BOOK REVIEWS

T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006) 263–267

DENNIS E. SMITH. From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early

Christian World. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. Pp. xi Ⳮ 411.

From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World brings
together an impressive array of source material on meal traditions in an-
tiquity, focusing on the formal banquet as a social institution in the
Greco-Roman world. The book, which began as the author’s 1980 Har-
vard University dissertation, represents the culmination of more than
twenty years of research. With chapters on Greco-Roman banquets, phil-
osophical banquets, sacrificial banquets, club banquets, Jewish banquets,
Pauline banquet traditions, and banquet scenes in Gospel narratives,
Smith’s text would be extremely useful for an introductory-level course
on custom and culture in the ancient world. The original artistic render-
ings of banquet scenes featured in chapter one, based primarily on vase
paintings and ancient literary sources, are especially useful pedagogical
tools.
The central argument of the book is straightforward. Placing the Eu-
charist in its sociocultural context, which he defines as predominantly
Greco-Roman in influence, Smith asserts that early Christians dined at
table simply because it was Greco-Roman custom to do so. He positions
his argument against earlier scholarship on the Eucharist which, he
charges, focused too much on the variety of discrete meal forms that
might have influenced the Eucharist or traced its origins to a particular
type of communal meal (e.g., Jewish Passover seder, Greek symposium).
Smith argues instead for a simplified model in which all variations of
meals in antiquity are subsumed under the general category of the Greco-
Roman banquet. His goal is to ‘‘provide a common model that can be
utilized for the study of all data on formal meals from the Greco-Roman
world’’ (p. 2) and to prove that ‘‘the banquet was a single social institution
that pervaded the culture as a whole’’ (p. 12). This argument is clearly
articulated in the opening chapter, with the help of detailed diagrams and
figures.
In support of his thesis, Smith devotes his remaining chapters to a
discussion of various types of ancient meals, highlighting what he sees as
their common structure. The most comprehensive chapters are those on
the Greco-Roman banquet and the Club banquet. These discussions re-
flect an impressive expertise with an astounding range of ancient sources.
According to Smith’s typology, the ‘‘banquet as social form’’ consists of
264 JQR 96.2 (2006)

the following elements: the practice of reclining at table; the division of

the meal into two courses (deipnon and symposium); the use of formal invi-
tations; the positioning of couches according to rank; the use of servants;
the practice of foot washing and anointment; the designation of a symposi-
arch to lead the banquet; and the central role of entertainment at the meal.
Smith then illustrates the ways in which each of the meals he studies
conforms to this basic structure.
In his concluding paragraphs, Smith suggests that his approach, which
situates early Christianity in its Greco-Roman context, ‘‘can provide a
surer basis for historical reconstruction of Christian origins’’ and allow
for ‘‘a greater appreciation for the diversity of early Christian social for-
mation and theological elaboration.’’ ‘‘Furthermore,’’ he adds, ‘‘if we take
full account of the richness of the earliest Christian meal tradition, we
can find in it models for renewal of Christian theology and liturgy today
toward a greater focus on community’’ (p. 287).
In the end, however, Smith’s earnest attempt to broaden the discussion
of Christian origins effectively narrows it with an analytical approach
that is overly reductive. Although he successfully demonstrates the influ-
ence of Greco-Roman banquets on the world of early Christianity, his
single-minded focus on only one aspect of the tradition eclipses the im-
portant subtleties that make the Eucharist (not to mention early Chris-
tianity as a whole) the fascinating, syncretistic tradition it is. While it is
undeniable that the various meal traditions Smith analyzes do reflect the
influence of Greco-Roman customs, Smith’s typology oversimplifies the
issues and presents a deceptively monolithic approach.
For example, the main focus on Greco-Roman traditions as the overar-
ching framework almost entirely effaces the Jewish influence on early
Christianity. Although Smith provides a lengthy chapter on Jewish meal
customs, he asks that those traditions, too, be considered Greco-Roman
in origin. He writes, ‘‘The meal traditions in Judaism are often studied as
if they were a unique phenomenon. This study has attempted to place
them in the broader world of the Greco-Roman banquet’’ (p. 171). He
continues, ‘‘Jewish meals of the Second Temple period are seen to be
embedded in the Greco-Roman banquet tradition in form, ideology, and
literary description. Though there were some distinctive aspects to Jew-
ish meal traditions, these are best interpreted as subdivisions of the gen-
eral banquet tradition and often can be seen as variations of common
aspects of that tradition’’ (p. 172). While all scholars of early Judaism
would agree that Second Temple Judaism must be viewed against the
background of Hellenistic and Roman influence, the suggestion that its
meal traditions are entirely derivative from those traditions ignores early
 SMITH, FROM SYMPOSIUM TO EUCHARIST—LIEBER 265

Judaism’s entire biblical and ancient Near Eastern legacy. Temple imag-
ery and sacrificial symbolism played a central role in the development of
Jewish communal meals in the Second Temple period. While Smith has
a full chapter on Greco-Roman sacrifice, he hardly mentions the biblical
sacrificial or priestly traditions, which were quite influential in early
Christian communities.
In the chapter on Jewish meals, Smith analyzes the text of Ben Sira,
using that work to demonstrate how Jewish practices were influenced by
Greek culture, even as early as 200 B.C.E., and even in Jerusalem. He then
goes on to catalog the various other significant sources for Jewish meals
in antiquity, including Passover traditions recounted in the Mishnah,
Pharisaic meal customs, Qumran meal texts, Philo’s description of the
Therapeutai, and various traditions about messianic banquets. Smith is
correct that many of these sources do attest to the acculturated status of
the Second Temple–era communities that produced them. However, the
texts Smith cites also engage quite pointedly the priestly customs of bibli-
cal Jewish tradition. Yet Smith is so focused on tracing aspects of these
sources to Greco-Roman influences that he completely ignores the Jew-
ish context of these sectarian phenomena.
Indeed, one might argue that this is true of the New Testament sources
Smith discusses as well. While the early Christians may have gathered at
table because everyone else was doing it, the particular symbolic system
they employed in their discourse is just as indebted to Jewish traditions.
While early Christians may have employed the form of the Greco-Roman
banquet, the content of the ideology espoused during those ritual meals
drew on emergent Christianity’s relationship to Judaism. Smith stresses
that meals in antiquity were an important tool for establishing social
boundaries—but against whom were the earliest Christians defining
themselves? If Christians participated in Greco-Roman culture through
their development of communal banquet traditions, how might they have
used the social form of the banquet to critique aspects of Greco-Roman
and Jewish culture or differentiate themselves from the popular norm?
Smith’s tendency toward oversimplification extends to his methodolog-
ical approach as well. For example, in his reading of Emile Durkheim’s
dichotomy between the sacred and profane, Smith notes that Durkheim
‘‘defined the sacred and profane as two separate realms of human exis-
tence.’’ Smith then sets his own work in opposition to Durkehim’s view,
claiming, ‘‘[i]t is my contention . . . that the sacred vs. secular model is
not appropriate for ancient meals. Instead I consider meals to have an
integrative function in ancient society in which they combine the sacred
and secular into one ritual event’’ (p. 6). But, Durkheim’s precise point
266 JQR 96.2 (2006)

in Elementary Forms was that positive ritual acts are moments that inte-
grate sacred and profane in their affirmation of the religious beliefs of the
group. Durkheim viewed sacrifice and cult meals in particular as exem-
plary rituals that by their very nature bridge the sacred-profane dichot-
omy. In this sense, Smith’s analysis would actually do well to employ a
proper understanding of Durkheim’s theory to support his thesis and
deepen his reading of the texts.
Although Smith provides helpful resources about the role of women at
the banquet, his analysis of gender issues and eroticism, so central to the
structure of Greco-Roman meals, does not go far enough. Considering
that Smith is deeply concerned with the social function of the banquet as
a carrier of social codes, certain questions are notably absent from his
discussion of this material in chapter 2. For example, what relations of
power are operative in the selection of the ‘‘symposiarch’’ (p. 34) and in
the subservient role of women at the classical banquet (p. 35)? In a sec-
tion on social class and status at the banquet, Smith notes the case of
Aspasia, ‘‘a woman who began as a hetaira [prostitute] but progressed to
the point that she became famous in the literature as a female who could
spar intellectually with men’’ (p. 43). Smith takes this to suggest that by
the Hellenistic period women are gaining respectability in their inclusion
in the symposia. However, his reading assumes that women’s intellectual
activity and their erotic roles are polar extremes. But these are not mutu-
ally exclusive traits, and it is certainly possible that a woman included in
the discussion at a symposium still carried the burden of harlotry in her
historic association with the popular ‘‘flute girls.’’
Gender issues are totally absent from the remaining chapters of the
book, except for a few brief comments tangential to the main discussion
(pp. 92–93; 207–209). This is unfortunate, since it would be interesting
to hear Smith explain what happens to the flagrantly erotic (including
homoerotic) components of the classical Greco-Roman banquet as they
were adapted to early Christian meal practices. Did the early Christians
consciously adopt a less sensual model of the Greco-Roman banquet? Or
might we use Smith’s evidence to suggest that there was an erotic compo-
nent to the symbolic consumption of God’s body in the early Christian
rite? Unfortunately, such questions remain unaddressed at the close of
Smith’s study.
Nevertheless, Smith’s book deserves praise for its impressive breadth
and accessible writing style. In highlighting the common features of an-
cient banquet customs in Greco-Roman antiquity, he demonstrates the
pervasive influence of Greek traditions from the classical period through
the first centuries of the Common Era. However, the important material
 SMITH, FROM SYMPOSIUM TO EUCHARIST—LIEBER 267

presented here demands a deeper analysis than Smith provides. Smith

critiques those scholars who point to a single influence on the develop-
ment of the Eucharist. Yet, in the end, his highly reductive thesis is not
much different. By subsuming the variety of meals in Greco-Roman an-
tiquity into a single category, he masks the complexity of Christian ori-
gins.

Dickinson College ANDREA LIEBER

T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006) 268–271

JANE DAMMEN MCAULIFFE, BARRY D. WALFISH, AND JOSEPH W. GOER-

ING, eds. With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2003. Pp. xvii Ⳮ 488.

As a receiver and conduit of tradition, the religious exegete ever stands

in relation to the sacred foundation-document of a particular culture. For
the believer, this encounter makes the divine Word audible and present;
the speech of revelation emerges thereby from the otherwise ‘‘majestic
silence’’ of the text. Whether in regard to the Hebrew Bible in Judaism,
the unified Old and New Testaments in Christianity, or the Qur’an in
Islam, medieval religious thought revolved on the axes of holy Words,
and diverse imaginaires functioned, first and foremost, as exegetical proc-
esses for the discernment of ultimate meaning. These sacred texts func-
tioned as both anchor and compass for the different cultures; modalities
of hermeneutical attitude formed the great lines of connection between
them.
In the book presently under review, an outstanding group of scholars
have collaborated to research the varieties of religious exegesis in the
Middle Ages, and the result is a major contribution to the comparative
study of religion and hermeneutics. Produced under the combined editor-
ship of Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Barry Walfish, and Joseph Goering,
With Reverence for the Word grew into a published volume from its origins
as an international conference on the subject at the University of Toronto
(see pp. vi–vii). Assembling the work of a wide array of leading research-
ers, the finished product is impressive in scope, depth of individual analy-
ses, and thematic correlations. The book is divided into three parts of
unequal length (190 pages are dedicated to Judaism, 111 pages to Chris-
tianity, and 150 pages to Islam)—each devoted to medieval exegesis in
one of the three Abrahamic religions, and each begun with an introduc-
tory essay by one of the three editors (Walfish on Judaism, Goering on
Christianity, and McAuliffe on Islam). These overview pieces are a sig-
nificant asset to the symmetry and coherence of the volume as a whole—
they set the stage for what the reader can expect in the ensuing articles,
offer lines of connection between the various studies, and provide a very
helpful starting point both for the general academic reader and for the
specialist in one of the volume’s subfields. In addition to their scholarly
value, these introductory essays (along with selected other chapters from
 MCAULIFFE, REVERENCE FOR THE WORD—FISHBANE 269

the book) would also be valuable for university courses on religious inter-
pretation and comparative religion. Each article in the volume is followed
by endnotes and useful bibliographies; the volume as a whole is followed
by a detailed subject index, as well as an index to citations from the
Hebrew and Christian bibles, rabbinic literature, and the Qur’an. From
a cosmetic perspective, the book is only marred by its diminutive and
dense page print.
One of the great strengths of this book is the ease with which the
reader is able to discern the commonalities in concept and exegetical
method that exist among the three traditions. It is this quality that illumi-
nates the larger (cross-cultural) phenomenon of a belief in the sacrality
of certain texts, and the ongoing process of interpreting those texts within
a specific theological and social system. Through a long series of articles
(most of which are, by necessity, deeply particularistic and relatively self-
contained), this volume opens up issues of broader human concern and
cultural attitude. It is in this sense that the best results of comparative
study may be obtained: the interaction of diverse particularities (each
grounded in the texture and symbology of an individual tradition) in
quest of understanding the common human impulse to imagine and create
religiously, to live a life saturated by a sacred text and its well of mean-
ings, to think and theologize exegetically.
Following the introductory essay by Barry Walfish (chapter 1), the
section on Jewish exegesis proceeds through consideration of the follow-
ing hermeneutical issues and thinkers: a comparative assessment of Jew-
ish and Christian attitudes toward interpretive authority and the validity
of received tradition (Benin); literal (zāhir) and figurative (ta’wı̄l) mean-
ing in the thought of Saadia Gaon (Ben-Shammai), with emphasis on the
conservatism of Saadia’s approach to nonliteral interpretation; percep-
tions of literalism (peshat or zāhir) and the notion of a univalent, correct
meaning in Karaite exegesis of the Song of Songs (Frank); the parallel
attempts by Jewish and Christian exegetes to ‘‘restore’’ a more complete
(and unified) narrative to the scriptural text by ‘‘filling in’’ perceived gaps
in Scripture (Signer); the ‘‘rhetorical’’-literary function versus the ‘‘refer-
ential’’ function (discernment of new information) in the interpretation of
apparent scriptural superfluity (Lockshin); spiritual eroticism versus the
literal eros of physical pleasure in philosophical and kabbalistic interpre-
tations of the Song of Songs (Wolfson); the use of typological/figural
reading (a stereotypically Christian mode) in a Jewish exegetical source
(Walfish); ‘‘the method of doubts’’ in late medieval Jewish exegesis—a
rhetorical form that first poses a series of interpretive difficulties and
questions which are subsequently answered in the exegesis (Saperstein);
270 JQR 96.2 (2006)

the genre of Jewish exegetical prolegomena in the Middle Ages, with

special attention to the parallel phenomena in Muslim and Christian liter-
ature of the times (Lawee); the embodiment of attitudes toward Jewish
education and society in the exegetical use of a celebrated verse from
Proverbs (Cooper). Overall, despite the inevitable independence of the
different studies in this section, there is a unity of purpose and genre that
may be discerned, and the combined efforts of the scholars provide the
reader with a sense of the varieties of exegetical practice among medieval
Jews.
The group of essays on medieval Christian exegesis opens with an
introductory chapter by co-editor Joseph Goering—a piece that sets out
a chronological sketch (in very broad strokes) of Christian exegesis
from the Patristic Age to modern times. This survey is followed by three
studies (chapters 13–15) that touch on the phenomenon of layered
meaning and the ‘‘senses of Scripture’’ (the essays by Firey, Synan, and
Ginther)—each of which gives special attention to different exegetes
from the Christian tradition. Robert Sweetman centers on the phenome-
non of ‘‘performative reading’’ as a mode of scriptural interpretation (see
p. 265), while John Boyle unpacks the exegetical method of Saint
Thomas Aquinas, considering the scholastic proclivity to establish the
mystical meaning of the text on the firm basis of the literal meaning (p.
280). The studies of Édouard Jeauneau and A. J. Minnis (chapters 18–
19) further develop the central question of multiple scriptural ‘‘senses’’ in
Christian interpretation—the former with respect to Thomas of Ireland,
and the latter with regard to William of Ockham. Indeed, this conception
of manifold meaning is the clear undercurrent of the section on Christian
exegesis in With Reverence for the Word. Moreover, the manner in which
this interpretive structure parallels Jewish and Islamic hermeneutics is
one of the major lines of correlation that unifies the book.
Jane Dammen McAuliffe opens the third part of With Reverence for the
Word with a lucid and engaging introductory essay; a piece that, among
other things, offers a reflection on the literary-historical emergence of the
tafsı̄r (commentary) genre in Islam. This unit of the book then moves
through a series of core themes and problems in the history of Islamic
exegesis: the ongoing dialectic between the construction of authoritative
tradition and interpretive ingenuity (note the chapters by Leemhuis and
Berg); the phenomenon of layered meaning and the ‘‘scriptural senses’’ in
Sūfı̄ exegesis of the Qur’ān (Böwering and Lazarus-Yafeh—Böwering’s
piece in particular lends great insight into the interplay of zāhir and bātin/
internal meaning in Sūfı̄ mysticism, and he unpacks the correlation made
by many Sūfı̄ thinkers between the depths of qur’ānic meaning and the
 MCAULIFFE, REVERENCE FOR THE WORD—FISHBANE 271

depths of human spiritual interiority); instances of ‘‘internal qur’ānic exe-

gesis’’ as sources of historical knowledge and literary form (Neuwirth
and Wild); the existence and affirmation of distinct interpretations of the
same qur’ānic text (Hawting); the definition of borders and scope in the
genre of qur’ānic tafsı̄r (McAuliffe).
As mentioned above, the essays in this volume are diverse and free-
standing, representing the specialized scholarship of several intersecting
fields of research. And yet at least four lines of correlation among them
may be highlighted—commonalities that underscore the cross-cultural
concerns that are bound up in the interpretation of a sacred Scripture
and its critical study. I have touched on these issues above, but we may
sum them up in the following manner: (1) Literal versus figurative exegesis
in the construction of layered meaning. This is perhaps the most thoroughgo-
ing point of correlation and is an interpretive dynamic that is concretely
embodied in three parallel terminological binarisms: peshat/sod in Juda-
ism; literal/spiritual in Christianity; zāhir/bātin in Islam (see pp. 71, 72,
124, 125, 200, 206, 208, 225, 228, 243, 245, 292, 346, 347, 352). (2) Tradi-
tion and the assertion of authoritative interpretation. This theme figures most
prominently in the Islam section of the book, but the authors show the
extent to which it was a deep structural feature of the interpretive enter-
prise in all three religions (see pp. 60, 198, 302, 314, 321, 322, 323, 329).
(3) Literary and form-critical considerations. This methodological undercur-
rent is manifest in the focus of several scholars on issues ranging from
narrative structure to rhetorical meaning to the definition of discrete liter-
ary genres within the canons of religious creativity (see pp. 75, 133, 167,
168, 262, 276, 277, 408). (4) The intersection of hermeneutics and religious
experience (pp. 95–99, 245, 268, 347—a theme that is most notable in the
chapters by Wolfson, Ginther, and Böwering).
In all, these and other themes are taken up by the contributors to pro-
duce a collection of considerably broad range and impressive depth. The
essays are a model of erudition, and collectively they shed great light
on a core phenomenon in the history of religion. This book is highly
recommended to scholars working in all areas of religious studies, partic-
ularly those who aim to understand how different cultures construct the
notion of a sacred text, and how that numinous character is both sus-
tained and transformed over time through the creativity of exegesis and
the craft of tradition.

Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion EITAN P. FISHBANE

T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006) 272–275

J. H. CHAJES. Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Juda-

ism. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 2003. Pp. 278.

For some time, spirit possession has featured prominently in both general
anthropology and the historiography of Christian Europe as an important
indicator of how societies negotiate their relationships with angels and
demons, gods and spirits, or just the general dead. Episodes turn into
social dramas, with their own performances and theatricality, and exor-
cism in particular emerges as therapy, as communication, and, above all,
as power. A previous spate of enthusiasm for the subject produced—for
early modern Christianity—the historical studies of Robert Mandrou,
Michel De Certeau, D. P. Walker, Cécile Ernst, Giovanni Levi, and Erik
Midelfort, and more recently the debate has been continued by Lyndal
Roper (for Germany), Sarah Ferber (France), Marı́a Tausiet (Spain),
and Moshe Sluhovsky (Europe in general). J. H. Chajes now joins this
discussion with a long-overdue study of a neglected part of the subject,
spirit possession in the early modern Jewish world, triangulated on its
intellectual origins in pre-expulsion Spain, its actual appearance in the
sixteenth-century Galilean village of Safed, and its deployment against
skepticism in the Iberian Jewish community of seventeenth-century Am-
sterdam. And once again, the subject is shown to be central to the con-
struction of an entire religiosity. Chajes’s elegant and sensitive account is
deliberately cast as a contribution to the wider, transconfessional field
and as an answer to the question, did the reappearance of Jewish narra-
tives of possession, after a millennium or more of silence, have anything
to do with the ‘‘golden age’’ of the demoniac in Christian Europe?
Many aspects of this study and several of its findings will, indeed, seem
familiar to those who know the recent research on the equivalent Chris-
tian materials. Not least there is the methodology itself, which wisely
refuses to translate possession behavior into the categories of modern
psychology or other clinical diagnoses, as if contemporaries had a
‘‘ ‘wrong’ understanding of the phenomena’’ (p. 89). Following the litera-
ture specialist Diane Purkiss on this issue, as well as historical anthropol-
ogists as a group, Chajes agrees that we should be able to discuss the
supernatural historically without transforming it into something else. His
very choice of chapter themes also invites comparison with most cur-
 CHAJES, BETWEEN WORLDS—CLARK 273

rently useful work on spirit possession, both in history and anthropology.

First, there is a ‘‘making sense’’ chapter—a quite difficult chapter (which
should possibly have come second) covering the cultural genealogy of the
theories and practices, current in the literature in or about pre-expulsion
Spain, that gave meaning and coherence to Jewish spirit possession and
made it believable. Second, comes a chapter of cases—an account of the
spiritual economy of Safed, the pious town on which they epicentred,
recounting in wonderful detail its amplified engagement with death, its
propensity for visionary contact with the dead (a kind of ‘‘morbid ec-
stasy,’’ p. 34), and its experience of possession episodes in the 1570s,
partially under the guidance of the exorcists R. Isaac Luria and R. Hay-
yim Vital. Third, there is a chapter on rituals of exorcism that focuses on
Rabbi Luria’s only partly successful attempts to develop reformed tech-
niques responsive to the association between possession and the transmi-
gration of souls. Chajes’s invaluable contribution at this point is to pay
attention to the ritual texts themselves, a kind of reading and an attention
to language that are virtually absent from the historiography of Christian
exorcism in the same period. The fourth chapter is the ‘‘gender’’ chapter,
which asks the now-standard questions about possession as a potentially
positive form of women’s religiosity in a culture suspicious of female mys-
ticism (and subsequently forgetful of it), though not without its female
mystics. Close analysis of the two cases of Anav (daughter of R. Raphael
Anav) in Damascus in 1609 and Rachel Aberlin in Safed (both recorded
in R. Vital’s diary) allows Chajes to explore the implications of their spiri-
tuality and adept-hood via the issues of clairvoyance and the discernment
of spirits, the latter another only partially researched topic of European-
wide, transconfessional significance. Finally, the book moves to Amster-
dam in the seventeenth century, tracing Jewish possession’s reception
history in the use of the Safed (and other) narratives to make metaphysi-
cal points in the controversies of that place and time, the key text being
Menasseh ben Israel’s Nishmat Hattim. In an immensely valuable appen-
dix, amounting to almost a quarter of his book, Chajes adds the texts of
some of the narratives themselves.
Details familiar from Christian parallels also recur throughout this
study; examples are the tests of credibility applied to the possessed and
the signs of their genuineness (notable xenoglossia), the questions put to
possessing spirits (condoned by rabbis, though not by their Christian
equivalents elsewhere in Europe), and the use of ritual objects in exor-
cism. Possession in Safed, like possession in Catholic France, became a
matter for the senses and for eye and ear witnessing, a point recently
argued in Sarah Ferber’s Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern
274 JQR 96.2 (2006)

France (London, 2004). In addition, Safed, like its counterpart Christian

communities, saw the possessed as signs of its own insertion into the
historical process and sought preeminence in the Jewish world by this
means. More vital still, in European Judaism, as in European Christian-
ity, possession and exorcism were deployed to defend the fundamentals
of religion and religious behavior against sinners and sadducees, notably
such core values as the existence of an afterlife of the soul and the due
punishment of evil.
The most important divergence, therefore, lay in the fact that in early
modern Judaism, occupying spirits had mostly become not demons but
souls of the evil dead, sinners (dybbukim) who jumped bodies in a form of
transmigration, arriving straight from death or from other hosts, includ-
ing animals, springs and wells, and even items of food or drink. Reincar-
nation (gilgul) was thus the central concern of those involved, clerics and
laity alike. In Christianity, of course, the evil dead tended to return as
apparitions, not as occupiers, making purgatorial issues the most contro-
versial ones in ghost debates and leaving incarnation, not reincarnation,
as the inspiration for (demonic) possessions. Chajes says memorably:
‘‘The dead appeared to the living Jews of Safed in the living Jews of
Safed’’ (p. 35). The question originally posed, therefore—of parallels with
Christian demoniacs (Chajes prefers not to talk of ‘‘influences’’ in connec-
tion with cosmopolitan Judaism)—has to survive this major discrepancy.
Mostly it does, with Chajes falling back, a little elusively perhaps, on the
‘‘deep structures of the reality map’’ (p. 8), the ‘‘shared cultural construc-
tions’’ (p. 30), that contemporaries held all over Europe. What emerges
successfully from this enthralling study, therefore, is the existence of com-
parable cultural forms in genuine counterpoint.
There are one or two rather contestable claims along the way: that
European witch trials ‘‘were typically initiated or exacerbated by accusa-
tions of the possessed’’ (p. 4), that ‘‘the identification of a possessing spirit
as a ghost seems to have been common among late medieval and early
modern Christians’’ (p. 13), and that one can distinguish ‘‘the history of
spirit possession’’ from the ‘‘history of its representation’’ (p. 118)—this
last idea undermined by the very success with which Chajes allows the
latter to constitute the former. In addition, the appearance of Walter Ste-
phens’s Demon Lovers (Chicago, 2002), briefly acknowledged at p. 138,
has had more of an impact on how we see the trajectory of skepticism
about witchcraft and the whole relationship of Christianity to sense per-
ception than Chajes allows. The idea of proving the invisible and the
immaterial by experience and sense perception was, it seems, no less
 CHAJES, BETWEEN WORLDS—CLARK 275

complex in the first hundred years of demonology than in Menasseh’s

Amsterdam. Nevertheless, Between Worlds is an exciting, persuasive, and
well-written study and another key addition to a subject central to early
modern religions.

University of Wales, Swansea STUART CLARK

T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006) 276–282

SHAUL MAGID. Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and

Messianism in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism. Modern Jewish Philosophy and Re-
ligion. Translations and Critical Studies. Madison: University of Wiscon-
sin Press, 2003. Pp xxvii Ⳮ 400.

The most theologically radical sect ever to emerge from the traditional
hasidic milieu was that of Izbica/Radzin. Founded by Rabbi Mordecai
Joseph Lainer (1800–54), a disciple of the Polish hasidic masters R.
Simha Bunim of Przysucha and R. Menahem Mendel Morgenstern, the
renowned Kotsker Rebbe, in 1839 Lainer had a dramatic falling out with
the Kotsker. On the day after Simhat Torah of that year, he left Kotsk to
form his own small hasidic circle in Izbica, a shtetl in the Radom province
of Poland. The exact circumstances surrounding this break with his
friend and teacher remain unclear, but the result was an irreparable rup-
ture between Izbicer Hasidism and most of the major hasidic sects of
nineteenth-century Poland. The Izbicer Hasidim’s marginality was
largely a result of R. Mordecai Joseph and especially his heirs’ radically
deterministic theology and the unconventional nature of their writings
and interests.
R. Mordecai Joseph took the original hasidic doctrine of divine imma-
nence to its logical panentheistic limits on several fronts. If, as the early
masters of Hasidism claimed, God’s presence permeates all earthly things,
the Izbicer insisted that this must extend to the hearts and deeds of all
Jews. Thus, all that a Jews does, his most heinous transgressions in-
cluded, is somehow mysteriously a manifestation of God’s irresistible and
all-controlling will (retson ha-Boreh). In his most widely quoted epigram,
the Izbicer subverted the essence of the most famous rabbinic epigram
about the limits of Divine Providence (‘‘All is in the hands of Heaven
except the fear of Heaven’’) by changing just one word. The potentially
antinomian expression ‘‘all is in the hands of heaven, including the fear
of heaven’’ became the stunning leitmotif of his theology. This not only
insinuated that human sin too must be understood, at its deepest level, as
a manifestation of the Divine will; it also opened an avenue for individual-
ist behavior that threatened the conformity demanded by Jewish law.
Mordecai Joseph’s most famous work is his collected homilies to the
weekly Torah portions, Me ha-shiloah., edited and published posthumously
in 1858—despite the fierce resistance of other Polish Hasidim—by his
prolific and even quirkier grandson, Gershon Henokh of Radzyn, the
 MAGID, HASIDISM ON THE MARGIN—NADLER 277

central subject of Shaul Magid’s new book. Me ha-shiloah. is brimming

with radically panentheistic and determinist biblical interpretations. Per-
haps the most infamous and oft-quoted of them was R. Mordecai Jo-
seph’s defense of Zimri, the Israelite who was impaled along with his
Midianite lover by the moral hero and high priest Phinehas, grandson of
Aaron. (Nm 25.6–9). Mordecai Joseph takes Phinehas to task for his
anger and hasty vengeance, while insisting that Zimri’s act of fornication
with the idolatrous woman represented a mysterious, but sanctified, act-
ing out of Divine providence.
The publication of Me ha-shiloah. created much controversy within Pol-
ish Hasidism, which had, by the mid-nineteenth century, become ultra-
conservative, both theologically and halakhically. No Jewish publisher in
Poland was willing to print it, and it became the only hasidic book in
Europe ever to be issued by a non-Jew, the Viennese publisher Anton
della Torre. R. Gershon Henokh was unable to obtain a single rabbinical
haskamah (approbation) for the volume, and rival Hasidim actually con-
signed numerous copies of the work to the flames, the only time a hasidic
book had been burned by other Jews other than when the Mitnagdim
burned the very first hasidic work, Toledot Yaakov Yosef, in 1780. More-
over, the leading disciples of R. Mordecai Joseph himself—namely, R.
Yehuda-Leib (aka Reb Leibele) Eiger and R. Zadok Ha-Kohen of Lublin—
not only rejected R. Gershon Henokh’s personal authority as a Rebbe;
they specifically denounced his version of their master’s teachings as re-
dacted in Me ha-shiloah.. R. Gershon Henokh, and Radzin Hasidism, stood
indeed ‘‘on the margin’’ of the hasidic world.
Sensing both this marginality and the inherent dangers of much of
Izbicer theology, Gershon Henokh was acutely aware of the possibly ex-
plosive consequences of publishing his grandfather’s teachings. So, in the
(unpaginated) preface to the first edition of Me ha-shiloah. (Vienna, 1860),
Henokh explicitly limited its intended audience:

Despite the fact that I know that there are numerous places where the
teachings will be hard on the ears of those who have not been trained
in such doctrines. So that I have gathered them together only for the
members of our own sect who can appreciate their great value . . .

R. Gershon Henokh was a remarkable rabbinical scholar, but his be-

liefs and particular interests were always unconventional. Aside from ed-
iting his grandfather’s and father’s biblical commentaries, his original
compositions consisted in a pseudo-Gemara to those tractates of the
Mishnah not included in the Babylonian Talmud (Sidre tehorot, Josefow,
278 JQR 96.2 (2006)

1873), and several monographs regarding his claim to have rediscovered

the h.ilazon, a mollusk required to produce tekhelet—the bluish hue man-
dated by Scripture for one fringe of the tsitsit. (Gershon Henokh traveled
widely in search of tekhelet and claimed to have been led to the elusive
h.ilazon by researchers in a Viennese aquarium.) Both of these works, by
their very nature, reflect an urgent sense of imminent messianic redemp-
tion. He also published several of his own biblical commentaries, in three
volumes under the title Sod yesharim.
Izbica/Radzin remained among the smallest and least influential of Pol-
ish hasidic dynasties. However, the radical writings of its masters have
recently been rediscovered by the devotees of the contemporary Jewish
Renewal Movement. The followers of the late Shlomo Carlebach were
introduced to the Izbicer’s radical teachings some decades ago, and blue-
threaded tsitsit—once an extremely rare sight—have become an almost
standard sartorial accessory among those newly born into Renewal Juda-
ism. Despite R. Gershon Henokh’s explicitly stated desire strictly to limit
the reach of his potentially dangerous teachings, Me ha-shiloah. has become
popular in neo-hasidic circles, and an English translation of the first part
of the book was recently published.
The scholarly study of Izbica/Radzin Hasidism also began only quite
recently, and it has remained very sparse. The first scholar to take note
of this school was Joseph Weiss, who in 1961 published a groundbreak-
ing article about the religious freedom and potential antinomianism inher-
ent in R. Mordecai Joseph’s radical mysticism. This was followed, two
years later, by a brief and incisive article by Rivka Shatz. More than
another quarter century passed before Morris Faierstein published the
first monograph-length study outlining Mordecai Joseph’s biography and
the key features of his mystical theology (All Is in the Hands of Heaven: The
Teachings of R. Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica [Hoboken, N. J., 1989]).
Shaul Magid’s detailed investigation of the writings of R. Gershon
Henokh of Radzin, Hasidism on the Margin, therefore represents the most
serious scholarly attempt to make sense of this hasidic school to date.
Magid delves deeply and analytically into R. Gershon Henokh’s writings
in an effort to establish the importance of his radical reconstructions of
the teachings of the traditional Jewish canon, from the Bible through to
the writings of the disciples of the Baal Shem Tov.
Hasidism on the Margin consists of three major sections. In the first sec-
tion, ‘‘The Piety of Secrecy’’ (chapters 1–3, pp. 1–108), basing himself
largely on R. Gershon Henokh’s programmatic introduction (Ha-hakdama
veha-petih.a) to his father’s, R. Jacob Lainer, commentary to Genesis—
Sefer bet Ya‘akov (Warsaw, 1890)—Magid presents his understanding of
 MAGID, HASIDISM ON THE MARGIN—NADLER 279

Izbica/Radzin’s doctrine of esotericism and its internal understanding of

the history of Kabbalah and Hasidism. It is an interesting and detailed
presentation, but Magid’s use of his sources is problematic.
Magid makes too much, for example, of the rather short discussion
of Maimonides found in R. Gershon Henokh’s Hakdama, arguing that it
represents a systematic mystical rereading of the Guide for the Perplexed,
intended to incorporate it into the kabbalistic tradition. Magid’s bloated
claims about R. Gershon Henokh’s achievement include the statement
that R. Gershon Henokh engaged in ‘‘a detailed comparative analysis of
the Guide and the Zohar in an attempt to expose their similar positions
and shared influences’’(p. 73). This is depicted as an ambitious project
that he allegedly ‘‘begins by collecting all the contradictory statements
made by the Maimonides on any given issue . . . then finds a passage in
the Zohar that deals with the same issue’’ (p. 48). It all sounds quite
fascinating, but there is simply no textual evidence anywhere in R. Gers-
hon Henokh’s writings that he achieved any of this.
R. Gershon Henokh’s discussion of Maimonides in the Hakdama to
Sefer bet Ya‘akov, to which Magid devotes an entire chapter (chapter 2:
‘‘Recircumcising the Torah: The Synthesis of the Zohar and the Guide
and the Hasidic Reconstruction of Esotericism,’’ pp. 40–71), is essentially
based on two folios (5a–7a, in the Warsaw 1890 edition) of this text. R.
Gershon Henokh’s discussion of the Guide is far from being the uniquely
systematic hasidic ‘‘reconstruction’’ of Maimonidean philosophy claimed
by Magid. This is particularly evident when it is compared to the detailed
and systematic two-hundred-page commentary to the Guide for the Per-
plexed, written by the third Lubavitcher Rebbe, R. Menachem Mendel
Schneerson, (Derekh Emuna: Sefer ha-hakira, Poltawa, 1912), who had died
twenty-four years before the publication of Sefer bet Ya‘akov. Despite
Schneerson’s truly remarkable, syncretistic reading of the Guide through
the prism of kabbalistic literature, Magid introduces R. Gershon Henokh
as ‘‘the only Hasidic thinker to systematically read the Guide for the Per-
plexed through the lens of the Zohar and subsequently through Hasidic
thought’’ (p. xxii).
The result of Magid’s overly focusing on the alleged reconstruction of
the Guide and his detailed, narrow reading of R. Gershon Henokh’s Hak-
dama is that he seems to miss the text’s real novelty: namely, the moder-
nity of its historiography, specifically regarding the ‘‘chain of tradition’’
(shalshelet ha-kabbalah). While in the first part of his history of the Kabba-
lah, R. Gershon Henokh follows the traditional view of generational de-
cline (yeridat ha-dorot), he adopts a striking theory of historical progress
when describing the post-Lurianic period, culminating with the emer-
280 JQR 96.2 (2006)

gence of the Besht and his own grandfather as pre-messianic figures.

This, together with his advocacy of a near antinomian individualism
rooted in the subconscious, though both are couched in messianic lan-
guage, seems to me to betray the influences of modernity on R. Gershon
Henokh’s thinking. Unfortunately, beyond asserting very generally, in
the introduction, that ‘‘by the latter third [sic] of the mid-19th century,
particularly in Congress Poland [why not Galitsia? AN] modernity was
literally knocking at the door of every Hasidic home’’ (p. xviii) and imply-
ing that R. Gershon Henokh’s attempts to ‘‘redeem’’ Maimonides ought
to be appreciated in that context, Magid fails to explore this important
issue.
The second major part of Magid’s book, ‘‘Hasidism and the Hermeneu-
tical Turn’’ (chapters 4–6, pp.109–203), consists in his attempt to expli-
cate the hermeneutical methodology of R. Gershon Henokh’s biblical
commentaries. Magid argues that scholars of Hasidism have to date ig-
nored the hermeneutics of hasidic bible commentaries, focusing instead
on historical and theological issues, at the expense of a sensitive reading
that uncovers interpretive principles at work. Magid delves deeply and
at great length into R. Gershon Henokh’s biblical commentaries in an
attempt to achieve the latter. He is specifically interested in uncovering
R. Gershon Henokh’s idealized prototypes for the ‘‘messianic personal-
ity,’’ who may act ‘‘outside the law,’’ which he locates in his interpretation
of the biblical Patriarchs. The reader who struggles to get through the
ponderous discussions of these long chapters will not, unfortunately, dis-
cover any hermeneutic methodology at work. Rather, it seems to me that
Magid is imposing his own systematization onto these decidedly unsys-
tematic writings, in order to discover biblical prototypes with which to
explain R. Gershon Henokh’s radical theology and unusual historiogra-
phy. His clarification of difficult and obscure Hasidic biblical exegesis is
in itself a significant achievement, but, again, Magid seems often to over-
read primary texts, and his eisegesis still falls short of his claims about
the significance of his sources.
The final, shortest, and strongest part of this book, ‘‘In and Around the
Law’’ (chapter 7, pp. 205–48), deals with the issue that has been of cen-
tral interest to scholars, namely, the problem of the antinomianism inher-
ent in the most radical expressions of Izbicer Hasidism. Magid engages
in an extensive and finely nuanced exploration of the problem of antino-
mianism, as it relates to mysticism in general and Hasidism in particular.
There are some fascinating excursae along the way to his classification of
Izbicer doctrine as ‘‘soft antinomianism’’ in contrast to ‘‘hard antinomian-
ism,’’ of which Sabbateanism and Frankism are the classic Jewish exam-
 MAGID, HASIDISM ON THE MARGIN—NADLER 281

ples. But there are problems here too, particularly when Magid attempts
to engage in comparative theology. His efforts to draw analogies between
the issues raised by Izbicer Hasidism and Church controversies in the
period following the Counter-Reformation (pp. 207–16) are particularly
weak and reflect a superficial understanding of Calvinist theology. Mag-
id’s references to the followers of Arminius as ‘‘Armenians’’ (pp. 210–11
and 353) do not help reassure the reader that the complex doctrinal bat-
tles within Protestant Christendom are as potter’s clay in his hands.
At the end of his long discussion of antinomianism, often fascinating
but at times convoluted and confusing, Magid is still unable to point to a
single example of actual antinomian behavior by a single Hasid since the
inception of the Izbica dynasty in 1839. This hard historical fact raises a
central question: if the very idea that makes Izbicer Hasidism so intri-
guing was never translated into practice, what exactly are its meaning
and historical importance? That the potentially antinomian doctrines in
Izbicer writings have been interpreted internally (i.e., by Radziner Hasi-
dim) as applying only to postmessianic times, Magid seems to find quite
irksome. He has his own agenda, which, by the book’s conclusion, has
become quite apparent.
Magid wants to make the argument that Izbica/Radzin Hasidism can
serve as a case study through which to understand the imagined radical-
ism of nineteenth-century Polish Hasidism in general. He often refers to
‘‘Izbica and other Hasidic schools’’ in the same breath, arguing that the
determinism and ‘‘soft antinomianism’’ of Izbica is far more representa-
tive of Hasidism than both traditional Hasidim and critical scholars of
Hasidism have hitherto allowed.
While the title of Magid’s book accurately suggests that Izbica/Radzin
Hasidism is indeed, and always was, ‘‘on the margin,’’ it oddly concludes
with a lengthy complaint about the degree to which both scholars and
modern-day traditional Hasidim have marginalized it. To counter this,
Magid suggests that the writings of R. Gershon Henokh can serve as a
useful ‘‘lens’’ on Polish Hasidism in general (p. 249). He alludes to ‘‘other
Polish Hasidic masters’’ who allegedly shared the radicalism of Izbica/
Radzin (pp. 252–53), but he cannot of course name a single example,
since none exists.
Magid does not exactly conceal his own motivation for having written
this kind of book, which ends on a contentious, polemical note. With his
exposition of the radicalism and antinomianism of Izbica/Radzin Hasid-
ism, he hopes to provide a ‘‘traditional’’ model and ‘‘authoritative’’ sources
for the pious transgressions of New Age Hasidim. Thus he will have
overcome the suppression of the true spirit of Polish Hasidism by both
282 JQR 96.2 (2006)

the scholars and the major, conservative hasidic groups who have canon-
ized hasidic literature in such a way as to exclude the important, allegedly
representative doctrines of the Izbica/Radzyn dynasty. In so doing, he
opens the door for the use (or misuse) of the ‘‘heresies’’ of Izbica/Radzin,
by today’s pious heretics:

What I mean to say is that . . . the masters of the Izbica and Radzin
traditions and other masters in mid- to late-19th century Polish Hasidism
more generally, are heretics . . . they created the religious critique inside
tradition, sufficient for those who followed them to read (or misread)
them and implement that critique in a more overt fashion. (p. 253,
emphasis mine)

Magid therefore laments both the scholars’ and the later Hasidim’s exclu-
sion of Izbica/Radzin from the ‘‘Hasidic canon,’’ which he views as the
real source of its marginalization:

My claim is that the canonization of Hasidic literature is, in one sense,

its failure as it suppresses the very heretical elements that made Hasid-
ism so compelling and attractive to those interested in religious reform.
(p. 254)

It is hard to believe that Magid actually believes that nineteenth-century

Polish Hasidism was a heretical movement advocating religious reform,
and that the writings of the masters of the Izbica/Radzin dynasty are a
good and ‘‘not atypical’’ (p. 249) exemplar of such heresy and reform.
But this is precisely the belief that appears to animate this book and the
only possible explanation for its interpretive exaggerations.

Drew University ALLAN NADLER

T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006) 283–287

PIERRE BIRNBAUM. The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898.

Translated by Jane Marie Todd. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. Pp.
388.

In October 1894 a Jewish captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus,

was accused of spying for Germany. On the basis of documents later
proved to be forgeries, a secret military tribunal convicted him of treason
and in January 1895 sent him to the notorious penal colony of Devil’s
Island in French Guiana. During the summer of 1896 a conscientious
new member of the General Staff, Georges Picquart, discovered that the
true spy was Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, an impecunious rake who was
willing to exchange French secrets for German cash. To prevent Picquart
from revealing this miscarriage of justice, his superiors transferred him
to a dangerous post in Tunisia. The following year, however, Picquart
managed to convey his findings to lawyers, politicians, and, critically,
Mathieu Dreyfus, the defamed captain’s brother, who publicized the case
by formally complaining to the Minister of War. In January 1898 the
great novelist Émile Zola added his prestige to the cause by publishing
his famous ‘‘J’accuse,’’ an open letter to the President of the Republic
denouncing the army and declaring Dreyfus’s innocence, a move that
earned Zola a conviction for libel and forced him into exile in England.
Yet the case for judicial revision only strengthened throughout the year,
particularly after Colonel Henry, who had fabricated Dreyfus’s handwrit-
ing, confessed to the forgery and committed suicide. In October the Cour
de Cassation, France’s highest court, agreed to review the case, and in
June 1899 it declared Dreyfus innocent. The captain returned to France
only to be subjected to a second court martial in which the military judges
perversely ignored the evidence and convicted him again, this time sen-
tencing him to ten years in prison. The President of the Republic par-
doned Dreyfus, and in 1906 the Cour de Cassation revoked the second
court martial and forced the army to readmit him, though no military
tribunal ever reversed the 1894 and 1899 verdicts.
This sordid tale of military injustice might have been a footnote in
French and Jewish history had it not served as the catalyst for a power-
ful outburst of anti-Semitic rage throughout France. A nascent anti-
Semitic movement that had enjoyed limited success since the 1880s
seized the case as an opportunity to propagate its message about the
dangerous power of ‘‘the Jews.’’ Most infamously associated with the
284 JQR 96.2 (2006)

yellow journalist Edouard Drumond, who identified Jews as a capitalist

menace, the political anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus era attracted follow-
ers of practically all political stripes, from the republican left to the anti-
republican clerical right. Rivals set aside their differences to attack a
perceived common enemy, and the result was a seemingly endless series
of demonstrations, speeches, and newspaper pieces in which Jews were
denounced as vermin, bacilli, vipers, and other unsavory creatures bent
on the destruction of France. Jews suffered threats, beatings, and the
destruction of their property, and they had reason to fear a Russian-
style pogrom.
This outburst, limited primarily to the year 1898, constituted a crucial
moment in both Jewish and French history. It was while witnessing the
events of that year that Theodor Herzl became convinced that the Jews
could not be safe in the Diaspora and needed their own state. In retro-
spect, the anti-Semitic disturbances of the Dreyfus Affair seemed to fore-
shadow the murderous violence of the Vichy régime that would send
more than 75,000 Jews to their deaths by following or even preempting
German orders. In light of recent electoral successes of the anti-Semitic
National Front party and an upsurge in attacks on synagogues and Jew-
ish cemeteries since September 11, 2001, the Dreyfus Affair seems to
mark a more endemic problem of anti-Semitism in French society. The
prospect of a specifically French anti-Semitism is particularly troubling
to a national self-image that normally draws on the memory of 1789 and
the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
In spite of the importance of the Dreyfus Affair in the French collective
memory, it has largely remained a scholarly terra incognita. In 1982 Ste-
phen Wilson, a historian from the United Kingdom, wrote Ideology and
Experience: Anti-Semitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Ruther-
ford, N.J., 1982), but after its publication more than a decade and a half
elapsed before another scholar wrote a book on the subject. The painful
embarrassment the Affair evokes in France cannot explain this silence,
since many books have appeared on the more troubling era of Vichy.
Perhaps the attention to Vichy itself over the past three decades has made
the Dreyfus Affair seem less interesting, as though it were only a prelude.
Whatever the reasons for the inattention, in 1998 Pierre Birnbaum broke
the silence with Le moment antisémite: Un tour de la France en 1898 (Paris,
1998). That book, marking the centenary of the Affair, is now available
in English thanks to a fine translation by Jane Marie Todd.
Birnbaum is a professor of political sociology at the Sorbonne and the
author of some twenty books, several of which deal specifically with
French Jewry. The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898, is argua-
 BIRNBAUM, THE ANTI-SE MITIC MOMENT—SCHECHTER 285

bly the most ‘‘historical’’ of these books insofar as it draws copiously on

archival sources and eschews social-scientific methods in order to tell a
richly textured story. Moreover, rather than relying mainly on Parisian
archives, as Wilson did, Birnbaum has tapped the rich but previously
neglected archives in the provinces. His narrative follows his research
itinerary. It begins in Paris, takes a meandering southern route through
Orléans, Bourges, Clermont-Ferrand, Saint-Etienne, and Rodez, then
turns northwest to Perigueux and Limoges. Next Birnbaum takes us east
to Lorraine (Alsace was under German control at the time), south to
Provence, west to Toulouse and Bordeaux, north to the Vendée and Brit-
tany, and finally east to Normandy, where the journey ends. Like the
artisans who once learned their trade while traveling around the country,
the author has literally taken a tour de France. The result is a masterwork.
At each stop on his tour—he cites thirty-five local archives in his foot-
notes—Birnbaum meticulously describes the demonstrations and distur-
bances, political speeches, broadsides and newspaper articles in which
local residents vented their opinions and feelings regarding Dreyfus,
Zola, the army, the Republic, and ‘‘the Jews.’’ His material is abundant
since the police, who were famous for keeping tabs on potential trouble-
makers, were particularly nervous about the potential for unrest in 1898
and wrote countless reports on activity related to the Dreyfus Affair. By
examining the ‘‘neat rows of virtually untouched folders’’ (p. 6) in which
reactions to the Dreyfus case were recorded, Birnbaum has produced
surprising insights into the fateful year of 1898.
Specifically, whereas historians have typically characterized the Drey-
fus case as a Parisian affair, Birnbaum has found that it penetrated into
cities, towns, and villages far from the capital. In Nantes, a city of
120,000, approximately three thousand anti-Semites rioted for nearly a
week after the appearance of Zola’s ‘‘J’accuse,’’ attacking the synagogue,
threatening the rabbi, looting stores, and beating a Jewish shopkeeper.
Only after five brigades of gendarmes supplemented the city’s police
force did the violence subside, though Birnbaum reports that ‘‘until 1900
the incidents in the streets of Nantes barely paused’’ (pp. 233–36). In
Anger, a city of roughly 75,000 inhabitants, between two and five thou-
sand participated in anti-Semitic demonstrations for several days, and in
the minuscule village of La Romagne in Anjou one hundred people took
to the streets to denounce ‘‘the Jewish syndicate’’ and burn an effigy of
Zola (p. 223). Throughout France anti-Semitic journalists poured fuel on
the fire, and the legislative elections of 1898 provided an occasion for
would-be deputies as well as incumbents to assure voters of their hostility
to the Jews.
286 JQR 96.2 (2006)

Moreover, Birnbaum takes issue with the typical characterization of

the affair as a ‘‘Franco-French war’’ along the lines of the revolutions of
1789, 1830, and 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. He observes that
despite the violence of anti-Semitic language, the destruction of property
and the assaults on persons, no one was killed (outside Algeria) as a result
of the Dreyfus Affair. This made it very different from France’s prior
upheavals, the most recent of which (the suppression of the Paris Com-
mune) had resulted in between 20,000 and 25,000 deaths. The cry ‘‘Death
to the Jews!’’ was heard ad nauseum, yet the Jews were spared. What
prevented death threats from leading to actual murder? Birnbaum credits
the police with protecting the Jews. Although no less prejudiced against
Jews than their compatriots were, the police were loyal to the Republic
and dedicated to enforcing its laws. ‘‘Without their vigilant presence,
Paris, but also Nancy, Bordeaux, Nantes, Lyon, Dijon, Angers, Dinan,
and Avignon would have been transformed into so many Algierses or
Orans,’’ Birnbaum writes, alluding to the Algerian cities in which Jews
were killed that year (p. 308).
Finally, and perhaps most significantly for the history of the Jews,
Birnbaum disputes the premise that French Jews were passive in the face
of anti-Semitism. Léon Blum, the President of the Republic and a Jew,
faulted his fellow Jews for their alleged inaction during the Affair, and
later the Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt concurred. Yet Bir-
nbaum writes of Jews who armed themselves, defended their shops, ex-
changed blows with anti-Semites, challenged them to duels, shouted
Dreyfusard slogans in public, tore down anti-Semitic posters, and other-
wise faced their often-dangerous adversaries with great courage. He
admits that the Israelite Consistory, the official organization representing
French Jewry, was slow to protest openly and expressed its concern over
anti-Semitism in tepid language, yet this timidity sparked the published
indignation of both the liberal Jewish editors of the magazine Archives
Israélites and their orthodox counterparts at the Univers Israélite.
The only potential drawback in Birnbaum’s superb book is the number
and length of quotations. By quoting extensively from political speeches,
newspaper articles, posters, and police reports, the author has provided a
vivid sense of the violence of language deployed against the Jews as well
as its ubiquity in France. Yet it would have been possible to select and
edit citations a bit more. Birnbaum recognizes this problem, writing, ‘‘I
faced another formidable difficulty as I dove headlong into the local,
namely, that of resorting too often to quotation’’ (p. 6). Readers might
take this admission as an invitation to skim sections in which lengthy and
 BIRNBAUM, THE ANTI-SE MITIC MOMENT—SCHECHTER 287

repeated imprecations against the Jews eventually produce a monoto-

nous effect. This is unfortunate since The Anti-Semitic Moment deserves
to be read carefully. It is indispensable reading for anyone wishing to
understand the Dreyfus Affair.

The College of William and Mary RONALD SCHECHTER

T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006) 288–295

DAVID VITAL. A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789–1939. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xviii Ⳮ 944.

One cannot accuse David Vital of false advertising. The very first sen-
tence of his magisterial book informs the reader, ‘‘This is a political his-
tory’’—and indeed it is, in both senses of the word. A People Apart is a
study of the discourses and practices of power within Jewish society and
in that society’s highly asymmetric relationship with the surrounding Eu-
ropean world. It is also a study animated by a particular politics, accord-
ing to which virtually all non-Zionist actors on the Jewish stage are
found, sooner or later, to be engaged in a massive exercise of wishful
thinking and self-delusion.
Educated in England, with stints in journalism and in the Israeli gov-
ernment prior to his return to academia (he is now professor emeritus of
diplomacy at Tel-Aviv University), Vital is best known for his excellent
three-volume history of the Zionist movement.1 A People Apart draws liber-
ally on that history but reaches far beyond it, chronologically and themat-
ically. A further dress rehearsal can be found in Vital’s The Future of the
Jews, a compact and overtly present-minded survey of the post-emancipa-
tion ‘‘disarray’’ of modern Jewry.2 Now, drawing on decades of research
in half a dozen languages and sustained reflection on the vicissitudes of
power and authority, Vital has laid out in full his interpretation of the
political (mis)fortunes of European Jewry across a century and a half of
the modern era.
In its broadest outlines, Vital’s account will be familiar to many read-
ers, as will the spirit of shilat ha-golah (negation of the Diaspora) that
informs his analysis. European modernity, he argues, gradually but inex-
orably eviscerated what little collective autonomy Jews enjoyed prior to
the era of emancipation. Scattered into a Darwinian world of emerging
nation-states, the ‘‘modernists’’ among the Jews—secularists, integration-
ists, autonomists, Zionists—had to contend with rising waves of anti-
Semitism that ultimately made their absorption into the surrounding
nations impossible. By contrast, ‘‘traditionalists’’—those for whom reli-
gion remained the anchor of individual and collective identity—while

1. The Origins of Zionism (Oxford, 1975); Zionism: The Formative Years (Oxford,
1982); Zionism: The Crucial Phase (Oxford, 1987).
2. The Future of the Jews (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), especially chapter 1, ‘‘The
Plunge into Modernity.’’
 VITAL, A PEOPLE APART—NATHANS 289

steadfastly maintaining their collective ethos, failed to grasp, much less

contend with, the menacing effects of mass politics. Even before the ap-
pearance of definitive proof that emancipation was reversible, however, a
sober minority among the ‘‘modernists’’ confronted the logic of ethnic
nationalism and set out on the sole possible path to survival in the modern
world: the creation of a Jewish nation-state outside Europe.
One of the great virtues of A People Apart is the way it manages, despite
its enormous length, to be consistently argument-driven, a quality rarely
found in surveys of this size. Vital’s detailed accounts of events and lead-
ing personalities in England, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Rus-
sia, Poland, and Rumania—from the late eighteenth century to the mid-
twentieth—are cast in such a way as to highlight the shared experience of
European Jewry as a whole while allowing for variations among Jewish
communities East and West. Vital shows, for example, how sooner or
later Enlightenment notions of usefulness to state and society came to
inform the Jewish policies of virtually all European governments, and
how the practice of distinguishing between ‘‘useful’’ and ‘‘useless’’ Jews
introduced unprecedented hierarchies into a world where ‘‘internal class
distinctions had always been fluid’’ (p. 163). He applies this notion
equally, and cogently, to the Portuguese and Alsatian Jews of France,
Prussian Schutzjuden, and Russian cantonists. Across the European conti-
nent Vital sees three basic social groups within Jewry competing for in-
ternal authority and external representative functions after emancipation:
the rabbinate, the plutocracy (which benefited enormously from the En-
lightenment triage of Jews into the privileged and the unprivileged), and
the more or less secular intelligentsia. Thus Vital places the rabbis Zadoc
Kahn, Samson Raphael Hirsch, and Yaakov Lifshitz in a single analytic
field; he considers Sir Moses Montefiore, Gerson Bleichröder, and Baron
Horace Guenzburg as part of a historical continuum of wealthy interces-
sors; and he compares Adolphe Crémieux, Arkadii Kremer, and Lucien
Wolf as public spokesmen for the Jews.3 A People Apart is full of stimulat-
ing comparisons across time and space, not just of people, but of aspira-
tions, schools of thought, and practices. Vital links the Sanhedrin and the
Judenrat; the Treaty of Berlin (1870) granting legal protection for the
Jews of Rumania and the minority rights treaties after World War I;
Marxist and right-wing anti-Semitism. The effect of this comparative ap-

3. Women, it should be noted, are virtually absent from Vital’s history. Over
the course of some 900 pages he mentions four Jewish women by name (Glückel
of Hameln, Rahel Varnhagen, Gesya Gelfman, and Rosa Luxemburg), devoting
less than a single page to all four combined—and this in a book full of memorable
character sketches of men.
290 JQR 96.2 (2006)

proach (whose breadth and depth far exceed the examples mentioned
here) is to create a truly synthetic history of European Jewry up to the
eve of the Holocaust.
To be sure, the unity of vision that informs Vital’s book is achieved at
the expense of any sustained attention to culture, religion, and social life
(but not demography, which Vital integrates admirably). Haskalah, reli-
gious reform, Jewish urbanism, and a host of other topics are either
passed over in silence or given cursory treatments lacking the sophistica-
tion that informs the analysis of politics. While acknowledging such top-
ics as ‘‘of surpassing interest,’’ Vital establishes his guidelines early on:
‘‘when all is said and done, the realm in which the ultimately crucial
affairs of society evolve is the power-political’’ (pp. vii–viii). This blunt
conviction seems to have stopped him from considering the ways in which
power—and especially what political theorists call ‘‘soft power’’—
expresses itself through and is inflected by cultural forms. Though far
more learned in matters of Jewish culture than was his hero Herzl, Vital
appears, like him, to be more or less neutral, not to say indifferent, as to
its actual content.
It seems pointless, however, to take Vital to task for his lack of atten-
tion to realms of Jewish life outside politics. His book is already long and
rarely redundant. Instead, I would like to explore the vision of the politi-
cal upon which A People Apart stakes its case.

‘‘The study of power and authority,’’ Vital warns, ‘‘[ . . . ] draws us, like
it or not, to an examination of what is harshest, ugliest, and most danger-
ous in human conduct’’ (p. vii). And yet politics also turns out, in Vital’s
view, to be the arena in which human dignity and honor find their firmest
anchor. It is not a matter of public contestation over the common good
somehow ennobling its participants; rather, Vital regards the struggle for
power as a necessary precondition of collective self-worth.
Like Herzl, Vital has concluded that ‘‘the diaspora dishonored the
Jews’’ (p. 444). Not surprisingly, he prefers historical actors who demon-
strated what he takes to be a sober realism regarding the Jews’ prospects
in Europe. For all their utopian idealism, Vital argues, men such as Herzl
and Weizmann were not afraid to absorb the dark but fundamental truth:
that in the age of the nation-state, European Jewry was doomed to collec-
tive impotence, degradation, or worse. Emancipation threatened Jewish
honor because it was a gift that could be taken back; only hard-won
self-emancipation could secure genuine respect (including self-respect).
Participation in Gentile institutions compromised Jews’ dignity by plac-
ing them in a position of dependence on the Gentile majority; only by
 VITAL, A PEOPLE APART—NATHANS 291

constituting their own majority could Jews restore their collective integ-
rity.
Herzl famously fantasized about being a member of the old Prussian
nobility, and Vital wants his protagonists to think and behave like aristo-
crats, too, to adhere to the values of what Norbert Elias called the satis-
faktionsfähige Gesellschaft. Such instincts, Vital regrets, were foreign to
most Jews, for in the course of their long dispersion they had become
fundamentally nonpolitical beings. The crowning achievement of Herzl
and other early Zionists was thus to grasp the imperative of (re)turning
the Jews to ‘‘real politics.’’ The latter phrase appears repeatedly in Vital’s
narrative, and he uses it to signify a kind of moral autarky, an absolute
autonomy from Gentile society without which, he insists, honor and dig-
nity are unattainable. For Vital, ‘‘real politics’’ is the politics of modern
states, of collective entities that regard themselves as sovereign and be-
have accordingly. Everything else is shadowboxing. ‘‘Real politics’’ re-
quires not just complete independence from Gentile society but the
separation of public and private functions by Jewish leaders. ‘‘Real poli-
tics’’ demands institutions and bureaucracies and some form, however
indirect, of democratic legitimacy. ‘‘Real politics,’’ in a word, requires a
state.
Assessing his role at the first Zionist Congress, Herzl confided to his
diary, ‘‘I gradually worked the people into the mood for a state.’’ This is
Vital’s mood, too, or rather the yardstick by which he judges his protago-
nists, and it is here that his book’s consistency of argument threatens to
veer off in the direction of polemic, or even worse, anachronism. Vital
does not hesitate to pass moral judgment on his principal actors, to accuse
them of lack of courage, failure of imagination, or a refusal to ask the
‘‘hard questions.’’ And it is Jewish spokesmen not in the mood for a
state—above all, the Zionists’ rivals among the ‘‘modernists’’—who espe-
cially try his patience. Here lies what to my mind is the greatest weakness
of A People Apart, even when taken on its own (strictly political) terms: its
tendency to caricature non-Zionist Jewish politics as mired in ‘‘the an-
cient habits of political quietism, docility, and self-effacement’’ (p. 246).
Sooner or later, non-Zionist Jewish leaders find themselves on the re-
ceiving end of Vital’s most damning epithet: shtadlan, or intercessor. Inter-
cessors are self-selected rather than elected. They plead privately rather
than demand publicly. They operate behind the curtains of Gentile
power. They use their private wealth to influence (read: bribe) Gentile
authorities in ways that are as unaccountable as they are undignified. As
if that were not bad enough, they think only about ‘‘the alleviation of
the distress of particular [Jews] in particular circumstances’’ rather than
292 JQR 96.2 (2006)

‘‘work[ing] out a global reordering of the lives of the Jews’’ (p. 246).
Adolphe Crémieux, a hero of the Damascus Affair, stands accused of
having ‘‘failed to rise to the challenge presented to him’’ because he re-
fused to grasp that ‘‘it was against the non-Jewish world . . . that the
Jews needed to be led’’ (p. 247, emphasis in original). German Jewish
liberals are condemned for ‘‘constant slithering in and out of things Jew-
ish’’ (p. 261). The anti-Zionist position adopted by the Alliance Israélite
Universelle and the Anglo-Jewish Association leads Vital to liken their
leaders to eunuchs (p. 485). Even the leaders of the Bund, who can
hardly be accused of quietism or docility, are castigated for refusing to
abandon the illusion of working-class solidarity even though ‘‘they knew
perfectly well’’ that it was unreliable (p. 519).
The problem with such judgments is not simply their crude use of hind-
sight to browbeat historical actors. They often get the facts wrong, too.
For while he is right to contrast their aspirations, Vital vastly overplays
the difference in methods employed by the Zionists and their opponents,
exaggerating the modernity of the former and the archaic quality of the
latter. He dismisses the Central Verein as timid and spineless, barely reg-
istering the significance of the fact that one of every five adult German
Jews were members—a far more democratic base than any other public
Jewish organization of the time, Zionist or not. He castigates Baron Hor-
ace Guenzburg, the leading Russian Jewish ‘‘intercessor,’’ for fearing to
cross or slight the tsarist government, when in fact Guenzburg did so
directly in petitions to government officials, eventually turning to Russia’s
court system and parliament to continue the campaign for equal rights.
He praises Herzl for grasping that ‘‘the Jewish people in their exile were
incapable of conducting their political affairs for themselves’’ (p. 566) but
seems oblivious to the contradiction this poses to his argument that Zion-
ism was the only truly democratic Jewish movement. What was Herzl if
not (among other things) a self-selected intercessor, seeking out meeting
after meeting with high officials of European governments, always careful
to obey their various laws and regulations, and using his small private
fortune to fund an ostensibly public organization? Is not the same true of
Weizmann, who by Vital’s own account placed a premium on ‘‘personal
and confidential political relations’’ and who, like other intercessors, re-
lied on the argument that his program ‘‘offered advantages to Jews and
gentiles alike’’ (p. 687)? What was the Transfer Agreement between Zi-
onists in the Yishuv and the Nazi government if not an example of the
secretive, nondemocratic, pragmatic practices of the ‘‘old-style’’ politics,
aimed at ‘‘the alleviation of the distress of particular [Jews] in particular
circumstances’’?
 VITAL, A PEOPLE APART—NATHANS 293

The special contempt that Vital reserves for non-Zionist politics is

more than a matter of the narcissism of small differences. He wants to
secure Zionism’s monopoly on modernity and, by extension, on historical
legitimacy. In the end, however, Vital’s vision of a modern politics
grounded in moral autarky and absolute independence, in which personal
relationships are subsumed by transparent institutions, remains an ideal
type to which not even Zionist leaders—or for that matter, any political
figures—can conform.

Every work of synthesis is vulnerable to criticism by specialists, and I

will not shirk my duty in this regard. In addition to his occasionally ten-
dentious characterizations of non-Zionist Jewish political figures, from
time to time Vital makes significant factual errors concerning Jewish life
and the so-called Jewish Question in the Russian Empire and Eastern
Europe (I will not comment here on other regions). He incorrectly claims,
for example, that Russian prejudices against commercial activity were
directed solely at Jews (p. 295) and that tsarist authorities refused ‘‘to
permit Jews of any category . . . to form a social organization of their
own for any collective purpose whatsoever’’ (p. 348). He asserts that
because of censorship ‘‘pogroms were never frankly spoken of in the
Jewish press’’ (p. 349)—an absurd claim easily disproved by a cursory
glance at any of the contemporary Russian Jewish newspapers in He-
brew, Yiddish, Russian, and Polish. Vital further claims that ‘‘no Russian
or Polish or Rumanian Jew would or could have written, as Herzl did,
of the Jews’ unending efforts ‘to merge ourselves in the social life of the
surrounding communities’ ’’ (p. 444). Not only could they, they did: one
of the best-known jeremiads published during the pogroms of 1882 ex-
claimed, ‘‘Day in, day out we strove to draw near to the indigenous popu-
lation but look, they are attacking us with crowbars.’’4 Contemporary
East European Jewish belles-lettres (and the press), including widely
read writers such as Sholem Aleichem, regularly took up the theme of
assimilation’s promise and peril.
Relatively minor when considered individually, these and other errors
nonetheless take on a certain gravity when one realizes that they all point
in the same direction, distorting Vital’s portrayal of the Jewish predica-
ment in Eastern Europe in such a way as to strengthen the case for what

4. Originally published in Ha-melits (March 9, 1882); quoted in Jonathan

Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917
(Cambridge, 1981), 77 (a work cited by Vital).
294 JQR 96.2 (2006)

he calls the ‘‘catastrophic’’ mode of Zionism. Surely that predicament was

genuine and deep enough not to require embellishment.
A People Apart is written in a curiously uneven prose. At times Vital is
a master stylist, always ready with a bon mot or a deft character sketch.
He dubs Ahad Ha‘am Zionism’s ‘‘philosopher king’’ and Jabotinsky its
‘‘perpetual enfant terrible.’’ The Bund offers what he calls ‘‘socialism with
a Jewish face’’ while European socialists display a certain ‘‘impatience
with the Jewish reluctance to evaporate.’’ Of one argument he comments
that ‘‘repetition [has not] rendered it intrinsically plausible.’’ He is fond
of noting the existence of ‘‘indigestible facts.’’ And when he lists excep-
tions to a rule he reminds us that ‘‘it was the rule that counted.’’
But while Vital’s prose exudes Olympian confidence, it is periodically
poisoned by Olympic-size sentences like this:

The middle-class founders of the Bund differed from other social dem-
ocrats, most notably, although not exclusively, from the Bolsheviks
among them of whom, as we shall see, some were gentiles, some Jews
like themselves, in that there was a respect in which theirs was a case
in which experience finally outweighed principle and doctrine. (p. 421)

Or this:

Mathieu [Dreyfus]’s fight for his brother was thus to fight the tide of
opinion even within the limited circle of the notables of French Jewry
for whom there could be no question at all of quarreling with the re-
publican state to which the Jews of France did not doubt that they
were all beholden and to which they were indeed devoted as a matter
of primal civic faith. (p. 547)

Needless to say, orations such as these, sprinkled liberally across a text

of some nine hundred pages, make A People Apart a risky book to assign
to undergraduates. This is a pity, for Vital’s immense powers of synthesis
and sweeping narrative are a valuable addition to existing university-level
surveys of modern Jewish politics.5

5. These include Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (Oxford, 1993),

which favors taxonomy over narrative; David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in
Jewish History (New York, 1986), and Daniel Elazar and Stuart Cohen, The Jewish
Polity: Jewish Political Organization from Biblical Times to the Present (Bloomington,
Ind., 1985), both of which briefly survey the entire span of Jewish history; and
Michael Walzer et al., eds., The Jewish Political Tradition, 2 vols. (New Haven,
Conn., 2000–2003), which consists of essays by political theorists on key Jewish
texts from the Bible onward.
 VITAL, A PEOPLE APART—NATHANS 295

* * *
In a bibliographic essay at the end of the first volume of his trilogy on
Zionism, published nearly a quarter-century before the appearance of A
People Apart, Vital offered the following observation:

The fundamental causes of the relative poverty of Zionist historiogra-

phy, and, particularly, the dearth of studies which attempt a synoptic,
interpretive view of the subject . . . lie in the fact that the serious histo-
rian wields a sharp knife, while the body of modern Jewry has been
too deeply wounded and the wounds are still too painful for it to be
easy to set to work on the subject in a sufficiently detached frame of
mind. The subject does not yet belong to the past.6

Nor, evidently, does it today. By Vital’s own account, he found it difficult

to write A People Apart in anything other than a spirit of ‘‘savage indigna-
tion’’ (p. vii). In the end, the greatest strength of his synthesis—its persis-
tent argumentativeness—is also the source of its greatest weakness.

University of Pennsylvania BENJAMIN NATHANS

6. Vital, The Origins of Zionism, 377.

T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006) 296–298

STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM. In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Ger-

mans, and Jews. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Pp. x Ⳮ
269.

This book includes fifteen essays written since the late 1980s. Though
most of the essays have already been published in various journals or
volumes in the past, their compilation here, as well as the addition of three
new ones, and one newly translated into English, proves very valuable.
Aschheim, perhaps the most prominent Israeli historian in the field of
German and German Jewish intellectual and cultural history, illuminates
many key issues concerning the complicated heritage of these worlds, as
well as their current historical representations. In his writing about a
variety of ‘‘ambiguous legacies,’’ a term used in the title of the third essay
in this volume but relevant to many others as well, he often calls for new
ways to examine old problems.
Aschheim relates his short preface to the problematic tension between
the pre-Auschwitz and post-Auschwitz German culture. This tension be-
tween then and now and before and after, is clear through the book. The
essays are presented in four parts. Each touches this tension from a differ-
ent angle. Part 1, ‘‘The Crisis of Culture—Then and Now,’’ integrates
historical examinations of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau,
Leo Strauss, Max Horkheimer, and others with evaluations of their im-
pact on current Western culture. The second part, which starts with a
short autobiographical excursus about Aschheim’s childhood and youth
as a son of German Jewish immigrants in South Africa, consists of four
essays dealing with various identity issues which are related to the prob-
lematic encounters of Germans and Jews before and after Auschwitz.
The third and the fourth parts concentrate on the evaluation and analysis
of a variety of historical interpretations of German history, and of the
Nazism of the Holocaust.
Chapter 3, the longest article in the first part of the book, relates to a
set of problems typical to Aschheim’s discourse. The chapter deals with
Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and the three leading figures of the Frank-
furt School: Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. In spite of the significant
differences between their ideas—which moved between the elitist and
neoconservative Strauss to the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt school—
Aschheim still looks for certain common denominators. The departure
point can be merely biographical—all five were Jews active in Germany
 ASCHHEIM, IN TIMES OF CRISIS—MIRON 297

in the Weimar Republic, all of them were later in exile in the United
States. But this is not enough, of course, in order to discuss them in the
same article. One of Aschheim’s challenges here is to trace the impact of
the common biographic background on their thought, and more specifi-
cally on their critique on the modern social sciences.
All five figures were critics of modern mass society, as they knew it.
However, none of them formed his or her critique in the way of other
contemporary critics like Carl Schmitt or Ernst Junger. Their common
Jewish background, it seems, caused their discrete critiques of modernity
to be based on humanistic premises, not necessarily because of the Jewish
tradition (Strauss was the only one among them to relate in his work
explicitly to Jewish sources) but rather mainly because of the sensitivity
that their life as Jews in German society (on the margins, as Aschheim
says at a certain point) developed in them. They all objected in one way
or another to the positivistic-Weberian tendency for a sharp and clear
distinction between ‘‘science’’ (mostly social science) and ‘‘values’’ and
tried to suggest various alternative models for science. ‘‘All sought,’’ as
Aschheim puts it in the context of their ‘‘marginal’’ status as Jews, ‘‘anti-
reductionist, humanizing, and redeeming possibilities rather than forms
of hardness and domination’’ (p. 38). The major problems they dealt with
as well as the (ambiguous) solutions they tried to suggest are still relevant
at the turn of the twenty-first century, as we continue to struggle with
the consequences of modernity.
Chapter 8 consists of a rather short (seven pages) but, to my mind,
especially valuable observation of the field of German Jewish historiogra-
phy. Aschheim shows that the mainstream of German Jewish history has
dealt for decades with the problem of integration. However, the assump-
tion according to which there was a ‘‘standard’’ or ‘‘normative’’ German
society into which the Jews as a ‘‘minority’’ wanted to integrate looks
today to be problematic (p. 87). From this critical perspective the con-
cepts of ‘‘assimilation’’ and ‘‘integration’’ seem to be a more modern ex-
pression for the traditional apologetic discussion on the contribution
(Beitrag) of the Jews to Germany.
The alternative option that Aschheim suggests for this paradigm is
what he calls ‘‘co-constitutionality.’’ If we reject the understanding of the
German identity or Germanness (Deutschtum) as a given and normative
phenomenon, modern German history can be viewed as a creative proc-
ess of a constant recreation of ‘‘the German.’’ Such an understanding, as
well as giving up also parallel essentialist understandings of Judaism,
may pave the way to a very different understanding of the German Jew-
ish encounter. From this new perspective, various cultural and social phe-
298 JQR 96.2 (2006)

nomena from German Jewish history should be seen not as expressions

of assimilation (as Zionists critics might have seen them), Judaisation (as
anti-Semites might have it), and even not as acculturation (a more mod-
ern and ‘‘neutral’’ concept which still accepts the existence of a normative
culture) but as genuine attempts to redefine the meaning of both Jewish
and German. This anti-essentialist paradigm can open a new set of ques-
tions for the future development of the field.

Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem GUY MIRON

T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006) 299–303

ROGER F. COOK, ed. A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine. Studies in

German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden
House, 2002. Pp. xii Ⳮ 373.

The editor of this volume, Roger Cook, has brought together some very
fine Heine scholars from North America and Europe in order to produce
a collection of essays that might address those aspects of Heine which do
not fit neatly into any unified image of his career. In his introduction,
Cook expresses the rationale of the volume as an attempt to open the
main features of Heine’s work to contemporary critical approaches that
share some of its underlying assumptions. Thus, the essays regularly em-
ploy the tools and rhetoric of critical theory and modern cultural studies,
without abandoning literary critical, literary historical, and even more
traditional philological methodologies. Also, perspectives and insights
from the latest developments in German-Jewish studies have been
brought to bear on Jewish-related issues concerning Heine. Conse-
quently, the volume should be of interest to a wide range of readers.
In order to make the work broadly accessible to the English-language
readership, two of the essays were translated into English, but the quota-
tions from Heine’s work are given throughout in the original German (or,
on occasion, in French). This practice is a bit perplexing. The implied
readers of the volume would be an audience familiar with Heine in the
original, and they would have to know German to appreciate the essays
fully. I think it might have been better in this case to provide English
translations of these passages in order to enlarge the readership possibili-
ties, since the volume has much to offer, and Heine’s German is not easily
comprehensible for those with a rudimentary command of the language
or even for those with intermediate-level competence. Likewise, the ab-
breviated chronology of Heine’s life and the list of his major works, pre-
sented after the table of contents, can only provide very limited help for
the uninitiated. A more informative chronology would make the volume
more useful for a wider audience. However, Cook’s introductory explana-
tions concerning Heine’s different personae and regarding the different
editions of Heine’s works are informative and should prove to be quite
valuable for those less familiar with Heine scholarship.
Whereas Cook justifies the fact that the volume is weighted toward the
later period of Heine’s life—that is, his situation and writings after
1848—it is the essays which focus on the earlier period and on his poetic
300 JQR 96.2 (2006)

language through the 1840s that seem to me to be the most compelling.

Michael Perraudin’s essay on the ‘‘Buch der Lieder’’ presents an incisive
analysis of the work that established Heine’s international reputation. He
argues that this collection of poetry is a testament of generational disillu-
sion, straddling the gap between the world of Romantic imagination and
skeptical social and psychological realism. Perraudin reads the work con-
vincingly as one holding poetic impotence in productive tension with po-
etic power in a world where humans have lost the capacity to experience
ideality. In perhaps the most illuminating and brilliant essay in the vol-
ume, Paul Peters elucidates Heine’s erotic imagination, which blossomed
after he arrived in Paris. In close readings of the double entendres and
ironies characteristic of much of Heine’s poetic language, Peters suc-
cessfully demonstrates how irreverent and lascivious Heine’s verbal
playfulness really is. Cook’s own essay on Heine’s Romantic poetry and
historical progress raises the very difficult question of the place of Hegel
in Heine’s aesthetic development. The issue of Hegel comes up numerous
times and in various contexts throughout the collection, as in Gerhard
Höhn’s essay on Heine’s conception of history. Cook speculates, perhaps
a bit too irresponsibly, that Heine’s nearly obsessive fascination with un-
requited love in his poetry ‘‘may reflect the frustrations of a German Jew
trying to attain the status of a Romantic poet at this time in Germany’’
and ‘‘may resist a tendency to deny that a Jew could ever truly be a
German poet.’’ Maybe, but then, maybe not.
The issue of Hegel, raised by Cook, is also of concern to Willi Goetschl
in his essay on Heine’s ‘‘Joyous Philosophy.’’ Goetschl contends through-
out that he is not really interested in Heine as a philosopher per se but
instead makes a series of sweeping generalizations, characteristic of a
type of critical theory with a philosophical orientation, regarding the pos-
sibility of situating Heine and his work at the center of a postmodern
critical discourse. Nevertheless, in the course of his rather rambling and
overly ambitious essay, Goetschl states the following: Heine reconfigures
philosophy as a critical force; Heine captures the profound interlocking
of language, hermeneutics, and philosophy; Heine breaks new ground for
reimagining Hegel’s project of conceptual work; Heine’s poetics offers
attentive possibilities of imagining and realizing the boundaries of con-
ceptual thought. Of course, these exaggerated pronouncements have
more to do with the particular agenda of the observer Goetschl than with
Heine, and it is probably true that virtually any writer could serve as the
locus for these kinds of grandiose remarks, given the desire or inclination
to make them in the first place.
Two essays treat directly the issue of Heine and Jewishness. Robert
 COOK, WORKS OF HEINRICH HEINE—GELBER 301

C. Holub presents what I consider to be the most sensitive reading of the

issue of Heine’s conversion that has been written to date. Anyone who
writes on the very complex topic of Heine and Jewishness will have to
rely on work that already exists, but Holub seems to break new ground
by investigating the relationship between Heine’s activities in the Verein
für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden in Berlin with his exposure to the
possibility of conversion, which would have also occurred in Berlin in
the salon of Rachel Varnhagen von Ense. Despite the serious scholarly
difficulties of penetrating this topic, Holub carefully investigates the iden-
tity crisis Heine must have experienced in the 1820s which led to his
conversion and which continued thereafter. In his writings and in his
correspondence, Heine did not leave much for an observer to go on in
this regard. And in any case, he is not always a reliable source for his
own life and experiences. Nevertheless, by subtly evaluating a series of
distortions, displacements, and refractions of the conversion experience
in Heine’s writings, Holub argues forcefully that it must have been a
traumatic event with long-lasting personal and literary consequences. De-
spite his own warnings about Heine’s unreliability, Holub appears to me
to be too willing to accept some of what Heine reports and which I think
cannot be taken as truthful, for example, Heine’s (to my mind) totally
fictitious quotations of Börne on conversion or Heine’s uncorroborated
claim to have penned a two-volume study on Hegel’s philosophy (which
he supposedly destroyed). Also, it is not really fair of Holub to categorize
Eduard Gans, the Hegelian convert, in the way that he does, along with
Karl Marx, who was also influenced decisively by Hegel, because Marx
was actually converted by his father when he was a child. Although
Holub cites S. S. Prawer’s magisterial work, Heine’s Jewish Comedy (Ox-
ford, 1983), which devotes many pages to Gans and to other figures and
aspects related to Heine’s conversion, Holub’s essay does not draw nearly
enough from Prawer’s important contribution to this area of research.
However, Holub does make a very significant point when he argues that
using the rubric ‘‘German-Jewish writer’’ is too just facile and ultimately
useless in the case of Heine.
The second essay on the Jewish issue is by Jeffrey A. Grossman; it
relies on a model of cultural appropriation offered by Roger Chartier in
order to formulate a bold thesis concerning the Jewish issue. Grossman
claims that Heine appropriates cultural elements, symbols, texts, and
figures, which already have meaning in a given German or Jewish con-
text or discourse, and then incorporates them in his texts to produce an
alternative discourse and alternative cultural space in Germany. This
space is directly related to Heine’s Jewishness, but also to his critique of
302 JQR 96.2 (2006)

German culture. Heine’s appropriations challenge, according to Gross-

man, the constraints imposed in Germany on Jewish culture. It is not an
easy thesis to prove, I think, and as the essay plods its way through the
relevant material and dutifully reaches its conclusion, in the end it ap-
pears that instead of an actual proof of the thesis, there are rather a series
of repetitions of the thesis, paraphrased differently perhaps each time it
is reformulated. The essay focuses first on an unlikely example, ‘‘Deut-
schland. Ein Wintermärchen,’’ which is not normally cited in discussions
of Heine and Jewish issues. And, I think Grossman successfully demon-
strates how Heine deflates the norms of German and Jewish culture alike
in the poem. Grossman also devotes a good portion of his essay to Heine’s
travelogue ‘‘Über Polen,’’ a somewhat neglected text in the Heine canon.
Here, he shows convincingly how Heine’s text is a reading of David
Friedländer’s polemical essay, ‘‘Über die Verbesserung der Israeliten im
Königreich Polen.’’ While Heine’s text may be cited as an early example
of the perception of a divide between Western Jews and East European
Jewry, his criticisms of the Eastern Jews surprisingly yield to his own
critical comments on Western Jews and to his attempt to praise the
authenticity of the Eastern Jews. This topic would become of major im-
portance to world Jewry after Heine’s death, with far-reaching conse-
quences. Grossmann includes a fair amount of textual analysis in his
essay, but he does not seem to grasp (or he does not convey) how wildly
hilarious some of Heine’s literary and poetic formulations are in this re-
gard. Heine is a writer whom one can still read today, and when one
does, one finds oneself laughing out loud uncontrollably. His brilliant wit
and boundless satiric humor appear to be eternal. For example, in the
remarks concerning Heine’s spoof on the Jewish nouveau riche, the con-
verts, and the Reform in ‘‘Die Bäder von Lucca,’’ Grossman seems not
to perceive this aspect at all, despite his analysis of Heine’s uproarious
neologism ‘‘Papagoyim,’’ which Grossmann does call a pun and soberly
explains as ‘‘parroting the goyim.’’ Furthermore, Grossman is aware of
Heine’s satire, but he does not demonstrate how one can differentiate
between the satire of Jews in the anti-Semitic dramatic work of Sessa
and Voss and his own satire of German Jewry.
The idea that some of Heine’s poetry or that his allegiances in the
final period were modernist is argued by Anthony Phelan in his essay on
archetypes of modernity in the later poetry, and also by Paul Reitter in
his essay on Heine and the discourse of mythology. Phelan links Heine
to Baudelaire, a great admirer of Heine, and to Walter Benjamin, by
focusing on the way art is reduced to a commodity in some of Heine’s
late writing; in the way art and life (and death!) are desacralized by the
 COOK, WORKS OF HEINRICH HEINE—GELBER 303

everyday; and by the way the modern city becomes for Heine too the
final resting place of an exhausted tradition. Reitter is mostly interested
in the resignification of mythical figures in the late Heine, and their con-
nection to his incipient modernism. Thus, a good case is made for the
appropriation of Heine by modernist sensibilities. Joseph A. Kruse’s ap-
preciation of the last years of Heine’s life, 1848–56, the period of his
illness, suffering, paralysis, and tragic confinement, presents a bleak de-
scription of the living hell that was Heine’s until his death. At the same
time, as Kruse shows, this condition yielded in Heine ‘‘an amazing variety
of fresh insights and new perspectives,’’ as well as important literary
works. Thus, a sense of the mysterious is conveyed, which somehow
argues for the contemporary relevance of Heine into the twenty-first
century.
The last essay in the volume, written by George F. Peters, treats Heine
and politics from a reception point of view. It is definitely important to
give some weight to this context, since one of his important personae is
that of the politically engaged writer and poet. Peters explores why Heine
was never embraced by liberal-democratic intellectuals and artists during
the Weimar period. Of course, there were a few exceptions like Heinrich
Mann and Alfred Kerr, whom Peters mentions, and who both were quite
enthusiastic about Heine in their own ways. For Heinrich Mann, Heine
was the prototype of the European German. Nevertheless, their impact
was negligible at the time, and certainly insufficient to reverse the domi-
nant trend of avoidance. However, as Europe continues to develop in the
direction of more extensive cultural unification under the banner of lib-
eral democracy, perhaps the fate and reception of Heine in Germany and
in Europe altogether will prove to be kinder and more and more positive.

Ben-Gurion University MARK H. GELBER

T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006) 304–306

JOAN B. WOLF. Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France.

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stan-
ford University Press, 2004. Pp. x Ⳮ 249.

Writing on the Holocaust in France, from 1945 to 1967, although not

completely impossible—in fact, some interesting books on that subject
were published in the aftermath of the Second World War—was in any
case infrequent. There was no particular word intended to refer to the
destruction of the French (or the European) Jews, since neither the
American word ‘‘Holocaust’’ nor the Hebrew word ‘‘Shoah’’ was used in
French before the 1970s. And the history of the destruction of the Jews
was not even a chapter in the history of the war in general as it was
then taught in schools and colleges. In most cases, the Holocaust was not
anything more than a footnote.
As Joan B. Wolf shows in her book, the situation changed dramatically
with the Six-Day War. In June 1967, the Jews of France felt for first
time that the fragile existence of Israel was in real danger, and that its
possible disappearance might be for them a second ‘‘Holocaust.’’ During
those six hectic days, (non-Jewish) French public opinion was, for the
first and the last time, largely favorable to Israel. Very soon after that,
France turned back progressively to the Arab perspective on the conflict.
French Jews had to adapt, in turn, to that new situation. They did it by
choosing, in the first place, to speak, write, and publish more often about
the Holocaust and the trauma it had left in the Jewish consciousness.
The last survivors, feeling that they were becoming old, decided to break
with their former silence. The field of Holocaust studies became then, in
a few years, a significant one for Jewish and non-Jewish historians as
well. And it carried, as it was easy to foresee, political stakes in French
society as a whole.
In the next thirty years, the period of French history that Wolf ex-
plores, the words ‘‘Holocaust’’ and ‘‘genocide’’ were regularly used in
French politics in order to denote to the sufferings of the Palestinians in
the occupied territories and the massacres of the Armenians in Turkey
(1915) or of the Cambodian population under the Khmer Rouge. They
were also applied to the Atlantic slave trade and the massacre of Native
Americans, and even to persecutions against homosexuals. In spite of its
efforts to conserve the original meaning of the word ‘‘Holocaust,’’ the
French Jewish community felt, as a result, that its own unique history
 WOLF, HARNESSING THE HOLOCAUST—DELACAMPAGNE 305

was not properly recognized, and discovered that it was not as fully inte-
grated in the French nation as it had believed.
Although Wolf’s thesis is, to some extent, correct, a French reader will,
however, disagree with some of her assumptions, in part because most of
them are based only on a close reading of French newspapers (which
give a necessarily distorted perception of the reality), rather than on first-
hand information and interviews with real people.
It is wrong to assume, for instance, that the American television film
Holocaust (p. 71) and Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (p. 151) met a favor-
able welcome in France: the first of those films was unanimously criti-
cized, and the second was very controversial. It is equally wrong to say
‘‘Algerian Jews’’ (p. 89) when speaking of Jewish persons born in Alge-
ria with French citizenship, and I doubt that my colleague Shmuel Tri-
gano would like to think of himself as ‘‘a Sephardi professor of Jewish
thought’’ (p. 99), although he, as a French sociologist, is very much inter-
ested in Jewish issues. On the contrary, Guy Sorman, who is a writer,
will be happy to be called ‘‘a respected professor of politics’’ (p. 157).
Still more worrisome, it is wrong to give the reader the impression that
the slaughter of the Armenians in Turkey was not a real genocide (p.
110), or that the massacres in Sabra and Chatila were accomplished by
Syrians rather than by Lebanese Christians (p. 103), or that the bomb-
ings on Rue Copernic and Rue des Rosiers (see chapter 4) were the work
of French activists of the extreme right, when Palestinian terrorists were
actually responsible.
This very last error is particularly embarrassing, since it is not only a
factual error but the kind of historical distortion that can unfortunately
prevent the author (and the reader) from understanding what has really
been at stake those thirty years: the renaissance, under the mask of anti-
Zionism, of a left-wing anti-Semitism which takes its roots in nineteenth-
century French leftist thought (mainly Proudhon and Toussenel). Along
the same lines, it is to be regretted that Wolf has not effectively tried to
understand the French notion of citizenship. From a French point of
view, the religious affiliation of a person is not a constitutive element of
his of her citizenship. Religion is not denied; it is simply considered as a
private issue. In this respect, it is not necessarily self-contradictory to be
both French and Jewish. In fact, many people today go on sharing this
twofold situation. And this is one of the reasons why the French Jewish
community is still, in Western Europe, the most important one.
Strangely enough, such distortions might have been easily corrected, if
only Wolf had read the last volume of Léon Poliakov’s History of Anti-
Semitism, which contains a chapter on France covering exactly the same
306 JQR 96.2 (2006)

period as she tries to cover in her own book. But while she mentions the
first three volumes of this monumental enterprise in her bibliography, she
does not seem to know that a fourth volume has already been translated
into English (by the University of Pennsylvania Press), and that the fifth
one is easily accessible in French. Too bad.

The Johns Hopkins University CHRISTIAN DELACAMPAGNE