Who Owns Kafka?

Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy

By Benjamin Balint

Norton 2018 - 227 pages

You might think everyone is familiar with Franz Kafka – but I suspect lots of people know the name and perhaps the expression "Kafkaesque" and not much more. The phrase, as a matter of fact, connotes the absurdity of being helplessly caught up in an opaque bureaucratic labyrinth. 

I am racking my brain trying to recall which classics professor at Brooklyn College in the 1970s assigned us to read The Metamorphosis (written in 1912). However, I never forgot the first line of the book: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” 

And I still own the Schocken bilingual German-English edition that I bought used for $1.45. 

The other opening Kafka line that has stayed with me is from The Trial which begins (at least in my translation): “Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” 

I remember having to look up the word “traduced” which means defamed or slandered. I’m still waiting for a chance to use “traduced” in daily conversation.

Kafka’s books are not about the characters so much as they are about the situations in which they find themselves. If European Jewish philosopher Gunther Anders (1902-1992) is correct, Kafka could be pegged as the kind of skeptic who doubts his own skepticism.

Kafka 1.0

The Kafka basics are as follows: He was born in 1883 in Prague then part of Austria-Hungary into a German-speaking acculturated Jewish family. 

His day job after law school was as a risk-assessor at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company. He wrote in his spare time and published little in his lifetime. 

In today’s parlance, we’d say Kafka had “issues.” His father who made his money in haberdashery goes down in history as domineering and aloof. The son as suffering from neuroses, low self-esteem (exemplified by how he denigrated his own writings) and difficulty forming lasting relationships with women. 

In a letter lashing out at his father, Franz wrote him: “You have been too strong for me. Sometimes, I imagine the map of the world spread out, and you stretched diagonally across it. Moreover, I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that are not covered by you…” 

His mother was of little comfort. Julie Lowy came from a well-to-do family but was no less ill-equipped for parenthood. What Franz may not have appreciated is that both his parents came from dysfunctional homes. They had their own issues.

All this may have influenced how they reared their six children Franz being the first-born. 

Franz correctly viewed the Judaism they passed down to him as perfunctory. He was both drawn to and repelled by his heritage. 

Attraction-Rejection epitomized Kafka’s personality.

“My Hebrew name is Amschel, after my mother’s maternal grandfather, whom my mother – she was six at the time of his death – remembers as a very pious and learned man with a long white beard,” Kafka recorded mordantly in 1911.

At age 28 he took an interest in Yiddish theater. Kafka even gave a talk, in 1912, about the Yiddish language. He read the Hebrew Bible. He subscribed to Zionist periodicals. He studied Jewish history. He seems to have been a thinker who grappled with Jewish civilization, not someone who capriciously rejected it.

Fortunately, Franz Kafka did not serve in the Great War (WWI). He suffered from headaches, insomnia not to mention hypochondria. Mainly, however, his induction was deferred because his insurance company employers insisted that he was indispensable. He had what we baby boomers might call a draft card with a classification that made it unlikely he’d be called up. 

By 1917 (WWI began in 1914 and did not end until November 1918) he was diagnosed with tuberculosis for which at the time there was no cure. 

In and out of TB sanatoriums he died June 3, 1924 (at almost age 41) leaving an oeuvre of challenging writings behind.

What happened and what should happen to these writings is at the core of Benjamin Balint’s engaging book Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy. 

Max Brod

Kafka was no social animal, but in 1902 at Charles University he made one particularly good friend in the writer Max Brod. He was to Kafka what Paul the Apostle was to Jesus (though Jesus and Paul probably never met). 

Had there been no Max Brod it is doubtful readers in 2019 would be acquainted with Franz Kafka who published little during his lifetime – and then only under urging from Brod.

When Kafka died, Brod gathered his friend’s manuscripts, notebooks and sketchings and – instead of burning them as was Kafka’s written dying wish – organized, edited and embarked on their publication. 

Bang, bang, bang – Brod brought out three unfinished works – The Trial (1925) The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927). 

If Kafka wanted his manuscripts destroyed, he asked the wrong guy. As Balint points out, “Even in self-renunciation Kafka was beset by indecision."

Brod believed that Kafka’s surviving works were masterful. He convinced the German (later American and Israeli) publisher Salman Schocken to publish Kafka. When he moved briefly to Palestine from Germany, Schocken bought the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz in 1935 and left it to his son Gershom to run. 

Brod arrived in Palestine in 1939 with a suitcase full of original Kafka papers. He soon entrusted this cache to Schocken the elder to put in his fireproof safe.

Kafka as literature

The central figures in Kafka’s seemingly simple “naturalistic” stories which are full of irony and symbolism exist outside the parameter’s normal life. They're thrust into bewildering situations in which they struggle to understand what is happening to them and who they are – issues that go unresolved. 

In this sense, Kafka is in the vanguard of modernist literature.

Some think that Kafka anticipated “the dehumanizing effects of faceless bureaucracies,” in Balint’s terms. Kafka's characters find themselves brutalized for no crime at all as people did later in Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” or at the hands of Islamist terrorists. 

Writing in brilliantly organized cleverly non-linear and compelling prose, Balint reveals the many shades of Kafka’s identity because resolving who Kafka was is central to determining what should happen to the original material that Kafka left behind. 

As Balint frames it the issue is whether the (a) Jewish people or (b) the State of Israel have a claim on his literary heritage or (c) should his papers be deposited in a repository that specializes in German-language literature? After all, he wrote in German.

More broadly, can an Israel that is ambivalent toward Diaspora Jewish culture claim to be the custodian of European literature survived that the Nazis? Post-Holocaust Zionists might have believed in the negation of the Galut but not in losing the Diaspora’s rich Jewish cultural heritage.

Balint informs us that after WWII, before the 1948 establishment of Israel, a committee of Zionists worked to salvage owner-less Jewish books and bring them safely to Israel for archiving. They were in a race to head off forfeiture of these books to the dustbins and junkyards of Europe. But they were also in competition with champions of Diaspora supremacy such as Hannah Arendt who wanted to bring the books to the US. 

Kafka’s Identity

In Balint’s telling Kafka was no "ASHamed" Jew ala the "Finkler" character created by British Jewish author Howard Jacobson. 

Was he a Zionist? Was he in some fashion a believer in divine salvation? Unclear. Was he a nihilistic existentialist wholly alienated from his heritage? Extremely unlikely, as I read Balint tell it. After all, how did he rebel against his father’s vacuous Judaism? By becoming after a fashion engaged in Yiddishkeit. 

Moreover, Kafka was touched personally by Jew-hatred. The only thing he was ambivalent about was what to do about it. 

He wrote in 1914 to a friend of his fiancée Felice Bauer – of course, he was unsure about Felice too, and they never married despite being engaged twice – that, “I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it.” 

Of course, if Kafka had jumped off the fence, he would not have been Kafka.

Elsewhere, in 1914, Kafka had written, “What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” 

The year before he had attended the Eleventh World Zionist Congress in Vienna. Kafka had to be in the city anyway for work, Balint reports. 

I find myself puzzled by Kafka’s thoughts about his Jewish identity like this one cited by Balint: “The insecure position of the Jews, insecure within themselves, insecure among people, should explain better than anything else why they might think they own only what they hold in their hands or between their teeth, that furthermore only tangible possessions give them a right to live and that once they have lost something they will never again regain it, rather it will drift blissfully away from them forever.” 

Huh?

However, Balint references Kafka’s friend Georg Langer writing in 1941 from Tel Aviv, and I feel buoyed: “Yes, Kafka spoke Hebrew. In his later years, we always spoke Hebrew together. He, who always insisted that he was not a Zionist, learned our language at an advanced age and with great diligence. Moreover, unlike the Prague Zionists, he spoke Hebrew fluently, which gave him special satisfaction, and I don’t think that I’m exaggerating when I say he was secretly proud of it…”

In Israel Kafka gets Cold Shoulder

After the state was established, Kafka did not become part of the Israeli literary canon, Balint observes. Nor has any city named a street after him. His works have not been systematically translated. 

In part, this is because Kafka worked in the German language and in the years immediately following the destruction of European Jewry, many Zionists were viscerally revolted by all things German – reading it, hearing it spoken in public, listening to German composers (Richard Wagner, for example) even taking West German financial reparations for Hitler’s genocide. 

But also, because, as Balint astutely observes “Kafka’s motifs – humiliation and powerlessness, anomie and alienation, debilitating guilt and self-condemnation – were the very preoccupation Israel’s founding generations sought to overcome.”

The Zionists had little use for wishy-washy handwringing as in this 1921 epistle to Brod: “I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.” 

Balint allows that “Kafka allowed himself to imagine moving to Palestine only when his illness was so far advanced as to make the move impossible.”

He also sketches Kafka’s fraught romantic life. Besides the many women along the way, he was engaged to Julie Wohryzek (a Yiddish-speaking Zionist), in a relationship with his translator Milena Jesenska (who was not Jewish but married to a Jew) and was tended to by his lover Dora Diamant (who had volunteered in the Jewish TB camp where they met) as his life was slipping away. She, not incidentally, did burn a few of his papers as he requested while he looked on. 

 
Best Buddies 

Prolific and better known, Max Brod (1884-1968) saved Kafka from obscurity. Since no good deed goes unpunished, Brod is today mostly remembered for his Kafka-connection rather than in his own right as a composer, author, playwright and newspaper columnist. 

Like Kafka, Brod was a Czech-born Jew who worked in the German language. Brod had the good fortune to escape the Nazi onslaught – just – and the daunting task of finding a place for himself in a Tel Aviv where his earlier Prague stature held little currency.  (*)

He settled for a less than prestigious job at the Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv and made the best of it.

Brod may not have been a passionate Zionist, but he did affiliate with the movement (seven years before meeting Kafka) when he joined Prague's Bar Kochba Association, which Balint tells us had only 52 members.

Brod’s subsequent literary work struggles with how the Creator of the Universe can allow evil – thinking of Hitler and the Holocaust – to have free reign. 

While still in Prague, he wrote a novel about Kafka (1928) and began arranging for the publication of his late friend’s work. He also wrote a biography of Kafka that came out in 1937.

As Balint characterizes it, Kafka and Brod were soulmates. Brod: “We completed each other and had so much to give one another.” Yet they were cut from a different cloth. Brod knew how to enjoy life; Kafka did go to brothels with him, but these were fundamentally different types. Brod was a high-volume writer who had many interests. Kafka took little pleasure from life, miserably destroyed some of what he wrote yet, parodoxically, found purpose only in his writing. 

“Brod,” writes Balint “obsessively collected anything that Kafka put his hand to. Kafka, in contrast, felt the impulse to shed everything.” 

Jewish angle

In the winter of 1981, I went to the Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street which was devoting a significant exhibit to Kafka. As a brand, Kafka is an easy sell. You can see that when you visit Prague today. Back in 1981, I purchased a Kafka portrait poster that now hangs in my study. His face is haunting; he looks downhearted and waning. He would soon be dead.

The New York Jewish Museum curators decided Kafka wrote as a Jew and that his books The Metamorphosis, for instance, might best be understood in allegorical terms about the Jewish predicament in the period leading up to the First World War (though not only).

Legacy Battle

Balint’s book opens in 2016 at the Supreme Court of Israel. At issue: “Does the estate of the German-speaking Prague writer Max Brod, who died at the end of 1968 nearing age 85, belong to Eva Hoffe or the National Library of Israel, or would it be best housed at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany?” 

Eva Hoffe’s late mother Esther was Brod’s secretary and close friend. Esther and her husband Otto met Max Brod (whose wife Elsa had died in 1942) in Hebrew-language ulpan class. Max quickly developed into an honorary member of the Hoffe family. He and Esther in due course became intimate, according to Balint. 

A childless man, Brod was loved by Esther’s daughters Eva and Ruthie. 

In a will written in 1948, Brod identified Esther Hoffe as his only heir and executor. Whether the Kafka papers, part of Brod’s estate, were an outright gift to Esther or part of her inheritance became a matter of legal debate.

As the story opens, Eva Hoffe now herself aging is in physical possession of the Kafka and Brod material. She is fighting to hold on to these manuscripts that her late mother Esther inherited or was gifted and left to her and her sister Ruth (who died age 80 in 2012). 

The State of Israel had tried to take the Kafka papers soon after Brod died seeing them as the heritage of the Jewish people. In 1974, in Tel Aviv District Court, Judge Yitzhak Shilo probated Brod’s will ruling that Esther Hoffe “during her lifetime” could do whatever she wanted with her inheritance. 

With Brod deceased, Esther Hoffe began selling Kafka papers starting in 1988. She wanted to continue to sell them to the Marbach archive to make money.

Esther Hoffe died in 2007 and Eva probated her mother will. The National Library of Israel had been monitoring what was happening with the Kafka papers and went to Family Court to argue that Brod had intended Esther Hoffe give them to a reputable archive. 

It appears that Brod wanted his literary estate turned over to the National Library or some other repository while Esther Hoffe was still around. Did that include the Kafka papers? Not clear.

Judge Talia Kopelman ruled that the Kafka papers were not part of the inheritance case since Brod gifted them to Esther Hoffe while he was alive. 

In 2012, a Tel Aviv Family Court held that “Brod had bequeathed his estate – Kafka papers included – to Esther Hoffe not as a gift but in trust,” writes Balint. So, the papers should have gone to a public archive during her lifetime. 

Her daughters, Eva and Ruth certainly could not keep them. 

In 2015, the case wound its way to the Tel Aviv District court which rendered its verdict against Eva Hoffe. The court held that the Kafka material was part of Brod’s literary estate and he had instructed her to have them deposited at the National Library (or some other appropriate archive). 

Worth mentioning is Brod’s view about ownership. He saw as his property some of the manuscripts and the Kafka’s letters to him. “Everything else belongs to the heirs of Kafka.” Balint informs us that Kafka does have distant relations in London but they appear not to claim ownership and – if I understand correctly – want to see the literary legacy safely in a public archive. 

In 2016 Israel’s Supreme Court ordered Eva Hoffe to turn over Brod’s literary estate to the National Library (she would get royalties for any branded products generated). The court also asserted that Brod had possessed Kafka’s papers (the very ones Kafka wanted to be destroyed) but he did not legally own them. 

Loose Ends

The Kafka papers saga which Balint sets forth as plainly as possible is – at least to me – still confusing. 

In 1956, Salman Schocken purportedly moved Kafka material (entrusted to him by Brod) to a vault in Switzerland. These manuscripts than somehow made their way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. To further muddy matters, Esther Hoffe also moved some Kafka papers to a Swiss bank vault. 

So, as I understand it, some Kafka papers are in Marbach; some in Oxford; some were in the Tel Aviv apartment – these by now in the National Library. Some had already been sold. No one seems to know precisely which papers were in the Hoffe home in Tel Aviv and which were stashed in safe deposit boxes outside Israel. 

For those of us who want closure, Balint reminds us that with Kafka things are never  straightforward. “In Kafka’s imagination,” he writes “intelligibility will not illuminate our messages until the Messiah comes. And yet the Messiah himself arrives too late. ‘The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary,” Kafka writes.”

If you are first now embarking on an exploration of Kafka, start with Balint’s multi-layered book. It is an excellent introduction to Kafka as literature, and it’s about who owns Kafka not just legally or literally but politically and morally. 

Further Reading

The Nightmare of Reason by Ernst Pawel

http://www.kafka-online.info/

https://kafkamuseum.cz/en/#domu

(*) Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. World War II began in September 1939.

Benjamin Netanyahu - Indispensable Man

It was French president Charles de Gaulle who mordantly remarked that “the graveyards are full of indispensable men.” True enough. For the foreseeable future, however, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s most indispensable man. He is already its longest-serving leader starting from 1996 until July 1999 then returning in March 2009.

Now, with elections looming in March 2019 Netanyahu is trying to extend his political longevity into 2023. His endurance is due to a combination of popularity, a canny ability to elbow aside prospective rivals and unparalleled competence.

Popularity

Like any politician, Netanyahu’s approval rating fluctuates. However, in poll after poll, he triumphs over all other party leaders. With Netanyahu in the number one spot heading the Likud slate, the party is projected to achieve a plurality of support in all polls with an average (as of November 2018) of 32 Knesset mandates. His nearest rivals are Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party with 18 and Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home Party with 11 mandates.

The once formidable Labor Party, rebranded as the Zionist Union and jointly led by Tzipi Livni in the Knesset and Avi Gabbay in the party chairmanship has yet to find its political footing. His only living predecessors are Ehud Olmert of the defunct Kadima Party and Ehud Barak of the Zionist Union/Labor Party. An embittered Olmert was released from prison in 2017 after serving time for corruption. Barak at age 76 fulminates against Netanyahu and hints of a comeback but few analysts take him seriously.

Netanyahu is more popular with his base than the public at large. His detractors think him Machiavellian, duplicitous and smug — willing to do anything to stay in power. His supporters would not automatically disagree. Over 60 percent of Israelis tell pollsters that they will be voting for a party other than Likud – some supposing their favored party will join a Netanyahu led-coalition while others hoping against the odds that Likud can be ousted.

Opponents would like to think the prime minister’s core voters are by definition illiberal, hawkish and religiously inclined. However, the 30 percent of voters who plan to vote Likud reflect a broad segment of the population.

Last Man Standing

Netanyahu spots, exploits and then discards capable political operatives. Just-resigned Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, and Education Minister Naftali Bennett were all once in his orbit. Lieberman went on to form Yisrael Beiteinu, Kahlon established Kulunu and Bennett brought together Orthodox Zionist factions under the Jewish Home Party.

Netanyahu maneuvered former Internal Affairs Minister Gideon Sa'ar into quitting by claiming he was conspiring against him; benefitted as police announced a sexual harassment investigation (subsequently dropped) against former Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom forced him to end his political career. He pushed out the principled but politically naive former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. He coopted Benny Begin (former Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s equally principled and politically inept son). He kicked Danny Danon a popular Likud minister upstairs to the UN ambassadorship and brazenly exploited party rules fine print to toss firebrand Moshe Feiglin off the Likud election slate.

Netanyahu has not groomed a successor, and no Likud MK has anything close to the prime minister’s gravitas. He has a barely cold peace with President Reuven Rivlin, age 79, a hawkish liberal in the Jabotinsky mold.

Competence

Journalists who have observed Netanyahu over the years admire his fitness for office even if they disagree with his actions. A strategic thinker, Netanyahu’s scope of knowledge is both broad and deep. He is a voracious reader and a quick study. He has been his own Foreign Minister, and no one seems to think there is a better person for the job.

The perception of expertise comes across to average Israelis who give him high marks for his handling of Iran policy. He presents as a steady hand on the helm. While he is not charismatic, he is a gifted speaker in both Hebrew and English.

Foreign leaders may not like what he says but cannot deny that he speaks with panache and authority. When he first took office in 1996, the Internet was not a widely used tool. Netanyahu quickly appreciated its potential and became a master of social media. He uses it to circumvent the Israeli press which he denounces (with justification) as elitist and hostile.

He knows how to take credit and avoid blame. As Israel’s budget deficit grows to 3.6 percent and while the finance minister and the governor of the Bank of Israel bickered over the wisdom of tax cuts, Netanyahu remained above it all basking in a comparatively strong economy.

Israelis credit him for outwaiting the unpopular Barack Obama and are appreciative that relations with the US have stabilized. Netanyahu is the face associated with brand Israel and some 74 percent of Americans have a favorable attitude toward the Jewish state. According to a recent Gallop poll, 83 percent of Republicans, 72 percent of independents and 64 percent of Democrats support Israel.

Corruption? So, what?

The prime minister or those around him are under multiple police investigations for possible fraud and moral turpitude. Under Israel’s system, the police investigate and can recommend that the Attorney General issue an indictment.
Case 1000 – The police allege Netanyahu accepted $280,000 worth of luxury gifts from wealthy friends in return for favorable government treatment.

Case 2000 - Netanyahu is alleged to have cut a deal with tabloid newspaper Yediot Aharonot publisher Arnon Mozes to limit the circulation of the only pro-government tabloid Israel Hayom owned by Netanyahu-backer Sheldon Adelson in exchange for favorable coverage in Yediot

Case 3000 - Figures in Netanyahu’s inner circle including his attorney David Shimron are purported to have peddled influence in the procurement of German submarines and patrol boats for Israel’s navy.

Case 4000 - relates to whether the Netanyahu’s wife Sara dangled a telecommunications company executive regulatory relief in return for favorable coverage from the company’s Walla news

Case 1270 - Refers to whether a former Netanyahu spokesperson Nir Hefetz indirectly dangled the job of Attorney General through an intermediary to a sitting judge.

Separate from all this, Mrs. Netanyahu is in court for allegedly using public monies to pay for restaurant meals to be delivered to the official residence despite having chef on staff. She says she was saving the government money.

Veteran Jerusalem Post political reporter Gil Hoffman maintains that Israelis do not mind if Netanyahu appears a tad corrupt because culturally they admire a politician who is nobody’s fool. Better to have a political figure who cannot be taken advantage of than one who is incorruptible but naïve.

Further reading:

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu
by Anshel Pfeffer

The Netanyahu Years
by Ben Caspit and Ora Cummings

The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu
by Neill Lochery

(c)

GAZA: You call these options?

1. Israeli Pyrrhic victory – winning means you get to keep Gaza

2. Ousting Hamas on behalf of the PLO/Fatah/Palestinian Authority and then turning over Strip to these morally bankrupt and corrupt and thugs. This approach would also unite the two Palestinian Arab entities without any recognition of the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland (anywhere) in Palestine

3. Status quo – keeping in mind Hamas does not want the Strip to be refurbished or economically viable - it wants things more or less where they are

4. UN Trusteeship for Palestine – but this would require tremendous international leadership and an admission that the Palestinians Arabs are far from ready for independence. Aint gonna happen

Looking at US elections from Zionist viewpoint - Snap Judgement

Here is what I ask:

What kind of Democrats won?

What kind of Republicans won?

My "pro-Israel" yardstick:

1. Against pushing Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines

2. Against flirtation with Hamas, Fatah or BDS (the rebranded long-standing Arab boycott of Israel)

That’s it.

Criticism of Israeli policies is fair game. Especially if it is informed and contextualized.

PREVIOUSLY IN JEWISH HISTORY

With just the right amount of razzle-dazzle, Martin Goodman takes us through the origins of Judaism and how we got to where we are today.

Covenant: God, people and land

A History of Judaism

Martin Goodman

Princeton University Press

656 pages; $39.95

Here we are in season 3,517 (give or take) of “Jewish History – The Saga” and it is time to recap. That is because every generation needs its historians to put the story in fresh perspective. As English historian E.H. Carr argued, the facts do not speak for themselves. 
 

Martin Goodman’s A History of Judaism is not, strictly speaking, a history of the Jewish people but more of their religion — or as I prefer to think of it, their civilization. There is an overlap, but they are not the same. While Goodman covers the calamities and heartbreaks of Jewish life — endemic internecine divisions, expulsions, Christian teachings of contempt, ghettoization, inquisition, pogroms, the Holocaust, and Islam’s rejection of a national home for the Jewish people anywhere in Dar al-Islam — he does not dwell on them. His primary focus, as the title implies, is on developments within Judaism. 

For Goodman, there can be no Judaism without the covenant, and his history grapples with how Jewish civilization has interpreted the covenant over time. Judaism has never been static, yet it has a core. He writes: “At root, certain religious ideas percolate through the history of Judaism and render contemporary notions such as Secular Judaism, an affiliation divorced from any belief in God, problematic.” This claim reminds me of how the eminent psychologist Carl Jung put it: “Bidden or not bidden God is Present.” For Goodman, the covenant binds God “specifically to the Jewish people and lays special duties on them in return.” For me, the covenant is broader: the contractual relationship between the God of Israel, the people of Israel, and the land of Israel. It is a triad that expresses the foundational myth of Judaism. 

Goodman’s book appears just months after the publication of volume two of Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews. Schama is a masterful storyteller. He knows a great deal about a great deal. His readers mostly don’t mind when he goes off on a tangent because the ride is so vivid. Who cares if Schama takes a few flamboyant liberties in his combined history of the Jews and of Judaism? But ask me which book I would recommend for anyone who wants a clear, skillfully synthesized one-volume work and I would refer them to Goodman’s. With just the right amount of razzle-dazzle, he takes us through the origins of Judaism, explains the evolution of its creed, the far-reaching influence of Rabbinic Judaism, the challenges of modernity and the many, many schisms along the way. 

There is no official starting point to Jewish history. Schama begins around 475 BCE in Egypt in order to trace the origins of Jewish identity. Heinrich Graetz, the 19th-century historian, begins his multi-volume history of the Jewish people just as the Israelites settled in the land of Canaan. Max Margolis and Alexander Marx commence their 1927 A History of the Jewish People in Mesopotamia at the Euphrates. For Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews it is Hebron: “This is where the 4,000-year history of the Jews, in so far as it can be anchored in time and place, began.” Berel Wein in Echoes of Glory goes back to 400 BCE and the rise of Persia to set the stage for his description of the rebuilding of the Second Temple.   

Goodman, who is president of the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at (but autonomous from) Oxford, begins A History of Judaism in the first century CE with Flavius Josephus, born Yosef ben Matityahu — and the best source, he says, for insight into how the Jews understood their sacred history. Not that he takes everything Josephus writes at face value. “What really happened matters much less than what Jews believed had happened,” he argues. He does not dismiss sacred history as fabricated. However, he thinks some biblical narratives were “manipulated by later generations to teach moral lessons to their contemporaries.” 

History gives us the chance to take the long view. “It is an error to imagine that Jewish identity was secure and unproblematic before the complexities of the modern world,” writes Goodman. During the First Temple period, they even quarreled about centralizing the cult of sacrifice in Jerusalem (one would have thought that the presence of the Ark of the Covenant in Jerusalem would have settled the matter). 

A Shabbat prayer reads: “Turn us to thee, O Lord, and let us return; renew our days as of old.” However, the days of old were not all they were cracked up to be. Solomon’s kingdom splintered after his death (928 BCE), Samaria fell to the Assyrians in 722 BCE (hence the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon overwhelmed Judea in 586 BCE, and the Ark of the Covenant disappeared from history. When Persia defeated Babylon, Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and, under Ezra (458 BCE), to rebuild their temple (c. 515). Many preferred to stay put by the Rivers of Babylon. Still, writes Goodman, the Jews of the Diaspora “shared a concern for the welfare of the Jerusalem Temple and its cult” even while they felt free to develop local forms of piety.

Within this chronological map, A History of Judaism also serves as a primer to Jewish practice and ritual. Goodman weaves in, and contextualizes, the Jewish holidays. The Purim story is set during the early Second Temple period (perhaps 357 BCE), Hanukkah around 164 BCE. Festivals we observe today have their origins in ancient pilgrimages. “Three times a year, on the great festivals of Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (Pentecost) and Sukkot (Tabernacles), the Temple was transformed by the arrival of great crowds of pilgrim,” Goodman writes.

On the political front, the Jews squandered their political capital and became a Roman curatorship (in 6 CE). A rebellion (beginning in 66 CE) — its reasons still debated — led Rome to take Jerusalem in 70 CE, destroy the temple and exile the Jews. But wait. Goodman throws in this fascinating nugget: “Josephus claimed, probably correctly, that Titus would have preferred not to destroy the Temple, but once the building had been set alight in the dry August heat of Jerusalem, it was impossible to save.” The destruction was unintended: “In the chaos of the siege a fire started by a lighted brand flung into the sanctuary by a Roman soldier spread rapidly out of control and attempts by Titus to save the building were in vain.” 

Theology (what we believe), what we think we know (based on secular learning), and how we practice the Jewish religion are not necessarily in sync. I always wonder if those who identify as “Orthodox” realize that Orthodox doctrine holds that God literally revealed the Torah on Mount Sinai and that the Talmud was (at the very least) divinely inspired. Modern Orthodoxy provides no wiggle room on the principle that the Torah is from heaven. To be Modern Orthodox means mostly a willingness to engage with the world, in contrast to being Haredi and seeking insularity.

Although Goodman describes himself as observant, I am guessing he might consider himself post-denominational. He describes Judaism as a religion “rooted in historical memory, real or imagined.” The biblical books “were composed by many different authors” with different motivations “over a long period and it would be naïve to expect a consistent theology.” The takeaway message for me is the idea that while our rituals, practices, prayers, and way of living Jewishly were not set out at Sinai, but rather evolved over thousands of years, this does not diminish their sanctity. 

For those who believe that Judaism is the best course of life (for Jews, anyway), it is partly because sages such as Shimshon Raphael Hirsch taught that decency and respect for the other is paramount (Derech Eretz Kadma L'Torah). “Six of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai relate to human behavior in relation not to God but to other humans,” Goodman tells us. You want social justice? Judaism demands that when harvesting grain, the owner of a field should leave what’s in the corners for the poor. Among the ancient civilizations, only Judaism “forbids the taking of interest.” Slavery based on race as practiced in the New World was emphatically alien to the ethos of Judaism. Those who wrote the sacred texts wanted us to aspire to menschlichkeit.

Can today’s progressive and traditionalist Jews show menschlichkeit toward each other? It seems that streams in Judaism coexisted during the Second Temple era. Pharisees emphasized an oral tradition and introduced, probably under Greek influence, the idea of reward and punishment of souls in an afterlife. The probably more marginal Sadducees rejected the legitimacy of non-written traditions and believed that God did not directly intercede in human events. These camps shared space in the Temple, Goodman writes. Josephus probably offered a skewed view of the Sadducee in order to make them seem like pure biblical literalists, posits Goodman. A third (by no means final) doctrinal camp was the Essenes: ascetic, monkish, believers in the resurrection, communist-like in their lifestyle, obsessed with the scatological, anti-slavery and misogynist. Go figure. 

With the destruction of the Second Temple, Judaism enters a new phase. Synagogues take on new importance though they had been a feature of village life in Eretz Israel as well as in the diaspora already during the Second Temple period. The Mishnah (redacted c. 200 CE) and Babylonian Talmud (completed around the sixth century) set the stage. Goodman posits that the “rabbis in six century Mesopotamia were well aware of the extent to which the Judaism they practiced and taught had evolved from the scriptures they believed had been handed down from Moses.” Creating a diaspora-friendly Judaism required reimagining or inventing some festivals. Shavuot becomes a celebration of the giving of the Torah. Simhat Torah comes along to celebrate the completion of the Torah-reading cycle. The Talmud reframed the message of Hanukkah from one of nationalism to the supernatural — a day’s supply of pure olive in the rededicated Temple burned for eight days. 

Judaism like any creed has parameters, but no one can credibly claim that their particular stream is authentic or the original. Prayers evolve or are injected with new meaning, Goodman shows. For instance, by the high Middle Ages Kaddish took on an additional role as a memorial prayer for the dead. Rabbinic scholars developed halacha citing the Talmud, itself a compendium which dates back to the Babylonian Exile and codified only circa 500 CE. Responsa (questions and answers) continues to evolve and contend with legal (Halachic) issues in daily life. 

Goodman walks us through a host of seminal books and authors putting each into context. Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki or Rashi (whose day job was in viticulture) wrote commentaries that elucidated biblical and Talmudic texts. Maimonides (day job: physician) provided an accessible citation-free Mishneh Torah, guidelines for how to study, pray, repent — have sex even. Thanks to the printing press — the social media of the late Middle Ages — Rashi’s commentary on the Five Books of Moses practically went viral after 1475, and the Talmud became widely disseminated after 1523. Goodman points out that “The printing of halakhot began to spread norms and expectations far beyond any specific locality” so that by the 1500s Jewish law was “codified as never before.” 

Religions have defining garb and fashions. If you define yourself by the style of your kippa, then consider that only in the 13th century did Jewish men begin covering their heads in the synagogue. A contemporary trend among some Orthodox is to wear tzitzit (ritual fringes) that dangle outside their trousers below the knee. 

Schism is intrinsic to Judaism. The Karaites of the 9th century CE rejected the rabbinic interpretation of the Torah. Sabbetai Zevi in the 17th century and Jacob Frank in the 18th century were charismatic figures who claimed to be messiahs and left the Jewish world traumatized once they were exposed as charlatans. Kabbalah, mysticism and the Book of Zohar (redacted in the late 1200s) presented innovative spiritual opportunities but also theological risks. 

Among those who popularized what had been esoteric Kabbalah were the Hasidim. When Hassidism first appeared, it was vehemently opposed by the Vilna Gaon (1720–1797) and the rabbinic mainstream who became “Mitnagdim” (opponents) partly out of fear that some Hassidic rebbe would go down the path of Sabbetai Zevi. In the late 1770s, Mitnagdim might excommunicate Hasidim. Today Hassidim and Mitnagdim get along better. In Israel, they campaign for the Knesset under the same United Torah Judaism banner. Why? Think about Tom Lehrer’s satiric lyrics: “Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Hindus hate the Moslems and everybody hates the Jews!” In the same vein, the Hassidim may “hate” the Mitnagdim but everybody hates the Reform, a catchall phrase among the insular ultra-Orthodox for progressive Judaism of any stripe.

With 18th-century enlightenment and later political emancipation, Jews could, in theory, become equal citizens of the Jewish faith or jettison their identity altogether. How one might both blend in and be Jewish sometimes engendered radical experimentation — hence the Reform movement which evolved first in Germany and then in the US. Reform’s revolutionary schemes included discarding Hebrew, kashrut, and Shabbat. When the extreme was reached the reverse set in. In the United States, by 1937 the sociology and demography of the Jews in the pews demanded a more middle-of-the-road Reform Judaism, Goodman explains. Both Orthodoxy and Reform disapproved of political Zionism yet both streams contributed leading Zionist personages. 

The Conservative movement sought to steer a middle way and left “open even central issues about the notion of revelation and observance of halakhah,” writes Goodman. The movement, he notes, is presently in crisis. Those in the middle of the road get hit by cars coming from both directions. 

Progressive Judaism has never taken off in Israel where many Israelis are non-practicing Orthodox and often shockingly religiously illiterate. Israel’s political system has spawned the institution of the chief rabbinate, nowadays in the firm control of the ultra-Orthodox. The rabbinate is responsible for marriage, divorce and conversion (and has narrowly defined “who is a Jew”). 

Paradoxically, the ultra-Orthodox establishment operates a parallel, more insular “Eida Chareidis” which regards state rabbis as slackers. Money is no problem for the Eida Chareidis since numerous kosher products, from milk to mineral water, require the imprimatur of both the state rabbinate and the Eida for sale in kosher supermarkets. Money being fungible, Eida cash runs into the coffers of the Peleg Yerushalmi sect which violently opposes not merely service in the Israel Defense Forces but statutes that require Haredim to register at the draft office to receive a routine deferment.

One of the dubious innovations of the Haredi world, as Goodman shows, is the idea propagated by the Hatam Sofer (1762-1839) that “that which is new is forbidden according to the Torah” making virtually any innovation strictly forbidden. Haredim give paramount authority to Joseph Karo’s 1565 Shulhan Arukh or Code of Jewish Law and its 1864 abridged version. Those who profess to live in strict adherence to rules laid down over 1,300 years ago or their hardline incarnations necessarily part ways with Jews who might refer to the Shulhan Arukh as one of many sources in deciding how to live an observant lifestyle in the 21st century. 

Zeal has its limits and many Haredim have workarounds and dispensations to access the gadgets and paraphernalia necessary for modern living.   

Goodman wants to end on a positive note so posits that “Rabbinic literature is replete with stories of rabbis who agreed to disagree.” However, he is also realistic and leaves the reader with an open question: “Will the violence which in recent decades has begun to characterize religious disputes between Jews, especially in the State of Israel, escalate, or will it subside as it has so often over the past 2,000 years into a grudging acceptance of difference?” 

Stay tuned.

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(c) copyright asserted by Elliot Jager 2018