Jews – From Under the Fig Tree

Countdown

joselitJune 10, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

At first blush, numbers seem to be nothing if not neutral, especially when compared with words. Language makes known its intentions from the get-go; numbers, in contrast, don’t freely divulge their meaning and are susceptible to all manner of manipulation.

Little wonder, then, that modern-day Jews have had a fraught relationship with the quantitative imagination. The recent brouhaha over CUNY’s decision to institute “White/Jewish” as a category by which to enumerate and identify its faculty is but the latest in a long series of entangled encounters between the Jews and the numerical.

On the one hand, modern-day Jews once put their faith in numbers, trusting to them to set things right. Determined to prove that Jewish men had participated actively and fully in World War I, the Jews in both the Old World and the New turned to the statistical record.

Equally determined to prove that their coreligionists had not wantonly taken up a life of crime, American Jewry’s cultural custodians of the early 20^th century scoured the criminal docket for numerical proof that the proportion of Jewish malefactors in no way exceeded the proportion of Jews in the population.

Meanwhile, in the late 1920s, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations made excellent use of charts and graphs and other quantitative devices to explore the extent to which Reform Jews at the grass roots attended religious services, furnished their home with ritual objects, read books of Jewish content and actively identified themselves as American Jews.

But then, with the revelation that American universities had made ample use of a numerically-based quota system to contain the percentage of Jews among the nation’s undergraduates, American Jewry’s attitude towards numbers underwent a sea-change: from wholesale embrace to disenchantment. ...continue reading "Countdown"

Here, there and everywhere

joselitFebruary 21, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Princeton’s Cotsen Children’s Library is justly celebrated for the range of its holdings, the imaginative reach of its curators and its stimulating conferences, like the one I had the good fortune to attend just the other day, which explored the ephemera -- the stuff -- of childhood.

Alice in Wonderland — Credit: Wikipedia.

From its title, “Enduring Trifles,” to the fascinating constellation of its presentations, which encompassed such “trifles” as toy theater, writing sheets, paper and rag dolls, grammar books, Girl Guide badges and Moses action figures (my contribution to the proceedings), I knew I was in for a treat.

What I didn’t anticipate was the degree to which references to the Jews would surface time and again -- and in the most curious ways, leaving me feeling a bit like Alice in Wonderland.

For starters, our packet of informational materials included a brochure, playfully titled “More Tigers Spotted in the Cotsen Children’s Library,” -- an allusion to Princeton’s mascot -- which featured an illustration of a fierce, red-eyed tiger by El Lissitsky. The illustration accompanied Bentsiyon Raskin’s 1919 Yiddish children’s book, Di hun vas gevolt hobn a kam (The Hen Who Wanted a Comb).

Another Cotsen find was Aunt Fanny’s Junior Jewish Cookbook. This 1950s childrens’ cookbook was the subject of an insightful paper by my student Rachel Gross, who looked at the ways in which draydel salad and other fanciful postwar delights of the table placed culinary fun rather than filial responsibility at the center of young Jewish lives.

By far the biggest, and most eye-opening, revelation came from Matthew Grenby of Newcastle University. His inquiry into the ways in which politics informed 18th century children’s literature drew on an adventure story published in the Lilliputian Magazine, a periodical intended for young readers. In this yarn, citizens of the 18th century escape the ills of modern-day Britain by establishing a utopian society in faraway Madascagar.

In many respects, this tale resembled any number of island stories then popular with the reading public. (Think Robinson Crusoe.) Yet, as Prof. Grenby astutely pointed out, all sorts of coded and not-so-coded references to the controversial ‘Jew Bill’ of 1752, which dangled the possibility of granting the Jews civil rights, were embedded in this seemingly lighthearted narrative.

We tend to look for observations about the Jewish historical experience in the usual places. What I took away from the Cotsen conference was that they are just as likely to pop up where we least expect them.

Money matters

joselitNovember 1, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Many moons ago, when I was a graduate student in Jewish history happily spending my days doing little else but reading, one of the most intriguing books I encountered was not Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed, or Transactions of the Paris Sanhedrin or, for that matter, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism but Werner Sombart's The Jews and Economic Life.

money — Creative commons licensed image by Flickr user Tracy O.

Published in German in 1911, this work sought to account for why, time and again throughout history, the Jews were to be found on one side, and one side only, of the ledger book--the side that placed a premium on money, on matters mercantile, rather than on agriculture and the production of organic matter. How was it, Sombart asked, that the Jews seemed characterologically drawn to capitalism?

Instead of turning to the usual suspects for answers--to statistics, say, or government records--the German sociologist turned to Judaism or, more to the point, to the desert where Judaism was born. Linking religion to topography and culture to climate, he allowed how the religion of a rootless, desert people accustomed to reckoning with the hard, tree-less environment of the desert gave birth to a way of thinking that rewarded abstraction. And, in the fullness of time, this predilection for abstraction flowered into capitalism.

Wild, wooly, fanciful and fantastic, Sombart's theory drew me like the proverbial moth to the flame. Whether it was right or wrong, grounded in a willful misreading of the Bible or a skillful, daring reinterpretation of it--none of this mattered to me. What mattered was the way Sombart transformed a mode of thinking into a cultural position, a way of being in the world, a social value. To put it another way, I liked the way Sombart thought.

His conclusions, laced with a kind of racism that precluded change, was something else again. But his imaginative process was nothing less than captivating, prompting me to range a bit more freely in my own work on the modern Jewish experience.

It's been years since I've had Sombart in my thoughts. But now, thanks to Jerry Muller's provocative and perceptive new book, Capitalism and the Jews, Sombart is back in my sights.

Muller's lucid and gracefully written account not only devotes a couple of pages to Sombart's musings about the Jews but also makes abundantly--and at times even painfully clear--how money is not simply an economic transaction but a cultural and social phenomenon, whose consequences transcend the marketplace.

Money has meaning, a social meaning, especially when it comes to figuring out the place of the Jews in the modern world.