[The Montana Professor 15.2, Spring 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Melvin Konner
New York: Viking Compass, 2003
500 pp., $29.95 hc
Philip Pinkus
English (Emeritus)
University of British Columbia
Unsettled is a hugely ambitious undertaking. It is not of a time and place but of all times and all places. You would expect it to be a history rather than an anthropology of the Jews because the book begins with the prehistoric genesis of the Jews in Israel and ends with Israel today and its prospects for the future and there is a form of chronological development. But Konner explicitly makes the point that Unsettled is not a history. There is no clear logical sequence leading to a resolution. Incidents, details, sometimes whole chapters pop up without transitional context. Yet Unsettled gripped me without letup from the opening pages to the end.
The title gives the book its very loose direction. It is a drama of survival spanning some 4000 years of a small group of people who have made immense contributions to Western civilization, while enduring continual persecution and massacre, being driven from country to country, dispersed around the world, and still today not absolutely confident they are accepted fully in the lands they call their home, accepted without reservation, without a lingering feeling in their collective minds that one day, once more, they will be attacked and driven out not for what they have done but simply for what they are, the Jews, the unsettled ones.
History, especially covering so vast a period, is essentially linear and chronological, establishing connections and relationships, imposing a rational construct on human experience which in fact does not exist. Professor Konner tries to come closer to the experience of ordinary people by ranging back and forth in history, using history only as "anchor points" around which he clusters patterns of the Jewish experience unconfined by chronology. What he is trying to do in Unsettled perhaps cannot be approached by history or by any expository form. Unsettled seems to be an attempt to describe the soul and spirit of a people that held them together over the millennia in spite of repeated attempts to annihilate them.
From his anthropological perspective Konner can not only go deep into the origins and emerging society of the Jewish people, describe what they believe in and how they come to believe it, describe their rituals and customs, but he can also describe in some depth their folk lore, their myths and superstitions, even their songs, their jokes, the stories they told themselves, their poetry, their art, all of which come closer to that transcendent feeling in the heart of a people that tells us who they are.
What emerges is a portrait in depth of a unique people, not particularly a light unto the nations--though better than some--imprinted with the patina of 4000 years of civilization, yet still vibrant, still actively shaping society today. In the background of this portrait is the immense span of western civilization, the rise and fall of mighty empires, the volcanic eruption of Christianity and Islam. The enormous reach of this one-volume work is dazzling.
Melvin Konner is a medical doctor and professor of anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta and has published in both disciplines. In many respects Unsettled is his own personal odyssey in search of an answer to several questions which ultimately dissolve into one. How could such a tiny minority of the world's population attract so much attention over so vast a period of time? How could this tiny minority be such a thorn in the side of vast and mighty empires over so many years? And after so many pogroms, so many holocausts, after being driven out again and again from countries where they had lived for hundreds of years, even millennia, and having to start all over again, how can they still be here, still an identifiable people, still a major factor in our world? These are the mysteries at the heart of this book which the author tries to explore.
Of course there can be no clear answer to such questions. But the search adds an element of drama and passion to the book and he concludes in a tone of admiration, almost a celebration, of this tiny segment of the world's population who have endured so much and contributed so much to civilization.
If there is a single thread that holds the book together it is the Torah, the Old Testament of the Christian Bible subtly revised to fit the Christian message. Konner brings to his study of the Torah an impressive amount of erudition. If we examine the Torah as history, he points out, we find no corroborative evidence that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ever lived. Except for the Torah, there is no decisive proof that the Israelis were ever slaves in Egypt or that a leader, Moses, led them away into the desert and freedom, no proof that they walked for 40 years or that the Ten Commandments were brought down from Sinai or that they conquered the land of Canaan and made it their home. In fact, every piece of scholarly evidence we have shows that the Jews were an indigenous people and lived in Canaan from the beginning of civilization.
Yet, as an anthropological document, Konner continues, the Torah is a beautifully poetic, powerfully dramatized work that presents a different kind of truth, giving us enormous insight into the minds and hearts of the people who carried the Torah with them in and out of Israel for 3500 years, and in some form for at least 1500 years before that, carried it to almost every corner of the earth to which they were dispersed. Anthropologically, the Torah is a record of their aspirations and beliefs, their rules of behaviour, and ultimately of how they should serve their one supreme God of all the gods. It is this document, sanctified by the Jews as the earthly manifestation of their God, their "God in the clouds," as Juvenal derisively commented, with its ethical commandments, its stories, its drama, its evocative poetry, that has been adopted by almost half the world and is perhaps the single most important document in the whole of Western society.
To be Jewish in the fullest sense of the word is to believe that the Torah is the word of God, to be studied and interpreted and discussed and argued over and even questioned, but always out of belief. Even the commentary on the Torah, the Talmud, is given the same pious attention. To study the Word, hone your analytic skills by pursuing the meaning of the Word in its fullest sense, even to devote your life to it, became the most honoured of Jewish activities. When their Temple was destroyed and they were driven from their land it was their belief in the Torah that kept the exiled Jews together and gave them their sense of themselves as a people. No matter where they went, the sacred Book went with them. Yet embedded in the Torah were the beautiful words written 3500 years ago during the Babylonian captivity, in the first of their diasporas where "they sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept, as they remembered Zion." Throughout the whole of the Diaspora, Konner points out, the Jewish longing to return to Jerusalem has been at the centre of their faith.
As the centuries unfolded the longing became more symbolic, a Messianic dream of a land of transcendent peace and beauty where they would no longer be outsiders living in an alien land under sufferance, fearing the next pogrom, but home and safe at last and their 2000 year odyssey would be over. Only in the late 19th century did the dream become alive and urgent. Konner's approach to this theme and others in his book is for the most part scholarly and even-handed, yet the drama and emotion of the story that emerges is inescapable.
Despite the importance of the Torah and religion, the Jews, he points out, are more than their religion, they are a people. They are the people who were the Hebrews, the Israelites and ultimately the Jews, with identifiable common qualities carved out "by dint of culture and history." Much of this book goes to outlining what these qualities are. From the beginning, he points out, the Jews "had a book in one hand and a sword in the other." He rejects the stereotype of the Jews as a mild-mannered, studious people, unwilling to defend themselves, a stereotype that Hannah Arendt built on in describing the Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. They fought hard against the mighty empires of Egypt, Babylon, Syria, and Rome until they were overrun. It was their continued resistance that led the Romans to lay waste the entire country and drive almost the entire people into a 2000 year Diaspora. Wherever they lived in the Diaspora they fought loyally for the country. During the Holocaust it took the Germans longer to subdue the Warsaw Ghetto than it took them to conquer the whole of France. The Jews had to fight in order to survive, but mostly, Konner tells us, it was a fight for justice.
Ordinarily when we think of the history of the Jews we think of persecution and suffering. This is not Konner's emphasis. The massacres, the pogroms, the expulsions, are facts of history, but to Konner they are the "anchor points" around which he builds his portrait. His focus is on how the Jews responded to these disasters, what they contributed to the countries that sheltered them, the gifts the Jews brought to civilization despite or because of the hardships, because these are the qualities that identify them as a people. Much of what Konner writes here has been covered before in dozens of books. What makes this book unique is not only his anthropological approach, his wide-ranging knowledge of many disciplines, the enormous span of history he covers, but the clarity of his analysis, all of which provide a new perspective and a deeper understanding of the Jewish experience.
Konner makes the obvious distinction between the attacks on the Jews before Christianity became a political power and afterwards. Before, when the Jews became captives of powerful empires, the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Syrian, and finally the Roman, they were attacked for military or political reasons. After, they were attacked because they were Jews, and this changed the whole pattern of Jewish history. The irony is that had it not been for a strange twist of history, the followers of Jesus might have remained merely a sibling offshoot of Judaism. It was a vision of a cross in the sky in the year 306 that led the Roman Emperor Constantine to convert to Christianity, which at once made it the state religion of the world's most powerful empire.
In 325, with the Council of Nicea, Jesus was declared divine, the crucifixion and resurrection became doctrine, and the Jews were decreed the killers. Christianity had become the Church. It was the Romans who ruthlessly destroyed Israel and dispersed its population around the world. It was the Church that transformed a military response into a new virulent form of persecution. How ironic, Konner remarks, that Christ, the god of love and forgiveness, became the inspiration for 2000 years of relentless vengeance.
Konner traces the paths of the Jews as they dispersed across north Africa, into India, China, and parts of Europe. In Asia the Jews were not molested. Under Muslim rule the Jews as a conquered people were considered inferior and often attacked, though never with the severity of Christian Europe. Yet in Muslim Spain, with some few lapses, from the 7th to the 15th centuries, the Sephardic Jews, that is, the Jews of Spain, were sufficiently tolerated to create with the Arabs the highest level of civilization in Europe. Together they translated Greek and Roman manuscripts, introducing them to the rest of Europe, and helped initiate the Renaissance. This was one of several golden ages for Jewish scholarship that led to an outpouring of literature and music, both religious and secular, beautiful love poems and prayers, and with this, a constant theme through the years, the wistful longing for Jerusalem.
Konner quotes a melancholy prayer from the Sephardic poet, Judah Halevy, which entered the permanent liturgy:
My heart is in the East
But I dwell in the West.
I eat without taste,
Live without joy or rest.
How easy in my eyes to leave
This Spanish life of mine,
Just to see with those same eyes
The dust of the ruined Shrine.
The last 200 years of their life in Spain the Jews suffered repeated massacres and forced conversions. Finally, in 1492, the Christian monarchs gained sufficient power to expel both Jews and Moors, the Jews having lived in Spain for 1500 years, the Moors for 700. For the next 500 years this experience would become almost a commonplace for the Jews in Europe.
At this point in the book a pattern emerges where the authorial voice of the scholar is being joined by the voice of its Jewish author. Konner remains no less careful and objective, as we see, for example, in his blunt description of Jewish gangsters in the United States in the 1920s and '30s, but increasingly there is a note of admiration, for the Jewish ability to defy and endure. He seems to be saying that for 3000 years they, the gentiles, have tried to annihilate us and they have not succeeded. We are still here, still very much an important part of the human race. This is who we are, this is what we have accomplished as a people, and we are not going to go away. It is this blend of scholarship and passion that makes this book profoundly moving.
Konner, we have noted, spends little time on the hardships of continual persecution and expulsion, on the overall restrictions of their ghettoized lives but on how the Jews lived. Yet, when a response to the massacres becomes memorable, this he dwells on because it reflects the Jewish spirit, which is at the centre of this book. Rashi, one of the greatest of Jewish rabbis and thinkers, responded to the Crusaders' massacre of the Jews in Germany by warning God "if there be no Israel thy praises to sing, thou art indeed silenced in every mouth and throat." Konner calls the Jews the God-wrestlers, evocative of Jacob wrestling the angel: "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me." Here he touches on one of the principal elements of Jewish belief, the particularly personal I/Thou relationship to God. We see this in Abraham, who at Sodom and Gomorrah offered to teach God about justice. We see it most dramatically in Job, who says, "I am sick of life./ It is all one; therefore I say, / He destroys the blameless and the guilty." Even the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, cries out at his crucifixion, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The most direct challenge to God is in a profoundly moving poem written some time between the ninth and eleventh centuries which calls God to account, "The Poet's Commandments to God":
Thou shalt not ignore the one who cries to Thee from his heart.
Thou shalt not despise the wretch who begs for mercy.
Thou shalt not scorn the lowly poor before Thee.
Thou shalt not drive Thy creature off empty-handed................................
Thou shalt not scorn my plea when I stand poor before you....
Thou shalt not recoil from me, my Rock, my God, my refuge.
Thou shalt not forget my trouble, for who can weigh my shame.
Thou shalt not hide when I beg: let my sighs come before Thee!
The cry for justice, even from the Lord, calling on the Lord to fulfill His part of the covenant, in my experience, is unique to Judaism. Perhaps it is because as a people they have suffered so much. But it is also because there is no intermediary between the Jew and his God. He can speak to Him directly. The question of justice from a just God is universal. But when you are face to face with your God the question becomes profoundly dramatic. At the time of the Holocaust the question becomes all the more acute. Konner quotes the poet, Rabbi David Blumenthall, "Facing the Abusing God":
May God...
Who injures, destroys and harms beyond reason,
Who also loves graciously, and is compassionate, and cares....
The fight for justice, Konner says, is at the heart of the Jewish experience and one of the most distinctive qualities of the Jewish people.
Unsettled is at times a beautifully written book, at times sloppy, repetitive, and disorganized. Whole chapters are inserted, seemingly without a contextual transition. One of his chapters, "Brightness," is simply a jumble of Jewish achievements without logical sequence. Konner repeats themes and ideas to no advantage. Yet none of this seems to matter because it all seems to enrich the portrait, an impressionist rather than a representational portrait, of the Jewish spirit.
Unsettled displays an enormous breadth of learning, bringing together many disciplines that give us a richly textured insight into the Jewish people throughout history, and he presents this in the framework of a very personal, almost painful search for understanding. The question he raises at the beginning of the book, why have we paid so much attention to such a tiny minority of the world's population, is of course not answered. But the complexity of the problem is made clear and the place of the Jewish people in history is brought home with passionate clarity.
[The Montana Professor 15.2, Spring 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]