From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture Amelia Glaser From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture. Matthew Hoffman. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. 304. $60.00 (cloth). Exactly a century ago a particularly heated debate filled the pages of the American Yiddish journal, Dos Naye Lebn. The discussion was at once age-old and shockingly modern: does the crucifixion have anything to offer Jewish literature? The loudest voices in the 1909 “cross-question” (tseylem-frage) belonged to Chaim Zhitlovsky, who liked the idea of Yiddish literature embracing universal themes, and S. Ansky, who called for authentically Jewish imagery. In his excellent literary study, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew Hoffman suggests that this kind of conflict cut to the heart of much larger questions facing Jews at the turn of the twentieth century: “On what basis does Jewishness now rest? How can one be both Jewish and Western at the same time? What elements of Jewish tradition are still valid?” (62) Hoffman examines Jewish writers’ and artists’ fascination with Jesus from the nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) through the Holocaust. Of particular interest to Hoffman is the modernist Christ. The 1909 debate took place in an American journal, but the Yiddish stories that sparked it, Sholem Asch’s “In a Carnival Night” (“In a Karnival Nakht”) and L. Shapiro’s “The Cross” (“Der Tseylem”), are tales of European antisemitism. Shapiro’s protagonist is a pogrom survivor whose forehead has been scarred with two slashes in the shape of a cross. Once bearing the cruciform mark of Cain, he is compelled to seek his own scapegoat. He finds one in a non- Jewish woman—a fellow revolutionary and the object of his desire. He rapes and murders her. The more ecumenical Sholem Asch portrays a sympathetic Jesus. Set in medieval Rome, “In a Carnival Night” depicts a mob during the Catholic carnival hunting a Jewish martyr. Jesus descends from his cross in solidarity with the city’s Jewish population. The story foreshadowed Asch’s later Jesus trilogy, a logorrheic Yiddish retelling of various aspects of the New Testament that stirred rumors Asch had converted to Catholicism. The Jewish modernist Christ could represent either the ultimate evil or the potential for salvation. Hoffman contends: “These works, with their combination of cosmopolitan universalism, Jewish martyrology, symbolic syncretism, and occasional anti-Christian polemical stridency, reflect the paradoxical currents that informed Jewish modernism in general: a tension between old and new, Jewish and Christian, particular and universal, secular and religious, personal and national” (119). Indeed the cross, a ubiquitous but taboo religious symbol, was a sharp tool in the hands of the Jewish modernist, be it as a means of exposing the hypocrisy of Christian antagonists, or as a brazen reclamation of a Jewish Jesus. Of course, the cross was also an ironic symbol for non-Jewish modernists mocking or mourning the inefficacy of Christianity in the face of war. Take the ambiguous ending to Alexander Blok’s 1918 “The Twelve,” in which twelve Red Army-men march: “Behind them, a hungry dog . . . Before them, Jesus Christ.” Throughout the twentieth century Yiddish and Hebrew writers including H. Leyvik, Uri Tsvi Grinberg, and Peretz Markish, as well as a number of Jewish visual artists, the most famous being Mark Chagall, portrayed Jesus in their work. Christian iconography, whether presented with irony, empathy, blasphemy, or animosity, offered Jewish readers a willfully estranged symbol for suffering. The violence in Eastern Europe that increased because of the First World War and the Russian revolution haunted Yiddish writers, even those in the United States. Moyshe Leyb Halpern, in his 1916 poem, “A Nakht,” writes: “Blood drips from my hands and feet . . . and all around the cross, / My tormenters strike up a grim dance.” (150) Uri Tsvi Grinberg’s “Uri Tsvi [End Page 818] Before the Cross” (“Uri Tsvi Farn Tseylem,” 1922) was printed in the shape of a cross. Hoffman observes, “Through the use of such ‘self-crucifixion’ imagery, the poetic speaker expresses his personal sense of torment and alienation, a theme that recurred in the...