïsse’s book was published in France in 2008; this edition is translated, very well, by Arthur Goldhammer). What brought Vaïsse to the subject was, rather, foreign policy, which moved to the front of the neoconservative agenda in the late 1970s and became its exclusive focus in the George W. Bush years. Essentially, Vaïsse is reading the history of neoconservatism backward from the Iraq War, on the principle that “Bush’s failure in Iraq was also the failure … of a certain version of neoconservatism.” To explain this failure, he tries to understand how neoconservative ideas and personnel became influential enough by 2003 to play an important role in American foreign policy.

That story begins in the 1970s with the so-called “Scoop Jackson Democrats,” whom Vaïsse identifies as “second age neoconservatives.” These were Democrats who had once been classic Cold War liberals, supporters of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968. But the Democratic Party’s move to the left, under the pressure of the Vietnam War and the social changes of the 1960s, left them feeling stranded, especially after the Democrats nominated the dovish George McGovern in 1972. In response, many of them rallied around Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a liberal hawk who became a patron saint of neoconservatism. One month after McGovern was routed by Richard Nixon, these Jackson sympathizers founded the “Coalition for a Democratic Majority,” a small organization that bulks very large in Vaïsse’s book. He charts its career through the rest of the 1970s, as it tried and largely failed to convince the Democratic Party of the need for higher defense spending and a more confrontational policy toward the Soviet Union.

As Vaïsse makes clear, this was initially a battle within Democratic ranks. Many foreign-policy neoconservatives remained liberals on domestic policy; even at the time of the Iraq War, there were neo-liberals or liberal hawks who held this same combination of views. For another, in the 1970s the Republicans were the party of Nixon, Kissinger, and “detente,” which were anathema to the neoconservatives. It wasn’t until 1980, when the Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan, that most of the neoconservatives migrated into the Republican Party, with some former Democrats taking jobs in the Reagan Administration. By that time, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority had given way to the nonpartisan Committee on the Present Danger as the main neoconservative pressure group.

Yet Vaïsse argues, convincingly, that Reagan’s foreign policy was never strictly neoconservative. Yes, he raised defense spending and called the USSR “the evil empire.” But in his second term, he reached out to Mikhail Gorbachev and negotiated arms treaties, which the neoconservatives deplored. Was it Reagan’s toughness or his openness that helped bring about the fall of the USSR? That question would have huge implications after September 11, 2001, when the “third age” of neoconservatism came into its own.

By then, Vaïsse notes, the neoconservatives had long since lost their early connection to the Democratic Party. On domestic issues, they were mostly indistinguishable from other Republicans. This meant that an aggressive foreign policy was the main identifying characteristic of a neoconservative; neocon had almost become a synonym for hawk. But Vaïsse shows that something still separated neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle from more traditional hawks like Cheney and Rumsfeld, whom he calls simply “assertive nationalists.”

This was a belief, carried over from the Cold War, that the promotion of democracy was both in America’s national interest and an American duty. For ordinary hawks, invading Iraq was the right thing to do because it was necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein and stop him from spreading weapons of mass destruction (which almost all sources believed he possessed). For neoconservatives, invasion was necessary on these grounds, but it was also desirable on moral and ideological grounds: By replacing Saddam’s tyranny with a democracy, America could help spark a wave of democratic transformation in the Middle East. Just as in the Cold War, America was fighting for a freer world, which would also be a safer and more pro-American world. (A democratic Middle East would also, they presumed, be safer for Israel, a goal shared by both Jewish and non-Jewish neoconservatives.)

It is now pretty widely agreed that the invasion of Iraq was a failure and that this failure discredited the neoconservatives. But, as Vaïsse points out, neoconservatives themselves don’t necessarily see it that way. They had always argued that the invasion of Iraq would require massive forces and be followed by a long period of engagement. They were interested not just in victory but in democratic reconstruction. It was Rumsfeld, not Wolfowitz and Perle, who urged an invasion “on the cheap,” with the minimum number of American troops and with no post-invasion planning.

Vaïsse does not endorse this neoconservative defense. In the end, he is strongly critical of neoconservatives—for their hubris about American power, for their tendency to exaggerate threats and underestimate dangers, and for seeing states like Iraq as bigger threats than terrorist groups like al-Qaida. But unlike most critics, he sympathizes with neoconservative aspirations and anxieties. He recognizes that the neoconservatives—like liberals, realists, and other foreign-policy factions—are advocating what they believe to be the right and effective policy, not engaging in cynical or suspicious manipulation. And he is very tough on the canards that have grown up around the word “neoconservative”—in particular, the ludicrous overestimation of the influence of Strauss, which usually goes along with a malicious misreading of his work.

As a result, Vaïsse is perhaps even too careful to minimize the role of Jews, or at least of the Jewishness of Jews, in neoconservative thought. It is quite true, as he says, that it is not “ ‘in essence’ a Jewish movement”: not all neoconservatives are Jews, most Jews are not neoconservatives, and neoconservatives certainly do not place “Jewish interests” ahead of “American interests.” Still, I think that the appeal of neoconservatism to many Jews can be related to the lessons they draw from Jewish history. Neoconservatism can be defined as aggressive support for (classical) liberalism, and it is clear that the fate of the Jews has absolutely been connected to the fate of liberalism. Where free speech, the free market, individual rights, and tolerance flourish, Jews flourish; where they are destroyed, Jews are destroyed. This is one reason why American Jews tend to be truly patriotic, since America has the most durable and deep-rooted liberalism of any country in the world. The desire to defend and extend American freedoms is what leads many Jews to be left-liberals; a different interpretation of what that defense requires, and who freedom’s enemies really are, leads some Jews to be neoconservatives.

It’s easy to believe that it was painful to write the book, since even reading it is—appropriately enough, given the title—a kind of trial. Julius’s survey of anti-Semitic acts and ideas and discourse, from the blood libel of the middle ages to the fanatical anti-Zionism of the 21st century, offers an object lesson in how demoralizing it is to be slandered, even when one knows that the slander is false. Indeed, the wilder and more palpably incredible the slur, the more destabilizing it can be for the victim, since it thrusts him into a world in which the truth simply does not matter.

For many hundreds of years, for example, most English people believed that Jews had a religious obligation to kill Christian children and drink their blood. Julius shows how this crime was charged against the Jews again and again in the middle ages: in Norwich in 1144, Gloucester in 1168, Bury St. Edmunds in 1181, Lincoln in 1255, and on and on, until the Jews were finally expelled from England by King Edward I in 1290. The fact that no Jew ever committed such a murder and that Jewish law is radically opposed to bloodshed, did not stop the blood libel from flourishing. But while no Jews ever ritually murdered an English Christian, Christians inflamed by such accusations did murder very many English Jews. In York in 1190, for instance, 150 Jews died—many by suicide—when a looting mob trapped them in a castle.

In this respect, medieval anti-Semitism followed the same logic as Nazi anti-Semitism—the logic of the big lie, which charged Jewish victims with committing the very crimes that were being committed against them. The victim’s rational instinct in this situation is to reply and rebut, to demonstrate the falsehood of this or that charge against the Jews; but this response is entirely beside the point. As Julius writes, “what characterizes anti-Semites is not so much their falsehoods and their misbeliefs as the malice with which they promote them. They hate Jews. The errors in logic, in history and theology, in politics and sociology, come later.”

Yet this raises a question about Trials of the Diaspora itself. Julius is a respected intellectual, the author of a groundbreaking book on the anti-Semitic tropes in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, and a prominent London lawyer, known for his work as Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer and as defense counsel for Deborah Lipstadt in the David Irving Holocaust-denial case. Why, one might naturally wonder, would he devote so much time and work to documenting English anti-Semitism, if the content of anti-Semitism is null—if his book is, as he puts it, “mostly … the explication of nonsense—pernicious nonsense, at that”? One possible motive is scholarly—the simple desire to make a truthful record of the Jewish and English past—and Julius has certainly done a masterly job of that. It’s hard to imagine anyone needing to write this sorry history a second time.

But the temper of this book is not simply scholarly. Its forensic drive and controlled irony are lawyerly, in the best sense of the word. A case is being made here—but not, as Julius would be the first to insist, a case for Jewish innocence. It is not only unnecessary to make that case, it is degrading: You don’t argue with a sewer. If, knowing this, Julius still felt compelled to write Trials, his purpose was, rather, demonstrative. By so thoroughly documenting and analyzing English anti-Semitism, Julius puts himself in a position of mastery over it. A Jew, he shows, does not have to fear anti-Semitism; just as important, perhaps, he no longer has to fear thinking about anti-Semitism.

This is an especially important distinction when it comes to English history, since English anti-Semitism has been far milder and subtler than that of most other European countries. In part, ironically, this is because the expulsion of the Jews was so effective. Between 1290 and the 1650s, when Oliver Cromwell agreed to allow some Dutch Sephardim to settle in London, there were no Jews in Britain. Even after Cromwell, the Anglo-Jewish community grew slowly, numbering just 30,000 or so by the late 19th century. England had a smaller and less significant Jewish presence than any major European country.

Partly for this reason, English anti-Semitism became a matter of discourse and attitude, rather than violence and persecution. After the middle ages, Julius’s book contains no pogroms or ghettoes, no Dreyfus Affairs or Nuremberg laws, no concentration camps—subjects that would have to appear in any history of French or German or Russian anti-Semitism. On the other hand, English anti-Semitism presents a uniquely troubling literary legacy, since the very greatest English writers have been responsible for embellishing slanders about the Jews. As Julius puts it, “if it is the case that among anti-Semitism’s many products there are only a few literary works that deserve general esteem and thus challenge the self-respect of Jewish readers and spectators, then English literature has most of them.” Chaucer, in The Prioress’s Tale, told the story of a child ritually murdered by evil Jews (minions of “the serpent Satanas,/That hath in Jewes’ heart his waspe’s nest”); Shakespeare, of course, gave us Shylock and the pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice; and Dickens, in Oliver Twist, made Fagin a Jewish thief who preys on Christian children.

The key word in Julius’s description is “self-respect.” It hardly challenges a Jew’s self-respect to read the many obscure scribblers, conspiracy theorists, and crackpots whom Julius has occasion to quote; to be insulted by Shakespeare is another matter. Similarly, for most English Jews in the modern period, anti-Semitism did not inspire fear or dread but social unease, self-doubt, a sense of being unwanted. Julius quotes one writer from the 1930s explaining that Jews “by a thousand signs, and by ways not always conscious, [are] edged on one side, excluded.”

This sense of not belonging persisted even after individual Jews had risen to high positions in government and society. Thus we find paradoxical cases like that of Edwin Samuel Montagu, a Jewish politician who was Secretary of State for India at the time of the notorious Amritsar massacre in 1919. When Montagu sought to censure the British general who had fired on a crowd of Indians, he was attacked, in the words of another politician, as “a Jew, a foreigner, rounding on an Englishman and throwing him to the wolves.” Anti-Semitism did not stop Montagu from rising to the heights of power, but neither did his power and status stop him from being viewed, even by his colleagues, through an anti-Semitic lens.

The second motive behind Trials of the Diaspora has to do with Julius’s diagnosis of the present and future of English anti-Semitism. After the Holocaust, in England as throughout Europe and America, overt expressions of anti-Semitism became largely taboo. But this began to change with the Six Day War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which made the Palestinian cause popular on the political left. Julius’s claim is that criticism of Israeli policies has become, in some corners of English life, an irrational anti-Zionism, with both conscious and unconscious anti-Semitic overtones. This constitutes “the fourth of the English anti-Semitisms,” a successor to the medieval, literary, and social versions.

This argument is responsible for the controversy that Julius’s book has already provoked—see, for example, Harold Bloom’s review in the New York Times Book Review and the letters of complaint it drew in this Sunday’s issue. The obvious objection to calling this brand of new, Israel-centered hostility “the new anti-Semitism” is that, as Julius acknowledges, “it is adopted by people who profess deep hostility to anti-Semitism, [and] self-identified Jews are among its advocates.” Indeed, anti-Zionists often preemptively disclaim the charge of anti-Semitism as a way of discrediting their critics. Nothing is more common in anti-Zionist discourse than the notion that the anti-Zionist is bravely risking persecution by paranoid or malignant Jews.

But Julius is quite cognizant that a distinction must be drawn between criticism of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians—criticism that can be rational and ethical, and that he makes quite eloquently himself—and anti-Semitism, which is inherently irrational and unethical. And he convincingly shows that, in England, anti-Zionism frequently does pass over into anti-Semitism. Readers who follow British publications such as the London Review of Books and the Guardian will be familiar with many of Julius’s examples; those who don’t will find them eye-opening. Take, for instance, the poet Tom Paulin, who wrote “Killed in Crossfire” after the widely reported death in 2000 of Mohammed al-Dura, a young Palestinian boy allegedly shot by Israeli soldiers:

We’re fed this inert
this lying phrase
like comfort food
as another little Palestinian boy
in trainers jeans and a white teeshirt
is gunned down by the Zionist SS
whose initials we should
—but we don’t—dumb goys—
clock in the weasel word crossfire.

In these few lines, all the classic tropes of anti-Semitism are brought together. Jews deliberately murder non-Jewish children; they “feed” lies to unwitting Gentiles, presumably through their control of the media; they mock their dupes as “dumb goys”; they are as bad as Nazis. Yet when the obvious anti-Semitism of this poem was pointed out, Paulin—a highly respected figure in the British literary world—responded with another indignant poem called “On Being Dealt the Anti-Semite Card,” in which he protested his innocence while once again comparing Jews to Nazis (“the usual cynical Goebbels stuff”).

Such rhetoric, which Julius believes is moving from the fringes to the mainstream of English life, helps to explain his feeling that “the closed season on Jews is over.” We have not yet seen this degree of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism become mainstream in American life, but there are signs of its growing legitimation, especially under the guise of criticism of the “Israel lobby”—the contemporary name for the old fantasy of secret, limitless, malignant Jewish power. At such a moment, the judiciousness and confidence that Julius displays are more necessary than ever.

Irène Némirovsky with Les Nouvelles littéraires c. 1935.
CREDIT: Copyright Roger-Viollet, courtesy Random House

The rediscovery of the French Jewish novelist Irène Némirovsky has been one of the most ironic literary phenomena of recent years. It began with the publication in 2004, to wide acclaim, of Suite Française—a pair of novellas about the fall of France in 1940 and the subsequent German occupation. These were compelling stories, written within months of the events they describe, and of undoubted historical interest. But their merit alone hardly explained the rapturous reception of Suite Française, which led reviewers to compare Némirovsky variously to Tolstoy, Camus, and Babel. Such enthusiasm had at least as much to do with Némirovsky’s novelty—though well known in France between the wars, she was completely forgotten in the English-speaking world—and with her tragic story.

In July 1942, having written just two of the projected five parts of Suite Française, Némirovsky was deported from the small town of Issy-l’Évêque, where she and her family had taken refuge after the German conquest of Paris. Born in Kiev in 1903, Némirovsky had lived in France since the age of 16 and wrote exclusively in French; but she had never managed to secure French citizenship, leaving her an easy target for the new regime. Within days she was sent in a cattle car to Auschwitz, where she died, apparently of typhus, the following month. Three months later, Némirovsky’s husband, a fellow Russian Jewish immigrant named Michel Epstein, followed her to the death camp, leaving the couple’s two young daughters in the care of a Catholic governess. Thanks to Julie Dumot, Denise and Elisabeth Epstein survived the war and even managed to hold on to the suitcase containing the manuscript of their mother’s last work. Sixty years later, Denise decided to type out the manuscript and then have it published—thus sparking an international Némirovsky renaissance and making her mother more famous than she had ever been during her lifetime.

Such a terrible and moving story could hardly help coloring readers’ reactions to Suite Française, and Némirovsky was instantly adopted into the pantheon of Holocaust writers. Because she was both precocious and prolific—her first novel appeared when she was 23, and over the next 15 years she published dozens of novels, novellas, and short stories—there was a great deal of unknown material for publishers to reissue. But as more and more of Némirovsky’s work began to appear in English, some critics noticed a disturbing fact: This victim of the Holocaust trafficked in the most blatant anti-Semitic stereotypes. Notably, David Golder—Némirovsky’s most popular novel during her lifetime, which came out in an Everyman’s Library translation in 2008—is the story of a greedy and crooked Jewish financier, his rapacious wife and daughter, and his loathsome associates, who are all described using anti-Semitic clichés. (Golder’s nose, to take just one example, is “enormous and hooked, like the nose of an old Jewish money-lender.”) In a devastating essay in The New Republic, titled “Scandale Française,” Ruth Franklin argued that Némirovsky “was the very definition of a self-hating Jew”—a writer who ingratiated herself with a xenophobic French audience by defaming her fellow Jews.

Franklin’s essay provoked heated defenses of Némirovsky by her translators and admiring critics. At the time, no full-length biography of Némirovsky was available in English, to help readers decide the merits of the case. But now, at last, we have an English translation of The Life of Irène Némirovsky, by Olivier Philipponat and Patrick Lienhardt, which first appeared in France in 2007. This book is seriously disappointing in several ways: It is badly written and clumsily translated (by Euan Cameron), vulgar in its judgments and literary analyses, parochial on French matters, and tone-deaf on Jewish ones. There is still room, and need, for a good biography of Némirovsky, one that would fill in her Jewish and French background more clearly, delve more deeply into her social milieu, and have more intelligent things to say about her books. But with all its flaws, The Life of Irène Némirovsky contains enough hard facts to make clear that Franklin was right: The charge of Jewish self-hatred should not be made lightly, but it fits Némirovsky all too well.

Philipponat and Lienhardt make clear, however, that it was not herself that Némirovsky despised so much as her parents, and especially her mother. Leonid Némirovsky, a self-made businessman and banker, earned enough money to keep his wife Anna in the style to which she was accustomed; but Anna, in her daughter’s account, was a cold and vain woman, unfaithful to her husband and completely uninterested in young Irina, whom she saw only as a reminder of her real age. The Némirovskys, like many cultured Russians, were ardent Francophiles who visited Nice or Biarritz every year, and Irina learned to speak and write French better than Russian. After the Russian Revolution turned bankers into enemies of the people, Leonid and his family fled the Soviet Union for Finland, where they stayed briefly before settling in their beloved France.

From then on, they would be known as Leon, Fanny, and Irène, and all three would assimilate eagerly to the country they had always considered their real homeland. As a teenager, Irène took classes at the Sorbonne but devoted most of her energy to the dissipations of the Roaring Twenties—drinking, dancing to jazz music, scandalous love affairs. Her first published writing, in fact, was a comic dialogue between two flappers, Nonoche and Louloute, which appeared in a quasi-pornographic men’s magazine called Fantasio in 1921. She continued to publish in magazines, sometimes under pseudonyms, throughout the decade, while working on a vaguely autobiographical novel: the story of a Russian-Jewish businessman, his cruel wife, and his promiscuous daughter, clearly based on the Némirovskys themselves. Along the way, she married Michel, the son of another Russian-Jewish banker—a sign that, for all her love of France, her actual social milieu remained largely restricted to Jewish immigrants.

When she completed David Golder, in 1929, Némirovsky sent it to the influential publisher Bernard Grasset, just weeks before she was due to give birth to her first child. The legend goes that the publisher was bowled over by the work of this unknown, who had signed her letter simply “Epstein,” and wrote back the very next day to make an offer. But Némirovsky, who had used a post-office box to conceal the whole business from her family, was confined to bed and never got Grasset’s letters. Weeks went by as the publisher grew increasingly desperate, even taking out ads in the newspapers in search of the elusive Monsieur Epstein. When Némirovsky finally showed up at Grasset’s office, he was shocked to find that the author of this racy, sordid novel was actually a delicate young mother.

The whole story sounds too good to be true, and it may well have been cooked up Grasset’s skilled publicity department. Whatever really happened, there is no doubt that David Golder was a hit, selling 60,000 copies—more than any of Némirovsky’s other books—and making her famous overnight. The hatefulness of the Jewish characters did not go unnoticed, especially by Jewish critics, one of whom denounced Golder as “a Jew for anti-Semites.” Némirovsky denied any anti-Semitic intention but did not object to the insinuation that she was revealing the secret truth about Jews: “If I have been able to reflect the Jewish soul, it is—you may have guessed—because I am Jewish myself.”

Thanks to the success of David Golder, Némirovsky was a sought-after and well-paid novelist for the rest of the decade. Philipponat and Lienhardt assume a greater familiarity with Némirovsky’s work than American readers are likely to possess, since much of it has not yet been translated. But they make clear that Némirovsky worked at a feverish pace to support her family’s lavish lifestyle (strangely, the translator never gives dollar equivalents for the sums of francs that are constantly mentioned). And it is equally clear that the themes of David Golder were reprised in story after story. Némirovsky was genuinely fascinated by the subject of Jews—she wrote in her diary that she hoped to write an epic novel about the Jews, with characters based on Trotsky and the infamous French con man Stavisky.

But this fascination expressed itself in crude ideas about the Jews’ violent, all-conquering will, and she returned again and again to the same Jewish stereotypes. The Wine of Solitude was a novel about “a little Jew, eaten away by a kind of long and muddled ambition.” In the story “Fraternity,” an assimilated French Jew named Christian Rabinovitch meets a new immigrant with the same last name and realizes that both suffer from the condition of Jewishness: “Centuries of poverty, illness, oppression. …  Thousands of poor, weak, tired bones have made me what I am.”

Philipponat and Lienhardt offer various half-hearted explanations as to why such works are not really anti-Semitic and why it was not shameful for Némirovsky to publish in viciously bigoted, nationalistic magazines like Gringoire. In 1938, contemplating a story about Stavisky, Némirovsky wrote in her notebook: “I should vow to myself to do a Stav, and not to give a damn about the effect it would have on the condition of the Jews, in general etc. After all, the Jews, I like them as guinea pigs, so!”

Philipponat and Lienhardt even try harder than Némirovsky did herself to argue that her conversion to Catholicism, in 1939, was a heartfelt spiritual act, rather than a last-ditch attempt to secure some protection against the stigma of Jewishness. “Nor did the majority of converts have the feeling that they had spat upon the Book,” they explain, “since the Church was the daughter of Israel.” This being the case, the authors go so far as to write that “in receiving unction Irène Némirovsky was displaying a Jewish awareness”—a sentiment that is not the less offensive because it is intended as an exculpation of their subject.

Of course, Némirovsky’s feelings about Jews or her own Jewishness had no bearing on her fate, which was sealed as soon as the Germans occupied France. As a non-naturalized Eastern European Jew, she was exactly the kind of person the new regime demonized: She was legally forbidden to publish, travel, or even use the telephone. Yet if Némirovsky had had a better sense of her real situation as a Jew in France, there were steps she could have taken. She could have fled to the southern, unoccupied zone—Issy-l’Évêque was not far from the border. She could even, as her daughter later observed, have tried to go to Switzerland, or to get a visa for America, as some other stateless Jews managed to do.

Instead, Némirovsky continued to operate on the same principle that had governed her life and her work: that she was not one of those Jews, that her love for France would surely win her some consideration from the French. She and her husband tried to work their high-placed contacts, asking for favors and special exemptions. “I hope that this state of affairs will not last and that our influential friends will succeed in setting us free,” Némirovsky wrote in June 1942, the month before she was deported. The nadir of this effort came after Némirovsky had been arrested, when Michel Epstein composed a letter to the German ambassador in Paris, pleading: “In none of her books (which moreover have not been banned by the occupying authorities), will you find a single word against Germany and, even though my wife is of Jewish descent, she does not speak of the Jews with any affection.”

Anything can be forgiven a husband pleading for his wife’s life. But how can a Jewish reader ignore the deep dishonor implied by such a letter—a letter that suggests that Némirovsky has written so hatefully about Jews that the Nazis should not consider her a Jew herself? Only by remembering the kind of world Némirovsky had to live in—a world saturated with Jew-hatred, where self-betrayal could appear to a Jew as emancipation—can we fairly judge this tragic writer, who has been reclaimed from oblivion by the very people she spent her life disowning.

But does this familiar timeline apply to the history of the Jews? Was the Jewish experience determined by the same events that were shaping Europe as a whole, or does Jewish history have its own logic, which would require a different set of historical divisions? To take an obvious example: In European history, 1492 means the discovery of America, an event full of promise; in Jewish history, it means the expulsion from Spain, a great national trauma. Yet these two epoch-making events cannot be strictly separated. Both contributed to the unprecedented migration of peoples in the 16th century; indeed, many Jews who left Spain in 1492 ended up in the New World as merchants or settlers.

The term “early modern” has long been used to describe the period spanning the years 1500 to 1800 in Western Europe—it is a broader and more neutral-sounding term for what used to be called the Renaissance. Now Ruderman argues that, in the same years, the Jews experienced a cultural crisis equivalent to, though not quite the same as, what their Christian neighbors were undergoing. “The history of Jewish society and culture in early modern Europe is more than a mirror of the Christian world,” Ruderman writes. What’s more, it is possible to generalize about the experience of Jews across the Continent, to write not merely “a Jewish history specific to a Polish context or an Italian or Ottoman one but a history of the Jews and their cultural legacy as a whole.”

What are the defining traits of this early modern period that make it more than “a mere transitional stage between medievalism and modernity”? Ruderman, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Pennsylvania, proposes five key “elements” or “markers” and devotes one chapter of this short book to each of them. First, and in some ways most fundamental, is that Jews after 1492 were unprecedentedly mobile (the title of Ruderman’s first chapter is “Jews on the Move”). Hundreds of thousands of Jews left Spain and Portugal for the Ottoman Empire and the city-states of Italy, where they were discriminated against but enjoyed a certain amount of official protection. At around the same time, a mass migration of Ashkenazi Jews from Germany and France into Eastern Europe created what would become the heartland of European Jewish life, in Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine.

For all the differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, Ruderman observes that these two migrations followed the same broad pattern. Each group brought to its new territory an old language (Yiddish and Ladino), as well as old forms of communal self-government and ritual practice. And in the East and South alike, Jews occupied similar economic niches, “serving the interest of monarchy and nobility” by performing services like “lease management, tax farming, and customs supervision,” as well as commerce and money-lending. Ruderman also notes that there was a surprising amount of communication between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, with Amsterdam serving as a hub for travelers in both directions.

This newfound mobility can be seen in Ruderman’s biographical catalog of early modern Jewish luminaries. Joseph Karo, the compiler of the legal compendium known as the Shulhan Arukh, was born in Iberia in the late 15th century, moved to Istanbul as a child, then lived in various places in European Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and Palestine. Joseph Delmedigo, a 17th-century kabbalist and astronomer, moved from Crete to Padua to Cairo to Vilna to Amsterdam to Prague—a Cook’s Tour of early modern Jewry. Ruderman suggests that such men performed a kind of cultural crosspollination, which resulted in “the emergence of new forms of literary creativity in law, kabbalah, belles letters, medicine, history” and other genres, and may be related to “the concentration of Jews in itinerant professions such as medicine, the performing arts, the rabbinate, and trade.”

If Jews were on the move in the early modern period, so were Jewish books. The Gutenberg era famously produced a cultural revolution in Christian Europe; for Jews too, Ruderman writes, print was responsible for a “knowledge explosion,” which changed the way Jews communicated and thought about their traditions. Before the late 15th century, rabbinic works were “learned orally and transmitted through hagahot (glosses) written by a later exegete that eventually merged with the original text itself as they were studied, transmitted, and recopied.” This meant that the corpus of Jewish law stayed fluid, with many local variations, and that each rabbi had great authority to interpret the text.

But in 1580, in Krakow, Moses Isserles published an edition of Karo’s Shulhan Arukh with his own glosses included. This not only merged Sephardic and Ashkenazi customs (Karo was from Spain, Isserles from Poland), it heralded “the obliteration of localized oral traditions of authority and transmission.” In the age of print, “the text—not the teacher—became the ultimate word.” Reading was democratized, as rabbis “proved incapable of controlling the outpouring of small books and pamphlets quickly and inexpensively produced for a lay public [that] exposed them to aspects of a tradition that had once been the exclusive prerogative of highly educated legal scholars.” In this way, print helped undermine clerical power in the Jewish world, as it was also doing more dramatically in the Protestant Reformation.

Rabbinical authority was simultaneously being challenged on two other fronts. The early modern period saw the lay leaders of Jewish communities begin to exercise more power over rabbis. Parnassim, as the community elders were called, came from wealthy and prestigious families, and they were increasingly unwilling to let clergy tell them how to run things. In 1670, the parnassim of Leghorn (Livorno) issued a declaration that “on matters pertaining to religious law—marriage and divorce, dietary laws, and other ritual matters—[they] might consult the rabbis for their expert opinions but ultimately they had the sole prerogative” to make legal rulings. This led Jacob Sasportas, a leading rabbi, to denounce them: “their aspiration and desire is to cast away … and dismiss anything that bespeaks the honor of the hakhamim [the sages—that is, the rabbis], to deprive them of all authority and lower them to the dust to be trampled on by the laity.”

Such internal battles—and Ruderman finds similar ones from Amsterdam to Lublin—reflected a Jewish society in the throes of change. So too, even more dramatically, did the heretical movements of Sabbatai Zevi in Turkey and Jacob Frank in Poland. These false messiahs preached a radical challenge to normative Judaism, turning all laws and ethics upside down and even encouraging their followers to convert to Islam and Christianity. It was in opposition to such movements, Ruderman proposes, that Orthodox Judaism was born, as rabbis began to self-consciously unite to buttress their own authority and clamp down on innovation.

In this way, as in many others, developments that we think of as belonging to a later phase of Jewish history—the modern era, starting with the Enlightenment or Haskalah of the late 18th century—can actually be traced to the early modern period. “In aligning the early modern with the modern,” Ruderman concludes, “[and] carefully tracing the evolution of one to the other … the myth of a radical modernity itself is called into question.” Early Modern Jewry will certainly help to shape future debates over the ways we write and interpret Jewish history.

Politics and protest are far more central to Something Red, the new novel by Jennifer Gilmore, but she too conceives of a Brandeis uprising as something inherently comical. Early in the book, Benji Goldstein, the athlete son of a liberal D.C. clan, stumbles into a ragged rally on the Waltham campus—actually a counterprotest, in which a few students are opposing a larger student movement to ban nonkosher food from the dining halls. Here Benji meets Rachel Feinglass—“olive-skinned, black-haired, short, big-breasted”—who is sufficiently political to fight for the right of Jewish students to eat pork, even though she herself is a vegetarian. “This is about truth, about what this university is supposed to stand for. This is a participatory democracy,” she harangues, and Benji is more than convinced. On the spot, he falls in love with Rachel, with Brandeis, and with the idea of radical protest, all of which are mixed up in his inarticulate but heartfelt declaration, “I fucking love college.”

Of course, student demonstrations at Brandeis were not always so silly. In the 1960s, Benji learns in his class “American Protest!” (the exclamation point is a nice touch), the school produced radicals like Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis. But Gilmore’s novel is set in 1979—the year of the Iran hostage crisis and President Carter’s grain embargo on the Soviet Union—and all that remains of the ’60s spirit is the Grateful Dead and dropping acid. “Each and every day Benji sat in a lecture, he wished he’d been born a decade and a half previously,” Gilmore writes, and this sense of belatedness is the real theme of Something Red. Can Jews in the 1970s—and by implication, in our own time—really lay claim to the legacy of Jewish radicalism that dates back to the early 20th century?

For the Goldstein family, this is not just an abstract question. Sigmund, Benji’s grandfather, came out of the radical forcing-house that was City College in the 1930s and spent his youth as a socialist organizer. Even now he refuses to move away from the Lower East Side, out of a sense of solidarity with his poor neighbors, who are no longer Jewish but Asian and Latino. But Sigmund’s politics, Gilmore shows, long ago seemed obsolete to his son Dennis, who was born in the late 1930s, making him just too old to participate fully in the Sixties counterculture. Dennis, a mid-level official in Department of Agriculture, went to marches on the Mall—for civil rights, against Vietnam—but he always took his wife, Sharon, and his children, Benji and Vanessa, with him. Living in suburban Washington, working for the government, he was part of the system his father tried to overthrow:

Didn’t he think of his father watching him as he sat at his desk, waiting for his administrative instructions? Brief this one, brief that one. Toe the party line. … It was confusing to him: working from within the government was both the most benevolently liberal thing he could do, the most socialist really; had the last gasp of the sixties not been evidence of this? So why now did government work feel sometimes to Dennis like the most conservative anti-individual, anti-independent thinking move he could have made? Where did he stand?

If there is a wrong note in this soliloquy, it is the word “socialist.” No child of a radical like Sigmund, no one who lived through the 1960s, would think of working in the Department of Agriculture as a contribution to socialism. For someone like Dennis, that word would have much more radical and revolutionary implications than it apparently does for Gilmore, who treats it as simply a superlative of liberal. This kind of uncertainty frequently plagues Gilmore’s treatment of Jewish-American politics—above all when it comes to Sigmund, his Russian-born wife Tatiana, and their lives in the 1930s. Trying to parse Sigmund’s biography, based on the references he makes, is quite impossible, because the novel does not have a firm grasp on that complex period. Thus we hear that Sigmund was a Trotskyist, a Communist Party member, and a supporter of the Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas, all apparently at the same time—though these were three distinct political orientations that would have been quite incompatible in the ideologically fractured 1930s.

In this way, ironically, Something Red enacts the very phenomenon it means to describe: contemporary Jews’ loss of connection with their radical past. The closer Gilmore comes to her own generation, by contrast—she graduated from Brandeis in 1992, about a decade after Benji was there—the more authentic and compelling her observations become. For Benji and his younger sister Vanessa—who is still stuck at home, full of teenage rebellion and anguish—music meets all the needs that politics did for Sigmund. When Benji gets high at a Dead concert, he experiences his own kind of classless society: “Benji was instantly drawn to the sense of community and understanding, this insular world that shirked all preconceived notions of what happened outside it. From the moment he stepped into the Coliseum parking lot before the music started: happiness unadulterated. Pure utopia.”

Utopia, for the 1930s radicals, meant social transformation, which required organizing, indoctrination, and violent revolution; for Benji in the 1970s, it means personal transformation, totally subjective and hedonistic. For Vanessa, who is drawn to the Straight Edge punk lifestyle—no drugs or alcohol, just loud ugly music in packed clubs—community is apolitical in a different way: “Shirtless boys slammed into one another, bodies so thin and lanky she could see their blue hearts beating through their chests. There was no way to be separate. This was real protest music, Vanessa thought. …  It did something, and it did it close to your face.” For Benji and Vanessa’s mother, Sharon, an equally ersatz community is found in a self-actualization cult called LEAP, where she goes in search of the inspiration that politics and religion no longer provide.

Gilmore writes with affection and authority about the early D.C. punk scene—she knows Madam’s Organ and the Slickee Boys better than she knows the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and the Rosenberg case. And Vanessa, with her wholly personal struggles—against her mother, her peers, her own body—emerges as the best-drawn character in Something Red. Partly this is because, when writing about Vanessa, Gilmore is able to lose herself in the intimate evocations of suburban childhood that are the novel’s best passages. Compared to these, the plot involving Dennis Goldstein’s business trips to Moscow, and the sudden revelation of a spy in the family, feel awkwardly contrived. As Gilmore shows, political passion comes and goes in historical cycles, and Something Red is clearly the product of a time when the private has a greater hold on our imagination than the public.

In 2010, Sacks writes, what we need is not anxiety but confidence, not withdrawal from the world but a new embrace of it: “It is my considered view that, in this tense and troubled century, Jews must take a stand, not motivated by fear, not driven by paranoia or a sense of victimhood, but a positive stand on the basis of the values by which our ancestors lived and for which they were prepared to die. … Now is not the time to retreat into a ghetto of the mind.” Future Tense lays out Sacks’s vision of what that “positive stand” might look like, in terms of Jews’ relations with one another—in Israel and around the world—and the wider world, including both secular science and culture and members of other religious faiths.

Sacks is ideally positioned to argue for this sort of Jewishness—pious yet uncloistered, self-assured but not separatist, engaged with the world but not emptily “universalist”—because it is just the sort of Jewishness he himself lives. As Chief Rabbi, a position with no equivalent in the United States, he is an official spokesman for British Jewry, who often finds himself sitting on government commissions, leading interfaith dialogues, or offering opinions on the BBC. (There is, in fact, a certain amount of vanity on display in Future Tense—Sacks does not hesitate to let us know about his close personal friendships with figures like Isaiah Berlin and Teddy Kollek.)

These experiences have convinced him that Jews are by no means as friendless as they may sometimes believe. Certainly, as an American reading the news from Britain, it often seems that Britons’ interest in Judaism takes the form of demonizing Israel and casting suspicion on its Jewish supporters. But Sacks insists that “Jews cannot fight anti-Semitism alone” and writes that he has found Britons of all faiths—Anglican, Catholic, Hindu, even some Muslims—ready to join the fight against “prejudice and hate.” In fact, he persuasively argues, Jews are in some way destined to lead the fight for liberalism and tolerance in Western societies, because for 2,000 years they have been “the quintessential Other” in Christian and Muslim civilization. “That is Judaism’s great contribution to humanity: to show that one can be other, and still human.”

What is crucial to this coalition-building, and to Sacks’s whole vision of Jewish assertiveness, is that he speaks not just as a community leader but as a religious leader. Here Sacks’s particular kind of Modern Orthodoxy turns out to be ideal for his task. Few lay figures in the American Jewish leadership would affirm, as Sacks unhesitatingly does, that God literally did choose the Jewish people to play a unique role in the world, and that the Bible can be read as an actual expression of God’s will. (Possibly, few Reform or Conservative rabbis would say so either.) On the other hand, increasingly few Orthodox rabbis have the willingness or authority to engage with the secular world on Jewish terms. “A rabbinate untrained in the wisdom of the world,” Sacks writes, “will find itself irrelevant to those immersed in the world. A Judaism divorced from society will be a Judaism unable to influence society.”

How can a belief in Jewish uniqueness foster the practice of Jewish engagement in the world? To answer that question, Sacks turns from polemic to theology, in his chapter “The Other: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.” Judaism, he writes, teaches that “the God of Israel is the God of all humanity, but the religion of Israel is not the religion of all humanity.” This is why, uniquely among the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism does not demand conversion, or believe that all who are not saved through Judaism are damned. Rather, Sacks sees Judaism as dependent on pluralism: Jews do not want to impose uniformity on the world, only to secure a place in the world for Jews, and all others, to worship the one God in their own way. Indeed, the history of Biblical Israel—a small kingdom crushed between the empires of Egypt and Babylon—leads Sacks to call Judaism an anti-imperialist religion, “a critique of empire and the rule of the strong.”

This is an ingenious and very appealing theology—a 21st-century Judaism, no doubt, but one that is convincingly grounded in the Bible and history. That it is an incomplete definition of Judaism becomes clear only later in Future Tense, when Sacks turns from the appeal of pluralism to some of the implications of chosenness. One of Sacks’s favorite techniques—it is the classic technique of homily, adapted from the pulpit to the page—is to seize on a feature of the biblical text and turn it into a metaphor for a much larger lesson. Why, Sacks asks in one such passage, does the Bible call God by two names, which he refers to as Hashem and Elokim?

Elokim, he suggests, is what non-Israelites call God—for instance, Pharaoh, or King Abimelech of the Philistines. It is God as the pagans can understand him, “the totality of all powers,” which is why the word is plural. Hashem, on the other hand, is “God’s proper name, the name by which he is called in intimate person-to-person relationship: that is not universal.” That is why only the Israelites are permitted to call God by this name: The covenant with Noah uses Elokim, but the covenant with Abraham uses Hashem.

It is obvious that this sort of exegesis would be much less appealing to non-Jews than Sacks’s earlier paeans to pluralism. For it amounts to saying that all other faiths have an impersonal, generic relationship with God, while only Judaism knows him intimately and truly. All sincerely held faiths must, at a certain point, make a similar claim—otherwise there is no reason to urge people to belong to one’s own faith rather than another. That is why ecumenicism always depends on a certain amount of euphemism.

But with Jews and Judaism, the question is (as usual) a little more complicated. For Jewishness does not depend only on the practice of Judaism, and it is possible to be a Jew while denying that God chose the Jewish people. (One might say, for instance, that Sacks’s reading of the difference between Hashem and Elokim is simply a parable, while the truth—as generations of biblical critics have established—is that God is called by different names in the so-called J and E texts because those texts were written by different human authors at different times.) Sacks recognizes this, of course: As he puts it, Judaism is both a “community of fate”—a people, with a shared history and destiny—and a “community of faith.”

Sacks’s contention is that “without the covenant of faith, there is no covenant of fate. Without religion, there is no global nation.” The problem is that, in Future Tense, he is not trying to convince Jews that they belong to the covenant of faith, or that they should. He is not, in other words, arguing that the claims he makes about Judaism and God are true. Rather, he is suggesting that, if we care about the covenant of fate, we should act as if the faith is true, because that is the only way to preserve what Sacks has influentially called “Jewish Continuity.”

In other words, Sacks omits the existential dimension of faith, the one in which each of us must decide for him- or herself whether to believe and why. Nor does he really engage with the fact that the decline of faith among Jews is only one aspect of the centuries-long decline of faith among all Western peoples. There are very powerful reasons why it is difficult to believe in Judaism, or Christianity, or Islam, as a divinely revealed faith—reasons stemming from the secular humanist view of history, nature, and ethics. The dilemma, from the point of view of Jewish continuity, is that if a French Catholic stops being Catholic, he doesn’t stop being French. But if a Jew stops being a Jew, is he still a Jew, and why should he even care? That is where the real problem begins, and it is a deeper and more difficult one than Sacks acknowledges.

In titling his memoir Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, then, Kai Bird is situating himself and his story in a particular moment of Middle Eastern history. Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian, whose work so far has concentrated on leading figures in America’s Cold War establishment, such as John McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. But in the 1950s and 1960s, when those men were making their mark on American foreign policy, the young Bird was living far away from the United States. As the son of a Foreign Service officer, Bird spent his childhood in various corners of the Arab world: Jerusalem, Cairo, Beirut, Saudi Arabia.

Bird was just 4 years old when his father was posted to Jerusalem in 1956, a few months before the Suez War. The family lived in the eastern, Jordanian section of the city, but he attended school in West Jerusalem, so crossing Mandelbaum Gate was for him a daily ritual. This experience of “coming of age between the Arabs and Israelis,” as the subtitle of his book has it, marked Bird’s outlook deeply: “I spent virtually my entire childhood in the Middle East, and though it is not home, I worry about it as if it were my home.” Yet Bird’s book turns out not to say nearly as much about his own childhood as the reader might expect, or want. Much more than his own experiences, what interests him is telling the story of Arab politics during the years of his childhood. The milestones in Crossing Mandelbaum Gate are not personal but historical: the Suez War, the Six Day War, the Black September uprising of the Palestinians against King Hussein of Jordan.

When we do get personal glimpses, they are usually intriguing. As a boy attending Catholic school, for instance, Bird was punished for writing with his left hand, not realizing that this was “a breach of etiquette in the Arab world because the left hand is associated with the toilet.” In Beirut, where he and his mother and siblings were sent for safety during the Suez crisis, his favorite restaurant was “Uncle Sam’s,” where he could get American delicacies like fries and shakes. In Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where the American oilmen had their compound, Kai was kicked off the local horse-racing team because he was a mere “consulate kid”—an interesting glimpse of expatriate class distinctions, and a hint at where the real power lay in the Saudi-American relationship.

These are not much more than grace notes in Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, but they hint at the kind of book Bird would have been well-qualified to write. As the son of a diplomat, he had an unusual perspective on the growth of America’s unofficial empire. He shows how his father, as a low-ranking diplomat, was personally well-liked but frequently outranked by civilian businessmen and undercover CIA officers. The young Kai was personally privileged and writes about some of the luxurious settings he lived in—in Cairo, for instance, the Birds’ home was in Maadi, a wealthy cosmopolitan enclave inside a teeming Third World city. Yet he made many Arab friends and felt drawn to the cultures and peoples he lived among, leaving him ambivalent about his status as a representative of American power.

When he returned to America in the late 1960s to attend Carleton College, Bird was “an angry young man, self-righteous to a fault,” and more than ready to participate in student protests against the American establishment. In 1970, he was arrested for barring the doors of a draft office in Minneapolis (and ended up sharing a cell with Paul Wellstone, the future U.S. Senator). When his parents, then stationed in Bombay, read about the protest in the International Herald Tribune, Bird writes that they “suspected right away that I had been involved.” Considering the potential repercussions for his father’s official career, their response seems to have been remarkably calm: They wrote him that “we would probably have done the same ourselves under the same circumstances,” while trying to instill in Bird some political humility: “Who are you, or any other eighteen year old, to say that you have all the answers?”

In writing about the modern Middle East, Bird does not claim to have all the answers, exactly, but he definitely has his heroes and villains. What is troubling is that the heroes are Arab nationalists—above all, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who can do virtually no wrong in Bird’s eyes—and that the villains are, most often, America and Israel. Bird’s sympathies are most apparent in his discussion of the Six Day War—which he calls, following Egyptian usage, the June War. In that war, Israel struck preemptively against Egypt’s threatened invasion, which Nasser explicitly promised would lead to the extermination of the Jewish state. To Bird, however, Nasser is a hapless figure, guilty at most of “bluster,” and the onus for what he calls “a calculated war of aggression” rests squarely on Israel—and on the United States, which failed to restrain its ally. In another unsettling chapter, Bird writes with barely restrained admiration about Leila Khaled, the Palestinian terrorist whose hijacking of two airliners made her a cult figure, “the female Che Guevara.’”

In all this, Bird shows a clear continuity with his upbringing—after all, he was a teenager in Nasser’s Egypt, and he talks about his youthful support for the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He is also, of course, the son of a State Department Arabist, a type of diplomat that has long been mistrusted by American Jews for their anti-Zionist, anti-Israel instincts. (It is not strictly relevant to Bird’s book, but since he mentions in his epilogue that his father, now in his eighties, runs a nonprofit called Council for the National Interest, it is worth noting that this organization strikes me as considerably less benign than Bird makes it out to be. He describes it as a “quixotic” nonprofit, a “shoestring operation” that lobbies Congress “for a two-state solution.” In fact, judging by its website [www.cnionline.org], the Council is primarily concerned with ending America’s alliance with Israel and breaking the Jewish stranglehold on American politics and media—or, as its mission statement more diplomatically puts it, “to restore a political environment in America in which voters and their elected officials are free from the undue influence and pressure of foreign countries.”)

Bird is also, as he informs the reader on the very first page of Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, married to a Jewish woman who is the child of Holocaust survivors, and the last section of his book is devoted to telling his in-laws’ stories of persecution and escape from the Nazis. This comes as a non-sequitur, at the end of a book about modern Middle Eastern politics, but it is clear that Bird thinks of it as a way of telling the Jewish side of the story. He means to express his empathy with the Jews and their desire for a state, even as he advocates a vision for Israel’s future that would strip it of its Jewish identity and turn it into what Bernard Avishai has called a “Hebrew republic.”

But to ground the right of Israel to exist on the experience of the Holocaust is a moral and political mistake, though a common one (President Obama made it in his Cairo speech last year). The only reason so many Holocaust survivors could find refuge in Israel is that, for 70 years before World War II, Jews had created a homeland there—driven by the same longing for independence and national dignity that Bird admires when it comes to the Egyptians. This fundamental hostility to Zionism is most striking when Bird writes that “Israel has become its own ghetto” and laments that Israel is becoming “less ‘Israeli’ and more ‘Jewish’ with each passing war.”

When Bird repeatedly endorses Arab figures, many of them violent foes of Israel, who claim to be fighting only for a secular, binational state in Palestine, it sounds soothingly cosmopolitan. But what he is actually saying is that the Jews, alone of the peoples of the Middle East, have no right to national self-determination. And it is strange that, in a book which so amply documents the violence and dysfunction of Arab politics, Bird is so sanguine about the prospect of “open borders, free trade, and a healthy, multicultural and economic interchange between all the peoples of ancient Palestine.” But then, as he writes at the end of the book, “I plead guilty” to being “naive.” His friends, he writes complaisantly, call him that “in a generous spirit”; by the end of Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, the reader may feel a little less generous.

The English settlers were Christians, of course, but it was the Old Testament, much more than the New, that spoke to them and their experience. In the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and conquest of the Promised Land, the Puritans found an obvious parallel to their own journey across the Atlantic and their struggle in the New World. (As Alter notes, Israelite place names are everywhere in the American landscape, from Salem to Shiloh.) The King James Bible, then, was not just the matrix of the American language, but the means of transmitting Jewish history, and the morality of the Hebrew Bible, to the American people.

As a leading scholar and translator of the Bible, who is also deeply knowledgeable about American literature, Robert Alter is ideally suited to study this complicated inheritance. Alter’s own translations of scripture—most recently, the Book of Psalms—have inevitably been measured against the familiar cadences of the King James Bible, and they can be seen in part as attempts to criticize or displace that standard text. But in literary terms, Alter recognizes, the King James version—though it may be “often inaccurate”—is canonical and irreplaceable. In a sense, the English Bible has ceased to be a translation and become a second original. If you were more mystically inclined than Alter, you could consider it an example of Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation, which holds that every true translation completes the meaning of a text as it appears in the mind of God.

The locutions of the King James Bible echo through our literature so pervasively that we often take them for granted. The Gettysburg Address offers a small but telling example. Why, Alter asks, did Lincoln begin by saying “Four score and seven years ago,” rather than just “eighty-seven years ago?” The answer is that he was drawing, perhaps unconsciously, on the phrase “three score and ten,” which appears 111 times in the King James Bible. By measuring time in this formal, archaic fashion, Lincoln raises American history to the same level as sacred history. At the end of the Address, Lincoln again turns to the Bible: When he promises that American democracy “shall not perish from the earth,” he is echoing a phrase from Job and Jeremiah.

At the core of Pen of Iron—the title, of course, is itself a Biblical allusion (“the sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond”—Jeremiah 17:1)—is Alter’s analysis of the Bible’s influence on three great American novels: Moby-Dick; Absalom, Absalom; and Seize the Day. In discussing these books, Alter shows that that influence cannot be measured strictly in allusions or verbal echoes. Melville, Faulkner, and Bellow do not simply use biblical language, they think in biblical categories—especially, Alter argues, when they are challenging the faith and morality that the Bible teaches.

Moby-Dick is a perfect case in point. Melville’s novel is a riot of language, whose lavish rhetoric owes a great deal to Shakespeare, Milton, and other 17th-century writers. But the elemental power and metaphysical scope of the novel are rooted in its complex response to the Bible. When the Pequod sets sail, for instance, Melville writes: “ever and anon, as the old craft dived deep in the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang.” This simple form of narration, where events are connected only by “and,” is known as parataxis, and it is the Bible’s favorite technique: “Then Jacob gave Esau bread and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.” (As Alter points out, the parataxis is still more pronounced in the Hebrew: The King James’s “then” and “thus” actually translate the Hebrew “and.”) Biblical parallelism, too, is used to heighten Melville’s style. When he writes that the sea is “worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing now the creatures which itself hath spawned,” Alter observes that “the two long clauses … could almost be read as two lines of Biblical poetry.”

The irony is that Melville uses these biblical tropes in constructing a book that is a kind of anti-Bible—a long refutation of the existence of God and the goodness of Creation. In one of the best sections of Pen of Iron, Alter focuses on Melville’s use of Leviathan, the biblical sea-monster, as a way of turning scripture against itself. Leviathan, who is of course a prototype of Moby Dick, seems to Melville to puncture the Bible’s own chronology:

Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed blood older than Pharaoh’s. Methusaleh seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable horrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.

Leviathan, as the principle of brute violence and evil, is older than the biblical dispensation (“antemosaic”) and will survive it. As Alter writes, the whale “drops the bottom out of history, leaving man as an inconsequential and transient mote in a play of cosmic energies that vastly antedates him and that will no doubt outlast him.” In this way, Melville uses the Bible to herald a new, post-biblical worldview—which is one reason why his echoes of the King James text are so starkly powerful.

Alter’s other subjects, Faulkner and Bellow, are also powerful prose stylists, but they are less directly indebted to the English Bible. The style of Absalom, Absalom, with its nonce words, Latinisms, involved syntax, and general fanciness, is as unlike the plainness of the Authorized Version as English can well be. Yet as Faulkner’s title announces, the novel’s plot is based on events from the life of King David—the rape of Tamar, the murder of Amnon, and the rebellion of Absalom. More, Alter writes, Faulkner builds the book around certain primal words that come straight from the King James Bible: “birthright, curse, land or earth, name and lineage … seed, birthplace, inheritance, house, flesh and blood … dust and clay.”

Pen of Iron makes a convincing case that it is impossible to fully appreciate American literature without knowing the King James Bible—indeed, without knowing it almost instinctively, the way generations of Americans used to know it. The problem is that, over the course of the last century, biblical literacy has plummeted, even as translations and editions of the Bible have proliferated. (Several free apps can put the whole King James Bible, along with many other versions, on your iPhone.)  It would be interesting to try to read more recent American fiction through Alter’s lens: Can you hear the Bible in David Foster Wallace’s prose, or Lydia Davis’s? “The essential point for the history of our literature,” Alter writes at the end of Pen of Iron, “is that the resonant language and the arresting vision of the canonical text, however oldentime they may be, continue to ring in cultural memory.” I wonder how faint the ring can grow before we stop hearing it completely.

For one thing, the novel is a carnival of allusions, silently incorporating phrases and situations from a whole roster of other writers and challenging the reader to pick up on them. (Thirlwell offers a list of his sources in a postscript, as a kind of scorecard—it runs from Auden to Virgil and includes opera, jazz, and rap music as well as works of history, fiction, and poetry.) This is the technique of a writer who is not merely well-read—though Thirlwell is that, ostentatiously so—but who takes pleasure in the fictionality, the madeness, of fiction and wants the reader to share that pleasure.

It is not just its allusions that give The Escape this sense of being an experiment or essay in fiction. More important is the way that Thirlwell seems to be performing an inquest into a once-vital genre that is now rapidly passing into literary history: the Jewish American novel, Bellow-Roth division. Raphael Haffner, Thirlwell’s protagonist, is a cousin to Moses Herzog and Charlie Citrine, Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh—the sublime, foolish, voracious alter egos that populate Roth’s and Bellow’s books. Haffner, like his predecessors, is not just an inveterate womanizer—he is a philosophical sensualist, who thinks about sex even more than he has it, which is really saying something. The novel’s very first sentence—“And so the century ended: with Haffner watching a man caress a woman’s breasts”—serves almost as a bow of acknowledgment to Bellow and Roth, to their habit of always situating the comedy of sex within the tragedy of history.

Yet Thirlwell, inevitably, stands at a critical distance from his great predecessors. He is not American but British and two generations younger—biographical facts that necessarily mean different ways of thinking about both history and sex. (Thirlwell is Jewish, I believe, but it would not be terribly surprising to learn that he was not—that Jewishness, too, was simply a convention of the Bellow-Roth novel that he wanted to experiment with.) What this means is that, in creating the 78-year-old Haffner, the 32-year-old Thirlwell is not simply imagining an alter ego, as Roth and Bellow so transparently do in their novels. Indeed, to underscore his distance from his hero, Thirlwell occasionally drops an “I” into the narrative, though we learn next to nothing about this “I”: “And me? I was born sixty years after Haffner. I was just a friend.”

The result is that Haffner does not engross the reader’s experience of The Escape the way that, say, Zuckerman monopolizes our attention in The Anatomy Lesson. We are not asked to submit to his egotism, but to observe it and if possible to sympathize with it. “So, ladies and gentleman, maybe Haffner was grand, in a way,” Thirlwell writes very early in the novel. “Maybe Haffner was an epic hero.” It is a thesis, a proposition, and the novel is a kind of experiment designed to prove or disprove it.

Certainly the predicaments Haffner finds himself in do not appear very epic, or very heroic. On the first page, we find him hiding in a wardrobe in a hotel room, watching a much younger woman, Zinka, have sex with her boyfriend, Niko. Zinka knows that Haffner is there, though Niko does not: This voyeurism is part of the escalating erotic game that she is playing with her aged, submissive admirer. It is hardly to Haffner’s credit, moreover, that he has gotten involved with Zinka when he is supposedly on a mission on behalf of his late wife, Livia. Livia’s family once owned a villa in the Central European spa town—unnamed, it seems to be located in the former Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia—that Haffner is visiting. The house was confiscated by the Nazis, then taken over by the Communists, and finally sold off to a corporation, its history an index to the history of Eastern Europe since World War II. In trying to reclaim it, Haffner is paying homage to his wife’s memory—and offering a kind a reparation to his children and grandchildren, who resent him for his infidelity and selfishness.

As the novel progresses, we learn only a few sketchy details about Haffner’s past. Born in Britain, he served in the British Army during the Second World War, had a successful career as a banker, lived for a while in New York, and went through a succession of mistresses before Livia finally left him. Thirlwell is more interested in Haffner’s present, which shows how incorrigible he remains: In addition to Zinka, he is sleeping with a married middle-aged woman, Frau Tummler, who believes that Haffner truly loves her. Meanwhile, he is unable to make headway with the post-Communist bureaucrats in charge of his villa and decides to try the black market instead—using Niko, of all people, as an intermediary. Thirlwell skillfully heightens the farce elements of the book, placing Haffner in a series of unlikely situations—skinny dipping, getting an all-too-personal massage, engaging in serious S&M—that leave the reader uncertain whether to laugh or wince.

But the comic plot is only a screen, or accompaniment, to the real action of the novel, which is located in Haffner’s mind and in the narrator’s attempts to make sense of that mind. For Haffner, like his predecessors in Bellow and Roth, insists that there is a metaphysical dimension to his passions and foibles. He is fond of comparing himself to the Roman emperors, especially the bad ones—Tiberius and Caligula, with their insatiable wills and depraved appetites. “No one understood the emperors. No one saw how humble they were—free from the deeper vanity of concealing one’s own vanity—like Haffner before his family, refusing the illusion of maturity.” In this highly self-flattering view, Haffner is to be admired for his committed refusal of commitment, for acknowledging the eternal incorrigibility of desire.

In one of the most interesting and ambiguous developments in The Escape, Thirlwell explores this transgressive logic as it plays out in the sphere of Jewishness. The real estate Haffner is trying to reclaim can be seen as a symbol of his and Livia’s Jewish inheritance, and their lives are determined in many ways by the conflicting imperatives of their Jewish identities. Livia, we learn, was raised in Italy by a proudly Fascist father, who thought that supporting Mussolini was an expression of Jewish-Italian patriotism—until Mussolini passed anti-Semitic laws modeled on Hitler’s. Haffner too, in a less fraught way, always placed Britishness above Jewishness. (“What is the definition of a British Jew?” goes one of Haffner’s jokes. “A person who instead of no longer going to church, no longer goes to synagogue.”) Stationed in Palestine during World War II, he was outraged when Jews in the British Army were ordered out of the country, for fear that they would have dual loyalties.

In Thirlwell’s hands, Haffner’s refusal to be determined by his Jewishness becomes the central test case for his refusal of any limits on his autonomy. “He was just a Haffner, not a Jewish Haffner,” he protests at one point—just as he would protest that he is not a married Haffner or an aging Haffner, but simply himself, with all that self’s unassuageable needs and desires. “Let me be my own author! This was Haffner’s cry,” Thirlwell sums up, knowing that no man can be his own author—least of all a character in a novel, whose author is always looking over his shoulder, determining his next move. By the end of The Escape, Jewishness, sexuality, and fictionality, the book’s three great subjects, have converged in a single pattern. Thirlwell leaves it to the reader to decide whether Haffner’s pursuit of total freedom, in all these realms, is glorious or abject—or maybe both.

The newspaper printed there was as dominant in the city’s life as the building was in its skyline. Starting in the 1880s, Joseph Pulitzer’s World revolutionized journalism with its signature blend of muckraking investigations, crusading editorials, sensational crime and human-interest stories, and colorful graphics. Selling hundreds of thousands of copies, the World was the kind of newspaper that didn’t just record history, but made it. In the 1884 presidential election, the paper’s support helped Grover Cleveland carry New York State, putting a Democrat in the White House for the first time since the Civil War. In 1898, the World—along with its great rival, William Randolph Hearst’s Journal—led the drumbeat that carried the country into the Spanish-American War.

For that hypothetical immigrant, the power and promise of America could have been summed up in the fact that the World was itself the creation of an immigrant—a Hungarian Jew who arrived in the United States without a penny and without knowing a word of English. Joseph Pulitzer was born in 1847 in the Hungarian town of Mako and spent his childhood in Budapest, where his father was a successful merchant. (The family name came from a town in Moravia, Pollitz, where they had lived generations earlier.) Like most of the Jewish middle class in the Habsburg Empire, the Pulitzers spoke German, and they eagerly embraced Judaism’s new Reform movement. “By the time Joseph reached his teenage years,” Morris writes, “being Jewish remained part of his life, but no longer the center of it.”

Pulitzer might well have remained in this assimilated Jewish milieu if it hadn’t been for the death of his father, when he was 11 years old. This was the most devastating of the many deaths that afflicted the family when Joseph was growing up—of nine children, only two survived to adulthood—and it reduced them to poverty. When Joseph reached the age of 17, in 1864, he decided to strike out on his own. Ordinarily he could not have afforded the passage to America, but thanks to the Civil War recruiters were scouring Europe for young men willing to serve as paid substitutes for Northern draftees. It was on a ship full of these soldiers-to-be that Pulitzer crossed the Atlantic; he ended up serving in the First New York “Lincoln” Cavalry, in one of several German-speaking units.

Because he did not enlist until nearly the end of the war, Pulitzer never saw combat, and he was discharged in June 1865. At loose ends, he decided to strike out for St. Louis, a fast-growing Midwestern city with a large German immigrant population. He soon landed a job as a reporter for a German-language newspaper, the Westliche Post, and became a protégé of the its owner, Carl Schurz, a Union general and future U.S. Senator.

Schurz, Morris shows, was a role model for Pulitzer, proof of how an immigrant (he had fled Germany after the revolutions of 1848) could leverage his community’s clout into a career in journalism and politics. What Morris does not dwell on is the irony that Pulitzer, a Jew, could so easily adopt the German-American community as his own. Back home in Central Europe, Pulitzer’s Jewishness—no matter how assimilated he might be—would have been his defining trait, marking him out permanently from his German and Hungarian neighbors. In America, however, the bonds of language meant more than the divisions of religion and ethnicity, and Pulitzer was accepted, with remarkably little friction, as a spokesman for St. Louis’s Germans.

In 1870, just six years after he arrived in the country, Pulitzer was elected to the Missouri state legislature. His district was populated by German Republicans and Irish Democrats, and he campaigned on straightforwardly ethnic grounds. The Irish, he wrote in a newspaper article, “would vote for the Devil himself in order to defeat the candidates of the Germans. What do our German friends have to say about that?” Later he was appointed to St. Louis’s police commission as holder of its traditionally German seat.

But as Morris shows, in a detailed excursion into post-Civil War political history, Pulitzer’s rise was stalled by the failure of the Liberal Republican movement, which Schurz led as a rebellion against President Ulysses S. Grant. When Pulitzer subsequently changed his party affiliation to Democrat, he was acting on principle—he believed the Republicans had become the party of corruption and the rich—but he was also positioning himself for the future. Just as he moved from the German press to the wider English-language press, so he left behind the Germans’ preferred party. When he bought his first newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in 1878, he declared it would be “independent with a Democratic leaning,” and for the rest of his life Pulitzer remained an important power-broker in the Democratic Party.

Morris traces the rising arc of Pulitzer’s career, as he turned the Post-Dispatch into a moneymaker and set his sights on the capital of business and journalism, New York City. At the same time, he was leaving his Jewish origins far behind. The woman he married in 1878, Kate Davis, was a distant relative of Jefferson Davis, and the wedding took place in the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in Washington, D.C. “Success, power, and wealth in the United States had only one place of worship, the Episcopal church,” Morris writes, and for the rest of his life Pulitzer would belong to it. He even encouraged the rumor “that his mother had not been Jewish but rather was Catholic”—though it is doubtful that this would have seemed much of an improvement to America’s WASP elite.

Pulitzer’s Jewishness was an open secret, however, and his enemies were happy to make use of it. Morris quotes a few of their jibes—he was called “Jewseph Pulitzer,” and attention was drawn to his “nasal protuberance”—but on the whole, it is remarkable how mild and ineffective this kind of baiting was, especially compared to the kind of ideological anti-Semitism then being directed against Jewish press figures in Europe. What bothered people about Pulitzer was not that he was Jewish, but that he was so bad-tempered and hard to get along with. As early as 1870, while he was a state legislator, Pulitzer became notorious for shooting a man during a political dispute (the injury turned out to be minor). At the World, he continued to rack up a long list of influential enemies, taking on corrupt politicians or simply political opponents, including Theodore Roosevelt.

More damning, Morris shows, was Pulitzer’s treatment of his own staff and family. In the book’s last third, Morris draws a portrait of Pulitzer as a boss from hell—a micromanager who bombarded his employees with telegrams, even as he refused to set foot in the office. Editor after editor quit the World, often to swell the ranks of Hearst’s Journal, simply because they couldn’t tolerate Pulitzer’s rages and nitpicking. He and his wife eventually led separate lives, and his children were terrified of him. When Pulitzer lost his vision, because of detached retinas, in the late 1880s, he became abnormally sensitive to sound, and he spent millions of dollars buying and renovating houses in a hopeless quest for perfect silence. Eventually he preferred to spend time on his specially sound-proofed yacht, literally cut off from the rest of humanity.

By the time he died, in 1911, Pulitzer’s life had gone from American dream to nightmare. If Orson Welles had made Citizen Kane about Pulitzer instead of Hearst, it would have been just as devastating a parable. It might also have prevented Pulitzer from being so widely forgotten. The World went out of business in 1931, a casualty of the Depression, and the World building was demolished in 1955. (Spare a thought for it if you ever take the car on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, which was built over its remains.) Today, Pulitzer’s name is remembered primarily because of the prizes he endowed, along with Columbia’s Journalism School, at the end of his life.

What makes Morris’s biography especially timely, however, is that we are now witnessing the death of the whole style of newspaper publishing Pulitzer invented. The big city daily, the kind of newspaper that everyone read because everyone had to read it—from politicians and businessmen to laborers and homemakers—is a thing of the past. So are the profits that such papers used to bring in. Pulitzer’s paper made him the 19th-century equivalent of a billionaire; today, dying papers look for billionaires to bail them out as a public service. A century after Pulitzer’s death, the newspaper now promises to join the other great technologies of the Gilded Age—from railroads to coal mining—on the scrap heap of American history.

New Immigrants from Port Sayid, Egypt, 1956.
CREDIT: Courtesy of The Jewish Agency for Israel; some rights reserved

It is billed as a work of fiction, but for its first few chapters, From the Four Winds, the new book by the Israeli rabbi and novelist Haim Sabato, reads like a memoir. Sabato begins conversationally, recounting his early memories as a young immigrant to Jerusalem in the late 1950s. In a kind of modern-day Exodus, the Jews of Egypt were expelled after the 1956 Sinai War, and they made their way to Israel by roundabout stages, passing through Italy and Greece along the way. When the Sabatos arrived, they were assigned to a housing project in a new neighborhood in West Jerusalem, which the novelist refers to by its traditional name of Beit Mazmil, though by the time he lived there it had already been renamed Kiryat HaYovel.

The hardships of the Mizrahi immigrants to Israel are more widely known today than they once were, though for American Jews, who are mostly of Ashkenazi descendant, the early history of the Jewish state is still more often viewed through the eyes of Eastern European pioneers. Sabato introduces us to this hardscrabble immigrants’ world through the eyes of the child he then was, never certain that he really understood the folkways of his new country. For instance, he is bewildered by the enthusiasm of his fellow second-graders, mostly native Israelis, who are planning their Purim costumes:

I did not understand what it meant to come in costume. I looked around me and saw that everyone was excited and smiling, but I could not understand why. In those days I was not accustomed to ask about something I did not understand. What I did not understand I filled in with my imagination. I tried to equate an unknown word to a word I knew form the prayers, or from Arabic, or from what my heart told me.

Soon Haim learns that the most popular thing to be on Purim is a cowboy, which presents a new mystery: Unlike his classmates, he has not yet learned from American movies how to play cowboys and Indians. He begs his father for a costume and is overjoyed by the cheap paper cowboy hat that is all his family can afford. When the holiday comes, Haim’s hat is ruined by the rain, and no one can even tell what he is supposed to be. But Rav Levichter, the kindly teacher at his Talmud Torah, pretends to be impressed: “A cowboy. What a beautiful costume. I couldn’t recognize you!” For a moment, the child is happy, feeling that he has managed to fit in.

Reading this story, which comes in the first chapter of From the Four Winds, the reader might feel that he is in for a rather familiar kind of book; even if the time and place are unusual, the sentimental anecdote is not. But as the book develops and young Haim gets older, it becomes clear that the themes of this story are more significant, and even tragic, than they might first appear. The struggle of the Egyptian immigrant to understand the ways of his neighbors will become, in time, his effort to grasp the secrets of their previous lives, shadowed by the Holocaust. And the kindness of Rav Levichter is our first introduction to the moral dilemma the book constantly poses. How much truth can children be told about things too terrible for them to comprehend? How much revelation do fathers owe their children, and how much silence?

Haim’s own father is a remote presence in the book. A poor but learned man—the Sabatos are from a dynasty of scholars—he works hard all day and then rushes to the synagogue to study. The boy’s true father figure, the one who introduces him to the mysteries of his new life, is a Hungarian immigrant storekeeper named Farkash. And the Hungarians, who live side by side with the Egyptians in Beit Mazmil, are themselves the prime mystery. “We were all used to open homes,” Sabato writes, “neighbors coming and going without asking permission. … But in the houses of the Hungarians there was always silence, and they always asked us, the children, to be silent, totally silent.”

The reader knows, of course, that it is memories of what they suffered during World War II that shadow these lives. Farkash, who at first seems to be the exception—the only Hungarian who appears open and friendly, able to bring joy to the saddest of his countrymen—turns out to have some of the worst secrets of all. Gradually, Farkash displaces Haim at the center of From the Four Winds, and the book becomes more recognizably fictional. In fact, the fiction is often of a melodramatic kind. Farkash’s story is structured around deathbed confessions and secrets ostentatiously withheld, and it is full of Dickensian figures: ailing and adored mothers, cruel bosses, exploited children. Yet every time the reader resists being manipulated by this kind of storytelling, he is brought up short by the realization that no story could be more melodramatic, or more unbearably moving, than the facts of which modern Jewish history is made.

Farkash has been through the Holocaust, and Haim can see that it is the central fact of his life. But his stories have little to do with it: “I shall not recount to you what happened during those days,” he tells Haim. “And I never will be able to do so; those days are shut up in my heart. Those days are not of our world.” Instead, Farkash makes Haim—now grown to become a rabbi and teacher—the repository of his earliest memories, from the years before the war. These too are tragic, but on a more recognizably human scale.

Farkash, we learn, was raised to be a scholar and loved nothing more than studying in the yeshiva: “There I felt as if I were in the Garden of Eden. Completely immersed, beloved by my friends and my teachers.” But when his father dies and his mother gets sick, he is forced to leave school and become an apprentice to a baker. He soon realizes that his new employer is a monster, violent and heartless, who takes all the joy out of Farkash’s childhood. Worst of all, when his beloved mother is on her deathbed, the baker prevents him from going home to see her—a wrong that Farkash struggles all his life to be able to forgive.

Not until the end of the book do we start to understand why the baker might have thought he was doing Farkash a service by teaching him the necessity of toughness. The baker, it turns out, served during World War I with Farkash’s father, a great scholar who enlisted patriotically in the Austrian army. But something happened to him during the war that shattered his spirit, and he was never the same afterward. When Farkash was just 6 years old, he tells Haim, he was summoned to his father’s deathbed to hear about that dreadful incident, and he wants to pass the story along before he dies—but not to his own children, whom he wants to spare its awful burden. Sabato, who is not overly concerned with narrative subtlety, keeps dangling the revelation in front of the reader’s eyes, only to snatch it away: “I still have not told you the painful story about my father … No, no, I cannot do it. The time has not yet come.” Not until the very last pages of From the Four Winds do we get to hear the story, with its unmistakable moral for Jews and Israelis.

From beginning to end, in fact, From the Four Winds is a didactic book. Sabato arranges his story to emphasize the messages he passionately wants to deliver: about the beauty and value of traditional Jewish learning; the dignity of self-sacrifice in a Jewish state; the heroism and suffering of the Jewish past, and the obligations they impose on the present. These are not new ideas, and a reader who has heard them many times before may well resist the wholly unironic way Sabato presents them. But when it comes to stories like Haim’s and Farkash’s, how can irony be enough?

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.

What Montefiore witnessed on that birthday, which would turn out to be his last, was the emergence of what Green calls “the international Jewish public.” This was something different from the Jewish people, which had lived in many parts of the world ever since the days of the Roman Empire. Until the 19th century, however, it was impossible for these widely scattered Jewish communities to become actively aware of one another’s fortunes, or to speak with one voice on the world stage. It took modern technologies—the steamship, railroad, newspaper, and telegraph—to bring the Jewish world together, just as they were bringing the world itself closer together. No less important, it took imperialism—especially the liberal imperialism of Britain and France—to make the problems of Jews in Palestine or Morocco into a matter of concern for the whole “civilized world,” as Western Europe could still contentedly think of itself.

It is no coincidence, then, that the man who emerged as the leader and living symbol of the international Jewish public was an Englishman. Victorian England, like the United States today, was a society that prided itself on being the custodian of liberal democratic values around the world, even though neither its domestic nor its foreign policy quite lived up to that ideal. No other European government was so willing to intrude in the affairs of other countries, or enjoyed so much influence in places like Turkey, Morocco, and Palestine, with their large Jewish populations. Throughout his life, Moses Montefiore would travel through Europe and the Middle East, secure in the knowledge that his Englishness was a source of protection, power, and prestige.

It helped, of course, that he was extremely rich. Green does not devote much space to Montefiore’s business career—by the third chapter, he is already in his late thirties and looking for “a world beyond business.” But without the money he made in finance, he would never have been able to devote the rest of his life to philanthropy and politics. And he might never have been so successful in the marketplace, Green shows, without his family connections. When Montefiore married Judith Barent-Cohen, in 1812, he not only received a dowry, he became the brother-in-law of Nathan Rothschild, who was married to Judith’s sister Hannah. Montefiore was soon making huge profits as Rothschild’s agent and partner, and together they started the insurance giant Alliance Assurance, which is still in business today (though under a different name).

“Marriage in such circles was always about money and connections,” Green observes, just as it was for the English gentry (see any novel by Jane Austen). But Moses and Judith also became a very close and loving pair—despite his frequent infidelities and their inability to have any children. In fact, their childlessness may be what made Montefiore’s adventures possible. With a family to raise and heirs to provide for, he might never have risked his money and health so freely, or started to think of himself as a kind of father-figure to the whole Jewish people.

Both the great achievements and the significant limitations of Montefiore’s career can be traced to that paternalism. In early 19th century England, a businessman like Montefiore was naturally drawn to the company of intellectuals and social reformers, many of them Quakers and Dissenters who were, like the Jews, excluded from England’s political system. (One of his close friends was Thomas Hodgkin, the Quaker doctor who discovered Hodgkin’s lymphoma.) But for Montefiore, liberal politics were not at odds with religious orthodoxy. Unlike many English Jews of his class, Montefiore remained strictly observant. He kept kosher even when traveling, and when he bought a country estate, he built a synagogue on the premises so he could pray three times a day.

Montefiore’s task would be to unite these two impulses—to bring the liberalizing tendencies of the age to bear on the condition of the Jews, in England and around the world. On his first visit to Palestine in 1827—undertaken, he later said, according to a command given him in a dream by the Prophet Elijah—Montefiore was inspired to devote his future to Jewish observance and philanthropy: “This day I begin a new era,” he wrote on his 43rd birthday. On the way from London to Jerusalem, Moses and Judith contended with storms, plagues, pirates, and the threat of a war between Egypt and Turkey; they might well have seen their safe arrival as a kind of divine providence.

Montefiore would return to the Holy Land six more times—the last at the age of 91—and while he was not a Zionist in the modern, political sense, his benefactions in Palestine helped to move it to the center of European Jewish consciousness. On his centenary, the Hovevei Zion of Odessa—one of the earliest Zionist organizations—declared, “You were … the first that put your heart to build the ruins of Zion the land of our fathers, and your actions were the light beneath the foot of our people.”

Back home in England, Montefiore became the leader of the Jewish community’s representative body, the Board of Deputies, and earned a series of public honors. He was the first Jew to be appointed to the largely ceremonial position of Sheriff of London (the inaugural dinner, usually held on September 30, was postponed because the date fell on Rosh Hashanah). He was only the second Jew in British history to be granted a knighthood.

But it is not on these kinds of official milestones that Montefiore’s reputation rests. More important is that, starting in the 1830s, he began to concern himself with the problems of the Jews abroad. In 1840, the so-called Damascus Affair erupted, when Syrian Jews were accused of having ritually murdered a Catholic priest. This blood libel, which seemed so incredible to assimilated Western Jews, galvanized Jewish opinion in England and France. Indeed, it marked what Green calls “the beginning of a new Jewish politics, one that combined the influence that Jewish financiers wielded behind the scenes with a vocal campaign for Jewish rights.”

At the head of that campaign were Montefiore and the French Jewish leader Adolphe Crémieux, who set out together for Cairo to confront the pasha Mehmed Ali. Their mission, Green reveals, was fraught with tension—Crémieux found Montefiore arrogant and thought he wanted to take all the credit—but in the end it succeeded. Mehmed Ali freed the Damascus Jews, thanks less to Montefiore’s persuasive powers than to the diplomatic backing of England and France. Montefiore traveled on to Constantinople, where he secured from the sultan a decree, or firman, guaranteeing legal equality to the Jews of the Ottoman Empire.

This was a spectacular triumph, and it made Montefiore a hero to Jews everywhere. But as Green goes on to show, it set a pattern for Montefiore’s activism that would prove problematic. Over the next 40 years, he would undertake similar missions to the Czar in Russia, the Sultan of Morocco, and the King of Romania, each time asking for decrees of protection for the Jews, and sometimes even getting them. The problem was that such decrees could not always be enforced, and that Montefiore placed too much trust in figures, like Czar Nicholas I, whose deep anti-Semitism he did not fathom. Nor did he understand the dynamics of popular anti-Semitism, which by the end of his life had become a potent political force in Russia, Romania, and even Germany.

At home, too, Montefiore’s leadership had its critics. As the head of the Board of Deputies, he set his face uncompromisingly against the Reform movement that was winning the allegiance of many English Jews. When members of Bevis Marks left to set up their own congregation, the West London Synagogue, Montefiore encouraged the rabbi to excommunicate them. His own younger brother was one of the seceders, and Montefiore didn’t speak to him for the rest of his life.

All this helps to explain why Montefiore’s style of leadership—personal, cautious, and to a large degree unaccountable—alienated many younger, more progressive Jews. In a sense, he was a victim of his own success: He was a catalyst for the emergence of an “international Jewish public” that was too large and contentious for any one man to dominate. Yet Green never allows the reader to lose sight of Montefiore’s truly pioneering achievements, or of his courage, generosity, and farsightedness. In writing about this incomparable life, Green has produced an incomparable book. More than a biography, Moses Montefiore takes its place as one of the essential works on modern Jewish history.

Remember you promised to come on the holiday
One hour after dark.
For my part, I won’t keep count of wraths
Or wrongs till you come.
And you: Don’t believe a word I say
Even when it’s wondrous or perverse.

I lie down to sleep like ordinary mortals
And I don’t practice magic.
I forgo the honors in advance,
I bear no resemblance to the daughter of the gods.
And you: Remember when and where.

The common comparison of Ravikovitch with American poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton is not really apt: Ravikovitch writes about herself more ironically than those confessional poets, and is more hardheadedly engaged with the world around her. Still, it is easy to see why the comparison gets made. Ravikovitch’s poem “Clockwork Doll,” from her first collection, published when she was 23, caused a sensation with its cold, ironic, feminist anger:

I was a clockwork doll, but then
That night I turned round and round
And fell on my face, cracked on the ground,
And they tried to piece me together again.

Then once more I was a proper doll
And all my manner was nice and polite.
But I became damaged goods that night,
A fractured twig poised for a fall.

If you compare this poem with, say, Plath’s brilliant “The Applicant” (“A living doll, everywhere you look./It can sew, it can cook,/It can talk, talk, talk./It works, there is nothing wrong with it”), it is hard to feel that Ravikovitch’s poem has the same kind of power. Much of Ravikovitch’s early work, in fact, comes across in Bloch and Kronfeld’s translation as swaddled in literariness—it is too “poetic,” in the bad sense. This is not because the translation is inadequate, though I cannot know for sure; but I suspect it is because the translation faithfully attempts to preserve a quality that made Ravikovitch so exciting to Hebrew speakers—her continuous engagement with the vocabulary and conventions of the Bible and the modern Hebrew classics.

In “Clockwork Doll,” for instance, the translators note that Ravikovitch’s metaphor of the fractured twig, which is rather banal in English, would be clear to the Israeli reader as an allusion to Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “A Twig Fell.” In that poem, Bialik compares himself to a tree that cannot bear fruit, an image of disconnection and despair that Ravikovitch cleverly recast for her own purposes. This kind of allusion is, to continue the metaphor, the root system of any poetry, and the element that most resists transplantation into a new language. Nor does it necessarily help matters when Bloch and Kronfeld introduce what sound like allusions to well-known English-language poems into their translation. “Even for a Thousand Years” begins “I cannot bring a world quite round/and there’s no sense in trying”; but was Ravikovitch actually alluding quite so explicitly to Wallace Stevens’s “The Man With the Blue Guitar” (“I cannot bring a world quite round,/Although I patch it as I can”)?

But the allusion most important to Ravikovitch’s early work is Biblical, and here Bloch and Kronfeld offer indispensable guidance. Words that sound ordinary, or at best slightly formal, in English are often shown to be meaningfully peculiar in Hebrew. Ravikovitch makes excellent use of hapax legomena, words that appear only once in the Bible, and thus carry a very particular charge for the Hebrew reader. The first poem in her first book, “The Love of an Orange,” perhaps her most famous poem, is passionately carnal, in a way that would become Ravikovitch’s hallmark:

An orange did love
The man who ate it,
To its flayer it brought
Flesh for the teeth.

But the carnality takes on a whole new meaning when we learn, from the translators’ note, that the word here rendered as “flesh” is not the standard Hebrew basar, but barot. This word appears only once in the Bible, in Lamentations 4:10, a description of the siege of Jerusalem: “With their own hands, tenderhearted women have cooked their own children; such became their fare (barot), in the disaster of my poor people.” It is an open question how many of Ravikovitch’s original readers would have known their Bible well enough to understand this shocking allusion, but the translators make the poet’s intention clear, in this and many similar cases.

The allusiveness and the formality of Ravikovitch’s early poetry are largely cast off starting with her third collection, titled with meaningful plainness The Third Book. This appeared in 1969, at a time when poets across the world were in search of a more relaxed and plainspoken style. There is a new tone, sardonic and self-aware, in poems such as “Portrait”:

She sits in the house for days on end.
She reads the paper.
(Come on, don’t you?)
She doesn’t do what she’d like to do,
she’s got inhibitions….
In winter she’s cold, really cold,
colder than other people.
She bundles up but she’s still cold.

This informality does not mean, however, that Ravikovitch has given up her large subjects. When she writes about love in her own voice—rather than as “Tirzah” or “Shunra,” personae from her earlier poems—she is bitterly impressive:

I ask
with a quizzical look:
What else can happen to me
that hasn’t happened to me yet?
I dangle from a cloud
without wings, without a beak
but I don’t fall.
Once when I was in love
I could no longer feel
the cold or the heat.

As she gets older, we come to know Ravikovitch differently, and better. We see her loneliness and sadness, her worries about money and reputation, and—in a series of deeply moving poems—her troubled love for her son, Ido:

A tiny lizard on the wall of your house, Ido,
that’s what I want to be….
With no purpose,
enclosed in a space
where you inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale
oxygen.
We’re not talking about love, Ido.

Starting with the Lebanon War of 1982, Ravikovitch became an outspoken critic of Israeli treatment of the Palestianians. Though not all her protest poems transcend the subjects that provoked them, the provocations themselves—the burning alive of an Arab worker by Jewish arsonists, the killing of a pregnant woman’s fetus “under circumstances relating to state security”—are sufficiently terrible to make the verses powerful. And yet the Ravikovitch who lives on in the memory is less often the public conscience than the private sufferer, the poet who speaks in “The Window”:

So what did I manage to do?
Me—for years I did nothing.
Just looked out the window.
Raindrops soaked into the lawn,
year in, year out….
Winter and summer revolved among blades of grass.
I slept as much as possible.
That window was as big as it needed to be.
Whatever was needed
I saw in that window.

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. This piece originally appeared in The New Republic.

My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.

This kind of rhetoric, most commentators believe, helped to lose the 1992 election for the Republicans. And a good thing, too; for, whatever your party allegiance, there can be no mistaking the dangerously anti-democratic tendency of Buchanan’s metaphor. Politics is a matter of debate and compromise, but wars involve destruction and conquest, and “religious war” is the most savage kind of all. When politics ceases to be about “who gets what” and becomes an existential ordeal, a means of defining “who we are,” liberal democracy is in danger. And historically, the group that suffers first and most from the attack on liberal democracy has been the Jews. When a nation wants to proclaim “who we are,” it needs to be able to point to who it is not, and the Jews have always been the Christian West’s closest, most available Other.

Frederick Brown, the eminent historian and biographer of Flaubert and Zola, must have had Buchanan’s speech in mind when he titled his new book For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus. Despite the best efforts of Buchanan and his ideological heirs, America, thankfully, has never known the convulsions of a real, open, uncompromising culture war. If you want to know what that looks like, Brown seems to say, just look at France in the last decades of the 19th century—the era that culminated in the Dreyfus Affair.

Alfred Dreyfus, of course, was the Jewish army captain who was convicted in 1894 of selling French military secrets to Germany. But the years-long Dreyfus Affair, which Brown summarizes in the last section of his book, was more than just a miscarriage of justice—the miserably common story of an innocent man sent to prison. What made it a historical phenomenon, and a dire forecast of what would happen in Europe in the 20th century, was the way it revealed the deep hostility of millions of Frenchmen toward enlightened ideals of secularism, tolerance, and legal equality.

The really alarming thing about the Dreyfus case, Brown shows, is that the more apparent it became that Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted—and then, when the verdict was challenged, elaborately framed—the more insistently the French right wanted him punished. That is because admitting Dreyfus’s innocence would have meant acknowledging that top-ranking officers in the French Army—the bastion of the nation’s honor, and the preserve of conservative, Catholic, and monarchist forces—were guilty of spectacular injustices, including the forging of documents, the coercion of juries, and even complicity with the actual traitor who committed the crime for which Dreyfus was blamed. And to criticize the Army, its leaders said, was to endanger the nation: “What do you want this army to become on the day of danger, which may be closer than you think?” one general railed. “What do you want the poor soldiers to do, who will be led into battle by leaders discredited in their eyes?”

In this way, Dreyfus’s guilt ceased to be a question of fact and became a litmus test for ideology. Those who believed in it, the anti-Dreyfusards, considered themselves the “real” Frenchmen, while those who challenged it, the Dreyfusards, were painted as cosmopolitans, traitors, and pawns of a Jewish conspiracy. For it was Dreyfus’s Jewishness, all along, that was his real crime, or at least the piece of evidence that made his criminality believable. At his court-martial, the prosecutor stuck to insinuations about Dreyfus’s “supple, even obsequious character” and his suspicious knowledge of foreign languages (he was a native of German-speaking Alsace). The Catholic and right-wing press was not so subtle: “Our society has already been punished, but its suffering is not at an end,” wrote a priest in one extremist paper. “Our treasures, our banks, our papers, our railroads and our army are caught in the spiderweb of Judaism.” Edouard Drumont, the dean of French anti-Semites and editor of the rabidly Jew-hating newspaper La Libre Parole, was elected to Parliament in 1898, at the height of the Affair, under the slogan “Mort aux Juifs.”

Most shocking of all, perhaps, is the evidence Brown uses to reveal the state of mind of ordinary Frenchmen. One of the most despicable figures in the Affair was Colonel Henry, the intelligence staff officer who forged evidence to support the Army’s weak case against Dreyfus. When his forgeries were exposed, Henry committed suicide in his jail cell; but as Brown writes, this didn’t stop him from becoming a hero to the anti-Dreyfusards, “a would-be savior out of whose mortal wound flowed blood for a ritual of tribal self-affirmation.” La Libre Parole solicited donations for Henry’s widow, and readers sent messages along with their contributions. Brown quotes from these in a footnote: “From a cook who would rejoice in roasting Yids in her oven”; “Two francs to buy a round of drinks for the troopers who will shoot Dreyfus … and all the kikes.” From this to the world of Hitler’s willing executioners does not seem like a big step.

To understand how matters could have reached such a point in France, the birthplace of the Rights of Man, Brown begins his book some three decades before the Dreyfus Affair, with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. The defeat of France in that war, followed by the radical uprising of the Paris Commune and its bloody suppression, left deep wounds in the French body politic. The Third Republic, which took shape in the early 1870s, was the heir to defeat and rebellion, and just as with Germany’s Weimar Republic after World War I, it never succeeded in convincing its die-hard foes of its legitimacy. Monarchists might well have succeeded in making a France a kingdom, if they hadn’t had two rival princes to deal with. Catholics were bitterly opposed to the secularizing policies of the Republic, in particular its attempt to bar clergy from being teachers. An