Richard Jeffrey Newman

Not much time for post­ing these days. Too much teach­ing and grad­ing and deal­ing with the sit­u­a­tion at school which only seems to be get­ting worse. Right now, it appears as if the admin­is­tra­tion has used the pre­text of a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion into the alleged abuse of our col­lege email sys­tem, specif­i­cally involv­ing the college-wide list­serv that we use to com­mu­ni­cate with the entire cam­pus, to impose a pre-screening of any email that any­one wants to send to the entire cam­pus; and it is very clear that the result of this pre-screening, even if it is not the intent, has been to cen­sor cer­tain com­mu­ni­ca­tions that are crit­i­cal of the admin­is­tra­tion. It’s not a free speech vio­la­tion, appar­ently, since they have not closed off all avenues of com­mu­ni­ca­tion – though this sit­u­a­tion does make it more dif­fi­cult to get infor­ma­tion out to the entire cam­pus in an effi­cient man­ner – but it does raise seri­ous ques­tions about the administration’s com­mit­ment to aca­d­e­mic free­dom. And it is depressing.

But it is also Chanukah, and I want to share with you this video that my wife shared with me on Face­book. It’s just plain fun and it lifted my spir­its. I hope it does some­thing sim­i­lar for you:

I con­fess that I am among those Jews about whom Pro­fes­sors Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Bret­tler write in the intro­duc­tion to their recently pub­lished The Jew­ish Anno­tated New Tes­ta­ment who tend to “believe that any anno­tated New Tes­ta­ment is aimed at per­sua­sion, if not con­ver­sion.” My expe­ri­ence with Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies and pros­e­ly­tiz­ers of all sorts has made it very dif­fi­cult for me to see the Chris­t­ian Bible as any­thing other than a tool for per­suad­ing me to give up my own reli­gious tra­di­tion as obso­lete at best. I real­ize this is not ratio­nal. The book is a book, noth­ing more; it’s the Chris­tians who have tried to put the book in my hand or who have brought quotes from it to prove to me the error of my ways who deserve the sus­pi­cion and dis­trust that I feel. Nonethe­less, like any irra­tional belief, this one has been hard to shake, and I have tried, even assign­ing por­tions of the New Tes­ta­ment in one of my lit­er­a­ture classes as a way of forc­ing myself to read it. I read it; I taught it; but it left a bad taste in my mouth and I have not picked the text up again.

I am think­ing about this because The Jew­ish Anno­tated New Tes­ta­ment got a write-up in The New York Times this week­end, and it seems that even Jew­ish Bib­li­cal schol­ars have devel­oped the habit of not deal­ing with the Chris­t­ian holy book in their work. As Mark Oppen­heimer, the article’s author writes:

As any vis­i­tor to the book expo at the [Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Reli­gion] con­fer­ence dis­cov­ered, there is a glut of Bibles and Bible com­men­taries. One of the exhibitors, Zon­der­van, pub­lishes hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent Bibles, cus­tomized for your sub­cul­ture, niche or need. Exam­ples include a Bible for those recov­er­ing from addic­tion; the Pink Bible, for women “who have been impacted by breast can­cer”; and the Faith­girlz! Bible, about which the pub­lisher writes: “Every girl wants to know she’s totally unique and spe­cial. This Bible says that with Faith­girlz! sparkle!”

Nearly all these Bibles are edited by and for Chris­tians. The Chris­t­ian Bible com­prises the Old and New Tes­ta­ments, so edi­tors offer a Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on both books. For exam­ple, edi­tors might add a foot­note to the story of King David, in the Old Tes­ta­ment books I and II Samuel, remind­ing read­ers that in the New Tes­ta­ment, David is an ances­tor of Jesus.

Jew­ish schol­ars have typ­i­cally been involved only with edi­tions of the Old Tes­ta­ment, which Jews call the Hebrew Bible or, using a Hebrew acronym, the Tanakh. Of course, many curi­ous Jews and Chris­tians con­sult all sorts of edi­tions, with­out regard to edi­tor. But among schol­ars, Chris­tians pro­duce edi­tions of both sacred books, while Jew­ish edi­tors gen­er­ally con­sult only the book that is sacred to them. What’s been left out is a Jew­ish per­spec­tive on the New Tes­ta­ment — a book Jews do not con­sider holy but which, given its influ­ence and lit­er­ary excel­lence, no Jew should ignore.

He is, of course, cor­rect. No Jew should ignore the New Tes­ta­ment, espe­cially for the irra­tional rea­sons that have led me to do so for most of my life, and so it is nice to know that an edi­tion of that text now exists which uses as an edi­to­r­ial and crit­i­cal frame­work a per­spec­tive that counts me as an insider.

Com­ment­ing in the dis­cus­sion on Alas about a post deal­ing with the cir­cum­ci­sion ban that has been pro­posed in San Fran­cisco, Ching­ona wrote the following:

Sec­ondly … and here I’m try­ing to put into words some­thing that I think is felt on a sub­con­scious and instinc­tual level (with addi­tional caveats that I can­not speak for every Jew every­where) … with all the blood that has been spilt to main­tain Judaism over the cen­turies, there is a feel­ing that one, as an indi­vid­ual, does not actu­ally have the right to just dis­pense with some­thing so fun­da­men­tal as this. For more sec­u­lar Jews, to not cir­cum­cise is to say that not only do you not care if your kids aren’t Jew­ish, but to actu­ally push them away from it. You might be a scofflaw in a hun­dred dif­fer­ent ways, but to not cir­cum­cise would be to renounce your cit­i­zen­ship. It’s the step too far. And to take that step is to spit on the mem­ory of every Jew who died for being Jewish.

Even as I write this, I imag­ine you laugh­ing at how ridicu­lous it sounds. Do other Jew­ish peo­ple on this thread think I’m exag­ger­at­ing? Like I said, I’m try­ing to put some­thing into words that is more felt than thought, and it’s entirely pos­si­ble that I’m over­stat­ing the mat­ter. But in my expe­ri­ence, it’s some­thing in the neigh­bor­hood of what I wrote above.

It reminded me of some­thing I wrote in my first Frag­ments of Evolv­ing Man­hood post, called A Full-Throated Protest Against Exis­tence and the World. (I should add I have not edited this excerpt to take into account Grace Annam’s gen­tle admo­ni­tion to remem­ber that “there are women who have the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing had a penis.”)

Even now, hav­ing rejected cir­cum­ci­sion in my own fam­ily, it’s hard to dis­miss the rit­ual merely as the patri­ar­chal mark­ing that, at its roots, it is. Because what­ever else that rit­ual might be, the his­tory of the oppres­sion of the Jews has made it also a sign of defi­ance, a bod­ily affir­ma­tion of Jew­ish (male) iden­tity and Jew­ish (male) worth in the face of enor­mous persecution.

I put the word male in paren­the­ses in the last sen­tence because, while cir­cum­ci­sion marks only men and is there­fore prob­lem­atic from the point of view of gen­der equal­ity within the Jew­ish tra­di­tion, I do not want to deny the courage that it took for Jew­ish moth­ers to con­tinue to allow their sons to be cir­cum­cised, or for Jew­ish women to con­tinue to value cir­cum­ci­sion as a reli­gious rit­ual, a phys­i­cal mark and as a metaphor for the rela­tion­ship between the Jews and their god at times when forc­ing a man to pull down his pants was one way that anti-semites would iden­tify appro­pri­ate tar­gets for their hatred and vio­lence. In Hasidic Tales of the Holo­caust, for exam­ple, Yaffa Eli­ach tells a story that, whether it is com­pletely true or only an embell­ished ver­sion of the truth, illus­trates pre­cisely what I mean. In the midst of a “children’s Aktion,” a mas­sacre of Jew­ish chil­dren, the tale goes, a Jew­ish woman demanded of a Nazi sol­dier, “Give me [your] pocket knife!”

She bent down and picked up something…a bun­dle of rags on the ground near the saw­dust. She unwrapped the bun­dle. Amidst the rags on a snow-white pil­low was a new­born babe, asleep. With a steady hand she opened the pocket knife and cir­cum­cised the baby. In a clear, intense voice she recited the bless­ing of the cir­cum­ci­sion. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Uni­verse, who has sanc­ti­fied us by thy com­mand­ments and hast com­manded us to per­form the circumcision.”

She straight­ened her back, looked up to the heav­ens, and said, “God of the Uni­verse, you have given me a healthy child. I am return­ing to you a whole­some, kosher Jew.” She walked over to the Ger­man, gave him back his blood-stained knife, and handed him her baby on his snow-white pil­low. (152)

I am that boy; that boy was me. Had I been alive dur­ing the time of the Nazis, they would have tried to kill me pre­cisely for being “whole­some and kosher.” Yet while the vio­lence that mother did to her son absolutely pales in com­par­i­son to the vio­lence the Nazi intended to do to him, the story nonethe­less omits the boy’s pain, glosses over the blood that must have stained the pil­low, the mother’s hands and the German’s knife. It is that blood which haunts me, for my cir­cum­ci­sion is my con­nec­tion to that mother’s courage, to the courage of the men who cir­cum­cised and were cir­cum­cised at a time when a cut penis could have got­ten them killed.

It was not an easy thing for me to arrive at the point where, as a Jew­ish man, I could choose not to have my son cir­cum­cised and also not feel like I was betray­ing my com­mu­nity at a much, much deeper level than any rejec­tion of circumcision’s reli­gious sig­nif­i­cance might rep­re­sent for me. This is some­thing I might choose to write more about at a later time, but for now I will say that it had to do with let­ting go of a cer­tain kind of cul­tur­ally incul­cated anger and fear, with decid­ing that doing vio­lence to my son’s body – to the body of any Jew­ish infant born with a penis – in order to mark that body over and against the vio­lence that has been done to Jews through­out our his­tory was, in some sense, only a con­tin­u­a­tion of that violence.

Nonethe­less, I have tremen­dous respect for the feel­ings of peo­ple who con­tinue to see brit milah – we might as well call the cer­e­mony by its proper name – as a way of say­ing not only to the cir­cum­cised child, but to the his­tor­i­cally hos­tile world in which that child will grow up, “You are here, in this world, as a Jew; we are here in this world, as Jews, and we are not going any­where.“

My mother sent me the link to this music video by 8^th Day. The music is great, but what made me smile the most was the lit­tle boy in peyos and a sweat­shirt with a Bat­man patch bop­ping to the beat. I also really appre­ci­ate the mix­ing of Sephardic and Ashke­nazic lan­guage and ref­er­ences through­out. Dis­cus­sion of lyrics, etc. is below the video.

Accord­ing to this dis­cus­sion on Jew­ish Lyrics, Ya’alili:

is a com­bi­na­tion of the sepharadic “Ya’lah”, a com­mon phrase in sephardic songs which roughly trans­lates as “come on”, and “li li li”, a com­mon filler in yid­dish songs (BTW, the word for ‘song’ in yid­dish is “leid”).

The lyrics – though it’s worth read­ing the whole dis­cus­sion at the above link – can be roughly trans­lated as follows:

Ya’alili, dance my beloved

It should be for­tu­nate, may it be,
G-d will­ing, it will be

The bride­groom, sephardi
the attrac­tive bride, ashkenazi

Mother Imeinu [our mother] sephardi,
Mama Rachel, ashkenazi

Baba Salli [a famous rabbi] sephardi,
Rabbi Nach­man, ashkenazi

It should be for­tu­nate, may it be,
G-d will­ing, it will be

Ya’alili, dance my beloved

Gina Gina sephardi
may we hear more ashkenazi

Yosef our father, sephardi
the eith day, ashkenazi

days for joy, sephardi,
have a good yom tov, ashkenazi

It should be for­tu­nate, may it be,
G-d will­ing, it will be

I found a link to Fore­skin Man on The Good Man Project. To respond fully will require a more care­ful read­ing than I can give the comic now, but even pag­ing quickly through issue two reveals an awful lot that is prob­lem­atic in the way the char­ac­ters are drawn. The Good Man Project pointed to this image of the evil Jew­ish circumcisers:

But the depic­tion of women is also problematic:

The rou­tine cir­cum­ci­sion of infant boys, med­ical and oth­er­wise, is a prob­lem. Some­how I can’t see a comic like this being the way to address it.

I am not quite up to typ­ing a full-fledged post yet, though I will be soon. Still, I couldn’t resist post­ing a link to this piece on The Lede, by Robert Mackey.

Greek Bishop Equates Zion­ism to ‘Satanism’ — NYTimes.com:

The bishop, known as Met­ro­pol­i­tan Seraphim of Piraeus, said dur­ing an inter­view on Greek tele­vi­sion on Mon­day that Jews “con­trol the inter­na­tional bank­ing sys­tem.” He added: “Adolf Hitler was an instru­ment of world Zion­ism and was financed from the renowned Roth­schild fam­ily with the sole pur­pose of con­vinc­ing the Jews to leave the shores of Europe and go to Israel to estab­lish the new Empire.”

In response to the out­rage his state­ments caused, the bishop issued a state­ment, which Mackey quotes in full:

Decem­ber 23, 2010

On the occa­sion of the con­cerns raised by the Euro­pean Jew­ish Con­gress with regard to my inter­view with the MEGA tele­vi­sion chan­nel on Decem­ber 20, I have to say the following:

1. The things I said dur­ing my tele­vi­sion appear­ance on the show “Soci­ety Hour Mega” are strictly my per­sonal views and opin­ions, which I have repeat­edly expressed… ver­bally and in writing.

2. I respect, revere and love the Jew­ish peo­ple like any other peo­ple of our world accord­ing to the teach­ing of the incar­nated Son of God and the true Mes­siah the Lord Jesus Christ the Sav­ior and Redeemer, who was her­alded by all the Prophets and was incar­nated through the Jew­ish nation.

3. My pub­lic vehe­ment oppo­si­tion against Inter­na­tional Zion­ism refers to the organ that is the suc­ces­sor of the “San­hedrin” which altered the faith of the Patri­archs, the Prophets and the Right­eous of the Jew­ish nation through the Tal­mud, the Rab­bini­cal writ­ings and the Kab­balah into Satanism, and always strives vig­or­ously toward an eco­nomic empire set up through­out the world with head­quar­ters in the great land beyond the Atlantic for the preva­lence of world gov­ern­ment and pan-religion.

4. I con­sider like any sane per­son on the planet the Nazi régime and the para­noid dic­ta­tor Adolf Hitler as hor­ri­ble crim­i­nals against human­ity and take a stand with all honor and respect against the Jew­ish Holo­caust and any other heinous geno­cide such as that of the Pon­tic Greek and Armen­ian peo­ple. Besides, the Greek nation mourns thou­sands of mar­tyrs from the crim­i­nal Nazi atrocities.

+ The Met­ro­pol­i­tan of Piraeus, Seraphim

On the one hand, I am not sur­prised; on the other hand, the whole thing leaves me speechless.

I took my wife and my son for their birth­days, which are a day apart later this month, to see the Iranian-American comic Maz Jobrani last night at Town Hall. He is very tal­ented and very funny. One of the things he does to great effect is bring the audi­ence into dia­logue with him as part of his show, and so – since part of this agenda is quite explic­itly polit­i­cal, i.e., to use com­edy as a way of call­ing out and break­ing down stereo­types and other kinds of bar­ri­ers between dif­fer­ent kinds of peo­ple – he asks mem­bers of dif­fer­ent groups to iden­tify them­selves in the audi­ence: Ira­ni­ans (obvi­ously), white peo­ple, Arabs (mak­ing sure to spec­ify which coun­try they come from, to make the point, you know, that the Arab Mid­dle East is not all one coun­try), Jews, Lati­nos, etc. Per­haps my favorite joke of the evening resulted from this – not that it was the fun­ni­est, but it was my favorite.

He was talk­ing to some Pales­tin­ian women sit­ting in the front and then – I don’t remem­ber exactly who said what – iden­ti­fied some Jew­ish peo­ple sit­ting in the same row, more or less, but across the aisle. He asked them to wave at each other, which they did, and made the pre­dictable joke about the peace process start­ing right there as part of the Maz Jobrani show. There fol­lowed some other pat­ter and then he said, address­ing him­self to some­one else in the audi­ence, say­ing some­thing like, “See, now, we need to start with a wave. Can’t go too far too soon; there’s just too much dis­trust.” Then he turned to the Pales­tini­ans and said, “Please, now, don’t go throw­ing any­thing at them; I don’t know what you brought with you, but don’t throw it. Not tonight.” And then he turned to the Jews and said, “And don’t you go tak­ing her seat; it’s her seat. Okay?”

The audi­ence exploded with laugh­ter. It was not his fun­ni­est joke of the evening, but it was in some ways his most point­edly polit­i­cal, and he car­ried it off so lightly, so well, I was clap­ping as much in admi­ra­tion as I was in laugh­ter. It made me won­der what he would have done with us had we been sit­ting close enough: a Jew­ish Amer­i­can man, a Mus­lim Iran­ian woman and our son. It also reminded me, for some rea­son, of one of my favorite poems by the 12^th cen­tury Iran­ian poet Saadi. Here it is in my tranlsation:

Every­one thinks his own think­ing is per­fect and that his child is the most beautiful.

I watched a Mus­lim and a Jew debate
and shook with laugh­ter at their child­ish­ness.
The Mus­lim swore, “If what I’ve done is wrong,
may God cause me to die a Jew.” The Jew
swore as well, “If what I’ve said is false,
I swear by the holy Torah that I will die
a Mus­lim, like you.” If tomor­row the earth
fell sud­denly void of all wis­dom
no one would admit that it was gone.

My favorite parts of this video are Sarah Sil­ver­man explain­ing how a Jew would kvetch about your sweater while sav­ing you from a fire and Ben Stiller explain­ing why the orga­ni­za­tion should change its name to Jew­ish Amer­i­can World Ser­vice, so the acronym would spell “JAWS.”

Part 1 ended with the fol­low­ing para­graph: And so on and so on, until the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between the Jew and the woman. Nei­ther believe in them­selves; but the woman believes in oth­ers, in her hus­band, her lover, or her chil­dren, or in love itself; she has a cen­ter of grav­ity, although it is out­side her own being. The Jew believes in noth­ing, within him or with­out him.…The woman believes in the man, in the man out­side her, or in the man from whom she takes her inspi­ra­tion [Jesus], and in this fash­ion can take her­self in earnest. The Jew takes noth­ing seri­ously; he is friv­o­lous and jests about any­thing, about the Christian’s Chris­tian­ity, the Jew’s baptism.

The Jew, in other words, is an even more debased woman than a woman is.

•

The Jew’s bap­tism. A Jew­ish joke: In the years before Vat­i­can II, when Catholics were still pro­hib­ited from eat­ing meat on Fri­days, a Jew­ish man named Yankel con­verted to Catholi­cism. From that moment on, he insisted on being called only Jacob.

Jacob was a devout church­goer, active in his parish and well-liked and respected by those who knew him. Still, Jacob was a new Catholic and old habits do die hard. So one Fri­day the parish priest decided to stop by Jacob’s apart­ment, just to make sure. As he walked up the stairs to Jacob’s floor, the priest could smell that some­one was cook­ing pot roast. As he approached Jacob’s door, the smell got stronger, and when he knocked and Jacob appeared in the door­way, the priest’s worst fears were con­firmed. The odor fill­ing the hall­way came from Jacob’s apartment.

“Jacob,” the priest tried to be cir­cum­spect, “you do real­ize it’s Fri­day, don’t you?”

“Of course, Father. Would you like to stay for dinner?”

“I’d love to stay, but it is Fri­day, you know, and we’re not sup­posed to eat meat.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Father,” Jacob’s voice was warm and reas­sur­ing, “I’m not serv­ing meat.”

At this obvi­ous lie, the priest got angry. “What do you mean you’re not serv­ing meat! I can smell the pot roast!”

“Really, Father, don’t worry. It’s not pot roast.”

The priest pushed past Jacob into the kitchen. Sure enough, there, in the oven, was a pot roast. “Look,” he was point­ing directly at the meat. “How can you tell me this is not a pot roast?”

“Well, Father, last Sun­day I brought some holy water home from the church, and today, before I started to cook, I sprin­kled some of the water on the meat and I said, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, you’re no longer a pot roast. You’re a poached salmon.’”

•

The book was called Sex and Char­ac­ter, and it was bril­liant — all the crit­ics on both sides of the Atlantic said so. Otto Weininger, the author, was a Ger­man Jew who con­verted when he received his doc­tor­ate. By argu­ing that Jew­ish men are essen­tially degen­er­ate women — this is Sander Gilman’s line of rea­son­ing in Jew­ish Self-Hatred—Weininger hoped to prove that he had left his for­mer Jew­ish self behind for good, but it didn’t work. Weininger the Jew haunts the pages of Sex and Char­ac­ter the way the voice of any unwanted self haunts the per­son who tries to dis­own it. We are always, inescapably, at every moment of who we are, all of who we are, and to dis­avow that whole­ness is to turn the part of our­selves we have rejected into a ghost.

•

The Jew’s bap­tism. I wish I could remem­ber which rebbe it was who first explained to me that Jews can­not con­vert — or, more pre­cisely, that Jew­ish law does not rec­og­nize as valid any con­ver­sion rit­ual to which a Jew might choose to sub­mit. You could live the rest of your life in strict, defin­i­tively non-Jewish adher­ence to the prin­ci­ples of your new faith, adopt­ing what­ever label of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion that faith required, but, accord­ing to this rebbe, there was ulti­mately noth­ing you could do to wipe away the fact of your Jew­ish­ness. “When the day of judg­ment finally arrives,” I remem­ber him telling my class, “God will judge these men and women as Jews, and it will be as Jews that they enter or are pro­hib­ited from enter­ing olam haba, the world to come.”

The under­ly­ing Jew­ish real­ity of my exis­tence, in other words — and I believed this, because in those days I believed almost every­thing about being Jew­ish that my rebbes told me — could not be changed. What it meant for me to be a Jew was as per­ma­nently writ­ten into the foun­da­tion of my Yid­dishe neshama, my Jew­ish soul, as the fact of my cir­cum­ci­sion had been per­ma­nently writ­ten into my body, because even though most of my non-Jewish friends were also cir­cum­cised, mine was dif­fer­ent. My cir­cum­ci­sion had been per­formed in the name of God — this is my grand­mother talk­ing, though I don’t remem­ber why she felt the need to explain it to me — was proof of the covenant God had made with Abra­ham, of my inclu­sion in and oblig­a­tion to ful­fill that covenant. I could change about myself any­thing I wanted to; I could even become a woman — this is me; my grand­mother would never have allowed such a thing to enter her mind — but I could never escape the fact that a divine cut had been made in my flesh, that the mark of God’s cho­sen peo­ple had once been vis­i­ble on my flesh.

Given the fre­quency with which Jews were forced to con­vert to Chris­tian­ity through­out much of Euro­pean his­tory — and as far as I know it was in Europe that the notion of the uncon­vert­ible Jew first took shape — it’s under­stand­able that the rab­bis who shaped Jew­ish law might see becom­ing a Chris­t­ian as some­thing one might do to sur­vive, but not as an act one would choose will­ingly to per­form. Indeed, the idea that there was such a thing as an immutable Jew­ish soul could be under­stood as a form of resis­tance, a way of draw­ing a line that the Chris­tians could not cross under any cir­cum­stances. It’s ironic, there­fore, that the medieval church also con­ceived of the Jew­ish soul as immutable, except that the church thought the impos­si­bil­ity of a fully valid Jew­ish con­ver­sion resulted from short­com­ings with which the Jews were born and which could never fully be overcome.

Remem­ber “the blood of Christ” ver­sus “the blood of a Chris­t­ian”? Accord­ing to de Cantim­pré, the mis­take was made by a Jew­ish prophet who didn’t under­stand Latin well enough to get it right. No, more than didn’t. Couldn’t. Who couldn’t get it right because he was inca­pable, as all Jews were under­stood to be inca­pable, of com­mand­ing any lan­guage other than their own. In de Cantimpré’s time, this lan­guage was Hebrew, the tongue in which the Jews read and inter­preted their holy texts, and it was in the nature of Hebrew, and there­fore in the nature of the Jew­ish soul that per­ceived the world through Hebrew, that the Jews could not see, for exam­ple, the many pre­fig­u­ra­tions of Christ’s com­ing that their texts. To put it another way, the Jews had a lim­ited and essen­tially false view of the world because they spoke Hebrew, and they spoke Hebrew because they had a lim­ited and false view of the world. The Jews’ very exis­tence, in other words, was based on false pre­tenses, and so even when a Jew claimed to have con­verted out of real con­vic­tion, the assump­tion among his new core­li­gion­ists was that he or she was most prob­a­bly lying.

Since Jews in the mid­dle ages could be con­demned to burn at the stake for even the tini­est per­ceived slight against Chris­tian­ity — and a false con­ver­sion was an offense nei­ther tiny nor imag­i­nary — Jews who con­verted had a vested inter­est in putting as much dis­tance as pos­si­ble between them­selves and their own dis­avowed Jew­ish­ness. So, in the 1500s, when the con­verted Jew Johannes Pfef­fer­korn wrote a series of pam­phlets attack­ing the Jews, he had first to con­vince his Chris­t­ian read­ers of the valid­ity and value of his own con­ver­sion. “My dear­est Chris­tians,” he wrote, “you should under­stand and appre­ci­ate the great value and bounty that the Jews will bring to the Chris­t­ian Church.… Much as a hun­gry bear who has bro­ken open a bee­hive will not be dri­ven away because of the attrac­tion of the sweets, so, too, will it occur with the Jews. When they taste the honey, they will say, This is a feast above all feasts, and I believe, as true as it is within me, that all of the worldly feasts are not to be com­pared with one who has under­stood the Old Tes­ta­ment in the light of the New.”¹

Pfef­fer­korn wrote in vain. Vic­tor of Kar­ben, a rabbi who con­verted to Chris­tian­ity and became a priest, and who was a con­tem­po­rary of Pfef­fer­korn, summed up where con­verts like him fit into his new reli­gious community’s world view: “And thus, says the Psalmist, one spends the entire day like a poor dog that has spent its day run­ning and returns home at night hun­gry. For there are many unchar­i­ta­ble and igno­rant Chris­tians who will not give to you but will rather show you from their doors with mock­ery, say­ing, ‘Look, there goes a bap­tized Jew.’ And then oth­ers answer, ‘Yes, any­thing that is done for you is a waste. You will never become a good Christian.’.…And [still oth­ers say] with sat­is­fac­tion, ‘Though you may act like a Chris­t­ian, you are still a Jew at heart.’”²

You are still a Jew at heart. The cycle is vicious, because if Jews can never change, then con­ver­sion and its accom­pa­ny­ing sal­va­tion are cat­e­gor­i­cal impos­si­bil­i­ties. And yet if you are a Jew who’s con­verted not only do the Jews have to be able to change, but they also have to be, at the same time, so rad­i­cally and irrec­on­cil­ably dif­fer­ent that your becom­ing a Chris­t­ian negates entirely the Jew you once were. Oth­er­wise, how can you prove that your con­ver­sion is real? Or maybe your con­ver­sion was a lie after all, the result of a Jew­ish deceit­ful­ness within your­self of which you had no knowl­edge. And yet you know how you feel. You know the joy you expe­ri­enced when you were bap­tized. How could that have been false? And yet and yet and yet and yet, and yet again. The cycle is vicious, and it forms the core of all self-hatred — in this case Jew­ish self-hatred — and there is, ulti­mately, no way out of it.

•

Dear — ,

Her­mann

•

Her­mann — yes, he really did exist³—did not write this let­ter, but I am guess­ing that he wrote or wanted to write one just like it, and so I have imag­ined for him an inter­locu­tor to whom he could express his frus­tra­tions and fears not only with­out fear­ing reprisal, but also, and more impor­tantly, with the hope that in speak­ing to this per­son he would be able to find some affir­ma­tion of what he under­stood to be true about him­self. In this sense, Sex and Char­ac­ter was Otto Weininger’s let­ter to the world, but while the let­ter I’ve invented for my ver­sion of Her­mann suc­ceeds in the sense that he is hon­est about his doubts and the pain they cause him, Weininger’s left him blind.

•

“The pilpul,”—this is Sander Gilman — “is the quin­tes­sen­tially Jew­ish mode of argu­ment. It is the basis for all Tal­mu­dic dis­course. Sus­pend­ing time and space, it con­fronts the opin­ions of all author­ity, seek­ing the moment of res­o­lu­tion hid­den within seem­ingly con­tra­dic­tory posi­tions.” The pilpul pro­ceeds “based on anal­ogy and approx­i­ma­tion and not on the syl­lo­gism, the basis of clas­si­cal logic.”⁴ So, for exam­ple, in Trac­tate Bava Met­zia, when the rab­bis take up the ques­tion of what kinds of found objects the finder is obliged to return and what kinds he or she may keep, every­one agrees that if the found object has some iden­ti­fy­ing mark on it, such that the object’s owner has a rea­son­able expec­ta­tion of iden­ti­fy­ing and retriev­ing it, the finder can­not keep the object with­out first mak­ing a con­certed and pub­lic effort to locate the owner. If, on the other hand, the found object has no iden­ti­fy­ing mark, then the finder can keep it with­out mak­ing that effort because we assume that the owner, since he has no expec­ta­tion of iden­ti­fy­ing what he has lost, has given up hope of retriev­ing it.

In other words, if some­one finds “scat­tered fruit” with­out any iden­ti­fy­ing mark, he or she is allowed to keep it. Rabbi Yitzhak wants to know, how­ever, pre­cisely how much fruit spread over pre­cisely how much area qual­i­fies as “scat­tered.” The rab­bis then take a moment to define the con­text in which the fruit is found, decid­ing that they are not talk­ing about a sit­u­a­tion in which the fruit fell by acci­dent or where there is some indi­ca­tion — even if there is no mark on the fruit — that the owner will return later to retrieve what he dropped. Rather, they are deal­ing with a sit­u­a­tion in which grain ker­nels have been left behind on the thresh­ing room floor, and since the effort required to col­lect the ker­nels would be greater than what the owner would gain by col­lect­ing them, we can assume the owner will not come back to do so. Any­one who finds the grain, there­fore, is enti­tled to keep it. On the other hand, though, if the grain is spread over a small enough area such that the owner might con­sider the effort it would take to retrieve the grain worth­while, then we have to assume that he or she will return for the grain, and so the per­son who finds it can­not keep it with­out first attempt­ing to return it.

But another ques­tion still remains unan­swered. The rab­bis want to know the owner’s pri­mary motive for aban­don­ing part of his crop. Is it the fact that it will take too much effort to col­lect the scat­tered grain? Or is it because the value of the grain once it has been gath­ered will be too small? So Rabbi Yirmeyah poses the ques­tion of whether the same prin­ci­ples would apply to half the amount of grain scat­tered over half the area. The effort to gather the grain is smaller, but the value of the grain is less. Do we assume the owner would come back for the grain or not? So then the rab­bis ask about twice the amount of grain spread out over twice the area, where the effort to gather the grain would be greater, but the value would be greater as well. The dis­cus­sion then becomes even more com­pli­cated when the rab­bis start to con­sider that dif­fer­ent kinds of fruit are not only of dif­fer­ent sizes, but they have dif­fer­ent val­ues. Sesame seeds, for exam­ple, are very small and excep­tion­ally hard to pick up, but they were also, in Tal­mu­dic times, extremely valu­able. Given that fact, some­one might indeed be will­ing to expend the effort of gath­er­ing the seeds up, even a rel­a­tively small amount scat­tered over a rel­a­tively large area. So is the quan­tity and square footage that define “scat­tered” for sesame seeds dif­fer­ent from, say, the mea­sure­ments that define “scat­tered” for figs?

And so on and so on and so on, until the rab­bis pro­nounce teiku, which means they have con­cluded that the ques­tions raised by Rabbi Yirmeyah must remain undecided.

And that’s it. They just leave it there. The text records no uneasi­ness that they have not been able to resolve this ques­tion, no frus­tra­tion at Rabbi Yirmeyah for pos­ing an unsolv­able prob­lem. They seem to be con­tent that the prob­lem has been artic­u­lated, and they move on to the next issue, which is a good deal more com­plex and has to do with what it means to say that some­one who has lost an object has given up hope of find­ing it — and remem­ber that we are talk­ing here about objects that have no iden­ti­fy­ing mark. The rab­bis want to know the pre­cise moment at which this loss of hope takes effect, free­ing the finder of any oblig­a­tion to locate the owner. Is it from the moment the loss occurs, whether or not the owner is aware of the loss? Or is it from the moment the owner becomes aware that he has lost some­thing? The ques­tion may seem silly, but there is an impor­tant under­ly­ing prin­ci­ple at stake: Is it pos­si­ble, or even desir­able, to con­sider as hav­ing already occurred events that have not yet taken place, but that will with­out a doubt occur in the future? Here’s another vari­a­tion of the same ques­tion: How does one dis­tin­guish legally between some­thing that hap­pens of its own accord (a storm, say, that knocks a tree from your yard onto your neighbor’s prop­erty and dam­ages your neighbor’s roof) and some­thing that hap­pens because of human action (the same tree dam­ages the same roof, but this time it’s because you were cut­ting the tree down and it fell in the wrong direc­tion)?⁵

•

The Jew takes noth­ing seri­ously. So imag­ine you’re a man walk­ing down the road at the time of The Malleus Malefi­carum. Not far ahead some­thing that looks like the largest worm you’ve ever seen is try­ing to crawl across the road. When you get closer, you real­ize it’s a penis, prob­a­bly just escaped from the cage it was kept in by the witch that stole it. Which por­tion of the law should apply? Is find­ing the penis the same thing as find­ing, say, a lost sheep? (Or in this case per­haps a horse, since the witches, you’ll remem­ber, feed their stolen penises bar­ley and oats?) Or is it like find­ing a piece of food that fell from the bag of the per­son who bought it? Or sup­pose instead of one penis, you hap­pen across an entire cage’s worth scat­tered along the road? Does it mat­ter pre­cisely how scat­tered they are? Do we assume that a man who has lost his penis will be able to iden­tify it and so, by def­i­n­i­tion, can­not be said to have given up hope of find­ing it? Or is it all moot because the penises were stolen? And since we’re talk­ing here about penises that have become unat­tached to the men whose bod­ies they used to adorn, we know, I mean, we really know, they had to have been stolen. Must you announce what you’ve found? How, assum­ing some­one comes to claim what you’ve found, will you iden­tify its right­ful owner? Under what cir­cum­stances, if any, can you keep a penis you have found for your­self? Why on earth would you want to?

Well, if you were an eigh­teenth or nine­teenth cen­tury man of med­i­cine or sci­ence, you’d want one in your spec­i­men col­lec­tion, specif­i­cally a Black one, because the study of com­par­a­tive anatomy pretty much demanded that you have one. Founded by Johan Friedrich Blu­men­bach, this new sci­en­tific field treated the body as a text even more reveal­ing of the dif­fer­ences between and among groups of peo­ple than their lan­guages or cul­tur­ally deter­mined behav­iors, espe­cially when the dif­fer­ences in ques­tion were racial. “Every pecu­liar­ity of the body has” — this is the nine­teenth cen­tury anatomist Edward Drinker Cope, quoted by David M. Fried­man in his book, A Mind Of Its Own—“…some cor­re­spond­ing sig­nif­i­cance in the mind, and the causes of the for­mer are the remoter causes of the lat­ter,” a prin­ci­ple under­stood in prac­tice to mean that larger phys­i­cal or phys­i­o­log­i­cal fea­tures con­ferred supe­ri­or­ity on the race that pos­sessed them. With one excep­tion. The larger penises that Black men were under­stood to have — the myth actu­ally dates at least as far back as the ancient Romans — con­ferred on them not sex­ual supe­ri­or­ity but the bes­tial­ity that white peo­ple believed defined Black infe­ri­or­ity. ⁶

Even in the early years of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, the idea was wide­spread that the gen­i­tals of Black men pre­cluded any pos­si­bil­ity of equal­ity with whites. In “The Negro as a Dis­tinct Eth­nic Fac­tor in Civ­i­liza­tion,” pub­lished in 1903, Dr. William Lee Howard devel­oped this idea at some length, argu­ing that because “all intel­lec­tual devel­op­ment [in Black men] cease[d] with the advent of puberty,” and because Black men pos­sessed “enor­mously devel­oped” gen­i­tals that com­pelled them to devote their entire lives “to the wor­ship of Pri­a­pus,” result­ing in the cor­re­spond­ing enlarge­ment of the sex­ual cen­ters of their brains, the only way Blacks could be “ele­vated” by edu­ca­tion — the phras­ing that was com­mon at the time — was if that edu­ca­tion man­aged some­how to “reduce the large size of the African’s penis.”⁷

Through­out his­tory, in other words, peo­ple have believed that what they think they know about the nature of a man’s penis some­how bespeaks the true essence of his char­ac­ter.

1. Gilman, Jew­ish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hid­den Lan­guage of the Jews 36. [↩]
2. ibid. 40 – 41 [↩]
3. Adapted from ibid. 29 – 31 [↩]
4. ibid. 90 [↩]
5. My sum­mary here is taken entirely from Rabbi Israel V. Berman, ed., Trac­tate Bava Met­zia, Part Ii, vol. 2, The Tal­mud: The Stein­saltz Edi­tion (New York: Ran­dom House, 1990) 3 – 10. [↩]
6. David M. Fried­man, A Mind of Its Own: A Cul­tural His­tory of the Penis (New York: Pen­guin Books, 2001) 106 – 07. [↩]
7. Quoted in Ibid. 120 – 21. [↩]

The poet Kazim Ali posted this to his Face­book page, say­ing that he thought it “had to be a myth,” and that is what it sounds like at first, but the Dove World Out­reach Cen­ter is indeed invit­ing peo­ple to burn a Quran on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2010. It’s easy to dis­miss this as quack­ery, as not worth giv­ing the atten­tion that it got through CNN’s cov­er­age, but the truth is that if we don’t pay atten­tion to it, if we don’t call it out for what it is – and it’s grat­i­fy­ing to see that the Face­book page protest­ing the event has close to twice as many fans as the Face­book page announc­ing the event – it will spread. More than that, though, it will become – it already has become, actu­ally, and this is kind of fright­en­ing – part of the way per­cep­tions of Islam are framed by our national rhetoric. Here’s the video:

Rick Sanchez, I think, proves him­self to be a par­tic­u­larly inept inter­viewer here – I don’t watch him, so I don’t know if he’s usu­ally bet­ter than this – but one of the things that dis­turbs me about the way he tries to respond to Terry Jones, Dove World Outreach’s pas­tor, is his but-there–are–moderate-muslims-out-there tone, as if those “mod­er­ate Muslims” – and more about that phrase in a moment – are some­how the excep­tion to the rule. Or as if they are, you know, out there, but really well hid­den, and so you have to know the secret code or some­thing to get them to reveal them­selves. Equally trou­bling to me, though, is the way the phrase “mod­er­ate Mus­lims” has taken on the same descrip­tive weight and author­ity as, say, Ortho­dox Jew or Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, as if “mod­er­ate” were some­how actu­ally a sect of Islam. Well-meaning as it may be, the phrase actu­ally con­tributes to rather than decon­structs the way in which Islam is being defined as a pro­foundly hos­tile theologically-informed, we-want-to-rule-the-world polit­i­cal stance towards the West, broadly speak­ing, and the United States in par­tic­u­lar, rather than as a reli­gion. This is to me – and I’d be inter­ested to hear what other peo­ple think of this – very sim­i­lar to the way in which the anti­se­mitic rhetoric of Europe framed Judaism from the 18^th cen­tury, and cer­tainly the 19^th cen­tury on, and it is cer­tainly one of the under­ly­ing assump­tions – i.e., that the Jews want to rule the world – of the “World Zion­ist Con­spir­acy” theories.

It’s also worth not­ing that Jones and his group also declared August 2 “No Homo Mayor” day, a day to protest Gainesville’s openly gay mayor. Both groups – Mus­lims and homo­sex­u­als – are god­less accord­ing to Jones, a logic sim­i­lar to the one that cre­ated the asso­ci­a­tion between being Jew­ish and homo­sex­u­al­ity, to men­tion being com­mu­nist, Jew­ish and homo­sex­ual, that was an impor­tant point of anti­se­mitic rhetoric in this coun­try dur­ing 50s, 60s and even 70s.

It’s easy to dis­miss Terry Jones and his church as a bunch of nuts, espe­cially when his argu­ments for why Islam is a devil’s reli­gion, as quoted in the text accom­pa­ny­ing the Rick Sanchez video, include doozies like this:

“I mean ask your­self, have you ever really seen a really happy Mus­lim? As they’re on the way to Mecca? As they gather together in the mosque on the floor? Does it look like a real reli­gion of joy?” Jones asks in one of his YouTube posts.

“No, to me it looks like a reli­gion of the devil.”

The prob­lem is that Jones and com­pany are only giv­ing expres­sion to the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of what an awful lot of peo­ple in the United State., con­sciously or not, already believe. The term Islam­o­pho­bia may be rel­a­tively new, but the (often racial­ized and racial­iz­ing) hatred of Mus­lims has a long his­tory in this coun­try – and that is some­thing I will per­haps write about in another post – a his­tory that pre­dates the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks not by decades, but by cen­turies, and its assump­tions, its images, its rhetoric is/has been as much a part of our cul­ture as the assump­tions, images, rhetoric of, say, racism.

I am not an alarmist, though I do think there is a com­par­i­son to be made between the way in which anti­se­mitic rhetoric was deployed so as to make the Nazi’s cam­paign against the Jews and the way Islam­o­pho­bic rhetoric has been more and more mak­ing its way into our pub­lic dis­course. Indeed, I think this com­par­i­son would prob­a­bly work with the rhetoric of any geno­ci­dal cam­paign, though I do not think and I am not imply­ing that this is the begin­ning of some kind of anti-Muslim gov­ern­ment action. Rather, I think, plain and sim­ple, that those com­par­isons should make clear to us how imper­a­tive it is not to let the actions and the rhetoric of peo­ple like Terry Jones go unan­swered.