The Hebrew Imperative

By Ruth Wisse
Professor, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Reprinted from Commentary, June 1990, by permission; all rights reserved

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoning lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles, from her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your stories pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, "The New Colossus," written in 1883 and affixed to the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1903, was an act of cultural appropriation. The French republicans who conceived the notion of a Statue of Liberty in the aftermath of the American Civil War; the sculptor and architect who designed the monument; and the people of France who presented it as a gift to the people of the United states—all had a very particular idea in mind. This was to be a statue of liberty, liberty seen as the quality common to Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité and "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"Liberty Enlightening the World," as the statue was originally entitled, was iconographically quite complicated. The torch in the lady’s right hand (which for a time did practical duty as a lighthouse) represented the flame of reason which had sparked the Enlightenment and ignited the French Revolution. The tablets in her left hand linked the American Declaration of ../ipendence to the Tablets of the Law at Sinai, while her majestic crown of thorns or rays evoked both martyred Christ and prophetic Moses.

In all, the statue of Liberty marked the triumph of a modern political ideal; nothing in her features or physical properties suggested maternity, and no one looking into her eyes could imagine them mild. It took Emma Lazarus to turn Liberty into the Mother of Exiles. Herself a highly acculturated American Jew who probably had been made aware of Jewish homelessness through a reading of George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, she watched the statue going up in New York harbor as she helped tend to the flood of Russian Jewish refugees newly arrived at Wards Island. To her, America was no extension of Europe but, for all those fleeing poverty and pogroms, a welcoming alternative to Europe. (Palestine was another such place of refuge, and she was for the same reason a Zionist.) Emma Lazarus’s understanding of liberty was also shaped by the biblical Exodus, with its practical gloss on what liberty requires. Because America is free, it must open its golden door to unfortunates, and the opening of the golden door to unfortunates is what makes America free.

As it fell out, so true to the American spirit was Emma Lazarus’s Jewish interpretation that her small words at the foot of the statue came utterly to redefine the massive icon. A product of the very welcome its words proclaimed, the sonnet reimagined the Statue of Liberty not just for Jews but for all Americans. The Jewish author of this poem felt sufficiently at home not merely to express the nature of her country with Emersonian authority, but to speak in her country’s name. Pointless to ask whether this is a Jewish or an American poem: the American voice is thoroughly Jewish, and the Jewish expression is avowedly American.

What is true of Emma Lazarus is true in general. Other countries forced upon Jews a choice of loyalties, exacting from them a price in ethnic distinctiveness in return for the privilege of citizenship; America did not. And so the vast majority of immigrant Jews, like most immigrants, readily considered the country not yenems, someone else’s, but their own. American Jewish culture, indeed, arose out of the creative fusion of the Anglo-American and the Jewish traditions; in many cases the process of that fusion began even before an immigrant landed on America’s shores.

Consider the eponymous hero of Abraham Cahan’s novel, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). Levinsky is one of those destitute young men fleeing persecution whom Emma Lazarus set out to welcome. Crh=14ng the Atlantic as "one of a multitude of steerage passengers on a Bremen steamship," he is still a traditional religious Jew who prays three times a day, says grace after meals and a prayer before going to sleep. But now the sanctity of the texts he knows by heart takes on the quality of personal experience:

As he approached land, the young Levinsky feels yet another connection, this one between himself, the immigrant Jew, and the pilgrims who had founded his soon-to-be home:

Two features about this immigrant Jew that would have made him alien in any European country—namely, his religious faith, and the fact that he was in flight from persecution—are precisely what qualify him as a true American, recalling and recapitulating the route traversed generations earlier by America’s founders.

Of course, Levinsky, who goes on to become a successful businessman torn by intellect and conscience, is a fictional character, and Abraham Cahan’s astonishing gifts as a cultural mediator are greatly in evidence in the passages I have cited. Cahan, the legendary editor of New York’s Yiddish newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward, wrote The Rise of David Levinsky in English, in order to calm some of the nativist fears aroused by the flood of Jewish immigrants. In the novel he shows that a Jew, though he may pray in a different language, and out of a strange little book, not only respects the myth of America, but can revitalize it.

Cahan believed this as devoutly as does his character Levinsky: for half a century under his editorship, the Forward, the most successful foreign-language daily of its day, was the chief instrument of its readers’ Americanization. It taught them American history, introduced them to American customs, offered advice on behavior and attitudes, and (to the consternation of Yiddish writers and intellectuals) promoted the use of English. Simultaneously, through his stories and novels in English, Cahan introduced America to the Jews.

These were not happy works, because Jewish immigrant life was troubled and problematic. But the troubles and problems were also typically American. The Rise of David Levinsky, for example, bears a striking resemblance to William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, the tale of a New Englander beset by analogous conflicts between the drive to succeed and the conscience. Cahan was confident that Americans could be made to feel comfortable with the Jews as the Jews got comfortable with America, because he was convinced of their common purpose. Again, pointless to ask whether Levinsky is an American novel: its Jewish character is an American archetype, and in its narrative texture the strands of style and language that are traceable to its diverse sources have blended into a unified whole.

The same holds for all the best products of American Jewish culture, past and present. Like children who sometimes resemble one parent more than they do another, these works may seem to derive more from one side or another of their fused inheritance, but who would want to separate them into their genetic influences? Anyway, the task has become hopelessly complicated over time. Contemporary novels like Saul Bellow’s Mister Sammler’s Planet or Johanna Kaplan’s O My America! Respond to American culture as it has been, by now, shaped by the Jews themselves, among others. Nor, by now, are Jews themselves the trustiest carriers of Jewish values and themes. If asked to reconstruct the "Jewish" moral imagination on the basis of American fiction, for example, I would go to the Protestant John Updike sooner than to the Jewish E.L. Doctorow; not only is Updike closer in his view of life to Jewish tradition, he has more interesting things to say about the Jews.

Yet I would be wrong to look to American literature in the first place for traits that would serve the purposes of a specifically Jewish identity. The Jewish community may take pride in the contributions of its writers and artists to American culture, but once the Jewish elements have fused into a work they cannot be extricated or even, sometimes, located. In this sense Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and the late Bernard Malamud have been correct to voice discomfort with the Jewish label that has been placed on their work. Not that they would ever deny their own Jewishness, or the plain influence of Yiddish on the cadences of their language, or the fact that their characters and their subject matter and even their themes are often recognizably Jewish. But no matter how much of the Jew goes into the making of the American work, that work contains at least as much linguistic, narrative, and thematic materials from other sources, and in any case the whole is directed toward the independent end of fiction. No one will learn Yiddish from Saul Bellow’s Herzog. The Jewish family will not be strengthened by a reading of Portnoy’s Complaint. A child cannot absorb Jewishness the way Malamud’s protagonist does from a Jewish grocer in The Assistant.

It is, of course, tempting to believe otherwise—and indeed some Jews have tried to use American Jewish literature as a means of shoring up their own and their community’s self identity. But they have invariably ended in disappointment with the text themselves for failing to live up to what is expected of them. If only (they rail) our writers would become more authentically Jewish; if only they were steeped in Hebrew and Yiddish and Talmud, suffused with love of Israel, tolerant of their fellow Jews; if only they would set themselves against assimilation—than their work would surely help, would it not?, to maintain and strengthen Jewish life. The answer is no, it would not, and it could not. Herman Wouk and Cynthia Ozick, two very different writers who are alike in being extraordinarily cultivated Jews, have explicitly taken a stand against assimilation in their work, The hero of Wouk’s novel Inside, Outside is a senior White House aide and does what he can to help Israel; in fascinating detail Wouk sets out the formative choices such a Jew must make in America. In The Cannibal Galaxy, Cynthia Ozick explores the mystery of education that is so central to the historic Jewish experience, and as part of that inquiry she tests the idea of the "dual curriculum," which is precisely the hope that a marriage of Jewish and Western sources can produce a modern, integrated Jew.

Reading these books entertains and enriches us. But what can either novel possibly contribute to Jewishness other than to organize our feelings and perhaps point us in a direction? Implicitly, the fiction of both these authors warns against mistaking the culture they are producing for the authentic works of Jewish law and faith from which (again, in very different ways) they derive their themes. Cynthia Ozick in particular is creatively obsessed with paganism and the making of idols, a category in which she includes the modern literary vocation itself. But even Ozick’s fiction, with its self-denying (and somewhat ambiguous) warning against the false promise of culture, cannot sustain or invigorate Jewishness.

An essential condition of modern culture is freedom, the freedom of the consumer as well as the creator. The writer may lead his characters into church or under the hupe, the Jewish wedding canopy; the reader may buy the book or not, and having bought it, may leave it unread. Modern culture is a matter of personal taste. This applies (though in a complicated way) to Yiddish and Hebrew literature no less than to literature in English. A generation ago many Yiddish writers and readers believed that the culture being produced in their language would be sufficient to nurture the Jewish people worldwide. But somehow the grandeur of the inheritance has been lost on their children, many of whom have filled the shelves of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, with a million unread copies of the books their parents cherished.

Modern culture rejects pledges of allegiance, daily prayer. Yet this is what the process of meaningful transmission finally comes down to. A single Yiddish poem, even a single word—God, Israel—repeated once a day, because one feels directed to do so, can help guarantee the survival of a people. Contrarily, all the world’s great books can be discounted as yesterday’s junk so long as one does not consider oneself bound by duty to inscribe them on the minds of one’s children and one’s children’s children.

The Jews are not a simple people, and their teachings cannot be summarized in a mantra. When I suggest that not choice but obligation, even to the daily recitation of a single word, is necessary for cultural survival, I hardly mean that the obligation is minimal. One of the reasons for the steady disappearance of so large a percentage of Jews throughout history is surely the difficulty and the complexity of Jewish religious civilization, and the burdens it places on membership. If anything, it is easier for a Jew to Yield up his particularism in America than elsewhere precisely because America, unlike other diasporas, shares so many of the basic values of the Jews.

The point is this: the openness and freedom provided by the American polity and its modern culture permit maximal self-expression to ethnic and religious communities while also encouraging their undifferentiated participation in the community at large. Where the Jews are concerned, it has already become clear to at least some observers that the ensuing process of acculturation must end with their collective disappearance. In a recent article, the Israeli literary critic Gershon Shaked has offered the tempting analogy of the Jewish community of ancient Alexandria, where Jews developed a remarkable culture in the Greek language and so successfully integrated themselves as to become almost totally assimilated into their environment.

Shaked thinks that the English language will swallow American Jews just as Greek swallowed the Jews of Alexandria. In a sense, his parallel does not go far enough, because on this continent the Jews are at home as they never were in ancient Egypt. Although some Alexandrian Jews were permitted to assume Greek citizenship, their political status remained a provisional one, not something that even in the best of times they could think themselves entitled to. More importantly, Hellenistic culture was seen by the Jews as other, aher, while in America a Jewish component was already implicitly present in the culture before Jews in large numbers had even begun to arrive. No other civilization has ever offered Jews the reciprocal opportunity of assuming a national identity they are at the same time entitled to shape. One simply cannot imagine an Alexandrian Jew undertaking to redefine the Colossus of Rhodes as Emma Lazarus did the new Colossus.

But this unique American hospitality may pose an even greater challenge to continued Jewish distinctiveness than Shaked imagines—the more so because, by now, most native American Jews have had their slates wiped almost clean of commandments, customs, and observances. Most young Jews in particular no longer have the option of maintaining or abrogating the "golden chain" of Jewish tradition; if they wished to retrieve that tradition, they would, like mountaineers, have to toss a roped hook across a chasm and inch their way across.

In an episode of the series thirtysomething, television’s tribute to the maturing generation of the 60's’ the Jewish character Michael wanders around a synagogue during the Christmas and Hanukkah season hoping to be touched be some compelling idea or emotion that might counteract the Christian tree his Christian wife had introduced into their home. With no apparent understanding of the meaning of the Jewish holiday, and lacking a coherent Jewish way of life, Michael is Jewish by virtue of the self-pity he feels as the member of a minority within a culturally still-Christian environment. In defense of his wistfulness, his tender wife lights a Menorah alongside the Christmas tree.

Now, suppose a Jew like Michael should come to feel the urgent claim upon him of Jewish religion and nationhood. He would have voluntarily to reimpose on himself and his children a burden of which his parents and grandparents tried valiantly to free him. He would have to do this, moreover, in full view of his fellow Americans (and even of the gentile to whom he may be joined in marriage), and without shirking his obligations or minimizing his cultural identity as an American. While it might be some comfort to know that in a nation of immigrants his predicament was not unique, for a Jew like Michael such an act of self-perpetuation would nevertheless require an enormous effort of will.

This is not to say that such an effort is entirely out of the realm of possibility; on the public level it is even, partly, in evidence, at least to judge by the wealth of books currently being published in Jewish religious and cultural topics. American Jews have brought into English almost all their required Jewish texts. Bible and prayer book have long since been translated, and now, thanks to Adin Steinsaltz, the Talmud itself is being made available, set out on the English page just as it is in the Aramaic original, true to both content and all-important form. If Michael were so inclined, he could walk into a bookstore for the inspiration and information he seeks vainly in the synagogue; there he would find Maimonides and the mystics, as well as guides to Maimonides and the mystics. So much Jewish scholarship is now written in English that it will soon be, if is not already, a required language for anyone in the world entering the field of Jewish studies.

But there is a problem here. Judaism in English lacks the dimension of historical time, without which there is no Jewish people. The Torah scroll in the Ark is written in Hebrew, and those who can read it are rightly recognized by those who cannot as more "authentically" Jewish. Access to the sources has always been a key to status within Jewish life; there is not a Jew in America who does not sense this intuitively. Reform and Conservative congregations that take their religion seriously feel, rightly, in a defensive position on this point; and the more seriously they take their religion, they more painful they must find it to confront their ignorance. In practice, the acceptance of English as a substitute for Hebrew in such congregations has had a cumulatively weakening effect. English was admitted in order to make Jews feel comfortable in the synagogue, to make them participants rather than observers in prayer and study. Yet English also ensures that they will remain forever marginal, unable to become full participants in prayer and study.

Similarly, a Jewish child who is obligated to master a section of the Torah in Hebrew by the end of the first grade in his Sunday or afternoon religious school will know exactly what distinguishes him from his non-Jewish neighbors: the ability to read the Torah in Hebrew by the end of first grade. But more often, the school this child attends will require no such effort of mastery, but will rely instead on a curriculum based on the teaching of "values." Thus the typical American Jewish child will learn that Jews are particularly concerned for the welfare of other human beings, for trees and for animals, and for whatever else is deemed ethically important at the moment. The intelligent child will also learn to dismiss this unwelcome and presumptuous effort to separate him artificially from his Gentile fellow-Americans, who are patently no less kind and no less sensitive than he.

David Schearl, the hypersensitive child protagonist of Henry Roth's great novel Call it Sleep (1934), attends a primitive heder on the Lower East Side of New York where an ill-tempered teacher with no other means of authority at his disposal tries to whip his students into attentiveness. Yet although David is taught the Hebrew Bible by rote under the worst possible conditions of pedagogy, nevertheless the words of Isaiah, dimly understood, set his imagination afire, and inspire him with the confidence to seek his own salvation. By contrast, Ozzie Freeman, the child protagonist of Philip Roth's story "The Conversion of the Jews," likewise uncomprehending of the Hebrew he is taught by rote in his Sunday school, is driven wild with anger by the "soul-battering' of the modern rabbi who uses the pretense of free discussion to suggest that the Jews have something other people lack. Given the scarcity of good teachers in any system, the teaching of the Hebrew Bible and post-biblical literature remains a wise objective for Jewish educators. Hebrew alone gives a child unmediated access to his heritage. English leaves him forever at the mercy of second-rate interpreters.

Hebrew is not the Jews' heritage alone; early American educators made it a requirement of the general and the Christian curriculum. But of Jewish literacy Hebrew is the basic or minimal requirement. An ideal of Jewish cultural literacy would have to include Yiddish as well as Hebrew, Aramaic for Talmud study, and, depending on intellectual ambition, any of eighteen or so Jewish languages that preserve folkways and lore from earliest times to the present. But Hebrew, always the main artery of a self-renewing Jewish tradition, is the indispensable thread that binds all Jewish languages to their biblical source.

If Judaism in English is without a focus in time, it is also without a focus in space; and without such a focus, once again, there is no Jewish people. From a strictly pragmatic point of view, English seems to satisfy the demands of Jews for a common international language of discourse, since more Jews on more continents speak it today than any other language. There is ample testimony to this at international Jewish gatherings in Tel Aviv as well as New York. But the statistical fate of Jews throughout history, and particularly in our time, makes it dangerous to rely on such data.

Against all odds, statistical and otherwise, Jews in this century have effected a linguistic revolution unprecedented in the history of the world. Yiddish, once the vernacular of over three-fourths of world Jewry, spoken at the outbreak of World War II by more Jews than have ever spoken a Jewish language at any time, is now a relic of the past. At the same time, Hebrew has been spectacularly resurrected as a living national language. Yiddish was an immense treasurehouse of national culture, and its loss has been far more serious to the Jewish people than the loss of a single limb to a human body. Nonetheless, although for centuries it was the safeguard of Jewish life in Europe, Yiddish was never the language of all the Jews in space and time. The deeper logic of peoplehood required the generative powers of Hebrew, for it alone could provide for the Bnei Israel of India and the Jews of Morocco as well as for the Hasidim of Belz.

In 1951, when the wondrous aspects of the Hebrew revival were still undimmed by custom, the Canadian Jewish poet A.M. Klein visited Israel to witness the miracle for himself. The autobiographical protagonist of his novel The Second Scroll (1951), though much impressed by the poets he encounters in the land, is truly overwhelmed by the creative inventiveness of the populace at large:

Klein's lifelong and lonely effort as a poet to fashion a high Anglo-Jewish style made him exceptionally appreciative of its opposite, the spontaneous eruption of a national language. In this case he could simultaneously savor the creative enterprise and his own ability to participate in it through creative response. Had he not known Hebrew, he could not have experienced the miracle.

The kindly, hospitable outreach of English cannot compete with or substitute for the centripetal energy of Hebrew in the national life of the Jews. And there is another aspect to be considered, a special problem which no other modern nation has had to face. Launched in history as the chosen children of God, the Jews have become singled out in the modern period by successive ideologies of hatred. Just as Christianity and Islam once identified themselves in negative relation to Judaism, and fitted Jews with the historical role of tolerated or despised prey, so in modern times the Jews have been targeted by an astounding variety of emerging nation-states and ideological movements as the main threat to some positive identity or ideal. Today the portemanteau Jew still personifies the negative principle of liberalism and modernization to most of the Arab world, just as he did in the earlier part of the century to many segments of European society. I am not speaking here of the "normal" antipathy that people of one religion or race or nationality may feel for another, but of the calculated use of the Jews as a political foil.

Election by other nations as the focus of political opposition and ideological hatred is humiliating, degrading, and damaging to the spirit as well as threatening to the body. As love nurtures, so hatred deforms. The campaign of discreditation launched by anti-Semitic regimes from the czars to the Nazis and beyond has smeared Jews in their own eyes as much as in the eyes of others, and has affected them everywhere, not just in those places where the propaganda happens to originate. There is no way of turning this hatred to advantage. Jews who think they can thrive on crisis, or who take pride in the discrimination practiced against them as if it were an inverted honor, are suffering from the poison they have been fed.

Jews have to work harder than others if they are to withstand the efforts to destroy them and if in so doing they wish to remain even partially subject to their own authority. Otherwise, whether through the mechanisms of appeasement or defiance, they will begin to function as the puppets of their antagonists. The defense forces that Israel calls upon to protect itself from Arab assaults are not strong enough to shield the battered soul. National dignity under these conditions can only come from deep self-knowledge and self-respect, which have to be acquired and learned.

Hebrew is the intimate part of Jewish nationhood representing the sovereignty of the Jews as a people and the will of the Jews to sovereignty. This is not to suggest that Hebrew is inviolable; the language of sovereignty can be used for purposes much less charming than those described by A.M. Klein; it can even be used as a tool to attack that sovereignty. Although it is a common bond of religion and nationhood, Hebrew cannot guarantee the uses to which it will be put. But at the very least, it allows Jews outside Israel to participate meaningfully, directly, in the culture of their people. Given the long struggle they may still be facing before the state of Israel is accepted by its neighbors as an unexceptional fact, Jews sorely require experiential proof of what their enemies try so hard to deny them. That proof had best be on the tips of their tongues.

It is paradoxically true, however, that any argument for Hebrew as a Jewish imperative must turn back with fresh gratitude to the hospitality of English. The Jews are too small to be self-sustaining in the world, and less than ever in the late 20^th century can they afford the deceptive comforts of the ghetto. Those Jews who still wait for the Messiah to decide their fate may immure themselves in Jerusalem's Mea Shearim quarter, but all the rest of Jewry in Israel and outside Israel, the part that intends to reside within the family of nations, has to learn how to negotiate and to survive. English is essential to that negotiation and survival. It is the major international language in every sphere from technology to diplomacy, and of intellectual-cultural discourse worldwide. It is also the language of the United States, and even if there were no Jews in America, the support of the largest democracy would be necessary in what is still a struggle for basic acceptance.

Culturally, too, as well as politically, the Jews are too small to be self-sustaining. Of all the peoples in the world, Jews have maintained the most prolonged, intense, confident interaction with others, and it would hard to name a language that has offered them quite so much knowledge, civility, and liberalizing enhancement as English. If the Jews cannot remain a viable people in time and space without drawing upon the linguistic source of their peoplehood, neither in the modern world can they remain a significant people without command of English.

Paradox noted, then. But if English is essential to survival, it is not, sufficient, even in the happy conditions of the United States. Here, freed of the coercive pressures that have habitually cramped them, Jews can decide for themselves whether they value their civilization enough to preserve and perpetuate it. For those purposes the recourse to Hebrew is indispensable.