History and Martyrological Tragedy: The Jewish Experience in Sholem Asch and Andre Schwarz-Bart

Abstract

In Isaiah 43:11-12, God, after instructing His servant, Israel, that beside Me there is no saviour, imposes the awesome obligation: Therefore ye are my witnesses . . . that am God. A rabbinic midrash or exegesis offers this meaning: When you are my am God, and when you are not my am, as it were, not God.(1) The biblical text and response embody the potentially tragic crisis for both individual and community who may be called upon to the [of God]--Kiddush haShem--by suffering martyrdom, the act of witnessing whose imperative is declared in Lev. 22:32: Neither shall ye profane my Holy Name, but will be hallowed among the children of Israel: am the Lord which hallow you. While the act of Kiddush haShem affirms God's spiritual sovereignty, there also seems little doubt that a major consequence of martyrdom bears directly upon the necessity of witnessing God's salvational history grounded in and shaped by the Covenant, exile, testing, suffering, faith, sin and punishment, expiation and messianic hopes of redemption. God's divine primacy, as the biblical narratives (Exodus, above all) and their commentaries attest, is manifested in His power as a Lord of history. Thus, when the crisis of whether or not to the Name appears in times of persecution and ideological strife, the very meaning of history itself is placed in theological jeopardy. When you are not my witnesses, the midrash insists, I am, as it were, not God. To remove God from history is, then, a desecration of the Name--Hillul haShem--perhaps the most shattering violation of all. For while the failure to witness cannot affect the ontological nature of God or thwart His providential design, it can, for those seeking order and purpose in the apparent chaos of history, either destroy it or render it so problematic that what remains is a form of existential despair. And yet the grand irony is that there is also an inherent tragic knowledge in the reality that countless individuals have witnessed with their lives to the honor of God and the integrity of His revealing historical plan. The putative martyr is nevertheless faced with a tragic dilemma: if the individual fails to witness, God and divine history are betrayed; but to pass the test of sacrifice and to sanctify God's presence in the historical moment means death. As Max Weber has termed it, martyrdom is the of absolute ends.(2) Moreover, it is an ethic fraught with a genuine tragic content which has been thematically exploited by both secular and religious writers, most markedly from the seventeenth century to the present.(3) This ethic energizes the very form of martyrological drama and other genres whose appearance and popularity in Judeo-Christian culture characterize the response of the artist to those historical and ideological clashes which rarely admit of a reconciliation or solution except through death. Most significantly, martyrological tragedy in particular becomes a theological commentary on both the tragic and redemptive nature of history itself. Conceived as either an irony-laden providential order or a random process upon which meaning must be subjectively conferred, history inevitably creates those situations which demand the need for a total commitment to some abiding or absolute truth. Martyrdom is thus a fated condition of the historical process. The testimony incarnated in the martyr's death is the tragic ground of this process. From this perspective, individual artistic statements about the nature of God, martyrdom, and history independent of any formal dogma, may be fairly--if loosely--called literary theologoumena or, in generic terms, the trauerspiel (mourning-tragedy), whose influence on the development of a non-Aristotelian esthetic of tragedy Walter Benjamin seminally analyzed in 1928. A central tenet of Benjamin's study is that the royal martyr-tyrant tragedies of seventeenth-century German baroque drama embody the shift from the classical mythos of heroic sacrifice to the realm of history. …