Association for Jewish studies 2010- 34(2)

THE JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES

VOL. 34, NO. 2 • NOVEMBER 2010

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The Letters of Gershom Scholem © 2002 by Mark Podwal, Courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York.

AJS Review ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES NEW YORK, NEW YORK EDITORS Robert Goldenberg, SUNY Stony Brook Elisheva Carlebach, Columbia University BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Charlotte Fonrobert, Stanford University ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Eugene Sheppard, Brandeis University EDITORIAL BOARD Michael Alexander, Temple University Pamela Barmash, Washington University in Saint Louis Yaakov Elman, Yeshiva University Talya Fishman, University of Pennsylvania Gershon David Hundert, McGill University Riv-Ellen Prell, University of Minnesota Jeffrey Rubenstein, New York University Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University Magda Teter, Wesleyan University Chava Weissler, Lehigh University MANAGING EDITOR Stanley Mirvis The AJS Review (ISSN 0364-0094) is published twice annually by the Association for Jewish Studies The AJS Review has been subsidized in part by a contribution from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation. Manuscripts for consideration should be e-mailed as a MS Word or rich text file to the AJS Review managing editor at [email protected]. Books for review should be sent to Prof. Charlotte Fonrobert, Stanford University, Department of Religious Studies, Building 70, MC 2165, Stanford CA 94305-2165. © the Association for Jewish Studies 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopy, or otherwise, without permission in writing from Cambridge University Press. Permission inquiries from the USA, Mexico, and Canada should be addressed to the New York office of Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge. org/us/information/rights/contacts/newyork.htm; permission inquiries from elsewhere should be addressed to the Cambridge office http://www.cambridge.org/uk/information/rights/contacts/cambridge. htm; permission inquiries from Australia and New Zealand should be addressed to the Melbourne office http://www.cambridge.org/aus/information/contacts_melbourne.htm. Publishing, Subscription, and Advertising Offices: Cambridge University Press, 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, U.S.A.; or Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8RU, England. Annual subscription rates for Volume 35, 2011: Institutions print and online £108/$184; institutions online only £93/$160; institutions print only £101/$172; single part £56/$95, payable in advance or on receipt of invoice; institutional check or credit card only. Special rates exist for members of the Association for Jewish Studies; membership information can be found at http://www.ajsnet.org. Information relating to AJS Review can be found at http://www.ajsnet.org/ajsreview.htm. AJS Review and all other Cambridge Journals can be found at http://journals.cambridge.org/ Photocopying Information: Permission to copy (for users in the U.S.A.) is available from Copyright Clearance Center, http://www.copyright.com, email: [email protected]. Specific written permission must be obtained for republication; contact the nearest Cambridge University Press office. Postmaster: Send address changes in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico to: AJS Review, Journals Dept., Cambridge University Press, 100 Brook Hill Drive, West Nyack, NY 10994-2133, U.S.A. Send address changes elsewhere to: AJS Review, Journals Dept., Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8RU, England.

THE JOURNAL

AJS Review OF THE

ASSOCIATION

FOR JEWISH

VOLUME 34, NUMBER 2

STUDIES NOVEMBER 2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A STATEMENT

FROM THE

EDITORS ................................................................................ 169

ARTICLES Leah Garrett Just One of the Goys: Salinger’s, Miller’s, and Malamud’s Hidden Jewish Heroes ... 171 Kära L. Schenk Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative in the Dura-Europos Synagogue ............. 195 Andrew N. Koss War within, War without: Russian Refugee Rabbis during World War I .................... 231 Simon G. D. A. Lasair Targum and Translation: A New Approach to a Classic Problem ............................... 265 James Loeffler Between Zionism and Liberalism: Oscar Janowsky and Diaspora Nationalism in America ................................................................................................ 289 Mitchell First The Origin of Ta‘anit Esther ........................................................................................ 309 SYMPOSIUM : THE JEWISH BOOK Adam Shear Introduction to AJS Review Symposium: The Jewish Book: Views and Questions .... 353 Lawrence H. Schiffman The Dead Sea Scrolls and the History of the Jewish Book ......................................... 359 Yaacob Dweck What Is a Jewish Book? ............................................................................................... 367 Jeffrey Shandler The Jewish Book and Beyond in Modern Times ......................................................... 377 REVIEW ESSAY Eliza Slavet A Matter of Distinction: On Recent Work by Jan Assmann ....................................... 385 EXCHANGE Between Past and Present, Jew and Arab: An Exchange between Gil Anidjar and David N. Myers .................................................................................. 395

BOOK REVIEWS BIBLICAL STUDIES Lori Lefkovitz. In Scripture: The First Stories of Jewish Sexual Identities ADRIANE LEVEEN , Hebrew Union College .................................................................. 405 Benjamin D. Sommer. The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel RONALD HENDEL , University of California, Berkeley ................................................. 407 JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE IN LATE ANTIQUITY Seth Schwartz. Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism ERICH S. GRUEN , University of California, Berkeley .................................................. 410 Yehudah B. Cohn. Tangled Up in Text: Tefillin and the Ancient World JOHN MANDSAGER , Stanford University ...................................................................... 413 Leonard V. Rutgers. Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation ANDREW S. JACOBS , Scripps College .......................................................................... 416 TALMUD , MIDRASH, AND RABBINICS Aharon Shemesh. Halakhah in the Making: The Development of Jewish Law From Qumran to the Rabbis ALEX P. JASSEN , University of Minnesota ................................................................... 418 Hillel Gamoran. Jewish Law in Transition: How Economic Forces Overcame the Prohibition against Lending on Interest YOSEF RIVLIN , Bar-Ilan University .............................................................................. 421 Gwynn Kessler. Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narrative JUDITH R. BASKIN , University of Oregon .................................................................... 425 MEDIEVAL JEWISH CULTURE Eli Wiesel. Rashi: A Portrait EVYATAR MARIENBERG , University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill ........................... 427 Marina Rustow. Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate JOSHUA HOLO , Hebrew Union College ........................................................................ 430 Dana E. Katz. The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance VIVIAN B. MANN , Jewish Theological Seminary, New York ...................................... 433 MODERN JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY Jeanne E. Abrams. Dr. Charles David Spivak: A Jewish Immigrant and the American Tuberculosis Movement ABRAHAM FUKS , McGill University ............................................................................ 435 Steven J. Zipperstein. Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing ANITA NORICH , University of Michigan ...................................................................... 438

Sharon Gillerman. Germans into Jews: Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic SANDER L. GILMAN , Emory University ....................................................................... 440 Marc David Baer. The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks MATTHIAS LEHMANN , Indiana University, Bloomington ............................................. 442 Sara Bender. The Jews of Białystok during World War II and the Holocaust REBECCA KOBRIN , Columbia University ..................................................................... 445 Eliza Slavet. Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question LAURA LEVITT, Temple University .............................................................................. 447 Jeffrey Shandler. Jews, God and Videotape: Religion and Media in America ARI Y. KELMAN , University of California Davis, California ....................................... 450 ART Vivian B. Mann. Art and Ceremony in Jewish Life: Essays on the History of Jewish Art VANESSA L. OCHS , University of Virginia ................................................................... 452 ERRATUM COVER, AJS Review 34(1) ........................................................................................ 455

AJS Review 34:2 (November 2010), 169 © Association for Jewish Studies 2010 doi:10.1017/S0364009410000309

A S TATEMENT

FROM THE

E DITORS

This issue of AJS Review contains two new formats. The first is a symposium on the state of the field of Jewish book history, a set of brief contributions by three scholars from various chronological and disciplinary perspectives. The symposium was curated by Adam Shear, convener of an ongoing working group on that subject at the Center for Jewish History during the academic year 2009–10. The contributions reflect the authors’ remarks in a live exchange and deliberately eschew the traditional heavy annotation of full-fledged scholarly articles. A second innovation is an exchange of views prompted by the publication of David Myers’ Between Jew and Arab. Book Review Editor Charlotte Fonrobert took a leading role in the formation of this exchange between Professors Gil Anidjar and David Myers on a topic of vital interest to scholars in Jewish studies on campuses world-wide. This issue also contains a review essay, a feature we plan to continue from time to time. The editors invite suggestions for other exchanges on topics in emerging fields or new turns of scholarship in traditional areas. We welcome ideas prompted by the publication of interesting, challenging, and significant new books in all fields of Jewish Studies. Finally, the editors reiterate their appreciation to Mark Podwal for continuing to provide his wonderful illustrations for our cover.

Robert Goldenberg and Elisheva Carlebach, Editors Charlotte Fonrobert, Book Review Editor

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AJS Review 34:2 (November 2010), 171–194 © Association for Jewish Studies 2010 doi:10.1017/S0364009410000310

J UST O NE

G OYS : S ALINGER ’ S , M ILLER ’ S , AND M ALAMUD ’ S H IDDEN J EWISH H EROES

OF THE

by

Leah Garrett

In his seminal essay “Jewish-Americans, Go Home” (1964), Leslie Fiedler attacked postwar Jewish writing and its widespread use of what he controversially labeled “crypto-Jewish characters,” who are in habit, speech, and condition of life typically Jewish-American, but who are presented as something else—general-American say, as in Death of a Salesman.1

The essay castigates the trend of an entire wave of postwar male Jewish writers— Miller, Salinger, Wouk, Bellow, Roth, Mailer—who reinvented Jewish protagonists as non-Jews, or gave them “goyish” qualities in order to represent a “universal” form of American alienation. The writings of this generation, according to Fiedler, are negatively “marked by the abandonment of the Jewish character as a sufficient embodiment of the Jewish author’s aspirations and values, and by the invention, beside him or in his place, of characters who are not merely nonJewish, but are, in fact, hyper-goyim, super-Gentiles of truly mythic proportions: specifically, sexual heroes of incredible potency.” For Fiedler, these prototypes are found in a vast corpus of works, from the Loman family of Death of a Salesman, to the half-Jewish protagonists of Salinger’s short stories, to the Hemingwayesque, Gentile Henderson of Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, and Norman Mailer’s Sergius O’Shaughnessy in The Deer Park. Fiedler never questions the place of these works within the Jewish American canon or asks whether they should be excluded from the rubric of Jewish American literature simply because the characters are not overtly Jewish or because the authors, such as J. D. Salinger, had abandoned Judaism as adults. Rather, Fiedler shows how these works are absolutely rooted in, and are the result of, the anxieties

1. See the chapter “Jewish-Americans, Go Home!” in Waiting for the End: The American Literary Scene from Hemingway to Baldwin, ed. Leslie Fiedler (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), 91. The second quotation is from page 96.

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Leah Garrett of postwar Jewish American life. For Fiedler, there is likely no trope more “Jewish American” than these “hyper-goy crypto-Jews.” Surprisingly, forty-five years later the works that Fiedler discussed in his essay as most representative of the postwar Jewish experience have been excluded from the canon of Jewish American literature.2 Yet, as this essay will show, to neglect them is to overlook a central movement in Jewish American writing of the 1940s and 1950s. That age produced a trend that catalogued the intense pressures writers encountered as they sought to navigate the postwar literary landscape and felt unable or unwilling to explicitly assert the Jewishness of the world they were writing about. Hiding one’s Jewishness became for many a common and acceptable type of assimilation in the immediate postwar years, and when the literature took on this form, Jewishness went underground. It is my purpose here to show how three major works, Death of a Salesman (1949), Catcher in the Rye (1951), and The Natural (1952), while not overtly describing Jewish life, appropriate and subvert iconic American tropes such as the sportsman and jock as a means of examining the stresses Jewish men faced in the postwar years. Each work sheds light on major concerns of secondgeneration Jewish men: Miller’s play delineates how the Depression and anti-Semitism in America affected the progeny of immigrants; Salinger’s novel demarcates the fissure between American and Jewish notions of masculinity; and Malamud’s novel critiques the American obsession with sports culture in order to negotiate a space for intellectual pursuits. Fiedler used the term crypto-Jewish in a historically inaccurate and simplistic way so as to imply that the literature was a manifestation of the writers’ Jewish self-hatred. However, I suggest that these writings are instead appropriating iconic American tropes, such as the sports jock, and giving them a Jewish spin. By so doing, the writers infuse Jewish characteristics (Yiddish speech habits, immigrant concerns, intellectualism) into the dominant culture. Instead of seeing these works as expressions of the minority Jew assimilating into the majority Anglo world, we can view them as creations in which the majority culture is assimilated into a Jewish worldview.

2. The three most recent major anthologies and surveys of Jewish American writing do not include these “crypto-Jewish” texts, although they do contain other works by the authors. See, for example, A Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature, ed. Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001); Josh Lambert, American Jewish Fiction (JPS Guide) (Philadelphia: JPS Guide, 2009); and The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, ed. Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Nevertheless, the editors’ introductions to each of these books offer nuanced considerations on how Jewish American literature should be defined, suggesting that the trend is toward an increasingly inclusive definition. Thus, while Lambert’s guide “excludes books that do not mention Jews,” he does include “novels by non-Jewish authors” (10). Wirth-Nesher and Kramer aim to cast “a wide net—historically, thematically, linguistically, and generically” (9), while the introduction to A Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature offers a compelling discussion of the problematics of the term Jewish American and/or American Jewish, asserting that in the end “this anthology means to expand the question of identity to encompass all its turns and folds” (3).

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Just One of the Goys These plays and novels indicate a subversive and powerful form of Jewish American cultural appropriation that has been neglected, or castigated, because it is not easily categorized as overtly Jewish. To quote Robert Alter from his groundbreaking 1968 essay, “Jewish Dreams and Nightmares” (which was a response to an essay composed by Fiedler one year earlier): … there is no simple formulaic key for identifying the Jewish character of all Jewish writers…. The varied materials of art itself, with their confusingly various connections with reality, are more recalcitrant, less pleasingly symmetrical, than the neat designs of archetypal criticism, but, in the final analysis, they are a good deal more interesting.3

Jewish American writing in the postwar years demarcated in subtle, “unsymmetrical” ways the manner in which categories of “Jewishness” were breaking down for second-generation Jews. Scholars need to take this into account and be open to the varied ways that second-generation Jewish American writers accounted for a postwar reality in which Jewishness was not easy to define. As Alter noted in his essay, the attempt to locate Jewish characteristics in modern writing can be difficult, as we must “translate such vague intuitions into clear descriptive statements about what actually goes on in the literary works.”4 Perhaps this is one reason why these works have been excluded: They require us to challenge how we define our terminology. Moreover, when seeking out nonovert representations, we risk over-reading or essentializing the texts. Nevertheless, I believe that this is a risk we must take to truly understand postwar Jewish American life. To define Jewish American discourse adequately requires that we include these writings, because in many ways they present forceful expressions of the specific pressures of being a male Jewish American in that era. Hence, I will present a Jewish reading of Death of a Salesman, Catcher in the Rye, and The Natural, seminal texts in American literary history that, I believe, should as well be viewed as seminal in Jewish American literary history. Throughout their literary careers, Miller, Salinger, and Malamud asserted that they were “universal” rather than specifically Jewish writers. With these characterizations, each writer correctly reckoned that he would gain admittance to the American literary establishment, would increase his readership from just Jews to the larger public, and would connect himself to a whole range of world writers—Dostoevsky, John Dos Passos, Hemingway—rather than just Jewish ones. For them, universal meant someone shorn of Jewish or ethnic specificity, which, as Fiedler suggests, really meant Gentile. Nevertheless, while the authors sought to write “universal” stories and be “universal authors,” they clearly exhibited Jewish facets in these very first writings. As I will argue, we see this in many ways: a style of discourse that uses Yiddish inflections, a focus on assimilation, a use of story lines that mimic Jewish American literature of 3. See Robert Alter, “Jewish Dreams and Nightmares,” Commentary 45, no. 1 (January 1968): 54. 4. Ibid., 48.

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Leah Garrett the previous generation, an infusion of intellectualism into the arena of American sports culture, an inclusion of attacks on American Christianity, portraits of fathers as first generation immigrants, and so on. These types of writings served a number of purposes for the authors. First, given that English works (unlike those in Yiddish) would be read by non-Jews, the authors were uncomfortable creating Jewish characters with negative qualities such as money grubbing. The desire to avoid negative Jewish representations was particularly acute in the post-Holocaust years when writers were understandably sensitive about critiquing Jewish life.5 The convention also enabled Miller, Salinger, and Malamud at the beginning of their careers to represent themselves as “universal” and part of the Anglo-American conversation. Moreover, they were employing a tool to render an attack on American society from within, rather than from the angry bitter voice of the outsider Jew. Thus, instead of having a Jewish protagonist who would be an ethnic “other” critiquing American life, these authors created WASP insiders to do the job for them. And in all three cases, the attack on mainstream America was leveled specifically against its sports and jock culture, where athletic oafs were deemed as popular and worthy of emulation while intellectuals were bullied and excluded from the dominant vision of positive masculinity. All three authors were young men seeking their way in a confusing postwar world, and the concerns and pitfalls of growing into a man became the central theme of the three texts. Death of a Salesman, Catcher in the Rye, and The Natural establish a new form of masculinity. In a literary era dominated by “hard boiled-dom” (as Saul Bellow labels it in Dangling Man), Miller, Salinger, and Malamud challenged mainstream Anglo notions about masculinity that rewarded the tough guy athlete and jock at the expense of the intellectual.6 These Jewish authors thus rewrote the rules of the game so that the popular sports jock was transformed into a corrupt vision of a crooked country that did not offer all young men the same opportunities of limitless success and reinvention; these were, in fact, granted only to white male Protestants. The Jewish texts showed that the prep school brotherhood was in reality riddled with bullying; that the elevation of sports in high school left jocks with few options upon graduation; and that the pursuit of the American dream was not always as important as self-fulfillment. The early writings of Miller, Salinger, and Malamud thus paved a way for a new vision of masculinity that rewarded such qualities as intellectualism and self-reflection. “Hard-boiled” men were shown to be hollow and corrupt; instead, they were replaced by reflective and psychologically astute individuals. And the writing itself shifted from the Hemingwayesque terse prose, to verbose, psychologically deep, and profoundly textured discourse. 5. The introduction to Anita Norich’s Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007) gives an overview of the variations in response to the Holocaust between English and Yiddish authors. See pages 1–15. 6. See Saul Bellow, “The Dangling Man,” in Bellow: Novels 1944–1953 (New York: Library of America, 2003), 3.

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Just One of the Goys As outsiders desperately trying to be seen as insiders in Anglo-American culture, Jewish authors presented a new range of images about the anxieties of postwar life. The extraordinary popular and critical success of Death of a Salesman, Catcher in the Rye, and The Natural makes sense: In an era when Hemingway’s writings still dominated the American scene, it must have been refreshing for a generation of readers, Jewish and non-Jewish, to come across protagonists who constantly ruminate over their attempts to become fulfilled adult men in an uncertain era.7 In these works, and countless others by postwar Jewish men, a sort of sensitive yet hyper-masculine figure takes hold, who desperately seeks out greater meaning to his life. It is not my intention to replicate the stereotype that Jews are physically inept intellectuals and that Christians are the opposite. Instead, I will indicate how Miller, Salinger, and Malamud challenged America’s obsession with sports culture in order to show how it could be detrimental to all men. In looking at these writings in conjunction with one another, one might discern very clear trends that delineate the particular and peculiar anxieties of postwar Jewish life.8 A Jewish reading is absolutely essential, for a number of reasons. It increases our literary understanding by enabling us to uncover a broad range of important but neglected themes. It deepens our historical understanding of the immediate postwar years, as each work delineates a response to the crisis in Jewish American life in the wake of the Depression and the subsequent war. And it assists our biographical understanding of these major Jewish writers, shedding light on the struggles they underwent at the start of their literary careers when they sought to define the relationship between their ethnic and cultural background and their art. Hence, with each work I will discuss how the Depression and the war that followed it influenced the author’s decision to use a Gentile protagonist. I will point out the type of critique that was being leveled with such a figure and will indicate how the texts have Jewish resonances that show us the complex nature of postwar American life. Overall, these three works reveal how these influential writers challenged the dominant Anglo construct of masculinity as delineated in the sports hero in order to offer a Jewish critique on the mainstream culture. My larger aim is to persuade my readers that these works are essential documents

7. Morris Dickstein’s groundbreaking Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) shows the huge shift that occurred in American writing generally in response to the Depression and war. The book focuses extensively on the prominent role played by Jewish male writers in this sea change. Deborah Dash Moore’s essay “When Jews Were GIs: How World War II Changed a Generation and Remade American Jewry” and Hasia R. Diner’s “Before ‘The Holocaust’: American Jews Confront Catastrophe, 1945–1962” demarcate the ways that war service and the experience of the Holocaust caused a profound shift in postwar Jewish life. These two essays are found in American Jewish Identity Politics, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 23–44 and 83–118. 8. Michael Alexander’s persuasive Jazz Age Jews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) delineates how first-generation immigrants had their own sets of profound anxieties that played themselves out in popular culture.

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Leah Garrett of the postwar male Jewish experience in America and that they point to a need to expand our existing understanding of the definition of Jewish American literature. To suggest this is to accept what is common practice elsewhere. Writings without overt Jewish content are often viewed as part of the canon of European Jewish writing, as we see, for example, in the common inclusion of Franz Kafka’s works, even though they do not explicitly describe Jewish life.9 The trend with Jewish American literature, in contrast, often relies on a more exclusive definition that requires the writing to explicitly address Jewish matters. I believe that we need to drop the requirement that texts be explicitly about Jewish life and consider works on a case-by-case basis to see whether and how a Jewish reading might enlarge and deepen our understanding of the work. I know this suggestion will be problematic to some,10 but if we are to fully understand how Jews wrote about postwar American life, we need to see that for many the Jewishness of the text was not explicit, but was instead cloaked in a rhetorical strategy of meaning. I. D EATH

OF A

S ALESMAN

Arthur Miller composed Death of a Salesman in April 1948. It was first staged in London in 1949 in a production overseen by the legendary director Elia Kazan.11 The character resonating most with the jock icon is the son, Biff Loman, an extremely popular football captain who is lured by three colleges with sports scholarships. Instead of fulfilling the jock’s dream, however, Biff fails his Regent’s exam and spends his college years drifting between bad jobs and petty theft. At the play’s end, Biff rejects New York to follow his own dream to head west and work the land on a ranch.12 9. The most thorough consideration of the role of Kafka in the Jewish canon can be found in Dan Miron’s From Continuity to Contiguity: Towards a New Jewish Literary Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 303–402. Ruth Wisse includes Kafka and The Trial in her influential The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000). Robert Alter problematizes the widespread reading of Kafka’s works as Jewish in “Jewish Dreams and Nightmares,” Commentary 45, no. 1 (January 1968), 48–54. 10. For an illuminating glimpse into the fears some feel about creating inclusive definitions of Jewish American culture, see Stephen Whitfield’s essay “The Paradoxes of American Jewish Culture,” in Moore, American Jewish Identity Politics, 243–66. Whitfield asserts that a maximalist definition (of the type that I am espousing here) wipes out what is specific to Jewish life. Yet I believe that to widen the net of inclusion is not to water down to nothing the Jewish factors of the texts, but instead to focus our attention on them, and to see how they are responsible in multiple ways for making postwar writing in America take on a Jewish tone. Whitfield’s essay expresses in a dehistoricized manner the anxieties felt by those who see the reduction in active Judaism in America as a reduction in Jewish culture. He desires a “vigorous” Jewish response when, in fact, throughout time, Jewish cultural responses to the dominant society have rarely been “vigorous” and have generally been incredibly textured and subtle. This has, I believe, been a major factor in the Jewish resilience and vitality that he seeks out. 11. For a detailed analysis of the process of writing Death of a Salesman, see Christopher Bigsby, Arthur Miller: 1915–1962 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 289–338. 12. Christopher Bigsby points out that Biff’s dream of running a ranch is doomed to inevitable hardship, as can be seen when Miller wrote the screenplay for the film, The Misfits. Biff Loman had become Gay, “an ageing cowboy as bewildered by the collapse of his world as Willy Loman had

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Just One of the Goys The reason behind Biff’s failures are gradually revealed in the course of the play. In a flashback to an incident from his adolescence, Biff has dropped in unexpectedly on his father, Willy, at a Boston hotel. There, Biff recounts to his dad how Biff had teased his neighbor, Bernard, in front of his high school class. Willy finds the story hilarious and begins laughing aloud. Hearing this, a woman with whom Willy is having an affair, who is hiding in the bathroom, begins to laugh as well. Biff hears her and realizes that his father is cheating on Biff’s beloved mother. In this moment of reckoning, the pain that the jock’s family inflicts on the intellectual Jewish nerd, Bernard, catches up with them. After the discovery of his father’s affair, everything starts to go downhill for Biff: He drops out of summer school, fails his exams, and loses his college football scholarships. One might view the Loman family in large measure as a response to the cataclysm that Miller saw leveled on urban life during the Depression. Miller’s own family suffered the greatest impact of our three authors when his father’s business was ruined. His upper-middle-class family became part of the working poor.13 Miller’s father’s generation “blamed themselves, not the system, by and large.” The Depression caused Miller and other children of immigrants to realize that “there was nothing to lean on. There was no security anywhere. The country was a fraud.”14 The absolute destruction of belief in the United States is tangible in Death of a Salesman, because, as Miller stated, “The psychology of the audience was still that of Depression people.”15 As Miller wrote, Willy’s great tragedy was that he “has broken a law without whose protection life is insupportable if not incomprehensible to him and to many others; it is the law which says that a failure in society and in business has no right to live.”16 For Willy Loman, the American dream is shattered, and he must die. In Miller’s play, the formula of the self-made man is undermined, both with the father (who fails at work) and the son (who fails at work and sports). Death of a Salesman charts the ruinous repercussions of American capitalism on a couple, Willy and Linda, who have bought into it completely. A Jewish reading of the play shows that this ideal was particularly catastrophic for Jewish immigrants who exchanged the European Jewish belief in intellectualism for a vapid obsession

been.” See Bigsby’s essay, “Death of a Salesman: In Memoriam,” in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 127. 13. For a detailed account of the influence of the Depression on the Miller family, see the chapter “From Harlem to Brooklyn” in Christopher Bigsby’s excellent new, comprehensive biography of Miller entitled Arthur Miller: 1915–1962, 1–76. 14. Miller’s revealing and emotional discussion of the impact of the Depression on his family, from which these statements are taken, are found in an interview conducted with Arthur Miller by Christopher Bigsby and published in Arthur Miller and Company: Arthur Miller Talks about His Work in the Company of Actors, Designers, Directors, Reviewers and Writers, ed. Christopher Bigsby (Norwich: University of East Anglia, Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies) 1990, 17–21. 15. See Colby H. Kullman’s “Death of a Salesman at Fifty: An Interview with Arthur Miller,” in Bloom’s Major Literary Characters: Willy Loman, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005), 114. 16. Arthur Miller, introduction to Collected Plays (London: Cresset Press, 1958), 35.

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Leah Garrett with emulating mainstream America: They sold out their values for the dubious benefits of consumerism. Over the years, a few critics have claimed that Willy is a Jewish man cloaked within a universal one, although the vast majority of the analyses do not posit this connection. The Jewishness of the Lomans was most famously asserted by Mary McCarthy, who in 1959 wrote the following in an introduction to her collection of essays Sights and Spectacles: 1937–1958: A disturbing aspect of Death of a Salesman was that Willy Loman seemed to be Jewish, to judge by his speech cadences, but there was no mention of this on the stage. He could not be Jewish because he had to be “America.”17

McCarthy believes the audience feels discomfort because the play does not admit something so obvious to them, that is, the Lomans are New York Jews. Leslie Fiedler, as discussed, attacked the “hidden Jewishness” of the Lomans because “works influenced by pseudo-universalizing lose authenticity and strength.”18 In an interview, Miller responded to Fiedler by stressing that he did frequently write about Jewish characters, and that “where the theme seems to me to require a Jew to act somehow in terms of his Jewishness, he does so. Where it seems to me irrelevant what the religious or cultural background of a character may be, it is treated as such.”19 Miller claims that Fiedler’s problem is that he does not find Miller to be quite Jewish enough and that he wrote about the “wrong” type of Jews. The interview makes manifest Miller’s desire to seem a writer of both Jewish and universal narratives. For Miller, to be universal necessarily means to sublimate the Jewish. The universal man is thus the Christian man, which is in stark contrast to the reconfiguration of this notion over the past thirty years, when American and “universal” can also include a variety of ethnic aspects. What is it about Death of the Salesman that makes it resonate as a Jewish text, and why did Miller possibly choose to hide the ethnicity of the Lomans? The Jewish resonances, as I will discuss, include the infusion of Yiddish mannerisms into the speech (a factor that makes it sound as if New York Jewish immigrants are talking), the employment of the iconic Jewish image of a traveling salesman, the father who resonates as a first-generation, insecure immigrant, and the idealization of Bernard, the Jew, as the most positive and fulfilled character. The character’s speech habits contain numerous Jewish New York resonances, including Willy Loman’s constant repetition of stock phrases common in Yiddish such as, “Do you know?” (Veystu?), and his regular use of “nothing” for “anything,” as in “You can’t see nothing out here.” Some critics believe that this makes the play seem like an English rewrite of a Yiddish-based original. 17. Mary McCarthy, introduction to Sights and Spectacles: 1937–1958 (London: Heinemann, 1959), xxiii. 18. Fiedler, Waiting for the End, 91. 19. See Robert A. Martin, “The Creative Experience of Arthur Miller: An Interview,” Educational Theatre Journal 21, no. 3 (October 1969): 310–17. This quotation is on pp. 314–15.

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Just One of the Goys Typical is George Ross’s 1951 discussion in Commentary of a Yiddish version of the play, Toyt fun a Salesman: I don’t think it would be altogether too facetious to propose as an interesting project to Arthur Miller that in the light of this production he make another try at a more imaginative translation of his material into English; the attempt might result in a more authentic and, by that same token, more moving play than we saw in the production on Broadway.20

And nearly fifty years later, Harold Bloom noted that “the most satisfactory performance I have seen of Death of a Salesman was in Yiddish translation,”21 and David Mamet asserted in his 2005 piece for the Guardian that “it is a Jewish Play.”22 Moreover, a play about a traveling salesman resonates with the iconic traveling salesman of Jewish literature: Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman.23 Whether or not Miller was consciously rewriting Tevye, the Yiddish author was on his mind the year he wrote Death of a Salesman, as he mentioned Sholem Aleichem in an essay of March 1948 (based on a November 1947 speech).24 And as one critic astutely noted: “Well, maybe Tevye was swept to America, and there one of his literary descendants turned out to be Willy Loman, weakened by time and an alien culture.”25 20. See George Ross, “Death of a Salesman in the Original: The Yiddish Version Reveals the Real Willy Loman,” Commentary II (1951): 184–86. Jeffrey Shandler astutely notes that “such postulations of nonexistent Yiddish Urtexts that lie hidden beneath actual English originals imagine Yiddish as an extralinguistic phenomenon, a fundamental as well as a transcendent essence that can persist despite the absence of actual language.” See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 122–23. Thus these Yiddish readings of Miller’s play suggest much about the broader Jewish culture’s desire to continue Yiddish. In one of the first essays to consider the Jewish aspects of the play, Joel Shatzky’s “Arthur Miller’s Jewish Salesman,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 2, no. 1 (1976), 7, furthered the trend by suggesting that Death of a Salesman would be more authentic in Yiddish. Shatzky states, “when the playwright stumbles in his use of language, when words sound strange in their context, it seems to me it is because Miller’s feeling for Yiddish often interferes with his desire to eliminate all traces of it from his English.” Shatzky provides examples showing features of Yiddish speech. For further discussions of the Jewish literary cadences of the play, see Ruby Cohn, “The Articulate Victims of Arthur Miller,” in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: Modern Critical Interpretations, 41. Louis Harap discusses the play’s “use of Yiddishized English expressions” in Dramatic Encounters: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Drama, Poetry, and Humor and the Black–Jewish Literary Relationship (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 124. Bigsby discusses how Jewish writers of Miller’s generation “reveled in the English language, listened acutely to its differing accents and rhythms, often shot through with Jewish idioms and construction,” in Arthur Miller: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 484. See Harold Bloom’s “Editor’s Note,” in Bloom’s Major Literary Characters: Willy Loman, xiii. 21. See Bloom, “Editor’s Note,” xiii. 22. David Mamet, “The Human Stain,” The Guardian, May 7, 2005. 23. For a full discussion of this, see Dan Vogel, “From Milkman to Salesman: Glimpses of the Galut,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 10, no. 2 (1999): 172–78. 24. Arthur Miller, “Concerning Jews Who Write,” Jewish Life 2, no. 5 (1948): 10. 25. Vogel, “From Milkman to Salesman,” 177.

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Leah Garrett Willy Loman also has numerous traits that mark him as either a Jewish immigrant or a child of immigrants. Miller’s own father, typical of his generation, “wanted me to succeed. That was a basic immigrant’s idea anyway. And once you did that, anything else was gravy.”26 Willy suffers profoundly when he senses that he is not fully accepted and is a joke to his fellow workers. This suffering translates into his unrelenting pressure on his sons to succeed as WASP icons: football captains, popular, and with an array of girlfriends. Willy’s actions express an insecure Jewish father’s frantic attempts to have himself and his sons fit into mainstream culture. Willy knows and hates the fact that he sticks out, and thus he struggles at all costs to assimilate and have his sons do so as well. Perhaps Miller was drawing on the experiences of his own parents who, as he wrote, knew that “if you wanted to move up in society, you’d better take on a coloration like the society.”27 Moreover, as Miller states in his autobiography, from a young age he “had already been programmed to choose something other than pride in my origins.”28 Miller had learned two lessons from his parents about being Jewish: To succeed one needed to assimilate, and sticking out as a Jew was problematic. These lessons are personified in Willy’s anxieties over himself and his sons, and are evident in the desperate (and eccentric) Americanization of the sons’ names: Biff and Happy. Miller noted that he had written the play when he was the same general age as the rebellious son Biff.29 Biff is struggling, much as young Miller did, to resist the pressures placed on him by his father. And like Miller, who left Brooklyn to go to college in Michigan, so too Biff in the end clearly has decided that he will define “success” on his own terms and will also leave Brooklyn and head west. Miller explained that he created Biff at a time when he had “no cultural” tools to help him construct a character trying to break free of traditional constraints placed on him. This, after all, was before rebellious men came to dominate American culture in the 1950s and 1960s. As Miller notes, Biff was “a precursor of the hippy movement in a way.”30 Biff represents the struggles of a generation of sons who tried to reinvent themselves but found no models to help them do so. Miller is not only showing the despair of the jock, Biff, but as well the revenge of the Jewish nerd, because in the end, the play’s only successful young man is the very Bernard who was teased by Biff in high school, and who yet grew up to find a fulfilling career as a lawyer, while the jocks, Biff and Happy, become troubled and lonely adults without good jobs or families. It is as if Miller is warning his audience that in America, if Jews downplay traditional intellectual pursuits to try to gain popularity, they risk a future of loneliness and

26. As quoted from Bigsby’s interview with Miller in Arthur Miller and Company, 28. 27. Ibid., 16. 28. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 24. 29. See his interview with Bigsby in Arthur Miller and Company, 56. Bigsby, in fact, asserts that Biff’s betrayal of his father’s values is directly tied to Arthur’s decision to go to college instead of remaining in Brooklyn to take on his father’s business. See Bigsby, Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, 100–101. 30. See his interview with Bigsby in ibid., 61.

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Just One of the Goys failure. Bernard, who at first glance seems to be a manifestation of the caricature of the nerdy, intellectual Jew, is much more well rounded than a simple stereotype: He is a physically adept tennis player and also a fulfilled husband and father. So why did Miller hide the Jewishness of the Loman family? There were likely three primary reasons behind his technique: Miller was worried about employing negative stereotypes that would encourage anti-Semitism; he was trying to develop his own voice, rather than mimic the social realism of his literary predecessor, the Jewish playwright Clifford Odets; and he wanted to distance the play from his own family upon whom many of the characters were based. Although Miller had no firsthand experience of the Holocaust, he believed that the Shoah created shock waves in America. He noticed, and directly experienced, a large increase in anti-Semitism.31 In November 1947, five months before he began to write Death of a Salesman, Miller gave a talk at the Jewish Committee of Writers, Artists and Scientists. His speech was reproduced in March 1948 in the journal Jewish Life.32 Thus, in “Concerning Jews Who Write,” Miller states that his writing changed once his awareness of anti-Semitism made him know “I was a Jew.” He then decided to no longer “go on writing about Jews.” This radical decision came about because of “Hitler…. I felt for the first time in my life that I was in danger.” Miller adds, “I think I gave up [on] the Jews as literary material because I was afraid that even an innocent allusion to the individual wrong-doing of an individual Jew would be inflamed by the atmosphere, ignited by the hatred I suddenly was aware of, and my love would be twisted into a weapon of persecution.” Miller thus turned away “from the Jews as material for my work.” Thus, just months before composing Death of a Salesman, Miller asserted in the clearest way possible that he was no longer going to write about Jewish topics because he was fearful of an anti-Semitic backlash. Christopher Bigsby has made a groundbreaking discovery of a 1932 memoir/short story that Miller wrote as a prototype for the play, in which the salesman is given the Jewish name of “Schoenzeit.”33 Between 1932 and 1949, the horrendous increase in anti-Semitism worldwide, and in the United States, likely caused Miller to change his protagonists’ names from Jewish to indistinct ones. Willy’s neurotic cloying for monetary success would have likely made him the type of Jewish villain Miller did not want to represent.34

31. See, for example, Miller’s 1947 piece “Concerning Jews Who Write,” 7–8, or Miller’s essay “The Face in the Mirror: Antisemitism Then and Now,” in Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays 1944– 2000, ed. Steven R. Centola (London: Methuen, 2000), 205–208. Leonard Dinnerstein examines the large rise in anti-Semitism during the war years in the appropriately titled chapter “Antisemitism at High Tide: World War II (1939–1945),” in his Antisemitism in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 32. Miller, “Concerning Jews Who Write,” 7–8. 33. For a discussion of the 1932 piece, see Bigsby’s Arthur Miller: 1915–1962, 325–26. 34. See, for example, Arthur Miller and Company, 21 and Timebends: A Life, 184. It is no wonder that Miller felt the need to convince the world (and perhaps himself) that his real intention in not making Willy Jewish came from a positive desire to make him into an everyman. To admit

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Leah Garrett Miller’s distancing of the Lomans from any distinct ethnicity was also tied to his desire to create a new voice for himself, in contrast to one that piggybacked on the social realist plays about Jewish families by Clifford Odets with which his writing resonated so strongly.35 Also, by making the family not seem overtly Jewish, Miller could deflect the obvious suggestion that they were based on his own family.36 While Willy shared numerous traits with Miller’s father, he also was a reflection of two of the playwright’s uncles, both of whom were salesman, and one of whom committed suicide, although Arthur Miller noted in an interview that “I’m sure he [Manny] would never recognize himself [in Willy].”37 In 1999, with the fiftieth anniversary edition of Death of a Salesman, Miller finally admitted that the Lomans were in fact supposed to be Jewish: These folk are the innocent receivers of what they imagine as a more elegant past, a time “finer” than theirs. As Jews light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity, they exist in a spot that probably most Americans feel they inhabit—on the sidewalk side of the glass looking in at a well-lighted place.38

The Lomans, according to Miller, are Jewish outsiders who desperately want to be insiders. Like many Americans, their religious and ethnic specificity has been deracinated, and they find themselves looking for a better place.39 This Jewish family is made American by the adoption of English and the watering down of their culture, and although according to Miller this experience is not specifically Jewish, “this play seems to have shown that most of the world shares something similar to that condition.” The merging of Jewish and American within the text is thus the truest reflection of the situation of postwar Jewish life. Moreover, fifty years after the play’s appearance, Miller not only asserts the Jewishness of the Lomans but also shows that the Jewish loss of culture in America represents a universal condition. Miller has finally found a way to breach the binary of the Jewish and the universal by stating that he is using a Jewish form of particularity as his basis for universalism.

that anti-Semitism was a huge influence on this decision would have made him seem to be a fearful responder to anti-Jewish trends. 35. See Enoch Brater’s essay, “Ethics and Ethnicity in the Plays of Arthur Miller,” in From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 123, and Bigsby’s discussion of the role of Odets on Miller in Arthur Miller: 1915–1962, 311–14. 36. See Bigsby, Arthur Miller: 1915–1962, 314. 37. The interview is written up in Mel Gussow’s book Conversations with Miller (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), 195. See Matthew C. Roudané’s essay, “Death of a Salesman and the poetics of Arthur Miller,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, 68–69. 38. Arthur Miller, “Preface: “Salesman at Fifty,” in Death of a Salesman: Fiftieth Year Edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), xii. 39. For a discussion of this, see Julius Novick’s “Death of a Salesman: Deracination and Its Discontents,” American Jewish History 91, no. 1 (2003): 97–107.

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Just One of the Goys Miller’s play levels an intense critique on Anglo-America’s obsession with the sports jock as the masculine, sexual, popular figure to emulate. Miller instead shows the American jock as deeply lost outside the halls of high school and suggests that he must reject that vision of masculinity to find fulfillment. By making Biff become cognizant of himself and his negative traits, Miller provides the sports jock with a deep internal world that is a counterbalance to his physical abilities. Miller is making him more humane, more intellectual, more sensitive, and more a figure to whom outsiders who feel weak and bullied can relate. He thus grants Biff the ability to see outside himself and his actions and to understand forcefully the negative repercussions on everyone—including Jewish Bernard, and even himself—when a culture allows this type of jock to reign. Rejecting the immigrant Jewish fathers’ vision of fulfillment that is based on a daily trudge at a 9-to-5 job, and the Anglo culture’s vision of jock popularity, Miller clears a space for the sons of immigrants to constitute a new, more astute, and articulate form of manhood not based solely on the standard American dream. Here rebellion against the norm is the one and only means of happiness. II. C ATCHER

IN THE

RYE

J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is considered one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. A masterpiece that forever changed youth culture in America, the novel is almost never considered as part of the Jewish American canon.40 This is for two reasons: Salinger’s Jewishness is questionable, and the text itself seems not to have explicitly Jewish qualities. Even though Salinger was raised in a Jewish home, had a grandfather who was a rabbi, and unlike many Jewish American men of his generation celebrated a bar mitzvah, he is not often considered to be a Jewish author. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that after his bar mitzvah he learned that his Jewish mother Miriam had in fact been born as Marie, a Catholic. His mother had never formally converted, but she did practice Judaism and raised her son Jerome as a Jew. Attending prep school in New York and Pennsylvania, Salinger faced a great deal of antiSemitism; these experiences resonate throughout his writing, particularly in “Down at the Dinghy,” a story dealing explicitly with anti-Semitism in America. As an adult, Salinger distanced himself from his Jewishness, and like many other American Jews, found religious affinity with Buddhism. Yet if we excluded nonpracticing Jewish Americans from the rubric of Jewish authorship, we would 40. My recent essay considers the Jewishness of the text. See “The Kvetcher in the Rye: J. D. Salinger and Challenges to the Modern Jewish Canon.” The only criticism I could find that stated outright that Holden’s family was in fact “middle-class urban Jewish” despite the fact that Salinger had “Anglicized them” was a 1958 piece by Maxwell Geismer. Geismer condemns Salinger outright for hiding the Jewishness in the text. See his chapter “J. D. Salinger: The Wise Child and The New Yorker School of Fiction,” in American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity, A Mid-Century View of Contemporary Fiction (New York: Hill & Wang, 1958), 195–209. My essay, “The Kvetcher in the Rye,” is found in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse, ed. Justin Cammy, Dara Horn, Ayssa Quint, and Rachel Rubinstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 645–60.

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Leah Garrett probably reduce the field by at least a third.41 Even though Salinger was personally distanced from his Jewishness, the topic comes up explicitly in his writings, particularly in his tales about the Glass family. If we grant Salinger his Jewish status, as Fiedler did, because Salinger was raised as a Jew and frequently wrote about Jewish topics, how might we then read Catcher in the Rye? With Holden Caulfield, I believe, Salinger created an iconic Jewish dangling intellectual—funny, sarcastic, depressed, weak, empathetic, intellectual, well read— of the type that shows up regularly in male Jewish American culture, from Philip Roth to Woody Allen to Larry David. Yet, if Salinger is tapping into the tradition of the Jewish American dangling intellectual, physically weak but rich in mind, why, then, hide his Jewishness? Although generally ignored, Holden is in fact potentially Jewish. He notes, for example, that his “parents are different religions, and all the children in our family are atheists.”42 And later he tells us that “my father was a Catholic once. He quit, though, when he married my mother” (the italics are Salinger’s, p. 112). There is thus a good chance that Holden is Jewish because his mother is, whereas his father possibly converted to Judaism. Moreover, throughout the text Holden levels some of his most sarcastic attacks on Christians. For example, he describes the lecture of a wealthy donor to his prep school in the following way: He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs. The only good part of his speech was right in the middle of it [when] Edgar Marsalla, laid this terrific fart. It was a very crude thing to do, in chapel and all, but it was also quite amusing. (17)

Why this tactic of obfuscation, of suggesting but not stating outright that Holden might be Jewish? Foremost, Salinger is doing what Fiedler suggested was commonplace at the time, a standard trope throughout the pages of Commentary in the mid- and late 1940s: conflating the alienation of the male Jewish intellectual in America with the general alienation prevalent in society.43 Moreover, Salinger may have downplayed Holden’s true identity because he might not have wanted to place him in the oppositional position of the repressed minority. Instead, he draws Holden as a member of the center, one of the WASP culture’s very own, down to the boarding school education and the Upper East 41. Wirth-Nesher and Kramer discuss the complexities of Jewish American identity in their “Introduction: Jewish American Literatures in the Making,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, 1–11. 42. I am quoting from the 1991 Little, Brown, and Co. paperback edition of the book, p. 100. 43. See, for example, Irving Howe’s seminal 1946 essay, “The Lost Young Intellectual: A Marginal Man, Twice Alienated,” Commentary 2, no. 4 (October 1946): 361–67, and Nathan Glazer’s “The ‘Alienation’ of Modern Man: Some Diagnoses of the Malady,” Commentary 3, no. 4 (April 1947): 378–85.

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Just One of the Goys Side apartment. As a member of this power center, Holden is able to look at and verbalize the foibles of that society from a seemingly insider’s position. However, our reading of Catcher in the Rye is altered if we follow Salinger’s hints and consider Holden to be Jewish. We get, instead, an insight into the world of postwar Jewish youth. In Catcher in the Rye, the jock trope is treated quite differently than in Death of a Salesman and The Natural. Rather than having a jock figure as the protagonist whose image could be undermined from within, Salinger places that stock figure in direct opposition to the hero, the intellectual Holden Caulfield. In so doing, Salinger delivers a direct and intense critique on how WASP jocks make life difficult for those who do not share their values. In this case, Biff and Happy Loman are transformed into nonintellectual, bullying oafs at Pencey Prep, who are so cruel that they even provoke the suicide of one of their victims. Like Holden, Salinger attended prep school, first McBurney in New York, where he was the manager of the fencing team, and later Valley Forge Military academy.44 According to his teachers at Valley Forge, Salinger was “quiet, thoughtful, always anxious to please.”45 He was so good at being “pleasing” that he composed a sickly sycophantic song about the wonderful virtues of the school that remarkably is still “enshrined in the Valley Forge school hymn book.” Yet as Ian Hamilton notes, Salinger’s school song “is almost certainly a spoof—an act of mimicry so consummately straight-faced that no one could possibly see through it.”46 Below the surface of seeking always to fit in, Salinger was mimicking and subverting the school credo of Valley Forge. Perhaps, as his daughter asserts, Salinger likely faced horrendous anti-Semitism at the school.47 One gets some sense of the hardships he must have undergone at Valley Forge in Salinger’s attempt to mimic and undermine its most cherished virtues. Holden, unlike Salinger, does not aim to please at school. Instead, he rebels in small and large ways, including failing most of his classes. And as manager of the fencing team, a Gentile sport resonating with all the boys’ literature of swashbuckling heroes with phallic weapons, he is given the role of manager, a comic antithesis of the sport’s participant. Yet Holden, in a hilarious act of passive-aggressive revenge against the dominant jock culture, manages to leave the team’s equipment on the subway before a big match. Pencey Prep’s brochure asserts that “Since 1888 we have been molding boys into clear-thinking young men” (2). In practice, the school works the opposite way: Pencey provides an environment where boys learn to sublimate their intellect for the jock sports culture that dominates every aspect of the school.

44. For a discussion of the ties between Valley Forge and Pencey Prep and Salinger’s time at Valley Forge, see Ian Hamilton, In Search of J D Salinger (London: Heinemann, 1988), 18–31 45. Ibid., 28. 46. The discussion of the school song is found in ibid., 28–29. 47. Margaret A. Salinger, Dream Catcher: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 31. This biography of Salinger is controversial because of the negative light in which she portrays her father.

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Leah Garrett Neither the broader world of the prep school nor the smaller world of his family can offer Holden a safe space in which to grow into a man. In prep school, the WASP jock culture regards Holden and other weak intellectuals as outsiders. In his family, his parents have been too depressed following the death of their youngest son to focus on Holden’s needs. Only his siblings Phoebe and D. B. can, and do, help him find comfort in himself. As with Biff Loman and Roy Hobbs in The Natural, when parents are absent or overwhelmed with their own problems, sons turn to their siblings, reflecting the intergenerational conflict felt by many second-generation Jewish men against the world of their immigrant parents. Sons would seek out peers their own age to help them construct a new vision of America. The impact of the Depression on Catcher in the Rye is less overt than in the other works I considered. What little biographical information we have on Salinger’s family suggests that in 1932, during the midst of the Depression, they somewhat surprisingly moved from the Upper West Side to upscale Park Avenue.48 In Catcher in the Rye, Holden and his family do not have financial insecurities and seem to embody upper-middle-class life. Yet Holden’s constant ruminations on issues of class suggest the discomfort that the sensitive Salinger must have felt when his family was doing so well while so many others suffered. Of the three authors, however, World War II had the most direct and profound influence on Salinger. He signed up for combat and experienced the destruction of Jewish life in Europe firsthand.49 As a sergeant, Salinger was part of the bloody Normandy campaign, and also spent months fighting nightmarish battles in the Huertgen Forest, where a number of his fellow soldiers and friends were wounded or killed.50 Another way of looking at the angst expressed in Catcher is thus to read it in light of Salinger’s very recent military service. I find it hard to accept that his powerful personal experiences of anti-Semitism—at school and at war—would not have been channeled into the book’s critique of upper-class Christian America. Holden’s radical disorientation expresses a young man’s troubled search to find an intellectual, verbal means of self-realization, a form of identity far from the hyper-masculine group mentality of prep school and sports culture. He is “lonely as hell” and not a member of the pack, and his voice is that of the “crazy” outsider until he finds others to join him in a normative chorus. Holden, like Salinger himself, is an Upper East Side prep school boy who finds himself an outsider in

48. Hamilton, In Search of J D Salinger, 20. 49. Discussions of Salinger’s military service can be found in Margaret A. Salinger, Dream Catcher, 50–69, Hamilton, In Search of J D Salinger, 80–98, and Paul Alexander’s Salinger: A Biography (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999), 78–105. 50. As found in Norma Jean Lutz, “Biography of J D Salinger,” J. D. Salinger, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002), 6. His experiences in the war led Salinger to be briefly hospitalized in Nuremberg for a “nervous breakdown.” For a brief discussion about viewing the book in light of the war, see Carl Freedman’s essay, “Memories of Holden Caulfield—and of Miss Greenwood,” in Holden Caulfield, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005). The essay is found on pages 165–81, while the discussion of its relationship to the war is on 175–77.

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Just One of the Goys upper-class Christian culture, experiencing a constant sense of alienation. Although perhaps Salinger sought to show the universal alienation of Holden, all of his rages are directed specifically against Christian upper-class culture, and reflect the particular status of the out-of-place Jewish intellectual in a society dominated by wealth and sports. While Salinger in his own life responded to Gentile America by trying to show that he was just like everyone else, his Holden continually reiterates the notion that fitting in at all costs is a fake way to be. When Holden speaks up and is authentic, just like Philip Roth’s Eli the Fanatic in his 1959 story of the same name, he ends up institutionalized. The extraordinary and impossible pressure on Jewish men to conform to Anglo norms is represented as so overwhelming that not to conform is to be labeled as, or to feel oneself to be, insane. If we neglect Catcher in the Rye as a Jewish text, we overlook the extraordinary, soul-destroying pressure that many Jewish men faced in the postwar era. III. T HE N ATURAL Bernard Malamud’s 1952 classic, The Natural, was based on popular sports fiction and, in particular, on the Frank Merriwell series. Malamud himself stated: As a kid, for entertainment I turned to the movies and dime novels. Maybe The Natural derives from Frank Merriwell as well as the adventures of the Brooklyn Dodgers in Ebbets Field.51

Frank Merriwell was the protagonist of the most popular and highest-selling dime-store series in American history, with weekly sales, during its heyday, topping 500,000 copies.52 Composed for young men, the series tells of a Yale 51. As quoted in an interview with Daniel Stern in “The Art of Fiction, No. 52,” Paris Review 61 (Spring 1975): 3. 52. Interestingly, both Miller and Salinger read the Merriwell series. Miller discusses his youthful adulation of the series in his autobiography Timebends: A Life, 62, and Salinger’s 1947 short story “The Inverted Forest” compares a macho jock student with Frank Merriwell. Although Merriwell had a huge influence on young men in America, no study has ever considered his role in the shaping of American culture. The only detailed, and very comprehensive, analysis of the series is from 1937, including a brief history of the dime novel, a biography of Patten, and a bibliography of his works. See John Levi Cutler, Gilbert Patten and His Frank Merriwell Saga: A Study in Sub-literary Fiction, 1896–1913 (Orono: University Press of Maine, 1934). For other discussions, see Robert H. Boyle, Sport-Mirror of American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 241–71, Michael Oriard’s Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), 27–29; Robert J. Higgs, Laurel and Thorn: The Athlete in American Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), 19– 21; Christian Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 165–71, and the entry “Merriwell, Frank,” in The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book, ed. J. Randolph Cox (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 170–73. For overviews of the Merriwell genre of sport fiction, see Walter Evans, “The All-American Boys: A Study of Boys’ Sports Fiction,” Journal of Popular Culture 6, no. 1 (1972): 104–21 and Christian Messenger, “Sport in the Dime Novel,” Journal of American Culture 1, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 495–505. Gilbert Patten wrote an autobiography that discusses how he came to create

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Leah Garrett student who undergoes a range of exotic adventures while excelling at a variety of college sports. Merriwell is a protean version of a superhero, famous for his strength, ability to remain unhurt, and genius at solving crime. Frank is both a thinker and a doer who not only sails through advanced courses at Yale, but also is the university’s very best fencer, baseball player, football player, rower, boxer, and runner. As we shall see in The Natural, Malamud subverts all of the idealized aspects of the Merriwell icon. Readers are less familiar with The Natural than with Malamud’s other works. The book has also been eclipsed by its film, which recreates Roy as a positive WASP hero, although in reality, the character is “one of the most thoroughly unsympathetic heroes in the history of American literature.”53 In brief, the plot of The Natural concerns Roy Hobbs, who is shot by a mentally unstable woman while on a trip to try out for the Chicago Cubs. Many years later, he returns to baseball as a member of the major league New York Knights and quickly becomes the team’s top batter. Roy falls in love with Memo Paris, a money-hungry woman, as opposed to the much more virtuous Iris with whom he spends one beautiful night in Chicago. In the final section, Roy is bribed by a bookie and the team’s owner to strike out during the pennant game. At the last minute, when he is just about to throw the game, he fouls the ball off into the stands and hits the virtuous Iris, whom he has not seen since their one-night stand. He runs to her, and she reveals that she is pregnant. Roy returns to the field, determined that he will not throw the game. Yet, even though he is trying to hit a home run to win the pennant, he strikes out. In the street, a newspaper boy hands him the paper stating that Roy threw the game. The boy says, “Say it ain’t true, Roy,” directly echoing “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” and the Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox scandal of 1919. The book ends with the following statement: “When Roy looked into the boy’s eyes he wanted to say it wasn’t, but couldn’t, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept many bitter tears.” (In contrast, the movie version ends with Roy winning the pennant game and getting the girl.) In both form and content, Malamud created a text in opposition to the Merriwell series.54 In form, Malamud used prose that combined, often quite strangely, naturalistic Yiddish-tinged dense writing and romanticism. His is the converse of

the series. See Frank Merriwell’s “Father”: An Autobiography by Gilbert Patten, ed. Harriet Hinsdale, assisted by Tony London (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 176–81. 53. Kevin Baker, “Introduction” to Bernard Malamud, The Natural (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), xii. 54. As Kevin Baker writes of The Natural, “Readers of a certain age will recognize the model for the book. Up until perhaps a generation ago, most public libraries still held shelves full of boys’ sports novels. They were a venerable line of American hack writing, churned out relentlessly by sportswriters and novelists, or even by a major college basketball coach such as Clair Bee…. The hero was sometimes a professional athlete, more often a high-school or college star…. In The Natural, Malamud draws heavily upon this genre, then stands it on its head.” See Baker’s introduction to Malamud’s The Natural, viii.

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Just One of the Goys the dime-store writing that is simplistic, not descriptive, and heavily reliant on dialogue. In content, he created Roy Hobbs who, like Frank Merriwell, is a sports hero. However, Roy’s personality is Frank’s opposite: Roy is corrupt, emotional, unpopular with his peers, and causes problems rather than solving them.55 Unlike the cardboard figure of Merriwell, who never experiences deep suffering, Roy is a tortured soul.56 Throughout Malamud’s works, redemption only comes through great pain, and while The Natural ends on a sad note, Roy has for the first time owned up to what he has done by nearly selling out the pennant race for a bribe. He begins to weep and therein begins to change, an act that brings with it the possibility that his life will improve. While Roy no longer will have fame and a baseball career, he will be with a woman who loves him, will have a child, and will have an honest approach to himself and his life. Roy Hobbs, like Malamud’s Jewish characters, in the end thus replaces self-delusion with honesty.57 Hobbs is a figure who shows the dangers of a life focused entirely on the needs of the body: He overtrains and overplays, he is oversexed, and he can never eat enough. Where there is an (often problematic) literary stereotype of the intellectual, physically inept Jew, in this case we also see the opposite trope of the ba’al-guf or man of the body, a boorish, physical, nonintellectual Jewish oaf.58 As a representative of this trope, Hobbs is hyper-masculine, and all the women in the novel are sexist constructs who are confined to “archetypal roles as temptress, mother, or commodity.”59 Only at the end, when he weeps, is he transformed from a Greek god with superhuman strength into a mere man. Malamud imbues his hero of the physical, Roy Hobbs, with aspects of the artist who on a good day uses baseball as a brush and the field as his canvas. Malamud thus intellectualizes the physical, male realm of baseball by making it the material for high art in his literary novel about the game. In this case, sports are to be appreciated not only for physicality, but also are to be enjoyed for their cerebral aspects. Baseball has been traditionally seen as the most intellectual of American sports, and its statistics and batting averages form a lure of their own 55. Malamud discusses what inspired him to write The Natural in “The Natural: Raison D’Etre and Meaning,” in Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work, ed. Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 41–46. 56. Or to quote Frederick W. Turner, III, Malamud “has been able to invest this boy’s game with tragi-comic qualities,” from his essay “Myth Inside and Out: The Natural,” in Bernard Malamud and the Critics, eds. Leslie and Joyce Field (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 112. 57. Philip Roth felt that Malamud created moral allegories, where “generally speaking, the Jew is innocent, passive, virtuous…. the Gentile, on the other hand, is characteristically corrupt, violent, and lustful.” Certainly Roy Hobbs embodies these traits, although in the end he has the possibility to change. For Roth’s quite negative views on Malamud’s fiction, see his essay “Imagining Jews,” New York Review of Books 21 (October 3, 1974): 22. 58. For a discussion of this term, see David Roskies’s Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 141–44. 59. See Susan J. Bandy, “The Female Voice in American Sports Literature and the Quest for a Female Sporting Identity,” in Upon Further Review: Sports in American Literature, ed. Michael Cocchiarale and Scott D. Emmer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 99.

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Leah Garrett for many fans. Malamud’s novel was one of the first literary representations to note the intellectual potential of the game. The Natural has been called a modern-day rewrite of a medieval romance60 and has also been correctly linked to American writing about protagonists seduced by the American dream, as was Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby (also played by Robert Redford in the movie version) or in the Horatio Alger story.61 Yet Malamud’s book has never been considered part of Jewish American writing. Because none of the characters are explicitly Jewish, the novel has been viewed as Malamud’s flawed foray into the Christian world.62 However, to fully understand the book I believe it is necessary to consider why and how Malamud sought to construct (and deconstruct) a WASP sports figure from a Jewish perspective. In the first part of the book, Roy Hobbs is continually called a “Greenhorn,” because he is a country bumpkin who knows nothing about city life. The novel shows the bumpkin’s transformation into the confident city slicker who then meets his downfall, and it matches the story of Abraham Cahan’s 1917 The Rise of David Levinsky.63 In Malamud’s version, as in Cahan’s story, the protagonist sells out for money. In both cases, capitalist materialism is evil. The way to reconnect with the virtuous life is to downplay material lusts and focus on being fulfilled in other ways. The Natural mimics numerous other instances of Jewish American writing that challenge the values of American capitalism; examples include Michael Gold’s Jews without Money and Anzia Yezierska’s The Bread Givers.64 But the critique here is different: The lust for money is not an immigrant’s problem but an American’s. Thus the United States offers myriad forms of capitalist seduction, with even its iconic game, baseball, up for sale. Nothing is sacred here, and the only means of resistance is through individual acts of rebellion against the pressure to sell out. For Malamud, Roy becomes an American hero not when he is the rising

60. For analysis that focuses heavily on the “Arthurian parallels” in The Natural, see Robert Ducharme, Art and Idea in the Novels of Bernard Malamud (Paris: Mouton, 1974); Sheldon J. Hershinow, Bernard Malamud (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), 16–28, and Peter L. Hays’s “Malamud’s Yiddish-Accented Medieval Stories,” in The Fiction of Bernard Malamud, ed. Richard Astro and Jackson J. Benson (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1977), 87–96. 61. Robert Ducharme, Art and Idea in the Novels of Bernard Malamud, 12. Iksa Alter convincingly reads The Natural as a reworking of the “Horatio Alger archetype wherein the hero must choose between two opposing concepts of success” all within a larger body of Malamud’s work that “presented the decline of the American dream into the nightmare of an entire civilization in decay.” See her essay “The Good Man’s Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud,” in AMS Studies in Modern Literature 5 (New York: AMS Press, 1981), 2–4. 62. See, for example, Robert Alter’s discussion of how The Natural “entertains more than it convinces” because it is not based on the reality that Malamud knew: Jewish immigrant life; in After the Tradition: Essays on Modern Jewish Writing (New York: Dutton, 1969), 118. 63. Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York: Harper, 1960). 64. For an incisive recent book on first-generation Jewish American writing, see Julian Levinson’s Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

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Just One of the Goys star of baseball, but instead when he weeps for his sins and is reborn to a life outside the game. Roy often interacts with others in a way that mimics the ways of Jewish– Yiddish New York. He intersperses his speech with Yinglish terms such as shyster, or resorts to humorous dialogue straight out of Yiddish writing.65 Here, for example, the greenhorn, Roy, and the porter, Eddie, sound like two Jews on the Lower East Side, with the long-term resident making fun of the newcomer: Roy laughed. “How far to Chicago, Eddie?” “Chi? Oh, a long, long ways. I wouldn’t walk.” “I don’t intend to.” “Why Chi?” Eddie asked. “Why not New Orleans? That’s a lush and Frenchy city.” “Never been there.” … “I’m going to Chicago, where the Cubs are.” “Lions and tigers in the zoo?” “No, the ballplayers.”66

Their quick banter with double entendres resonates with Yiddish humor (as found, for example, in the works of Sholem Aleichem and others). Malamud was the child of Yiddish-speaking immigrants; he grew up in a working-class, Jewish enclave of Brooklyn.67 For his family, who ran a “rather dreary and depressing” delicatessen, the Depression was less of a shock than it was for Miller’s family. As Malamud stated, “it was not good anywhere until the Depression and then it was bad.”68 Malamud found the economic downturn a catalyst for the soul-searching that can lead to writing: “The good thing about the Depression was everything went down to bedrock. Experience that deprives you of something can make you realize what it is that you need most, and it sends you inward, and that to a writer is important.”69 This concept of suffering that propels internal growth is the primary theme of Roy Hobbs’s story in The Natural. Malamud had to make Roy a Christian because a Jewish baseball hero who sells out would have diverted his critique away from American materialism in general, causing him to expose Jewish materialism. This crucial idea reflects 65. Alfred Kazin noted in his review of Malamud’s second novel The Assistant that Malamud has an “utterly objective ear for the harsh and plaintive American Yiddish speech.” See “Review of The Assistant,” Commentary 24, no. 1 (July 1957), 89. Robert Solotaroff discusses how Malamud was raised with Yiddish/English (or Yinglish) in Bernard Malamud: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 6–7. 66. Malamud, The Natural, 5. 67. The major biography of Malamud is Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life by Philip Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Malamud’s daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, wrote a memoir entitled My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). As with Salinger’s daughter’s biography, this one is also controversial because of the often negative portrait of the father. 68. Both quotations are found in Philip Davis’s Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, 13–14. 69. Ibid., 116.

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Leah Garrett how in the years after the Holocaust, first-generation Jewish portraits of moneyobsessed Jews all but disappear. As with Miller, who in the post-Holocaust era was uncomfortable creating a greedy Jewish protagonist, so too in Malamud one can read the figure as born at a time when Jews were reluctant to portray their people negatively. So, too, Miller’s decision to critique the American dream from a post-Depression perspective can be seen in Malamud’s desire to shed light on the more destructive aspects of American consumerism.70 Kevin Baker recently suggested a connection between The Natural and Death of a Salesman when he asserted that Roy Hobbs is the “mirror image of Willy Loman.”71 Hobbs is a member of the first generation of immigrants, the greenhorns, who, like Loman, swam, and drowned, in the promise of the American dream. He becomes an American hero when he finds redemption outside the great game that is up for sale. Malamud in this work thus clears a space in which young men who are physically inept can create a meaningful life beyond the pitch.72 As Miller does with Biff, Malamud presents the sports icon as a deeply flawed figure who has believed all the hype about the importance of being a jock, but who has found that it led to a deeply unfulfilled life because his body now dominates his soul and intellect. And as with Biff, Malamud is humanizing and reinventing the jock as a much more sensitive and intellectual soul. He projects onto the Merriwellian hero the values and virtues of self-reflection and intellectualism. By making his protagonist a WASP representative of America’s most iconic game, baseball, Malamud extends his critique of the United States: Not only does America seduce the immigrant with the destructive lure of money, but the country also shatters the lives of the archetypal Americans—the WASPs. In The Natural, Malamud creates a massive indictment of success: Even the game of baseball is up for sale, and our sports heroes can fail like classical icons of old. In this case, Frank Merriwell has been transplanted from the fantasy space of the dime-store realm into a real, and corrupt, American world where his only hope for finding a fulfilling life is in quitting the game and reconnecting with his neglected brain and emotions. In this way, Malamud mischievously turns the jock into the nerd.

IV. C ONCLUSION Miller, Salinger, and Malamud responded to the pressures of postwar Jewish life by creating works about the difficulties of being young men in an antiintellectual culture that idealizes the jock and sportsman. The American cultural adulation of the tough guy was a natural repercussion of the war years, when 70. Malamud discusses the promise of America for Jews in his essay “Imaginative Writing and the Jewish Experience,” in Talking Horse, 189. 71. Kevin Baker’s “Introduction” to Bernard Malamud The Natural, xii. 72. Davis writes that “The young Malamud was otherwise physically awkward, and poor at sports: the future author of The Natural threw a baseball like a girl, said Wittkin.” See Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, 33.

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Just One of the Goys young men were returning from service and the soldier–warrior was held in high esteem. Moreover, as Morris Dickstein documents in Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970, this was also a time when Jewish American discourse was moving from Marxian to Freudian interpretations of culture, a trend reflected in the personalities of Biff, Holden, and Roy. Whereas in prewar writings the concerns of the Jewish immigrant pack dominated, after the war the new focus was on the individual’s emotional world and his struggles for self-fulfillment. In this way, Biff, Holden, and Roy, who are all on a quest for psychological wholeness, stand in stark contrast to the ideal sportsman of American football or baseball, whose primary motivation is to be a successful member of the team. In this new era, Jewish intellectual men replace the iconic American sports figure as a great team player with the solitary sportsman who is on his own journey and is no longer comforted by team membership. By employing the sports figure symbolically, these Jewish American works chart out the transformation from the prewar Marxian collective “sports team” of Jewish immigrant life, to the postwar Freudian concern with the solitary Jew. It is a truly second-generation Jewish American trope. Even though throughout their writing each would frequently use either Jewish or half-Jewish protagonists, at the start of their careers they all turned to seemingly Christian protagonists.73 Each chose to write these types of works for different reasons: Miller, responding to the anti-Semitic climate, made the Lomans seem “universal” rather than Jewish; Salinger created Holden in part as a vector for his rage at the prep-school ideal and perhaps as a form of revenge against the bullies who dominated in his own school and America in general; Malamud rewrote the first-generation Jewish immigrant tale as a larger indictment against American consumerism while granting to the sports hero aspects of intellectualism. Death of a Salesman, Catcher in the Rye, and The Natural show that the standard definition of “Jewish American literature” as writing that focuses explicitly on Jewish life in America does not adequately represent the specific qualities of postwar discourse. If we do not consider Miller’s Death of a Salesman to be a Jewish play, then we are delineating “Jewish” as somehow different from “universal.” Instead, I assert that the Loman family members can be universal and Jewish figures at the same time. To exclude Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye as a potentially Jewish text because Holden is possibly only half-Jewish, is to overlook the way that Salinger constructed his critique by using a seeming insider who is really an outsider to the culture he attacks. To reject The Natural because none of its 73. Miller’s later plays linked “the Holocaust directly and profoundly to the American psyche.” See Joyce Antler’s “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” American Theatre 12, no. 2 (February 1995): 16. Edward Isser analyzes the full range of Miller’s writing on the Holocaust in “Arthur Miller and the Holocaust,” Essays in Theatre 10, no. 2 (1992): 155–64. For Salinger, his daughter claims he said that “he writes about half-Jews because, he says, that’s what he knows best.” Margaret A. Salinger, Dream Catcher: A Memoir, 20. And for Malamud, nearly early every work after The Natural was about Jews.

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Leah Garrett characters is overtly Jewish is again to overlook how Malamud employs a range of narrative strategies straight out of the previous generation of Jewish writing in America. By presenting Biff, Holden, and Ray as lost souls seeking meaning in a largely meaningless world, Miller, Salinger, and Malamud created protagonists to whom a postwar readership could relate. The writers also were delineating how hard it was for many Jewish men to find a place in the dominating Anglo-American culture. Moreover, by subverting the jock trope in Death of a Salesman, Catcher in the Rye, and The Natural, Miller, Salinger, and Malamud helped to lessen the pressure on young Jewish men to conform to Anglo visions of masculinity. The extraordinary influence of these works shows how these authors used Jewish visions of the WASP sports icons in such a way that they spoke for the general malaise and disorientation felt by a broad range of American youth in the postwar years. Biff, Holden, and Roy taught a generation of readers that the path to a fulfilled adult life is difficult, but to succeed, one had to speak honestly to one’s needs and desires. To find peace, they had to find their own voices and chart their own paths even when their immigrant parents, the American dream, and its popular heroes no longer offered simple answers. Leah Garrett Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

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AJS Review 34:2 (November 2010), 195–229 © Association for Jewish Studies 2010 doi:10.1017/S0364009410000322

T EMPLE , C OMMUNITY, AND S ACRED N ARRATIVE IN THE D URA -E UROPOS S YNAGOGUE by

Kära L. Schenk* for Henry Maguire The painted decoration in the Dura-Europos synagogue (Syria, 244–245 CE) is the most extensive surviving example of Jewish pictorial narrative in the ancient world. In its final stage, the decoration consisted of three bands of narrative panels that surrounded all four walls of the synagogue’s assembly hall and led up to the Torah shrine at the center of the west wall (Figure 1).1 Imagery related to the Jerusalem Temple, including a symbolic image of the Temple on the Torah shrine, made up a significant part of the decoration of the Dura synagogue. There is, however, considerable scholarly disagreement as to how this imagery should be interpreted, particularly as part of a “programmatic” structure.2 Because the * I was able to travel to Syria with the assistance of the Louis and Sadie Roth Fellowship and the Adolf Katzenellenbogen Prize (both through the Johns Hopkins University), and to carry out further research on the Dura-Europos Synagogue with the assistance of the Samuel H. Kress Athens/Jerusalem Fellowship. Many thanks to the staff of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, to my adviser Henry Maguire, and to Herbert Kessler, Dan Weiss, Eunice-Dauterman-Maguire, Ted Lewis, and Martin Jaffee for their help and suggestions at various stages of this project. 1. For the initial report on the synagogue and its frescoes, see Carl H. Kraeling, “The Synagogue,” in The Excavations at Dura-Europos Conducted by Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, ed. Michael I. Rostovtzeff et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936), 337–83. For a more comprehensive discussion of the site and the synagogue, see Carl H. Kraeling, The Synagogue: The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report VIII, Part I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956). 2. In addition to Kraeling’s final report, the following studies consider the question of the fresco cycle as a whole: Michael I. Rostovtzeff, Dura-Europos and Its Art. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938) 100ff; Robert Comte du Mesnil du Buisson, Les Peintures de la synagogue de Doura-Europos 245–56 Après J.-C. (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1939); André Grabar, “Le theme religieux des fresques de la synagogue de Doura (245–56 apres J.-C.),” Revue de l’histoire des religions 123/2–3 (1941): 143– 92 and 124/1 (1941): 5–35; Isaiah Sonne, “The Paintings of the Dura Synagogue,” Hebrew Union College Annual 20 (1947): 255–362; Eleazar L. Sukenik, The Synagogue of Dura-Europos and Its Paintings Jerusalem, 1947); Rachel Wischnitzer, The Messianic Theme in the Paintings of the Dura Synagogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); vols. IX–XI of Erwin R. Goodenough’s. Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period. 13 vols. Bollingen ser. 37 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953–68); Joseph Gutmann, “Programmatic Painting in the Dura Synagogue,” in The

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Kära L. Schenk

Figure 1. Dura-Europos Synagogue, west wall with Torah shrine at center (composite image), 244–45. (Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection) Temple image on the Torah shrine was positioned at the liturgical focal point of the synagogue and was created before the other surrounding narrative panels, the function of this image is a key component of the synagogue’s decoration as a whole. Two contextualizing factors would have informed the function and meaning of the image: the reception of the image as part of the liturgical activity carried out by the congregation, and the place of the image as the conclusion to the middle level of surrounding narrative panels that depicted the journey of the Ark of the Covenant from Sinai to Zion. This narrative helped to situate the members of the congregation in relation to the Temple image, defining the community’s active role as a part of the narrative itself. In making this argument, I will integrate (and, at points, challenge) the work of three scholars who have considered the Temple image and surrounding narrative. First, Carl Kraeling’s final report of 1956 offered the fundamental basis on which all subsequent studies have been built.3 In a central component of my

Dura-Europos Synagogue: A Re-Evaluation (1932–72), ed. Joseph Gutmann (Missoula, MT: American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature, 1973), 137–54; Kurt Weitzmann and Herbert Kessler, The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1990), 151–83; Warren Moon, “Nudity and Narrative: Observations on the Synagogue Paintings from Dura-Europos,” in Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition. ed. Warren Moon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 283–316 [originally published as Warren Moon, “Nudity and Narrative: Observations on the Frescoes from the Dura Synagogue,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60 (1992): 587–658]; Annabel J. Wharton, “Good and Bad Images from the Synagogue of Dura Europos: Contexts, Subtexts, Intertexts,” Art History 17 (1994): 1–25; Annabel J. Wharton, Refiguring the Post Classical City. Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 38–51; Shula Laderman, “A New Look at the Second Register of the West Wall in Dura Europos,” Cahiers Archeologiques 45 (1997): 5–18; Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 172–83. 3. See Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), especially 118–33.

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative article, I will reevaluate Kraeling’s identification of the first two panels of the middle level. Both panels are set in the Sinai Wilderness: In the first, Aaron and his sons offer sacrifice in the Tabernacle where the Ark was first placed; in the second, the twelve tribal representatives of Israel offer prayer just outside the Tabernacle as they surround a miraculous well. Kraeling identified the rituals taking place in the sanctuary with the consecration of the Tabernacle and the elite caste of priests who served there. And he found the inclusion of the panel with the well puzzling because he understood it as an isolated miracle having nothing to do with the ostensible “liturgical” focus of the middle level. In contrast, I offer a new identification of the rituals in the Tabernacle as part of the ongoing sacrificial service that the priests presented for the benefit of Israel as a whole; the Israelites are, in turn, shown just outside the Tabernacle offering their own complementary service of prayer while the springing up of the miraculous well has been transformed into a ritually recurring event. Together, the panels offer an idealized image of the whole community of Israel at worship in the Sinai Wilderness. Whereas Kraeling saw the middle level of narratives as tied together only by the general theme of liturgical activity, Joseph Gutmann’s study of 19734 argued that the surrounding narrative panels constituted one continuous narrative related to the Ark, beginning with the Tabernacle in the Sinai Wilderness and ending with the Torah shrine. When the congregation placed the Torah cabinet—called the “ark” in a dedication text on the shrine itself—into the shrine, they liturgically enacted the high point of Israel’s history: Solomon’s placement of the Ark of the Covenant in the “house” that he had built for it. The addition of narrative panels to the surrounding walls in the second phase of decoration transformed this liturgical event into the conclusion of a larger narrative sequence. In particular, the middle level of narratives depicts the Ark of the Covenant in the guise of the Torah cabinet and tells the story of the Ark’s journey from the Sinai Wilderness to Mount Zion. The placement of the Torah “ark” in the shrine represented the liturgical completion of this sacred narrative within the synagogue itself. In this way, Gutmann emphasized the role of the synagogue as a replacement for the Temple and as a “small sanctuary” where Jews could continue to worship in the wake of the Temple’s destruction. I accept Gutmann’s general idea of a liturgical completion for the historical narrative, though I will nuance his arguments in key places throughout this article. However, I will go beyond the emphasis found there on the construction of the synagogue as a sacred place to elaborate on the role of the synagogue community as a holy people liturgically positioned to interact with the shrine and its Temple image. In doing so, I will draw on more recent work by Steven Fine, who emphasized the receptive context that synagogue liturgy would have provided for the viewing of the Temple image.5 He has offered crucial observations about what we might know of the liturgy, and on how the liturgy would have framed the congregation’s perception of the image. Though taking these observations into

4. See Gutmann, “Programmatic Painting,” 149. 5. See Fine, Art and Judaism, 172–83.

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Kära L. Schenk consideration, I will also argue that my rereading of the Tabernacle images just mentioned suggests more specific and intentional connections between the rituals represented in the Tabernacle panels and the liturgical activity of the synagogue community. In particular, the liturgical interaction between the congregation and the shrine that displayed the “ark,” as sketched out by Fine, has an analogue in the liturgical interaction between the biblical tribes of Israel gathered outside the Tabernacle and the priestly activity taking place within the sanctuary that contained the Ark. Thus, the liturgical activities of the Tabernacle form a historical precedent for the celebration of liturgy in the synagogue itself. Liturgical activities of the congregation also served to complete the narrative on the surrounding walls by positioning the gathering of the congregation around the shrine as a means of enacting the gathering of the Israelites to the Temple under Solomon. In this way, the congregation not only echoed events on the surrounding walls, but also embodied in their own worship a key concluding moment in the drama of Israel’s sacred narrative. Many earlier studies on Dura, including those of Kraeling and Gutmann, presupposed a strong and relatively unproblematic relationship between the synagogue and rabbinic Judaism.6 However, we cannot assume that the rabbinic movement in this period exercised the kind of centralized control over all aspects of Jewish life (including the synagogue) that was once taken for granted in the scholarly literature.7 A priest is mentioned among the leaders of the synagogue in the Dura dedication text,8 and we know of other examples of synagogue inscriptions

6. As in Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 346–48; and Gutmann, “Programmatic Painting,” 150. 7. Early scholars such as Heinrich Graetz constructed a narrative in which R. Yohanan ben Zakkai founded an academy in Yavneh, reconstituted the Sanhedrin (or central court) there, and served as an all-powerful “president.” See History of the Jews, vol. II (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1893). In contrast, Catherine Hezser has argued that the early Rabbinic movement should be understood as an informal network of relationships between teachers who could boast knowledge of Torah (but also piety, personal charisma, social influence, and wealth) and their disciples, rather than in terms of centralized political power. See Catherine Hezser, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr/Siebeck, 1997), Texte und Studium zum Antiken Judentum 66, as well as her conclusions regarding the rabbinic movement as a “personal alliance system,” ibid., 492–94, in particular. David Goodblatt has debated the existence of an all-powerful court (the Sanhedrin) that functioned as the authority for Jews throughout the empire in this period; see The Monarchic Principle. Studies in Jewish Self-Government in Antiquity, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 38 (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr/Siebeck, 1994), 232–76. Likewise, Martin Jacobs expresses skepticism about the early status of the office of the “president.” See especially Die Institution des jüdischen Patriarchen. Eine quellen- und traditionskritische Studie zur Geschichte der Juden in der Spätantike (Tübingen, Germany: J.C.B. Mohr, 1995), 114. See also Seth Schwartz’s fundamental reevaluation of this question in Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. 177–289. Richard Kalmin has argued that rabbinic scholars in the Babylonian sphere were even less integrated into the larger Jewish community than their Palestinian contemporaries. See his Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8. 8. For the dedication inscription, see Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 264, Aramaic text on Tile B.

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative in both the late Second Temple period and late antiquity that list priests as leaders in this setting.9 In contrast, no rabbi is named in the Dura dedication text. Nevertheless, we do not need to adopt the view once presented by E. R. Goodenough that Dura and other synagogues of the period followed a radical alternative to the “kind” of Judaism represented by the rabbis.10 Fine has proposed that though the rabbis may not have controlled all aspects of late antique Jewish life, there appears to be a considerable overlap between the expectations regarding the synagogue and its function as found in rabbinic texts and in archaeological contexts such as Dura,11 and his observations provide a useful vantage point for considering the relationship between the two. In this light, Steven Fraade’s recent study on Temple vessels and imagery as a marker of identity should be noted. In it he asked “How much influence did the rabbis exert on the synagogue?” in order to consider the influence of synagogue practices on the rabbis.12 Rather than see the rabbis in the third century as in control of synagogues like Dura, it is certainly possible that rabbinic texts reflected or responded to developments in such synagogues. Finally, this article emphasizes archaeological comparanda from areas further west of Dura because there are no remaining synagogues from the eastern centers of the Jews associated with the Babylonian Talmud. It in no way implies that the conception or pictorial sources for the images in Dura must necessarily be understood exclusively as “influences” from these western centers. We do not need to postulate that the synagogue decoration was copied wholesale from a no longer extant synagogue in a western site such as Antioch.13 Rather, although

9. Although the Dura inscription does not make this claim about Samuel, other inscriptions state explicitly that priestly leaders in synagogues taught Torah in this setting. The Theodotos inscription from first-century CE Jerusalem refers to a synagogue run by generations of priests who list teaching the Torah as the primary function of the synagogue over which they presided. See Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 54–56 with notes for references related to the inscription. An inscription in the Sardis synagogue also refers to a “priest and teacher of wisdom”; see Andrew Seager, “The Synagogue at Sardis,” in Ancient Synagogues Revealed, ed. Lee I. Levine (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 183. Ed P. Sanders notes that “priests” and “elders” were specifically charged with the teaching of Torah (Deuteronomy 31:9–13) and that this formulation appears to be echoed in Philo’s description of a “priest” or “elder” who read and taught the Torah in the synagogue (Philo. Hypothetica 7:12ff). He argues that priests were the primary teachers and arbiters of the Torah in the late Second Temple Period; see Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–55 CE (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), 170–89. 10. See Goodenough, Jewish Symbols, vols. IX–XI. Other scholars have revived Goodenough’s approach to some extent. See, for example, Jodi Magness, “Heaven on Earth: Helios and the Zodiac Cycle in Ancient Palestinian Synagogues,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 59 (2005), 1–52. 11. Fine, Art and Judaism, 172–83. 12. Steven Fraade, “The Temple as a Marker of Jewish Identity before and after 70 CE,” in Jewish Identities in Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine and Daniel R. Schwartz (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr/Siebeck, 2009), 262. Seth Schwartz concludes that “It is obvious that neither the synagogue nor the community were rabbinic inventions, and unlikely that the rabbis played a role in their diffusion,” Imperialism and Jewish Society, 238. 13. Kessler refers to “some center, Antioch perhaps…” where such a program might have been devised, The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue, 182. In contrast, Kraeling had raised the possibility that

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Kära L. Schenk the general focus on Temple imagery seems to have been a broad preoccupation for Jewish communities throughout the ancient world in late antiquity, the Dura synagogue’s particular decorative structure can be understood as a local creation. The stylistic idiom of the synagogue reflects the local hybridized culture of the city itself, with both Greco-Roman and Persian influences. Likewise, Kraeling suggests that for the synagogue as a whole, midrashic sources for key elements of the narratives are almost equally divided between Palestinian and Babylonian sources.14 One scholar has recently suggested that antecedents of Targum Onkelos and Jonathan, for example, may actually stem from an area between Babylon and Palestine that would include the city of Dura itself.15 The Dura synagogue likely represents crosscurrents of influences from both west and east in a way that resists strict categorization, reflecting both broader Jewish developments in the transformation of the synagogue and the particular culture of the city in which the Jewish community conducted its affairs. I. T HE T ORAH

SHRINE AND THE

T EMPLE

UNDER

S OLOMON

After the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE and the failure of Bar Kokhba to rebuild that Temple during the revolt of 132–135 CE, late antique synagogues began to fill the vacuum that the sanctuary’s loss had created.16 The first phase of decoration in the Dura synagogue is directly related to this development. Like most synagogues in the late antique period, the Dura synagogue’s assembly

the model for the cycle might be found in the area near such centers as Edessa and Nisibis in northern Mesopotamia; see Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 391. Gutmann states more generally, “Scholars agree… [t]hat the repertoire of the Dura synagogue may have been repeated with greater artistic skill in no-longer extant or buried synagogues in some major Near Eastern Jewish centers”; see Gutmann, “Programmatic Painting,” 140. 14. Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 353. 15. For a brief synopsis of earlier arguments and associated literature, see Edward M. Cook, “A New Perspective on the Language of Onqelos and Jonathan,” in The Aramaic Bible: Targums in Their Historical Context, ed. Derek R. G. Beattie and Martin J. McNamara (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1994), 142–43 and notes. Cook argues that earlier versions of the texts represent a kind of “Central Aramaic” stemming from a triangle on a map of the Middle East with Damascus, Edessa, and Assur at the corners… [wherein] a clear majority of all speakers of Aramaic, as well as the important urban centers of Palmyra, Dura Europas [sic], and Adiabene, besides the three cities just mentioned… [were found] (ibid., 148). 16. For liturgy and synagogue decoration in general, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, “The Temple and the Synagogue,” Ancient Records and Modern Perspectives (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1984), 151–74; Joan Branham’s “Sacred Space under Erasure in Ancient Synagogues and Early Churches,” Art Bulletin 74, no. 3 (1992): 384–86, and “Vicarious Sacrality: Temple Space in Ancient Synagogues,” Ancient Synagogues. Historical Analysis and Archaeological Discovery, ed. Dan Urman and Paul V. M. Flesher (New York: E.J. Brill, 1995), 319–45; Steven Fine, “From Meeting House to Sacred Realm: Holiness and the Ancient Synagogue,” in Sacred Realm: The Emergence of the Synagogue in the Ancient World, ed. Steven Fine (New York, 1996), 32–45, and Fine’s This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue during the Greco-Roman Period (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative hall centered on a shrine for the liturgical display of the Torah cabinet (Figure 2).17 Although no wooden Torah cabinets have survived from the third century,18 many Jewish images of such cabinets displayed in shrines exist.19 At Dura, a simple image of the Temple was painted at the center of the decorative panel affixed to the top of the shrine.20 This panel is best understood as a crystallization of the community’s liturgical reorientation to the site of the Temple itself in an era

17. Hachlili uses these three categories to distinguish the types of shrines. Niches were generally built directly into the synagogue’s western wall, aediculae were independent or semi-independent and were often supported by columns, and apses in early Byzantine structures also housed aediculae. Rachel Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 167, and Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 67. Levine refers to the Torah shrine at Dura as an aedicula rather than a niche since the columns protrude and form a sort of half-canopy: The Ancient Synagogue, 329. For examples of niches, see Hachlili’s Ancient Jewish Art (Israel), 179–80 and Ancient Jewish Art (Diaspora), 67 and 73. For aediculae, Ancient Jewish Art (Israel), 167–75 and Ancient Jewish Art (Diaspora), 67 and 68–71. And for apses, Ancient Jewish Art (Israel), 180–82 and Ancient Jewish Art (Diaspora), 67 and 74–76. 18. No wooden cabinets survive from the period contemporary to Dura, though the text of the Mishnah (see M. Meg. 3:1 or M. Taan. 2:1) does refer to them. Fixtures that remain from wooden structures, such as nails or decorative bone inlays, have been recovered in Israel from later synagogues and may belong to Torah cabinets; see Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art (Israel), 273. The earliest wooden synagogue cabinets to survive date only from the Fatamid period in Egypt. Examples are described and illustrated in Fortifications and the Synagogue: The Fortress of Babylon and the Ben Ezra Synagogue, ed. Phyllis Lambert (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1994), 219–23. 19. Illustrated in Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art (Israel), 273–78 and Ancient Jewish Art (Diaspora), 363–70. In some cases, only the aediculae themselves are shown; however, not all such structures necessarily housed wooden Torah cabinets. Other images depict menorot, for example, between the columns. Early examples come from the Beit She’arim necropolis in the Galilee, predating the destruction of the city in 352 CE. A drawing on a sealing stone from one of the loculi shows a chest placed in a kind of aedicula. A horizontal line dividing the chest indicates either a lid or a shelf, and a Torah scroll (and its cover?) superimposed over the chest suggests its contents; see Benjamin Mazar, Beth She’arim: Report on the Excavations During 1936–1940. Vol. I: Catacombs 1–4 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957), 112–13. Although Mazar initially posited that the doors depicted would have been attached directly to the shrine (177), Hachlili sees the doors as attached to a separate cabinet. See Ancient Jewish Art (Israel), 166. 20. On the images of the “temple panel,” see Kraeling, The Synagogue (1936), 343 and Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 56–62. In the latter source (61), Kraeling explicated the meaning of the Torah shrine decoration in connection to the Abrahamic Covenant, the Torah, and the Temple, and the meaning these references would have had in connection to the community’s identity. See also Archer St. Clair, “The Torah Shrine at Dura-Europos: A Re-Evaluation.” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 29 (1986), 109–17; Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, “Images of the Tabernacle/Temple in Late Antique and Medieval Art: The State of the Research,” in The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art. Studies in Honor of Bezalel Narkiss on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Bianca Kühnel, Journal of the Center of Jewish Art, 23/24 (1997/8); Elisabeth Revel-Neher, L’arche d’alliance dans l’art juif et chrétien du second au dixième siècles (Paris: Association des Amis des Etudes Archéologiques Byzantino-Salves et du Christianisme Oriental, 1984), 85–86. See Rachel Hachlili, “The Niche and the Ark in Ancient Synagogues,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 223 (1976): 43–53; Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art (Israel) and Ancient Jewish Art (Diaspora), as cited previously, as well as Branham’s “Sacred Space under Erasure” and “Vicarious Sacrality.”

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Figure 2. Dura-Europos Synagogue, Torah shrine with “temple panel,” center of west wall, first half of third century. (Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection) when direct military response to the Roman occupation of that site was no longer deemed a present possibility. The Temple imagery defined the symbolic reference point for the Torah shrine. Although the tetrastyle form of the temple facade at the center of the panel is rather generic, elements to its right and left help to establish that it was intended as the sanctuary in Jerusalem. These include the ‘akedah or “binding [of Isaac],” a “foundation narrative” for the Temple’s construction on the right;21 a gold menorah, the lamp stand that once illuminated the Temple, on

21. For a summation of possible interpretations of the ‘akedah, see Avigdor Shinan, “Synagogues in the Land of Israel: The Literature of the Ancient Synagogue and Synagogue Archaeology,” in Sacred Realm: The Emergence of the Synagogue in the Ancient World, ed. Steven Fine (New York, 1996), 130–52; and Edward Kessler, “Art Leading the Story: The Aqedah in Early Synagogue Art,”

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative the left;22 and the etrog (citrus fruit) and lulav (palm branch)23 that were taken up as part of the feast Sukkot,24 preeminent among the three pilgrimage feasts associated with Jerusalem25 and strongly connected to the Temple in history26 and eschatology.27 These elements surrounding the central temple facade indicate that it represented the sanctuary in Jerusalem, focus of the pilgrimage at the feast first celebrated there under Solomon when he dedicated the Temple.28 An Aramaic dedication text scratched into the lower left corner of the panel provides a link between the shrine itself and the Temple image. Now only partially legible, it reads:

in From Dura to Sepphoris: Studies in Jewish Art and Society in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee Levine and Ze’ev. Weiss (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archeology, 2000), 40. For the connection between the ‘akedah and the site of Temple Mount, see I Chronicles 22:1; II Chronicles 3:1; Josephus Antiquities I. 224–26; Jubilees 18:13. The lamb presented twice daily for the tamid or perpetual sacrifice in the Tabernacle and Temple was linked to Abraham’s affirmation that “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering” (Genesis 22:8) in the later midrash Leviticus Rabbah II:11 (ed. Freedman and Simon, 31). Although this connection can be found only in texts that postdate Dura, some scholars believe there is evidence for an earlier association. The term ‘akedah (“binding”) is not from the same root form used in the Genesis 22 text, but rather reflects the connection between the “binding” of Isaac and the binding of the lambs of the daily sacrifice in Tannaitic literature. See Philip R. Davies and Bruce D. Chilton, “The Aqedah: A Revised Tradition History,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 40 (1978): 514–46. 22. For a review of possible meanings for the menorah as well as a discussion of previous scholarship, See Lee I. Levine, “The History and Significance of the Menorah in Antiquity,” in From Dura to Sepphoris, ed. Lee Levine and Ze’ev Weiss, 131–53. 23. “Four species” are mentioned in the celebration of Sukkot, generally identified as the etrog (citrus fruit) and lulav (palm), with the latter often tied together with the ’aravah (willow) and hadas (myrtle) into a “lulav bundle.” Other depictions of the four species in late antique Jewish art are more specific in their depiction of the lulav bundle of the three species along with the citrus fruit. 24. For biblical sources on the feast, see Exodus 23:14–19 (specifically verse 16b, the “Feast of Ingathering”); Exodus 34:22–24; Leviticus 23:33–43; Numbers 29:12–38; Deuteronomy 16:13–17. 25. The stipulation in Exodus 23:17 that “all the men are to appear before the Sovereign Lord” has been rendered in Deuteronomy as “before the Lord your God at the place he will choose” (verse 16), understood at least by the Second Temple period to mean the Jerusalem Temple. 26. Sukkot was celebrated as the culminating event of the First Temple’s consecration under Solomon (I Kings 8:2 and 65–66/II Chronicles 7:8–10) and was part of the consecration of the Second Temple (Ezra 3 and Nehemiah 8) and the purification of the Temple under the Maccabees (I Maccabees 4:36–61; II Maccabees 1:9–2:18 and 10:1–8). 27. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The History of Sukkot in the Second Temple and Rabbinic Periods. (Brown Judaica Series 302; Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995), 275–90. 28. Though some have argued that the Sukkot symbols indicate the “theme” of the panel and that the Temple image should be understood primarily as an eschatological structure, this argument seems too narrow to me. The Sukkot symbols themselves are comparatively marginalized within the panel, and it is not clear that the ‘akedah narrative can be related to the feast. See St. Clair, “The Torah Shrine at Dura-Europos”; Sed-Rajna, “Images of the Tabernacle/Temple,” 44; and Revel-Neher, L’arche d’alliance, 86. Revel-Neher indicates that an eschatological reading is only one of three possible levels of meaning, rather than the exclusive significance of the panel.

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Kära L. Schenk I… made the beit (“house”) [for the] arona (“ark”). [I,]… Joseph son of Abba.…29

The biblical antecedent for the phrase “house for the ark” is crucial for the text’s meaning. Like the biblical Hebrew aron, arona means “chest” or “ark,” as in the aron ha-berit or Ark of the Covenant. As described in Exodus 25:10–22, the Ark was an oblong box covered in gold, fitted with rings in which to insert carrying poles, and surmounted by a cover with an inward-facing cherub carved at each end. Whereas the tablets of the Torah that Moses had brought down from Sinai were the most significant contents of the Ark, the Ark itself also served as the visible reference point for the invisible presence “enthroned upon the cherubim.”30 The Ark moved with the Israelites through the Wilderness and then into the Promised Land with them, remaining in a mobile “tent,” until King David sought to build a permanent “house” or Temple in which the Ark could be placed.31 Only David’s son Solomon was allowed to build such a “house.” At the Temple’s consecration, he declared that he had “built the house for the name of the Lord, the God of Israel. And there I have provided a place for the Ark, in which is the covenant of the Lord.…”32 At the Temple’s consecration, God condescended to “dwell” in the Temple on Zion, even as he transcended the need for a “house.”33 When Solomon consecrated the Temple, “an exalted house, a place for [the divine presence] to dwell in for ever” (I Kings 8:13), it represented a high point in the narrative of Kings and in Israel’s history as a whole. Whereas the “ark” in the biblical narrative is the Ark of the Covenant that contained the tablets of the Torah, arona is also a term that referred to the wooden cabinets holding the synagogue’s Torah scrolls in other synagogue inscriptions,34 as well as in rabbinic texts. As Fine has demonstrated, the first use of the term arona to refer to such cabinets in rabbinic texts is found in two baraitot from the Babylonian Talmud (b. Shabbat 32a);35 in Palestinian sources it is found only in the 29. Kraeling read the lacuna in the first line as the name “Uzzi”: The Synagogue (1956), 269. We do not known what “Joseph, son of Abba” contributed. 30. According to Exodus 25:22, God would meet with Moses above the kaporet. The Ark is called God’s “footstool” in I Chronicles 28:2 (See also Psalms 132:7). For God “enthroned upon the cherubim,” see I Samuel 4:4 and Psalms 89:2 and compare also Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1. God leads the armies in battle from the Ark in Numbers 10:35–36 and Joshua, chapters 3 and 4, and God exits the Temple on his “throne-chariot” in Ezekiel, chapters 10 and 11, returning in 43:1–7. 31. See II Samuel 7. 32. I Kings 8:20–21 and II Chronicles 6:10–11. 33. According to II Samuel 7, God at first rejected the offer of a “house of cedar” (verse 7) and Solomon admitted that even the heavens could not contain him, “much less this house that I have built!” (I Kings 8:27). See, likewise, Isaiah 66:1: “Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is my resting place?” 34. In the Hauran region of Syria, as at Dura, an Aramaic inscription records the construction of a beit arona or “house for the ark” in a local synagogue. For the inscription, which was found reused in a mosque, see Joseph Naveh, On Stone and Mosaic: The Aramaic and Hebrew Inscriptions from Ancient Synagogues (Jerusalem, 1978) [ʿAl pesefas v.e-even ha-ketuvot ha-Aramiyot v.e-ha-Ivriyot mi-bate-ha-keneset ha-atik.im]. 35. Fine, This Holy Place, 133.

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative amoraic period.36 Just as the biblical “house for the ark” referred to the Jerusalem Temple, the “house for the ark” in a Dura synagogue referred to the Torah shrine, the niche or aedicular structure where the Torah “ark” or cabinet was placed.37 The combination of the inscription and the Temple image helps to mark the shrine that contained the wooden cabinet at Dura in connection to the Temple that Solomon had constructed as a “house for the ark.” Solomon’s prayer at the time of the Temple’s consecration had established Jerusalem as the direction for prayer. Should Israel find itself in exile, according to his prayer, it should “pray to you toward their land, which you gave to their fathers, the city which you have chosen, and the house which I have built for your name” (I Kings 8:48).38 Second Temple texts set in the Diaspora assume the orientation of prayer toward Jerusalem,39 although synagogues in Israel dating from this period are not positioned in this way.40 However, by the late antique period the majority of synagogues in both the Diaspora and Israel were aligned to the site of the Temple Mount.41 Whereas rabbinic texts continued the long-standing tradition that offered Jerusalem as the prayer direction,42 they

36. E.g., Y. Meg. 3:1, 73d. Fine, This Holy Place, 79–80. 37. The inscription indicating a “house for the ark” in the other Syrian synagogue (see Naveh, On Stone and Mosaic) referred to a Torah shrine very similar to the shrine at Dura. See Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art (Israel), 179, citing Mayer and Reifenberg, 1936, 8, fig. 8/Pl. 3. Another passage in the Tosefta describes a wooden Torah cabinet with its back to the qodesh or “holy place,” suggesting another link between the shrine and the Temple. See T. Meg. 4:21–23 and Hachlili, “The Niche and the Ark,” 52. 38. It is sometimes argued that the text, or part of it, is itself a product of the experience of exile. See, for example, Jon D. Levenson, “From Temple to Synagogue: 1 Kings 8,” in Traditions in Transformation. Turning Points in Biblical Faith, ed. Baruch Halpern and Jon Levenson (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns 1981), 143–66. 39. While residing in Babylon, Daniel goes to “his upstairs room where there are windows opened toward Jerusalem” when he prays (Daniel 6:10). In the book of Tobit, Sarah prays “with hands outstretched toward the window” (Tobit 3:11), whereas the youth in I Esdras prays with his face “lifted… toward heaven in the direction of Jerusalem” (I Esdras 4:58). Josephus presents Abraham as raising his hands in prayer toward the site of the future Temple (Josephus War 5:380). 40. The Gamla synagogue in the Golan seems to be oriented south, but this may have been dictated by the constraints of topography rather than the desire to face the Holy City. See Ze’ev Ma’oz, “The Synagogue of Gamla and the Typology of Second-Temple Synagogues,” in Ancient Synagogues Revealed, ed. Lee I. Levine (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 37. Numerous pieces of evidence from literary, papyrological, and epigraphical sources indicate the existence of synagogues in the Diaspora in the Second Temple period. Only in Delos, however, has a structure that may have been a synagogue building been unearthed. The entrance of the building faces east, toward Israel, perhaps indicating that orientation of synagogues toward Jerusalem was practiced first in the Diaspora. See Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, 100–101. 41. See Franz Landsberger, “The Sacred Direction in Synagogue and Church,” Hebrew Union College Annual 13 (1957), 183. Branham notes two cases (the earliest synagogue of H. Tiberias (IIb) and of Beth She’arim), which were originally constructed so that a wall with an entrance and windows faces the Holy City. These synagogues were modified subsequently so that doors and windows on the Jerusalem wall were blocked and displaced by a Torah shrine. See “Sacred Space under Erasure,” 384– 86. 42. M. Ber. 4:5; T. Ber. 3:15–16.

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Kära L. Schenk also reflect the assumption that the congregation would face the Torah shrine itself in prayer.43 Rachel Hachlili has noted a resulting conflation between the interior and exterior points of prayer focus.44 In the context of prayer, the image of the Jerusalem Temple and surrounding motifs are best understood as a flexible set of signs that provided orientation for worship. They served, literally, as a signpost directing devotion toward Jerusalem, thus bridging the space between the synagogue and the inaccessible site of the lost Temple. They also functioned as an existential positioning mechanism for a community that had lost its sacred center by “projecting” a virtual sanctuary onto the site, bridging the disruption of the Temple’s loss in the context of liturgy. The laconic decoration on the shrine was only the first stage in what was to be a far more dramatic intervention: In the second phase of decoration, the surrounding walls of the synagogue’s assembly hall were covered completely with narrative panels. In the middle level of these panels, the Ark of the Covenant appears repeatedly as the Torah “ark,” reinforcing the connection first established in the construction and decoration of the Torah shrine. The addition of the surrounding narrative images transformed the symbolic interconnection between Temple image and shrine from the first phase of decoration into the conclusion of a larger narrative account of the journey of the Ark of the Covenant from Sinai to Zion. Only sections of the middle level extending from the Torah shrine on the west wall to the north and south walls have been preserved, leaving a significant gap on the eastern side of the assembly hall where panels have not survived. Those panels of the middle level that remain can be read from right to left and are positioned in keeping with the order of the biblical narrative itself. Two panels on the west wall, to the left of the Torah shrine, are set in the Sinai Wilderness under the leadership of Moses and Aaron and represent the earliest episodes from this narrative. After offering a crucial rereading of the two panels that begin the narrative, the stage will be set for a discussion of the congregation’s relationship to the Ark narrative. II. W ORSHIP

IN THE

W ILDERNESS TABERNACLE

The first panel in the sequence depicted on the middle level shows the Ark of the Covenant at the center of the Tabernacle in the Sinai Wilderness, surrounded by figures performing various cultic acts (Figure 3). Kraeling’s discussion of key aspects of the Tabernacle image needs to be rethought. A reconsideration of the Tabernacle panel allows for a clearer sense of how a second panel depicting the miraculous well can be integrated into the narrative of the middle level, and how the both images together depict an idealized scene of worship from Israel’s past. Whereas the Tabernacle of biblical description was, essentially, a tent, the painter responsible for the Dura panel has modeled his depiction of the sanctuary on a classical temple structure, with Nike figures as acroteria on each corner.45 The 43. See, for example: M. Ber. 5:3–4; M. Taan. 1:2; M. Erub. 3:9; and T. Meg. 3:21–23. 44. Hachlili, “The Niche and the Ark,” 52. 45. See Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 125–31, for the formal antecedents of the Tabernacle structure.

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Figure 3. Dura-Europos Synagogue, The Tabernacle in the Wilderness, detail from the west wall, 244–45. (Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection) Tabernacle comprised an outer area, the “holy place,” and an inner area, the “most holy place” for the Ark of the Covenant. Although the two spaces were separated by a curtain in the biblical account (Exodus 40:3 and 20–21), this division is not clear in the panel. Here, the artist has followed Roman conventions for the depiction of a cult image within a temple, placing the Ark before the curtain at the threshold of the sanctuary. A seven-branched menorah stands below the Ark, and objects flanking it are incense burners that evidently served in place of the incense altar required in the biblical account.46 The menorah and incense altar were to be placed in the “holy place” of the Tabernacle but have, again, been externalized to the area before the threshold in the panel. Although an altar conforming to the description of the incense altar in Exodus stands to the right of the menorah and incense burners, it functions here as the altar of burnt offering, as suggested by the sacrificial animal placed upon it.47 This altar was to stand in the courtyard 46. Ibid., 126, and Weitzmann, The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue, 58. They are similar to the thymiatiria found in numerous scenes of incense-offering in Dura. For an example, see Rostovtzeff, Dura-Europos and Its Art, pl. VIII/I. 47. The precise reason for such apparent “confusion” in the depiction of the altars is unclear. Laderman argues that the incense burners are pedestals and that the altar is for incense; “A New Look at the Second Register,” 9–10. Her argument regarding the “pedestals” is not convincing, as they are smoking from the burning of incense.

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Kära L. Schenk surrounding the sanctuary. In the panel, a masonry wall encloses this courtyard, though curtains hung in the background and over the door recall its cloth construction. Six figures are at work in the Tabernacle panel. Aaron, labeled in Greek,48 stands before the altar, his dress conforming to the description in Exodus.49 He is at least a head taller than the other five figures who occupy the panel, all dressed in Parthian garments. The figure in the lower left-hand corner can be identified as Aaron’s son Eleazar leading the red heifer to sacrifice, as required by Numbers 19. The other four figures, two to the right of Aaron and two at the left of the panel, hold trumpets. Their identity is not as clear. Kraeling argued that these figures are Ithamar (Eleazar’s younger brother), and Gershon, Kohath, and Merari (heads of the Levite families).50 But Numbers only describes two trumpets, not four,51 and stipulates that only priests (“sons of Aaron”), not Levites, were allowed to blow the trumpets;52 most likely, all of the figures are priests. I propose that the two “sons of Aaron” (Eleazar, in red, and Ithamar) are repeated as part of a continuous narrative.53 They assist their father with the sacrifice to the right, and appear again on the opposite side, while Eleazar alone leads the red heifer. The cultic focus of the panel is clearly the offering that Aaron presents on the altar. According to Kraeling, the rite shown “is unlikely… to represent the cultus as such. Some particular scene must be alluded to.”54 He understood this scene as the consecration of Aaron’s sons (described in Exodus 29:1–25) on the basis of his identification of sacrificial animals, including the one on the altar (identified as a “ram” based on the shape of its tail) and another “ram” and a bull waiting below.55 Kraeling’s interpretation of all other elements in the panel in connection to the consecration flowed from this initial argument. Moreover, his interpretation of the Dura panel has influenced the identification of rites in the Tabernacle-related panels from the more recently discovered Sepphoris synagogue mosaic (Figure 4).56 Ze’ev Weiss argues that the bull that Aaron leads before the altar

48. Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 279, Greek text n. 29. 49. See Exodus 28:1–39 and 39:1–26 and ibid., 126–29. However, some details reflect Persian influence, as pointed out by Goodenough; compare the Tak-i-Bustan relief illustrated in Jewish Symbols XI, fig. 236. 50. Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 131. 51. Kraeling noted this fact, but then referred to Solomon’s creation of 120 trumpets for the Temple (II Chronicles 5:12) to imply that the number of trumpets in the panel was irrelevant. See ibid., 129, n. 462. 52. According to Numbers 10:8, “The sons of Aaron, the priests, are to blow the trumpets.” 53. Aaron’s two other sons died an ignominious death and left no descendants. See I Chronicles 24:1–2. 54. Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 130 55. Ibid., 126. 56. For an initial analysis of the Sepphoris mosaic, see Ze’ev Weiss and Ehud Netzer, Promise and Redemption: A Synagogue Mosaic from Sepphoris (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1996), as well as Ze’ev Weiss’s “Greco-Roman Influences on the Art and Architecture of the Jewish City in Roman Palestine,” in Religious and Ethnic Communities in Later Roman Palestine, ed. Hayim Lapin;

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Figure 4. Sepphoris Synagogue, Aaron in the Tabernacle, detail of floor mosaic. (Courtesy of the Sepphoris Excavation, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, drawing by Pnina Arad)

Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture (Bethesda: University of Maryland Press, 1998), 219– 46, and “The Sepphoris Synagogue Mosaic and the Role of Talmudic Literature in Its Iconographical Study,” in From Dura to Sepphoris: Studies in Jewish Art and Society in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine and Ze’ev Weiss, 15–30. Weiss’s more recent and comprehensive contribution on the Sepphoris synagogue is The Sepphoris Synagogue: Deciphering an Ancient Message through Its Archaeological and Socio-Historical Contexts (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005). Following Kraeling’s argument concerning the Dura panel, Weiss has identified the Tabernacle scene in the more recently discovered Sepphoris synagogue mosaic in

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Kära L. Schenk in the mosaic is the bull offered for the consecration of Aaron’s sons, with other elements in the panel understood in connection to these rites.57 However, a reconsideration of the Sepphoris and Dura Tabernacle images suggests that they both depict, in their different ways, the “cultus as such,” the ongoing rituals within the Tabernacle, rather than the consecration and the beginning of cultic worship. In the Sepphoris mosaic, there are no clear links to the consecration. Aaron’s sons are not present at all. Although the precise function of the bull is not clear, the two rams that were to accompany it as an offering for the consecration are not depicted; the animals behind the bull are labeled specifically in Aramaic as the “lambs” that were to be part of the daily offering (also known as the tamid or “perpetual” offering), as were the clearly labeled flour, oil, and trumpets below. Censers flanking the showbread table to the right would have been used for the daily offering of incense, and the basket of first fruits to the right of the showbread table is a seasonal offering. Weiss argues that the wash basin above the basket of first fruits was for the consecration of the priests, as in Exodus 29:4. However, Aaron and his sons were to purify themselves every day, according to Exodus 30:17–21, and it is here that we find the textual description of the basin itself that Weiss cites.58 The shofarot, incense pans, and etrog and lulav surrounding the menorot on the top level, an assemblage familiar from other synagogue mosaics, may be related to the yearly celebration of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. And at Sepphoris, the tongs with which Aaron would trim the menorot every day have been added to these symbols. Thus, a specific connection with the consecration of Aaron’s sons is not supported by any of the details in the image itself. Rather, the mosaic appears to present the ongoing celebration of the ‘avodah (service) within the Tabernacle. Dura, likewise, is better understood in connection with this ongoing “service.” According to the text describing the consecration, the bull was to be sacrificed first; but at Dura another animal is offered on the altar while the bull waits its turn below. Although Kraeling identified the animal on the altar as a “ram,” the most common offering presented there was the lamb for the tamid. Exodus 29:38 instructs Aaron: “This is what you shall offer on the altar: two lambs a year old, day by day continually [tamid].” The significance of the tamid lay in the fact that it was a ritually reoccurring point of reference for God’s dwelling with his people: It shall be a continual burnt offering throughout your generations at the door of the tent of meeting before the Lord, where I will meet with you, to speak there to you. There I will meet with the people of Israel, and it shall be sanctified by

connection to both the consecration and the daily sacrifice and notes the appearance of the same subject in Dura. See Weiss, From Dura to Sepphoris, 22, n. 17, as well as Weiss and Netzer, Promise and Redemption, 15. 57. For a discussion of the bull and “consecration” scene in particular, see Weiss, Promise and Redemption, 20–22, and Weiss, The Sepphoris Synagogue: Deciphering an Ancient Message, 77–85. 58. Weiss, The Sepphoris Synagogue: Deciphering an Ancient Message, 85.

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative my glory.… And I will dwell among the people of Israel, and will be their God. And they shall know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt that I might dwell with them. (Exodus 29:42–46)

Below the altar, the combination of the menorah with its lamps lit and the burning incense in the panel recalls the command of Exodus 30:7–8: Aaron shall burn fragrant incense on it [the altar]; every morning when he dresses the lamps he shall burn it, and when Aaron sets up the lamps in the evening, he shall burn it, a perpetual (tamid) incense before the Lord throughout your generations.

Aaron’s sons blow the trumpets to announce the sacrifice, as Numbers 10:10 specifies that they are to “blow the trumpets over your burnt offerings and over the sacrifices of your peace offerings.” The Mishnah stipulates that two priests were to blow trumpets to announce the tamid offering in particular, and in the later Sepphoris mosaic the two trumpets are included among the items specifically associated with the tamid offering.59 With the trumpets to their lips, the two “sons of Aaron” at Dura announce the sacrifice on the altar, while the lamps illuminate the sanctuary and the incense smokes. If my reading is correct, we see the priests performing the most frequent and representative acts of the sacrificial “service” (‘avodah), including the offering of the lamb and the incense, and the lighting of the lamps. Of all the sacrificial offerings Aaron was to present, Sirach chose the lamb of the tamid as representative of his office, recounting that “[h]is offering shall be burned entire, even each day, continually, twice. …”60 All other elements of the “cultus as such,” sacrifices associated with Sabbaths and holy days, were performed in addition to this offering. In the Dura panel, the bull and the “ram” standing ready below, representing sacrifices brought “from the herd or from the flock,” may serve as generic indications of sacrifices offered in addition to the tamid without providing an exhaustive catalogue or tying the image to a specific holy day.61 Priests appearing on the left side of the panel also perform activities that are best understood in connection to the ongoing “service,” rather than the consecration narrative. In the upper left-hand corner, a pair of priests (or Eleazar and Ithamar in their second appearance) mirrors the two priests behind Aaron. They hold, but do not sound, their trumpets. As Kraeling has noted, the second of these two priests holds a coin. This may be the half-shekel offering that the 59. Weiss and Netzer, Promise and Redemption, 22. 60. Sirach 45:14. 61. Laderman has recently argued that the central sacrifice at Dura relates to Yom Kippur. See “A New Look at the Second Register,” 8–10. However, her proposal that the panel at Dura represents the entry of Aaron into the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur is problematic for a number of reasons, including the fact that Aaron changed from his “garments of gold” into all white when he entered the Holy of Holies once a year. The panel also bears no resemblance to the extensive description of the day in Leviticus 16.

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Kära L. Schenk priests were to collect from every Israelite according to Exodus 30:11–16.62 The half-shekel supported “the service of the tent of meeting” (avodat ohel mo‘ed).63 In the lower left-hand corner, Eleazar leads the red heifer for sacrifice in accordance with the description from Numbers 19:1–3: Now the Lord said to Moses and to Aaron, “This is the statute of the law which the Lord has commanded: Tell the people of Israel to bring you a red heifer without blemish, and upon which a yoke has never come. And you shall give her to Eleazar the priest, and she shall be taken outside the camp and slaughtered before him.

The ashes of the red heifer were mixed with water and used for purification. Kraeling connected the rite to the consecration of the Levites, as Numbers 8:7 stipulates that Moses should “sprinkle the water of purification on them.”64 However, the Numbers 19 passage itself clearly has nothing to do with the Levites, but with any Israelite who becomes unclean through contact with a corpse (Numbers 19:5–10). Refusal to purify one’s self results in exclusion from the assembly: But the man who is unclean, and does not cleanse himself, that person shall be cut off from the midst of the assembly, since he has defiled the sanctuary of the Lord; because the water for impurity has not been sprinkled upon him, he is unclean. (Numbers 19:20–21)

Thus, the rite relates to the ritual cleansing of every Israelite before entering the assembly. Whereas Kraeling assumed that the sacrifices and offerings the priests present in the Tabernacle panel relate to their own consecration, I have argued that they represent key elements of the ongoing sacrificial service performed by the priests in the sanctuary for the benefit of all Israel. So far as I can determine, the rituals represented in the Tabernacle panel are part of a service carried out by a specific caste of qualified professionals, but performed for (and financed by) the community at large. This community is not shown within the Tabernacle itself, for only members of the cultic personnel could enter this area (and, thus, this panel). Rather, they are gathered outside the Tabernacle in a second panel, shown to the left (Figure 5). Because this panel lacks a depiction of the Ark of the Covenant and does not include priests, it does not appear to fit comfortably with the other images on the middle level. Kraeling therefore characterized it as the “least germane to the cultic interest” that held the Ark-related panels of the middle level together.65 I propose, however, that the panel depicting the miraculous well (Figure 5) is related to Israel’s cultic narrative. Unlike the priests who work in the Tabernacle in the panel to the right (Figure 3), nonpriestly Israelites 62. Ibid., 129. 63. The Mishnah enumerates the offerings that the half-shekel could fund in M. Sheq. 4:1–2. 64. Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 130–31. 65. Ibid., 132.

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative could not enter the court of the sanctuary to perform sacrifice. The image of the well is important precisely because it includes “ordinary” Israelites at prayer just outside the Tabernacle as a balance to the priestly performance of sacrifice within. Numbers 2 describes the way that Israel was to set up their camps according to tribe. In the panel to the left, twelve tribal representatives stand in twelve tents, arranged in a circle. Moses is also in their midst, unlabeled, but easily identifiable in comparison to other images of the leader elsewhere in the frescoes, where he is considerably larger and wields his staff. Although the panel is often identified as the “encampment” of the Israelites, its composition suggests a more complicated identification. Whereas Numbers 2 describes the encampment as encircling the whole Tabernacle, the circle of tents is shifted to an area before the door of the Tabernacle in the panel. The doorway at the top of the panel is identified as the door to the Tabernacle in particular through the items externalized to this threshold: The menorah is shown prominently in the center, and the two implements flanking it seem to be additional lighting devices.66 A gold table (the showbread table?) is also depicted below the menorah.67 In this way, the panel conflates the encampment with the assembly, for “[a]t the door of the tent of meeting before the Lord,” is the location where the divine presence would “meet with the people of Israel” and speak with them when the tamid was presented (Exodus 29:42–45). The overflowing well has generally been identified as a legendary elaboration of a miracle that occurred in the Sinai Wilderness.68 It is based on Numbers 21:16–20b: And from there they went to ha-be’er [literally, “the well”] concerning which the Lord said to Moses, “gather the people and I will give to them water.” At that time, sang Israel this song: Spring up, o well, sing to it; Well dug by the chiefs delved by the nobles of the people with the staff, with the scepter, 66. Kraeling had argued that the objects flanking the menorah should also be understood as incense burners; ibid., 119. However, as Weitzmann notes, they seem more like additional lighting; The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue, 66–67. 67. Kraeling, ibid., 119. Although the lack of bread presented on it would then be puzzling. Weitzmann argued that the table is the incense altar, ibid., 67. 68. Kraeling, ibid., 118–25, for the legend and the panel. Although Weitzmann challenged little of Kraeling’s identification, he expressed misgivings about the lack of connection to a specific biblical text, ibid., 64. J. Milgrom, on other hand, argued that it should be understood exclusively in connection to another water miracle in, “Moses Sweetens the ‘Bitter Waters’ of the ‘Portable Well’: An Interpretation of the Panel of at Dura-Europos Synagogue,” Journal of Jewish Art 5 (1978), 45–47. The image does not seem to relate to any one biblical text, but to an evolving tradition rooted in the interpretation of several texts.

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Figure 5. Dura-Europos Synagogue, The Miraculous Well, detail from the west wall, 244–45. (Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection) and and and and

from the Wilderness to Mattanah [or “in the Wilderness, a gift”], from Mattanah to Nahaliel [“God is my inheritance”], from Nahaliel to Bamot [“high places”], from Bamot to the valley, in the country of Moab, to the top of Pisgah, looking out over Yeshimon [“wasteland”].

The place names in the last portion of the text, from Mattanah to Pisgah, can be read as an itinerary from the “giving” (mattanah) of Torah (on Sinai) to Mount Pisgah (Nebo), whence Moses could see Canaan beyond the plains of Moab.69 Legends envision a miraculous well that followed Israel from Sinai to the border of the Promised Land.70 69. An important point made by Michael Fishbane in “From Scribalism to Rabbinism: Perspectives on the Emergence of Classical Judaism,” in The Garments of Torah. Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989): 76–78. 70. This legend dates from at least as early as the first century CE, as references in the Pauline epistles (I Corinthians 10:4) and Pseudo-Philo’s Antiquities 11:15 demonstrate. References to the mobile well/rock also occur in Midrash Sifre Numbers 11:21 and in Targum Onkelos, Targum PsalmsJonathan, and the Fragmentary Targum (see Kraeling, The Synagogue [1956], 123, where he summarizes the similarities and differences in the legend as recorded in the targumin), and is described most extensively in the Tosefta (as discussed below). (See also B. Shab. 35a, B. Abot. 5:6, and Numbers Rabbah 19:25–26.)

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative Though drawing on Numbers 21, such legends may also reference other water miracles; when in motion, the well took the form of a large stone like the one Moses struck to bring forth water (Exodus 17:1–7). In the Tosefta: The well that was with the children of Israel in the Wilderness, to what could it be compared? To a giant stone. In the place where the children of Israel found themselves, it accompanied them always finding itself in a high place near the door of the Tent of Meeting. The chiefs of the tribes of Israel used to come and march around it with their staffs and they would sing this song “Come up, o well, answer us.” And the water would bubble up as a pillar above them and each one would dip his staff into it, each man for his tribe, each man for his family, as it is said, “The well which the princes dug, which the nobles of the people delved with the scepter, and with their staves.”71

Likewise, the well in the image dispenses water in individual streams to the tribal leaders. In the passage that refers to the miraculous well, the Tosefta also cites prophetic descriptions of waters that flow from the door of the Temple.72 The most extensive passage related to this phenomenon is Ezekiel’s description in which “water was flowing from below the threshold of the Temple toward the east (for the Temple faced east); and the water was flowing down from below the south end of the threshold of the Temple, south of the altar.” (Ezekiel 47:1) This flowing water becomes a stream, and then a great river, that will flow to the Dead Sea, making its waters fresh, and irrigating the surrounding land (verses 2–12). This motif is likewise found in Joel 3:18 (“a fountain shall come forth from the house of the Lord / and water the Wadi Shittim”) and in Zechariah 14:8 (“On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem, half of them to the eastern sea and half of them to the western sea…”). The Tosefta passage appears to graft the location of the miraculous water’s origin (the threshold of the Temple) onto the legendary description of the well as just before the threshold of the Tabernacle. Thus, in both the Tosefta and the Dura image, the well has acquired a specific place before the door, just as the other sanctuary implements had their designated places within the sanctuary. In the biblical account, the provision of water from the well occurs only once, satisfying the Israelites’ thirst. Previous scholars have tended to treat the image as the representation of an isolated miraculous event in Israel’s history. However, legendary elaborations transform the springing up of the well into a recurring event taking place every time the Tabernacle is set up and worship occurs within. As Moses gathers the people before the sanctuary in the panel, they also worship, forming a circle and raising their hands in an orant gesture that signified prayer in the surrounding culture. The panel is thus imbued with a formal, ceremonial quality. Although all physical provision for Israel (including 71. T. Sukk.. 3:10. 72. T. Sukk. 3:10 ff.

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Kära L. Schenk manna and quail) had a divine origin, the provision of water from the well here has effectively become part of the regular cultic service. In accordance with the biblical pattern, the division between the Tabernacle and the surrounding encampment in the two panels conforms to the hierarchical division of Israel’s holiest place, with the priests within and the lay people without. The pairing of the two panels suggests a distinction between people and priests, and between outside and inside, with the center of the Tabernacle, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, representing the place of greatest holiness and least access. Yet, the relationships among the two panels, spaces, and castes, can also be understood as a complementary and mutually beneficial one, in which the community at large supports the priesthood and receives the spiritual benefit of their service as figured by the outpouring of the water in their midst. Together, the two panels represent an idealized vision of the entire community at worship in the Sinai Wilderness. I do not suggest by any means that the images here are illustrations of either the biblical texts in question or of later texts such as the Mishnah or Tosefta. Moreover, unpacking specific textual points of reference in an attempt to better understand the imagery does not imply that the congregation itself would necessarily have seen the images as an amalgamation of different textual sources. The images derive from an evolving tradition regarding the Tabernacle that wove the later history of Israel’s holy places, specifically the Temple (first, second, messianic/eschatological) and the synagogue (when, for example, the Ark is shown as the Torah “ark”), back into a conception of a divinely authorized original, whose plan was revealed to Moses on Sinai. Certain themes (such as the legend of the mobile well) are presented in both the image at Dura and in textual sources, particularly rabbinic ones. It is not necessary to argue that the synagogue community drew on a specifically “rabbinic” tradition regarding the well, and that both the synagogue community (with its leaders) and the rabbis were heirs to an older repertoire of legendary elaborations known (in the case of the well, for instance) by such first-century CE figures as Saul of Tarsus and the author of the Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo. The creation of the images likely depended on this tradition as it was communicated orally by members of the synagogue community to the workshop responsible for the synagogue decoration.73 This workshop, in turn, appears to have drawn from a repertoire of locally available pictorial sources that were transformed for the synagogue context.74 For example, the presentation of the Wilderness Tabernacle as a Greco-Roman temple, complete with Nike acroteria, can probably be seen in this light. Moreover, the single most popular type of image (painted or relief) recovered from the city of Dura at large is the depiction of a figure (or figures) offering incense on incense burners (similar to those depicted in the synagogue’s Tabernacle panel) before a cult image.75 Thus, while Aaron 73. As emphasized by Wharton, “Good and Bad Images,” 13–15, who rejects the notion that one particular text must stand behind each image as a source. 74. As argued by Moon; see “Nudity and Narrative.” 75. See Thomas Pekáry, “Das Opfer Vor Dem Kaiserbild,” Bonner Jahrbücher 186 (1986): 91– 103, particularly 100–101, for a recent discussion of one such painted image, which shows the local Roman military leader offering incense before various deities. This panel is of similar dimensions to

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative may be offering incense in accordance with ancient Israel’s earliest cultic practices, he also does what many worshipers were depicted doing in their non-Jewish cult sites down the street from the synagogue. Whereas older scholarly publications on the synagogue began with the assumption that the images should be understood as illustrations that deviated from a text through the intrusion of Greco-Roman (or other) motifs,76 perhaps a reversal is in order. We could describe the Tabernacle panel as an image that began in the workshop, compositionally or conceptually, as a generic type of incense offering and was modified to accommodate the idiosyncratic tradition of a Jewish minority in the city. III. T HE A SCENT

TO THE

T EMPLE

IN

J ERUSALEM

Directly opposite the Tabernacle panel (Figure 3) on the left side of the west wall, and to the right of the shrine, there is another panel depicting a temple (Figure 6) that is obviously paired with the Tabernacle panel in a number of ways. Like the Tabernacle panel, this panel has three doorways at the bottom of the composition, similar to the doors of the wall that marks off the holy precinct of the Tabernacle. The pseudoperipteral temple on the right is similar in structure to the Tabernacle on the left and, like the Tabernacle, is also decorated with Nike acroteria figures. The temple to the right is a grander version of the Tabernacle, with larger and more elaborate gates below and more columns. It also appears to be situated at the top of a hill surrounded by seven multicolored walls, a feature corresponding to a much later rabbinic description of the heavenly Jerusalem, but having an earlier precedent in Herodotus’s description of the city of Ecbatana in Persia, surrounded by seven walls of different colors to indicate its cosmic significance and orientation.77 As a similar but more impressive version of the Tabernacle, the temple structure can provisionally be identified as the Jerusalem Temple itself, as conceived in the hybrid Greco-Roman/Persian visual idiom that characterized the city of Dura. In addition to the clear status of the Tabernacle and Temple panels as pendants, they are also part of a larger series of panels on the middle level as a whole, many of which center on the Ark of the Covenant. To the left of the Tabernacle and well panels, the narrative series continued on the south wall with the tail end of a procession involving the Ark. The beginning of this procession has unfortunately been destroyed, and its identification is difficult to determine. However, it clearly moves from right to left and thus away from the Tabernacle images.78 This seems to indicate that the Ark’s story continued, though it is followed by the lacuna

the Tabernacle panel and was created at about the same time. It is possible that the same worship produced both panels, though no investigation of this matter has been carried out. 76. See especially Weitzmann, The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue, which is a late example of the methodology developed by the author in several earlier publications, chiefly his Illustrations in Roll and Codex: A Study of the Origin and Method of Text Illustration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947). 77. Histories I.98. See Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 106–108. 78. For images, See Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), plate LVIII.

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Figure 6. Dura-Europos Synagogue, The Jerusalem Temple, detail from the west wall, 244–45. (Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection) up to and just beyond the doorway on the east side of the assembly hall. The story resumes on the north wall with an extended series of narrative panels leading up to the Temple image, beginning with the account in I Samuel 4 of the Ark’s capture at the hands of the Philistines at the Battle of Ebenezer.79 As the Philistines carry the Ark from the field of battle, they parallel the procession with the Ark on the opposite wall. The narrative continues on the west wall with a panel showing two episodes from the events subsequent to the battle (Figure 7). To the right, the Philistine idols have fallen, broken, in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant, which the Philistines had placed in the temple to their god. In response, the Philistines have placed the Ark on a cart to send it away from their country toward Israel (I Samuel 5), as shown at the lower left of the panel.80 Whereas the empty threshold of the Philistine temple echoes the threshold of the corresponding panel with the well, the chaotic scattering of the idols and the presence of several cultic objects on the ground form a contrast to the orderly worship of the Israelites. The narrative panels to the right of the shrine have been carefully planned so that they are balanced compositionally and

79. For images, See ibid., plates LIV–LV. 80. For the panel, see Du Mesnil du Buisson, Peintures, 75–84; Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 99–105; Goodenough, Jewish Symbols, X, 74–91; Weitzmann, The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue, 75–80.

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Figure 7. Dura-Europos Synagogue, The Ark Triumphant, detail from the west wall, 244–45. (Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection) thematically with the narrative panels on the left side of the middle level. The narrative moves chronologically from right to left, leading up to the Temple panel itself, and recounts events leading up to the period of David and Solomon, when the Temple was first vowed and constructed. As the panel depicting the temple (Figure 6) follows these episodes, it would, again, make sense to call it the Jerusalem Temple, the final destination for the Ark of the Covenant.81 Although both the pairing of the panel with the temple and the Tabernacle, and the panel’s position at the end of a series of images related to the Ark support its identification as the Jerusalem Temple, both the pairing and the narrative position also emphasize the very thing that the Jerusalem Temple lacks in comparison to the Tabernacle image: the Ark of the Covenant. Moreover, there are no priests, no sacrifices, and no worshipers in this structure. The Temple is beautiful, but empty. Explanations for this contrast run the gamut of possibilities, ranging from the argument that the Temple is a spiritual82 or messianic Temple83

81. Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 111–113. 82. For Goodenough, the “Closed Temple” was part of a focus on “the Judaism of Immaterial Reality”; Jewish Symbols, X, 42–60. 83. For Sed-Rajna, the absence of the Ark is a fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy that the Ark would no longer be needed in the Messianic Age; “Images of the Temple/Tabernacle,” 44.

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Kära L. Schenk somehow in no need of an Ark or of sacrifice, to the proposal that the Temple has been profaned, or even that it is a pagan temple.84 These arguments all imply a comparison in the inherent value of the respective sanctuaries (and their representations), the nature of which is fundamentally important to the pictorial rhetoric of the holy places in the decoration of the synagogue. I am not inclined to see the contrast between the Tabernacle and the Temple panels in terms of the ontological status of each shrine relative to the other (“holy” vs. “profaned,” or “earthly” vs. “heavenly” or “messianic”). What the viewer now sees is the Ark of the Covenant in the panel to the right, victorious over the Philistine idol and set on a path toward Israel and toward the panel depicting Jerusalem with its Temple. Taken together, the panel with the Ark moving away from the land of the Philistines and the panel with the Temple actually figure the movement or ascent of the Ark as it “goes up” toward Jerusalem. The panel with the Temple serves as the penultimate set painting in a drama centered on the Ark of the Covenant. The contrast between the two sides and the “incompleteness” of the Ark’s journey has a specific narrative function: It creates suspense. The worshiper/ viewer who has followed the narrative thus far is made to wonder when the Ark will finally arrive at the Temple to complete the narrative. Like watching a slowmotion film of a runner in the last lap of a race, one feels the tension of the final phase of the competition and, perhaps, is tempted to shout out encouragement to the favored contestant. Moreover, as Joseph Gutmann has argued, the movement of the Ark of the Covenant in a narrative ring around the assembly hall may also have echoed and reified liturgical processions with the Torah “ark” within the synagogue itself.85 A relief carving from the synagogue at Capernaum may show a Torah shrine on wheels that could be moved as part of such a procession.86 Although Gutmann’s argument that a specific hymn implying such an interconnection was the precise source for the imagery is probably too specific, his general idea that processions may have taken place at Dura seems plausible. Interestingly, in the hymn that Gutmann cites (associated with a third-century rabbi and found in the Babylonian Talmud) the milk kine who pull the Ark (presented in the guise of the Torah cabinet in the hymn) exhort the Ark to “ascend in the fullness of your majesty” to the “sanctuary place.”87 Considered in isolation, the middle level of narratives is thus curiously lacking in closure. However, to have depicted the Ark at the center of the

84. Du Mesnil du Buisson, followed by Wischnitzer, argued that it represented the “wicked” city of Beth Shemesh, the Israelite city where the Ark first came to rest, and where the inhabitants looked inside the Ark. Du Mesnil du Buisson, Peintures, 84–92; Wischnitzer, The Messianic Theme, 65–68; Grabar argued that the Temple was the corrupt Jerusalem Temple awaiting purification under Josiah. See Grabar, “Le thème,” 180–82. And Moon understood the Temple as the “pagan” Philistine temple meant to be seen in rhetorical antithesis to the positive image of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness. See Moon, “Nudity and Narrative,” 296–99. 85. Gutmann, “Programmatic Painting,” 148. 86. For the dating of the Capernaum synagogue, see Stanislao Loffreda, “The Late Chronology of the Synagogue of Capernaum,” in Ancient Synagogues Revealed, ed. Lee I. Levine, 52–56. 87. B. Abod. Zar. 24b; see Gutmann, “Programmatic Painting,” 148.

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative Temple panel from the second phase of decoration would have created structural and narrative problems in connection to the synagogue decoration as a whole. The Ark (or “ark”) would already have been shown placed in the Temple (the shrine) in the first phase of decoration. To place the Ark in the Temple panel to the right would have meant a redundant and off-center narrative focus that would have competed with the liturgical focus on the Torah shrine itself. Building on the interconnections between the Ark of the Covenant and the Torah “ark,” Gutmann argued that the placement of the “ark” in the Torah shrine actually constituted the completion of this narrative.88 By placing the “ark” in the shrine at the center of the west wall, the congregation completed the narrative of the Ark’s journey so that the Ark had come to rest at the center of the “house” constructed by Solomon. The tension created by the images to the right had been resolved and worship could begin. Kraeling has argued that the consecration of the Temple under Solomon was the subject of the incompletely preserved panel depicting the end of a procession with the Ark depicted on the south wall of the synagogue, to the left of the panels with the Tabernacle and well.89 However, this identification would disrupt the otherwise chronological sequence of the existing panels on the second level. The procession could just as well be identified as the crossing of the Jordan with the Ark, as suggested by Gutmann,90 or the Battle of Jericho. The victory at Jericho, entailing multiple processions with the Ark, would provide a foil for the defeat at Ebenezer, with its removal of the Ark from the field of battle as depicted on the wall directly opposite. In addition, Kraeling’s identification of the fragmentary Ark procession with the consecration of the Temple under Solomon would also have offered a redundancy: The Sukkot symbols next to the Temple image on the Torah shrine’s decorative panel were a previously existing reference to the feast celebrated at the time of the consecration and the initial placement of the Ark in the Temple. It is the placement of the Torah “ark” in the “house” represented by the shrine that signals the central event in the consecration narrative; there was no need to represent this event on the surrounding walls if the congregation already enacted it through their liturgical interaction with the Torah shrine. Thus far, I have said little about any “messianic” or “eschatological” meanings that either the Temple image on the Torah shrine or the surrounding narrative may have had. On the one hand, I see no evidence that the Temple or any other images on the middle level have any discrete iconographical features requiring that they be understood as inherently “messianic” structures. On the other hand, the historical construction of the Jerusalem Temple under Solomon was the basis for all subsequent expectations regarding its restoration, as these expectations depended on the historical background and surrounding circumstances for their extrapolation. To return to the Temple courts in the age to come would

88. Gutmann, “Programmatic Painting,” 149. 89. Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 113–17. 90. Gutmann, “Programmatic Painting,” 141.

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Kära L. Schenk be to replicate the great age in Israel’s history under Solomon. Gathering for prayer in the synagogue represented a liturgical completion to a historical narrative at Dura that could also, potentially, prefigure a future age of restoration to the site of Jerusalem itself.91 Whereas the consecration of Solomon’s Temple took place during Sukkot, the great pilgrimage feast was also associated with a return of the Israelites to Jerusalem and to the Temple in the age to come.92 There is no reason either to insist on an eschatological reading as the exclusive interpretation to the images or to deny the possibility that the congregation could have read the images in this way.93 The placement of the Torah “ark” in its shrine marks the moment when the liturgical present is linked to the past and, potentially, to the future. I would like to use the connections between the Ark as presented at the center of the Tabernacle and the “ark” displayed in the Torah shrine of the synagogue as a starting point to explore further links between the liturgical activities presented in the Tabernacle and well panels and the worship of the synagogue congregation itself. In what follows, I will offer some suggestions as to how two liturgical activities in the synagogue—prayer and the reading of the Torah—could have been understood: in connection to the images of worship in the Sinai Wilderness; as part of the larger Temple-focused narrative recounted on the surrounding walls; and, potentially, in anticipation of the restoration of worship in the Jerusalem Temple in the age to come. These suggestions are heuristic, but not farfetched, and would offer plausible (if not provable) accounts as to how the congregation would have understood its own activities in light of this narrative framework. IV. P RAYER

AND

S ACRIFICE

IN

TABERNACLE , T EMPLE ,

AND

S YNAGOGUE

Kraeling’s reconstruction of the synagogue’s dedication text suggests that at least some members of the congregation at Dura would have “spread out” their hands (in prayer) in the synagogue,94 a gesture that would have echoed the orant pose of the Israelites who gather just outside the door of the Tabernacle. 91. It is also likewise possible that the images could be understood in connection to mystical ideas regarding the heavenly sanctuary (as argued in Laderman, “A New Look at the Second Register”). But it is not clear that the images in question are inherently mystical, that they represent the heavenly sanctuary, or that parallels to liturgical hymns represent the structuring theme for the images. 92. See Zecharia 14:16–19, as well as Rubenstein, The History of Sukkot, 275–90. 93. Sed-Rajna has argued that at Dura “gold paint was used for the Temple, the menorah and the festival sheaf… to emphasize the eschatological character of an event which belonged to the realm of meta-history”; “Images of the Tabernacle/Temple,” 44. However, the gold color of the images is not an indisputable indicator of eschatological status. Josephus describes how Herod also adorned his Temple with gold, apparently for the beauty and richness of its associations. It was, according to the historian, “covered on all sides with massive plates of gold, the sun was no sooner up than it radiated so fiery a flash that persons straining to look at it were compelled to avert their eyes, as from the solar rays”; Josephus War, 5:222. 94. Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 264, Aramaic text on Tile B. It is translated as “on every Sabbath… spreading out [their hands] in it (in prayer).” Regarding the later half of the portion cited, Kraeling notes that, “In this much-used phrase ‘the hands,’ is often omitted, and this is true also of ‘in prayer,’” 266. See also Fine, Art and Judaism, 180–81.

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative Whether or not intended, such activity would create a link between the assembled Israelites and synagogue assembly itself as they oriented themselves toward the shrine. Prayer toward the sanctuary in the Tabernacle was thus made to provide the authenticating model for the activities of the synagogue congregation. Having placed the “ark” in its “house,” and positioned in prayer before the shrine, the congregation also played the role of Israelites who were assembling in Jerusalem for the pilgrimage feast of Sukkot. In this way, the synagogue not only constructed a link between the “ark” and the Ark, but also between the congregation and the biblical tribes of Israel as they gathered in the outer courts of the Temple for prayer. Although we don’t know precisely what the synagogue community at Dura would have prayed, Fine has recently pointed to a fragment of Hebrew text found at the site of the Dura synagogue similar in form to prayers known from rabbinic literature.95 Fine offers that exploring the ‘Amidah (or “standing” prayer) often referred to in rabbinic texts may serve as a test case as to how liturgical prayer created a receptive context for the congregation’s own interaction with the images. Having identified the activities taking place in the Tabernacle panel in connection to the sacrificial “service,” I would like to suggest that the ‘Amidah use of the terminology related to this “service” may provide a lens for both the images of sacrifice in the Tabernacle and the prayer that the Israelites offer at its threshold to the left. The “service” offered in the Tabernacle continued in the Temple in the First and Second Temple periods. The interruption of the tamid offering toward the end of the first Jewish revolt was understood as a great calamity. Josephus reports that during the course of the revolt, on “the seventeenth day of Panemus [Tammuz], the sacrifice called “the Daily Sacrifice” had failed, and had not been offered to God for want of men to offer it, and… the people were grievously troubled at it.”96 The Mishnah likewise records the cessation of the “Daily Whole-offering” as one of the “Five things [that] befell our fathers on the 17th day of Tammuz.”97 For the priestly leader of Dura, for the congregation, and for the Jewish community as a whole in this period, the cessation of the tamid and its continuing absence would have been cause for concern. In the period contemporary with Dura, however, rabbinic texts suggest that prayer was timed so as to continue the prayer that had once been offered by the priests in the Tabernacle and Temple at the time of the tamid.98 This

95. Fine, ibid., 174–77. The Amidah is also know as ha-tefillah, “the prayer,” or, in its daily form, as the shemoneh-‘esreh, “eighteen [benedictions]”). The fragment was published in Kraeling, The Synagogue (1956), 259. Prior to Fine, it was rarely discussed by art historians, with the exception of Laderman, “A New Look at the Second Register,” who identified the fragment as an example of piyyut (liturgical poetry), 5. 96. Josephus War 6:94. 97. M. Taan. 4:6. 98. According to the Mishnah, the prayer service in the Temple was carried out in the following fashion: “The officer said to the them, “Recite the benediction.” They recited the benediction and recited the Ten Commandments, the Shema, and “It shall come to pass,” and “And the Lord spoke

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Kära L. Schenk synchronization was already in evidence from the late Second Temple period, as Judith is depicted as timing her prayer in this way. 99 Following the fall of the Temple itself, such prayer was increasingly understood to substitute for the tamid.100 As the Sifre on Deuteronomy notes, “just as the service of the altar is called ‘service,’ so is prayer called ‘service.’ ”101 As recorded in the Babylonian form of the ‘Amidah, blessing 17 weaves back and forth between prayer and “service” so as to suggest their interconnection: Be pleased, Lord our God, with your people Israel and with their tefillah [prayer]. Return the ‘avodah [service] to the Temple precincts. Accept willingly and with love the offerings of Israel and their tefillah [prayer]. May the tamid offering of the ‘avodah [service] of Israel, your people, be acceptable to you.102

As Reuven Kimelman points out, the ‘avodah in question could be “service” to God in general, but also may refer to prayer “service” or to the “service” in the Temple.103 Contemporary writings on prayer, and the text of the prayers themselves, thus suggest a strong connection between prayer and sacrifice (particularly the tamid). If the wording or conception of the prayers offered at Dura was at all similar to the ‘Amidah, as described above, they would have had a strong resonance with the presentation of the tamid offering as depicted (I argue) in the Tabernacle panel. But while the images of the Tabernacle show the Israelites offering prayer in tandem with, but separate from, the priestly offering of the sacrificial “service,” the prayer “service” offered by the congregation at Dura would itself have

to Moses.” They pronounced three benedictions with the people: “True and certain,” and “‘Avodah,” and the Priestly blessing, and on the Sabbath they pronounced a further benediction for the outgoing course of priests.” (M. Tamid 5:1); Lee. I. Levine, “The Second Temple Synagogue: The Formative Years,” in The Synagogue in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine (Philadelphia, PA: American School of Oriental Research, 1987): 20. 99. “Then Judith prostrated herself, put ashes on her head, and uncovered the sackcloth she was wearing. At the very time when the evening incense was being offered in the house of God in Jerusalem, Judith cried out to the Lord with a loud voice…” (Judith 9:1). See also Psalms 141:2: “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.” 100. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, 184. 101. Piska 41, Hammer, 85. 102. Rueven Kimelman, “The Literary Structure of the Amidah and the Rhetoric of Redemption,” in Echoes of Many Texts: Reflections on Jewish and Christian Traditions: Essays in Honor of Lou H. Silberman, ed. William G. Dever and J. Edward Wright (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977), 190. 103. Kimelman, “The Literary Structure of the ‘Amidah,” 188–89.

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative perpetuated the sacrificial “service.” The structural interconnections between the congregation and the shrine would have mirrored (though in transformed fashion), the interconnections between the congregation in the Sinai Wilderness and the “service” performed in the Wilderness Tabernacle. However, for the congregation to emulate the activities taking place in (or just outside) the Tabernacle was also to complete the narrative of the Ark’s journey by embodying the liturgical fulfillment of worship established in the Jerusalem Temple itself. The offering of the “service” in the synagogue would have been a hinge between the panels to the right and left: It not only echoed and embodied the worship depicted in the Tabernacle but also brought closure to the narrative of the Ark’s journey to the right through the same embodiment of worship. Offering the “service” in this fashion, members of the congregation become actors in a drama played out on the walls surrounding them. Whereas the congregation’s liturgical activity could have brought to life the completion of the historical narrative in Solomon’s Temple, it could also have anticipated the restoration of worship in a messianic/eschatological Temple, as located on the site in Jerusalem toward which the synagogue was aligned. Contemporary sources suggest that liturgical activity in the synagogue was a multivalent endeavor that did not merely “replace” the lost Temple service, but also—simultaneously—anticipated its restoration. For example, as in contemporary rabbinic texts,104 blessing 17 of the ‘Amidah also suggests a hope for the restoration of the Temple itself, along with its sacrificial service. The terse phrase, “May the tamid offering of the ‘avodah (service) of Israel, your people, be acceptable to you,” could refer to the acceptability of “service” in both the present and the future and the blessing also specifically petitions, “Return the ‘avodah [service] to the Temple precincts.” To offer the prayer “service” in the synagogue was to follow the pattern established in the Tabernacle, but also to play a role in the narrative drama of the middle level by liturgically offering the “service” toward the “house for the ark” (e.g., Solomon’s Temple), and, moreover, to anticipate the restoration of that “service” to the Temple court in the age to come. The image of Aaron offering incense in the Tabernacle, as pointed out earlier, is similar to the many images of incense-offering in the city of Dura at large. If the images of worship in the Tabernacle were to be understood in connection to worship in the synagogue itself, the function of these images would be remarkably similar to that of the images in the surrounding city. The major difference between the synagogue and these sites would be the degree to which the Tabernacle images were part of a larger narrative that depended, ultimately, on another site in Jerusalem itself for its significance. Thus, the synagogue community appropriated the use of cultic images from the city at large in order to define 104. Sifre Deuteronomy refers to a “First Temple,” a “Second Temple,” and the Temple “built and beautified in the future,” Piska 352. The Mishnah also expresses hope for the restoration of the Temple: “May it be thy will, O Lord our God and the God of our fathers, that the temple be built speedily in our days.…” M. Abot. 5.20; see also M. Taan. 4:9. Its tractate on the tamid concludes as follows: “This was the rite of the tamid in the service of the house of our God.” It adds, “May it be his will that it should be built up again speedily and in our days.” M. Tamid 7:3.

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Kära L. Schenk themselves as different from the other communities who met for worship. In this way, the Jewish congregation at Dura was both similar to and distinct from the culture of the city in which they lived. The fact that the extant synagogue with the next most complex assemblage of pictorial decoration after Dura (Sepphoris) also features a representation of the tamid offering in the Tabernacle may suggest a degree of liturgical continuity between the two communities. The composition and iconographic details of the Tabernacle images in each site are not particularly similar. For instance, unlike Dura, the Sepphoris mosaic does not include an image similar to that of the Israelites worshiping just outside the Tabernacle to complement the priestly activity within. In keeping with this distinction, the mosaic offers the wash basin for the daily cleansing of the priests, while the Dura panel depicts the red heifer sacrifice for the purification of the community at large, as shown in the next panel. It is the subject matter and the context that connects the two sets of images at Dura and Sepphoris. If my argument is correct, the daily offering of the tamid is central to the activities taking place in the Tabernacle, as depicted in the decoration of both synagogues. The images in both would be appropriate complements for the content of the Amidah, the most frequently recited prayer in the liturgy. Yet, the imagery of sacrifice in the Tabernacle could have functioned flexibly in connection to most any holy day or ritual in the synagogue and would not have been narrowly linked only to this prayer. V. WATER

FROM THE

W ELL

AS THE

O UTPOURING

OF

T ORAH

That the Torah is a central focus for Judaism—ancient and modern—needs no elaboration here. At Dura, it was the cabinet containing this Torah that served as both the focus of worship and the central key to the interconnection between the congregation and the narrative recounted on the surrounding walls. There is, however, a widespread tradition that water flowing from the well—and the Temple—represented the study and interpretation of this Torah, a tradition that illumines how the congregation may have understood the image of the well in the midst of the praying Israelites.105 Broad connections between water and Torah abound from the earliest phases of Jewish tradition. For example, the prophet Amos speaks of an age to come when there will be a thirst for Torah rather than water (Amos 8:11), while Isaiah 11:9 speaks more positively (and more generally) of a time when

105. For the motif and its relationship to wisdom or Torah, see Michael Fishbane, “The Well of Living Water: A Biblical Motif and Its Ancient Transformations,” in Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon, ed. Michael Fishbane and Emanuel Tov (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992), 3–16. The significance of the water has been interpreted in many ways. Wischnitzer suggested that the panel was an allegorical representation of Moses giving the Law to Israel at Sinai. Wischnitzer, The Messianic Theme, 1948, 55–58. Laderman refers to a passage in the Mishnah that names the well among the miraculous provisions devised in advance for Israel during the creation of the world and offers that the image indicates the miraculous provision and presence that the Israelites enjoyed in “A New Look at the Second Register,” 14.

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative divine knowledge will “fill the world as the water covers the seas.” The connection between water and Torah was expanded in different ways in the late Second Temple period. Sirach wrote of the Torah as primordial wisdom that had found its dwelling on Zion and flowed from it like the rivers in Paradise. The scholar is “like a canal from a river” channeling wisdom to those who seek it.106 Philo also connected the well in the Numbers passage in particular with wisdom.107 The priest-led Qumran community elaborated on the connection between the well and the Torah. In the Damascus Covenant, their wise men interpret the Torah anew: But God remembered the covenant of the very first, and from Aaron raised men of knowledge and from Israel wise men, and forced them to listen. And they dug the well: [Numbers 21:18] “A well which the princes dug, which the nobles of the people delved with the staff [mehokkek].” The well is the law. And those who dug it are the converts of Israel, who left the land of Judah and lived in the land of Damascus, all of whom God called princes for they sought him, and their renown has not been repudiated in anyone’s mouth. And the staff is the interpreter [“searcher,” doresh] of the law.…108

As Michael Fishbane has pointed out, the word “staff” (mehokkek) is related to the word for instituting laws (hakak), and by stating that the “staff” is the “searcher” (doresh) of the Law,” the Damascus Covenant also employs a word related to midrash, or biblical interpretation.109 The link between well water and Torah also informs a number of other passages from the scrolls.110 Rabbinic texts most often connect well and water imagery to the individual teacher of Torah: In the Mishnah, for example, if one studies Torah “for its own sake,” the “mysteries” (razim) of the Torah are revealed to him, and he becomes like an overflowing fountain and ceaseless torrent.” This one who “diligently studies the Torah repeatedly is exalted, as [Scripture] says: ‘And from Mattanah [“giving” (of the Torah)] to Nahaliel [inheritance], and from Nahaliel [inheritance] to Bamot [high places]’ (Numbers 21:19).”111 But such water/ Torah could also be dispensed in the synagogue, as in the Mekhilta, where water given at Marah (Exodus 15:22–25) is likened to synagogue readings: The ancient interpreters said “And they did not find water…” refers to divine teachings, which are compared to water.… And since they were separated from “water” for three days and thereupon rebelled, for this reason did the 106. Sirach 24. 107. Philo. De Ebr. 113. 108. CD VI:4. 109. Fishbane, “From Scribalism to Rabbinism,” 76–78. 110. See also Cave 4, frag. 2, column XIX and 1Q Hodayot VIII.4 and V.9 and Fishbane, “From Scribalism to Rabbinism,” 76. 111. M. Abot VI:1–2 Likewise, Sifre Deuteronomy uses metaphorical language derived from Proverbs 5:15 concerning water from a well. See Piska 48 (ed. Hammer, 102).

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Kära L. Schenk prophets and sages make it a rule that the Torah is to be read publicly on the Sabbath, on Monday, and on Thursday.112

In the Mekhilta, the subsequent reference to the Israelites encamping by the water at Elim hearkens back to this interpretation, for “it is merely to teach that they were occupied with the words of the Torah which had been given to them at Marah.”113 And the Mekhilta also refers to the Numbers passage specifically in connection with the Torah: “The Torah is called an inheritance, as it is said: ‘And from Mattanah to Nahaliel’ (Numbers 21:19).”114 In a liturgical setting, the waters from the miraculous well could be understood in connection to the Torah read in the synagogue. Would the congregation at Dura have also known about the connection between Torah and water from the well in order to read the image in this fashion, or even to have included it as an intentional evocation of this symbolic meaning? Although it is impossible to argue this with any certainty, the tradition is certainly both broad and deep. As noted, we find versions of this interconnection in the late Second Temple period in authors as diverse as Sirach, Philo, and those responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls. In addition to the tannaitic texts cited above, the tradition also makes its way into later Palestinian midrashim, as in Genesis Rabbah, where a reference to Jacob’s well (“for out of that well the flocks were watered”) is glossed as “from there each one drew water for his standard, tribe, and family,” as in the Number’s passage, as well as “for from there they hear the reading of the Torah.”115 Likewise, the tradition in the Mekhilta linking the lack of water in the desert with the need for Torah was also cited in the Babylonian Talmud.116 Without suggesting knowledge of a specific rabbinic textual source, it seems plausible that the Dura community could have known about this tradition. Conversely, the overflowing of the waters could also anticipate the outpouring of waters from the eschatological Temple, as envisioned by the prophets. In particular, the passage in Zechariah regarding the celebration of the feast of Sukkot in the eschatological future is the same one that refers to waters pouring out of Jerusalem in this coming age. As noted, the Tosefta makes reference to such prophetic texts in connection to the miraculous well.117 Those gathered in prayer before the Torah shrine, with its image of the Temple and Sukkot symbols, could have anticipated not only a return to the Temple courts to pray but also the outpouring of divine blessing from the Temple to the land and people surrounding. Nothing in the image itself necessitates that the well in the 112. Mekhilta, Vayassa’ 1:73–81 (ed. Lauterbach, II:89). 113. Mekhilta, Vayassa’ 2:11–12 (ed. Lauterbach, II:98). 114. Mekhilta, Shirata 10:19–20 (ed. Lauterbach, II:78). 115. Genesis Rabbah, LXX:8 (ed. Freedman and Simon, 641–43). 116. b. B.Qama 82a. 117. Genesis Rabbah also cites both the water from the well and the waters flowing from the Temple in Zechariah among a list of examples in which God provided water for Israel in the past and in the future in recompense for the righteousness of Abraham. Genesis Rabbah, XLVIII:10 (ed. Freedman and Simon, 411).

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Temple, Community, and Sacred Narrative panel at Dura be interpreted in connection to Torah in either the liturgical present or the messianic future. Nevertheless, the texts cited above provide possible ways in which the congregation at Dura could have understood the significance of the well in the midst of the congregation gathered in the Sinai Wilderness. The connection between water and Torah would certainly relate to the central focus of the community on the Torah cabinet housed at the center of the west wall. If the Torah in the “ark” was a source of the synagogue’s holiness and blessing, it was by reading and studying the sacred scroll that the water was drawn from its source. VI. C ONCLUSION This account of images of holy places at Dura stresses the underlying significance of the placement of the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple under Solomon as the high point of Israel’s history and the focus of the synagogue’s decoration. The narrative focus on Solomon’s Temple and the way in which the surrounding narratives of the middle level frame the “house for the ark” provide a way of understanding the basic structure of the decoration and the logic behind the conception and the placement of the narrative panels. It also suggests how the imagery at Dura could have functioned as a means of orientation for the congregation in the period after 70 CE and 135 CE, when Jewish communities at large were coping with the extremely disruptive aftermath of two failed revolts against Rome. The images served as, first, a spatial signpost toward the site of Jerusalem and, second, as a narrative framework that integrated the congregation into a sacred history that would seem to have come to a disastrous end. In doing so, the decoration constructed the synagogue itself as a holy place where the congregation could still offer “service” and, quite likely, pointed beyond this site toward an age to come when the sanctuary could be restored to Jerusalem itself. In suggesting a definite structure for the Temple-related images and narrative, I nevertheless believe that the congregation and its leaders could have composed flexible interpretations of the imagery that would have depended on changes in the liturgy, holy days, or the particular circumstances of the community. The imagery could have excited a range of responses, including memory of and pride in a glorious shared past, anger at the loss of the Temple, spiritual exultation in the offering of the service, and desire for the culmination of Israel’s redemptive history on Zion in the messianic future. The crucial and unchanging function of the images, however, is the way in which they draw the congregation itself into the sacred narrative, designating them as Israel at worship before the sanctuary. Kära L. Schenk Maryland Institute College of Art Baltimore, Maryland

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AJS Review 34:2 (November 2010), 231–263 © Association for Jewish Studies 2010 doi:10.1017/S0364009410000334

WAR

WITHIN ,

WAR WITHOUT: R USSIAN R EFUGEE R ABBIS DURING W ORLD WAR I by

Andrew N. Koss

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rabbi Ya‘akov Landa was one of some 250,000 Russian Jews who had fled, or been forcibly expelled, from their homes in Russia’s western provinces to settle in the country’s interior.1 After Landa’s exile, he spent several months traveling amid refugee communities in Voronezh, Tambov, Penza, Saratov, and Samara provinces. At the conclusion of his journey, he composed a detailed report about the state of religious observance among the refugees, which he sent to Rabbi Shalom Dov-Ber Schneerson of Lubavitch.2 Landa’s observations during these months shocked his core sensibilities as a rabbi and an observant Jew. He noted that refugees were disregarding such fundamental aspects of Jewish practice as Sabbath observance and were living without the basic institutions that had traditionally defined religious and communal life. In community after community, Landa noted the same phenomena: traditional Jewish schooling abandoned, the absence of ritual baths or mikvehs, and a dire shortage of rabbis and kosher slaughterers. In several cases, he questioned the piety and competence of the rare ritual slaughterers who could be found, and occasionally he called attention to the capabilities even of the rabbis.3 Many locales lacked synagogues or had insufficient room in existing synagogues for the hordes of newcomers. Furthermore, the administrators of Jewish charitable organizations to which Jews flocked for much-needed support tended to be “very distant from the ways of Judaism.”4 In short, the people and places necessary for the maintenance of normal religious observance were gone.

1. Semion Goldin, “Deportation of Jews by the Russian Military Command, 1914–1915,” Jews in Eastern Europe 1, no. 41 (2000): 58. The figure of 250,000 is most likely a conservative estimate. See notes 10 and 11 below. 2. The undated report can be found in Shalom Dov-Ber Schneerson, Igrot-kodesh, vol. 5 (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1987), 63–81 (hereafter cited as Igrot Rasha”b). The editors speculate (I believe accurately) that it was written in the winter of 1916–17, reporting on visits made over the previous nine months (pp. 62–63 footnote). 3. Ibid., 70, 76, 78, 79, 81. 4. Ibid., 74.

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Andrew N. Koss Both the rhetoric and content of Landa’s report suggest that his observations went beyond his lamenting of impiety or declining religious observance. He had, instead, identified a new pattern of religious laxity that resulted directly from wartime circumstances. His description of a religious crisis during World War I forms a rabbinic parallel to the picture of moral and societal disintegration apparent in other literary reports, memoirs, and journalistic Jewish sources of the period.5 It was not the seductive pull of secular ideologies on Jewish youth that Landa regarded as the primary corrosive force undermining traditional Judaism. Nor was it the trend among well-to-do families to attempt to imitate the mores of the non-Jewish bourgeoisie. Rather, it was geographic and economic dislocation that posed the greatest threat. Jews who had never objected to traditional observance in principle were caving in to enormous material pressures: While one son is employed in the shop of a non-Jew and does his work on the Sabbath as on any workday, the second son [works] for one of the [native] Jewish residents and does his work on the Sabbath as on any weekday, and sometimes their father, too, is like that. It should thus not be surprising that the feelings of holiness of the Jewish people on the Sabbath day are lost from their memories. . . . It is self-evident that public desecration of the Sabbath is a growing plague (the Merciful One be with them!) that is enveloping more and more [Jews] in its net—may God grant them atonement.6

It thus seemed to Landa that the vast majority of refugees who had faithfully observed the commandments in their home communities now ceased to do so in exile. Although quantitative data to support his claims is lacking, the evidence is ample and persuasive. Refugees violated the Sabbath, according to Landa, because they now resided in places where both Jewish and non-Jewish employers expected employees to work on that day. Furthermore, he claimed that the impact of the war went beyond outward observance to inward experience, robbing Jews of the very memory of the Sabbath’s sanctity. In the passage quoted above, Landa distinguished between refugees from the Pale of Jewish Settlement and those who had been living outside it, in the Russian interior, prior to the war. He drew this distinction because the Pale—an area comprised of the empire’s westernmost provinces—contained Russia’s most traditional Jewish population, and thus was a region where Jews were expected to observe the commandments. While Jews tended to perceive the 5. See, for example, Pinkes far der geshikhte fun Vilne in di yorn fun milkhome un okupatsye, ed. Zalmen Reisen (Wilno: Di historish-etnografishe gezelshaft oyfn nomen fun Sh. An-Ski, z”1, 1922); also S. An-sky, Der yudisher khurbn fun Poylen, Galitsiye un Bukovina, fun tog-bukh 1914–1917, in Gezamelte shriftn, 15 vols. (Vilna: Ferlag “An-ski,” 1920–1925), vols. 4–6. For an analysis of Jewish literature of World War I, see David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 115–21, 129–32, 134–41. See also Jillian Vanessa Davidson, “‘A Secular Catastrophe’ in Eastern Europe: The Great War and the Reconstruction of Modern Jewish Memory” (Doctoral dissertation, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2004). 6. Igrot Rasha”b, vol. 5, 65.

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War within, War without: Russian Refugee Rabbis during World War I residential restrictions that made it difficult for them to settle in the Russian interior as a harsh burden imposed by an unfriendly government, they also regarded the Pale as a bastion of authentic Jewish life.7 And although rabbis in the Pale had been engaged in a fierce struggle with the forces of modernization since the middle of the nineteenth century, they still counted on the support of the masses. Landa’s findings, however, suggested that this support had now crumbled and that the rank and file—driven from the Pale in large numbers— were defecting. By no means was Landa alone in his concerns; such worry was widespread among contemporary rabbis who noted a precipitous decline in religious observance during the war years, both among refugees and among those who remained in the ravaged territories on the Russian frontier. In the eyes of these rabbis, the destruction of traditional life in the Pale was a crisis of international proportions. The Jews of this territory, besides constituting a large portion of the global Jewish population, probably formed the largest existing mass of traditionally religious Jews. Outside the Pale—in the Russian interior, in Western Europe, or in America—only a minority clung strictly to religious observance; by contrast, observance in the Pale was the path of the majority. Here Jews not only kept the Sabbath, but tended also to live in insular Jewish communities and to prefer Yiddish as their language. Numerous towns and cities were recognized for their pious residents and great rabbis, or were famous as the locations of hasidic courts or yeshivas. In the minds of defenders of Orthodoxy,8 the Pale, together

7. This perception of the Pale was not limited to rabbis or the Orthodox. For attitudes of acculturating Jews living in St. Petersburg toward the Pale, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 147, 167–68, 190–91, and 378–79. The very fact that, in 1911, S. An-sky launched an ethnographic expedition through the Pale to document Jewish customs, folklore, and folk art bespeaks a belief in the Pale as a repository of Jewish authenticity. See Abram Rechtman, Yidishe etnografye un folklor: zikhroynes vegn der etnografisher ekspeditsye ongefirt fun Sh. An-ski (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Jewish Institute of Learning, 1958). 8. For the purposes of this article, I will use the terms Orthodox and Orthodoxy to refer to those who consciously espoused an ideology that was opposed to significant religious innovation. On the eve of World War I, most rabbis in Russia and Congress Poland could be considered Orthodox, while most of the religiously observant lay population would best be described as traditional. For scholarly approaches to this distinction, see Jacob Katz, “Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry 2: The Challenge of Modernity and Jewish Orthodoxy, ed. Peter Medding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 4–17; Michael K. Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention of a Tradition,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 23–84; Gershon C. Bacon, The Politics of Tradition: Agudat Yisrael in Poland, 1916–1939 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1996); Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 64–130. Mordechai Altshuler, “ha-Politikah shel ha-mah.aneh ha-dati veha-h.aredi be-Rusyah bi-shenat 1917,” Shvut 15 (1992): 195–234 provides an extensive discussion of Orthodox political organization in Russia in 1917 and briefly acknowledges some of the effects of World War I. Altshuler, however, does not consider the long-term effects of the war on East European Jewish Orthodoxy, the subject of the present study. To date, virtually no other secondary literature about Orthodox Judaism during World War I exists.

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Andrew N. Koss with the adjoining Kingdom of Poland,9 was the heartland of Jewry and of Judaism itself. If tradition could not be maintained among Jews of this region, how could the Jewish religion and culture survive at all? The religious crisis came directly out of a general catastrophe that engulfed the Russian Empire as a whole—and Russia’s Jews in particular—with the outbreak of war in 1914. By order of the tsar, the territories closest to the front lines—a major portion of the Pale of Settlement—were placed under the control of a military government with vast powers and deep hostility toward Jews. In 1915, the military crafted a program to expel Jews from the war zone. Hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes, often violently, with little warning and without plans for future settlement. Then, in the wake of a series of strategic defeats at the hands of the Germans, the Russian army pulled back hundreds of miles to more defensible lines, deeper within the Pale. During this Great Retreat, it carried out a scorched-earth policy that left bridges destroyed, storehouses burned, and factories dismantled. Dejected troops, especially Cossack units, vented their anger on the Jewish communities through which they passed, engaging in bloody binges of rape, looting, and murder. Contemporary accounts of these incidents are more reminiscent of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century massacres than of the pogroms of the 1880s or 1904–1907.10 In addition to those who were expelled outright, many Jews fled voluntarily from the German advance. By 1916, more than 250,000 Jews had fled or been expelled from Russia’s western provinces; most took refuge in eastern Ukraine or in adjoining provinces beyond the Pale where, after more than a century of exclusion, they were finally allowed to settle at will. Massive migration and the difficulties of travel broke up old communities, separating friends and family members. Entire yeshivas and hasidic courts either disbanded or relocated eastward.11 For the most part, the refugees arrived with very little money and few

9. This area, alternatively known as “the Congress Kingdom,” “Congress Poland,” or simply “Poland,” and officially designated Privislianskii krai (Vistula Land) after 1863, was not technically part of the Pale. However, Jews were allowed to reside there with relatively few restrictions. For most of the discussion here, what was true for the Pale was also true for Congress Poland. 10. No comprehensive work covering this episode of Jewish history exists at this time. The best available works are Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 156–67; Steven J. Zipperstein, “The Politics of Relief,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry 4: The Jews and the European Crisis, 1914–1921, ed. Jonathan Frankel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 22–40; Eric Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I,” Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001): 404–19; Simon Dubnov, “Iz ‘chernoi knigi’ rossiiskago evreistva: Materialy dlia istorii voiny 1914–1915 g.,” Evreiskaia starina 10 (1918): 195–296. 11. Ibid. In August 1915, the Russian government allowed Jewish refugees to settle outside the Pale (Zipperstein, “The Politics of Relief,” in Frankel, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 25). For expulsions, see Goldin, “Deportation of Jews,” 40–72. For expulsions from Galicia, see Alexander Victor Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914– 1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 48–62. For yeshivas, see Mosedot Torah be-Eiropah, ed. Samuel K. Mirsky (New York: Histadruth Ivrith of America, 1956). For hasidic courts, see Aaron Ze’ev Aescoly, ha-H.asidut be-Polin (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1998), 125–27.

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War within, War without: Russian Refugee Rabbis during World War I possessions. The areas in which they settled, as was true of the rest of the empire, were sinking into the economic crisis that would soon lead to the February Revolution of 1917. Thus it was in the midst of a general Russian crisis, with particularly severe consequences for Russian Jewry, that Landa, along with other members of the rabbinic leadership, identified a specifically religious crisis, one that threatened the continued existence of Judaism as they knew it. The disintegration of crucial aspects of Jewish observance meant that the traditional world was itself disappearing, and that Orthodoxy was losing its base of supporters. This article explores the ways in which rabbis in the Russian Empire evaluated and responded to the deterioration of religious practice during World War I, and, in doing so, took steps that would radically transform East European Orthodoxy. World War I was a watershed in the history of religious Judaism in the Russian Empire—a moment in the struggle between the traditional rabbinate and the forces of modernization in which the former reevaluated its positions and reformulated its strategies. On the one hand, part of the new strategy entailed adopting a more aggressive approach to protecting the religious way of life. On the other hand, rabbis opted to make major concessions, including some they had fought vigorously against for decades. In the half-century preceding World War I, Russia’s traditionalist rabbis tended to react to the threat of innovation by staking out stricter, more extreme positions. They waged a fierce battle against modernization, focusing their efforts on the educated elite through introducing innovations to the yeshiva (an institution attended only by a small minority) or polemics in the Hebrew press (which could be read only by the yeshiva-educated and a handful of others).12 World War I saw a reversal of both these tendencies. It led Orthodox rabbis to support reforms that seemed tepid to outsiders but were, in fact, groundbreaking precisely because previously they had been resisted so fiercely. The circumstances also forced rabbis to bring their antimodernization efforts to a broader populace, not just the educated elite. In order to do so, they created new and modern organizational structures, giving Orthodoxy many of the characteristics of a political movement. The nature of wartime compromise is illustrated by the changes in rabbinic attitudes toward secular education. In reaction to the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many rabbis who had regarded secular learning as benign but irrelevant now considered it inherently pernicious. Once they began to associate the acquisition of secular knowledge with an ideological threat to the religious status quo, they began to perceive it

12. Shaul Stampfer, ha-Yeshivah ha-Lita’it be-hithavutah (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar le-toledot Yisra’el, 2005); Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Responses to Modernity: New Voices in America and Eastern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 67–103. For other Orthodox responses, see Eli Lederhendler, “The Vilna Rabbis’ Anti-socialist Appeal, June 1903,” Shvut 15 (1992): xxxiii–xl; ChaeRan Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 2002), 243–79

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Andrew N. Koss as dangerous.13 Yet, during the war years, some of the very rabbis who had been at the forefront of protest against any educational reform endorsed the introduction of limited secular education into religious schools in order to defend Orthodoxy. Such rabbis saw these concessions as part of a tactical retreat, intended to shore up their weakening position. In the course of their wartime activities, these otherwise quite conservative rabbis joined forces with a small number of relatively liberal rabbis who supported such innovations as secular education on ideological, rather than pragmatic, grounds. These rabbis were more likely than most to seek limited accommodation with modernity within the framework of tradition and were less willing to react against change by taking more stringent positions. Such moderates were firmly Orthodox and completely integrated into the Russian rabbinate; it was only later that they would begin to be considered a distinctive group or movement. The collaborative efforts of both staunchly conservative and more moderate rabbis permanently changed the face of Jewish Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe. Most documentary records of rabbinic activity during the war years are found in correspondence between rabbis, in letters from rabbis to lay leaders, and in public announcements circulated in the Orthodox press. The bulk of these documents share one overarching methodological problem: Because Orthodoxy made a fundamental, implicit claim to being unchanging, rabbinic rhetoric always minimized innovation. Therefore, although some of the proposals contained within these sources were in fact quite radical, their authors never actually heralded them as such. In addition, there exists an additional methodological hurdle to the study of this topic: scant attention paid to religious life in contemporary Jewish sources that were not explicitly Orthodox. During and shortly after World War I, Jewish writers produced a substantial body of written documentation recording the events of these extraordinary years, yet most of these works were produced by a modernizing intelligentsia who took little interest in developments within Orthodoxy or in the attenuation of religious observance. The reasons for this neglect were simple: Such writers viewed Orthodoxy as marginal to the core narrative of Jewish progress and enlightenment to which they subscribed. They thus ascribed limited relevance to changes in the Orthodox scene, and considered lapses in religious practice as part of history following its natural course.14 Although this silence 13. See Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770– 1870 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 142–60. For examples of such rabbinic attitudes, see Nah.man of Braslav, Likute Mohara”n 64:2–4 (New York: 1966), 181–83; Ezekiel Landau, Tsiyun le-nefesh h.ayah to Berakhot 28b (Prague: 1828), 39a–40a. For Orthodoxy and secular education in Hungary, see Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy” in Wertheimer, Uses of Tradition, 35–37, 43–44, 61–62. For attitudes of Lithuanian rabbis, see Jacob J. Schacter, “Haskalah, Secular Studies and the Close of the Yeshiva in Volozhin in 1892,” Torah u-Madda Journal 2 (1990): 76–133. 14. An illustrative example of such an attitude can be found in an article by Zionist journalist Joseph Heftman on the Masoret ve-h.erut conference, discussed at length below. Heftman argued that support for a new Orthodox political party did not signify an important change within—or a resurgence of—Orthodoxy, but rather a reaction by the bourgeois majority to the “lefticization” (entlinkung) of Jewish political life. Thus, one of very few reports on rabbinic activities from the secular Jewish

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War within, War without: Russian Refugee Rabbis during World War I was by no means complete, it translated into a gap between Orthodox and nonOrthodox narratives of the war. Consequently, the historian must navigate between Orthodox sources that ignore history and secular sources that ignore Orthodoxy. To transcend these difficulties, this article focuses on the activities of three remarkable, but very different, rabbis who left behind usable historical documents. The first is Landa’s correspondent, Shalom Dov-Ber Schneerson (1860–1920), rebbe of the Lubavitch (Liubavichi) hasidim—the largest of the Lithuanian hasidic sects—whose substantial network of followers stretched throughout Lithuania and Russian Ukraine. The second, H.ayim Ozer Grodzienski (1863– 1940), by dint of his talmudic erudition, active involvement in communal affairs, and position as head of the rabbinic court of Vilna, was widely recognized as the leader of Lithuanian mitnagdic (nonhasidic) Jewry.15 Both stood at the forefront of the battle against secularization. Their correspondences, approaching a wide variety of issues, are available in published form.16 The third rabbi, Yehudah Leyb Graubart (1861–1937), was notably different. A member of a prominent family of rabbis, he had attracted attention in rabbinic circles prior to the war because of his talmudic writings and responsa.17 While Graubart became known in his rabbinic posts for his vociferous public protestations against Sabbath desecration, he also read works of classical Jewish philosophy and developed an interest in modern Hebrew literature. Although he was involved in Orthodox organizational activities in the prewar years, he never attained a profile comparable to that of Grodzienski or Schneerson. Between 1916 and 1919, however, Graubart traveled across Russia, agitating for the Orthodox cause and garnering support from the highest levels of rabbinic and lay leadership. In 1920, he left Europe to serve as a rabbi in Toronto and St. Louis. In North America, he played a marginal role in organized Orthodoxy, although he was a vocal supporter of religious Zionism—a position that had come to be associated with liberal trends within Orthodox Jewry.

press downplayed the religious aspect. Heftman instead went on to interpret the party’s creation as evidence of strong support for Zionism among the Jewish masses, i.e., as proof of the popularity of his own ideology. Yosipon [Joseph Heftman], “Di yudishe ortodoksye in Rusland,” Dos yudishe folk 24 (August 9, 1917): 3. For a contrary analysis by another Zionist observer, see Moshe Kleinman, Ben lehavot: ba-milh.amah uva-mahpekhah (Tel Aviv: “Yavneh,” 1943), 232–39, especially 235–36. (This piece originally appeared in Unzer leben [Odessa], July 18–19, 1917.) 15. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise specified, by “Lithuania” I mean the Jewish cultural region of greater or historic Lithuania, which approximately corresponds to modern-day Lithuania, Latvia, and Belarus. 16. For Schneerson’s correspondence, see note 2. Most of the letters cited here come from the last of the five published volumes of his letters, which primarily consists of correspondence from 1916 to 1918. This volume also includes a useful forward discussing Schneerson’s activities during this period. Grodzienski’s correspondence can be found in Ah.ie‘ezer: kovets igrot, ed. Aharon Suraski, 2 vols. (Bene Berak: Netsah., 1970); the second volume contains a biographic sketch by the editor. 17. Over the course of his life, Graubart published several volumes of talmudic scholarship under the title of H.avalim ba-ne‘imim; the first was published in Piotrków in 1901.

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Andrew N. Koss Graubart detailed his activities during the war years, along with his impressions of the situation of Polish and Russian Jewry, in his memoir Sefer Zikaron, which is probably the most significant extant account of the war in Russia from an Orthodox perspective.18 This work is in itself noteworthy because the memoir was not a traditionally accepted genre of rabbinic literature. His memoir was, however, one of several autobiographical works produced by rabbis in the aftermath of the war. And although only Graubart’s makes the war the focus of its narrative, this modest boom in memoir writing may have stemmed from recognition that World War I constituted a sharp break with the past. These memoirs sought either to record the events of this period of upheaval or to preserve the memory of the bygone prewar years. In both cases, their authors turned to memoir—and thus to history, as they were concerned not merely with their personal stories but also with the fate of their communities—out of a belief that the Old World of traditional religiosity had been shattered19 (a point one such memoirist20 made explicitly). In Sefer Zikaron, Graubart endeavored to record the specific effects of the war on religious life and his own participation in engineering an Orthodox response. His words thus provide a counter-narrative to lay war literature. In his postwar writings, Graubart hammered out an ideology (discussed below) that would harmonize the acceptance of some elements of modernization with strict religious observance, favoring improved relations with the non-Jewish

18. Yehudah Leyb Graubart, Sefer zikaron: reshumot mi-yeme ha-milh.amah ha-ah.aronah ve-hashkafot shonot u-mikhtavim (Łódź: Mesorah, 1926). Hereafter cited simply as Graubart. 19. Rabbi Jacob Emden’s Megilat sefer (written between 1752 and 1766) is the best-known example of rabbinic autobiography. In general, the genre is quite rare. Among the most interesting examples appearing immediately after World War I (in addition to Graubart’s) are Ya‘akov Lipschitz, Zikhron Ya‘akov: historiyah Yisre’elit me-h.aye ha-Yehudim be-Rusya u-Polin shenot 520–656, 1760– 1896 (Kaunas: 1924–30) (Volume 1 printed by David Draller of Frankfurt am Main. Volume 2 printed by Sh. Yoselevits of Kaunas Volume 3 printed by Y. Kuznitski and L. Beyles of Kaunas.); Barukh Epstein, Mekor barukh (Wilno: Rom, 1928); and Ya‘akov Mazeh, Zikhronot (Tel Aviv: Yalkut, 1936). Lipschitz died in 1921 and Mazeh in 1924; Epstein began work on Mekor barukh during World War I itself. Thus, these works were created in close temporal proximity to the war. Lipschitz and Epstein dealt exclusively with the pre-World War I era, and added histories of events before their own births to their personal memories, while Mazeh paid little attention to the war itself. For an analysis of these works as memoir, see Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 377–412. Perhaps there is an analogy between the rabbinic turn to memoir after World War I and the turn to history following the expulsion from Spain posited by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 57–75. Mention should also be made here of Khaykl Lunski’s Fun vilner geto; geshtaltn un bilder geshribn in shvere tsaytn (Wilno: Farlag fun dem fareyn fun di Yidishe literatn un zshurnalistn in Vilne, 1920). Although not a rabbi, and not particularly affiliated with organized Orthodoxy, Lunksi was himself strictly observant and filled his chronicle of the war years with rich descriptions of the impact of the war on Jewish religious life. 20. Epstein, Mekor barukh, vol. 1, 1–2. This passage can be found in the preface to the 1928 edition, which does not appear in the 2004 edition.

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War within, War without: Russian Refugee Rabbis during World War I world and encouraging the acquisition of secular knowledge.21 The war had given him the opportunity to experiment with such new concepts. Grodzienski and Schneerson, by contrast, had a more firm, conservative orientation that would today be described as ultra-Orthodox. While these rabbis represented three different ideological trends—hasidic, mitnagdic, and religious Zionist—they enjoyed mutual respect and cooperation during the war years. They also shared a common experience of the war: All were native to the heavily Jewish western provinces, and at the outset of the conflict, each held rabbinic posts; and all three fled to the Russian interior during the Central Powers’ advance. In exile, they came into contact with a broad crosssection of Russian Jewry, including refugees from various regions and local Jews who held diverse political and religious orientations. The rabbis’ wartime activities and postwar reflections, together with other contemporary rabbinic correspondence and writings, show how quickly they and their supporters grasped the magnitude of the crisis. Their impressions also illustrate how a collective rabbinic response was tailored to new circumstances and threats to allow them to defend their old beliefs and ways of life. I. I DENTIFYING

A

R ELIGIOUS C RISIS

As Jewish refugees tried to settle into new homes beyond the Pale, they sought out towns and cities with existing Jewish communities and often received support from local Jews upon arrival. These havens tended toward less widespread and less stringent religious observance in comparison with the refugees’ native shtetlekh. It was very difficult for new arrivals to find sources of livelihood in the impoverished east. Many, if not most, relied on charity distributed by Jewish relief organizations.22 Rabbi Schneerson was among the Jews who fled eastward during the Russian retreat. He left Liubavichi, which had been the seat of his dynasty’s hasidic court for five generations, to take refuge in Rostov-on-Don. Many of his hasidim were among the thousands of Jewish refugees streaming into that city during the war. Rostov was a popular destination, both because it was located just beyond the Pale and because it already had a sizeable Jewish population. Prior to the outbreak of the war, Jews had taken part in Rostov’s rapid economic growth, and it boasted a number of prominent Jewish industrialists and businessmen. Jews even were members of the municipal council. Yet, despite the fact that in 1914 Rostov had a Jewish population of 16,226, it had only two synagogues and one shtibl (small prayer house), offering just one place of worship for every 5,400 21. See in particular Sefer yamin u-smo’l: ma’amarim bi-sh’elot ha-h.ayim be-mah.aneh Yisra’el ve-‘al asher ben Yisra’el le-‘amim (Łódź: Mesorah, 1930). For biographic data on Graubart, see N. Shemen, “Rabeynu Yehude Leyb Groybart zts”1 in lebn un shafen,” in Yoyvl bukh: 25 yoriger yubiley talmud toyre “Eyts khayem” (Toronto: Jubilee Committee, 1943), 13–45 and Stephen A. Speisman, The Jews of Toronto: A History to 1937 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979), 278–92 passim. 22. Graubart, 25–40, 271–332. For the treatment of refugees, Jewish and non-Jewish, see Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, Indiana Michigan Series in Russian and European Studies, 2000).

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Andrew N. Koss Jews.23 (In contrast, in 1910, Vilna had 104 officially registered Jewish places of prayer for 63,840 Jews, or about 1 per 610 Jews, in addition to untold numbers of unregistered shtiblekh.)24 Similarly, although the size of the Jewish population had increased steadily since the turn of the century, the number of heders had decreased.25 In other words, Rostov was a city with a thriving Jewish population, but without the tradition-steeped environment that characterized the places from which the new refugees had come. Observing the lack of traditional Jewish schools in Rostov and aware that it would be difficult for refugee parents to establish such schools in their new homes, on March 9, 1916, Schneerson summoned Landa—one of his chief advisers26— and sent him on an expedition through the refugee communities to distribute funds for the establishment and maintenance of religious schools. As a result of this expedition, Landa came to confront the systemic religious decline that became the main subject of his report. In evaluating the issue of Jewish education, he noted that heders and Talmud Torahs were few and far between and always underfunded. The vast majority of Jewish children who attended school at all did so at a variety of secular or semisecular institutions, mostly run by the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among Jews (OPE) and other charitable organizations; many of these schools had a decided Zionist or Yiddishist bent. Landa took pains to interview schoolchildren and report on their curricula, teachers, and such procedural issues as whether students covered their heads when studying sacred texts. Although most of the schools he took note of taught some religious subjects, inevitably these took a back seat to secular studies. In at least one instance, a school cafeteria served nonkosher meat. Landa concluded that the schools he investigated were at best denying Jewish children a proper religious education and at worst were pernicious incubators of heresy.27 While, as we have seen, Landa provided details about the lack of Sabbath observance, he did not say whether Jews without access to kosher meat were abstaining from meat altogether or simply patronizing nonkosher butchers. It

23. E. V. Movshovich, Ocherki istorii evreev na donu (Rostov-on-Don: Donskoi izdatel’skii dom, 2006), 57–58, 62–63, 83–84; Oleg Budnitskii, “The Jews in Rostov-on-Don in 1918–1919,” Jews and Jewish Topics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 19 (1992): 16–17. 24. Israel Klausner, Vilnah: Yerushalyim de-Lita: dorot ah.aronim, 1881–1939, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1983), 93. 25. Movshovich, Ocherki istorii evreev na donu, 57, 60. 26. Landa’s position as “court rabbi” (rav he-h.atser) meant that he was responsible for all halakhic questions that arose in the rebbe’s home and court. Previously he had also held the post of rabbi of Kurenets. In 1936, he was made chief rabbi of Bene Brak. He was well known for his rulings on the subject of mikvehs and for reputedly possessing quasi-mystical medical powers. 27. Igrot Rasha”b, vol. 5, 66–69, 72–78, 80. For OPE activity during the war, see Zipperstein, “The Politics of Relief,” in Frankel, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 30–31 and 35–36. For secular Yiddish schools in particular, see Kh. Sh. Kazdan, Fun kheyder un “shkoles” biz Tsysho: dos ruslendishe yidntum in gerangl fun shul, shprakh, kultur (Mexico: Shlomo Mendelson fond bay der gezelshaft far kultur un hilf, 1956), 208–16.

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War within, War without: Russian Refugee Rabbis during World War I seems a likely inference, however, that many took the latter route.28 As to whether conjugal relations continued in the absence of mikvehs, Landa did not dare speculate. For traditional Jews, these three sets of religious regulations—the laws of kashrut, Sabbath observance, and family purity—combined to permeate daily life with religious observance. The abandonment of this ritual rubric, along with atrophied synagogue attendance and limited Jewish education, meant that there was very little left of traditional Judaism for the refugees. The Jews Landa encountered had generally adhered to Jewish rites and regulations when the proper institutions had existed, but now were, in a sense, being forced out of observance, or being seduced by new opportunities. Any given community might have a handful of pious individuals who would go to heroic lengths in their devotion to Jewish law—abstaining from meat and sex until normal conditions returned, gathering fellow Jews in a crowded room to pray, praying by themselves when this was impossible, and so on—but such religious heroism could not reasonably be expected of the masses. Like Landa, Yehudah Leyb Graubart, the exiled rabbi of Staszów in Radom province, was appalled as he traveled through the eastern refugee communities in the fall of 1915.29 The following summer, he delivered a sermon admonishing refugees living in Kazan’ for “desecrating the divine name” with their laxity in Sabbath observance, which he attributed directly to wartime conditions. He told them that when native Jews saw those who had come from “a place of Torah and religion” (i.e., Poland and the Pale) violating the Sabbath, they would feel justified in doing the same. Graubart was sympathetic enough to the plight of the refugees to realize that Sabbath observance had become a nisayon, a test of faith, for them. After all, he acknowledged, they would have been embarrassed to break the Sabbath back home in Poland or Lithuania. Furthermore, in their former communities no stores would have been open for them to shop in; even peasants from surrounding villages, knowing that Jews closed their shops for the Sabbath, would not come to town to trade on Saturday. But he stressed that a lack of social or economic disincentives did not absolve them from the charge of disobedience. The essential tragedy of the war, he told the Jews of Kazan’, was not the admittedly severe physical and material suffering it brought about, but, instead, the “spiritual distress.”30 During the first year of the war, prior to his deportation to the interior by the authorities, Graubart repeatedly intervened with Russian officials to protect his flock from persecution. During the brief Austrian occupation of Staszów, he collaborated with the town’s priest to keep cooperation with the Habsburg military to a minimum—trying to walk a tightrope between appeasing an occupying military and exposing their congregations to accusations of disloyalty if the Russians returned. When the Russian army retook the city, the military authorities took 28. This is particularly interesting when compared with S. An-sky’s certainty that many or most Polish and Galician Jews in situ would under no circumstance eat at nonkosher soup kitchens, An-sky, Khurbn Galitsiye, in Gezamelte shriftn, vol. 4, 65–66, 70, 80–81. 29. Graubart, 33–59. 30. Ibid., 279–80.

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Andrew N. Koss Graubart hostage in order to guarantee the loyalty of the town’s Jews; thus he experienced the cruelties of war firsthand.31 Once in exile, he saw that nondenominational relief organizations were already managing, to the extent possible, the humanitarian crisis facing the Jews. As a rabbi, he saw his task as helping Jewish refugees maintain their faith in a spiritual wilderness, and combating what he saw as threats to Judaism itself. In other sermons given to refugee communities at that time, Graubart, like Landa, complained of the refugees’ inattentiveness to family purity and religious education. By the end of 1916, the two rabbis were in contact with each other and were doing what they could to alert the rabbinic establishment to what they saw as a severe and dangerous crisis.32 This crisis was by no means limited to refugees. The war also had a devastating effect on Jews who remained in Poland and the Pale. While the stalemate on the Western Front meant that (after a few well-publicized incidents in 1914) civilian populations could remain relatively safe from the fighting, the mobility of the Eastern Front went hand in hand with frequent shelling of towns and villages by both sides, in addition to attacks on Jews by Russian soldiers. The war closed down major commercial routes, leaving many Jews without their primary sources of livelihood. Shortages of basic goods became widespread. Able-bodied males not drafted into military service were often put to work digging trenches or assisting in military hospitals. In areas that came under German occupation, requisitions, forced labor, and harsh restrictions on trade and movement led to mass pauperization, outbreaks of disease, and even starvation. The unsavory trades of smuggling and prostitution gained central economic importance. Schools, heders, and yeshivas, along with other institutions, often ceased to function.33 In addition, the occupation took a specific toll on religious life. Synagogues and study halls had to be transformed into shelters for refugees and the homeless, or remained empty because congregants were too hungry to attend, had been taken away for forced labor, or had died of privation or illness.34 Barukh Epstein, a wellknown rabbinic scholar, recalled forsaking talmudic studies during the period of German rule.35 Furthermore, forced labor generally entailed working on Saturdays. In certain locales, the German administration forced Jews to keep their stores open then, and thus, as one secular memoirist put it, “the psychological fear of Sabbath desecration was broken.”36

31. Ibid., 10–27. 32. Ibid., 26–95; Igrot Rasha”b, vol. 5, 60–83. 33. An-sky, Der yudisher, in Gezamelte shriftn, vol. 6, 17–18, 30; Graubart, 180ff; Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 115–21, 129–32, 134–41; Pinkes far der geshikhte, ed. Reisen, 1–204; Lunski, Fun vilner geto, 19, 36. 34. Lunski, Fun vilner geto, 11, 57–58, 65, 67–69. 35. Epstein, Mekor barukh, vol. 1, 1–2. 36. Quotation from Hirsz Abramowicz, Farshvundene geshtaltn (Buenos Aires: Tsentral farband fun poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1958), 299; Jakub Wygodski, In shturm: zikhroynes fun di okupatsye-tsaytn (Wilno: B. Kletskin, 1926), 41.

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War within, War without: Russian Refugee Rabbis during World War I Reports from the immediate postwar period describe the religious decline among Jews who did not leave Poland and the Pale of Settlement as similar to that experienced by refugees in the east. Upon returning to Vilna from exile in Ekaterinoslav in 1919, H.ayim Ozer Grodzienski evaluated the situation as follows: Even when the days of Haskalah, integration, and assimilation arrived, and when the government issued decrees and fenced in the heders and yeshivas [as if] with hewn stone, none of this was able to inhibit or extinguish the spirit that came from those raised in purity on the fields of Lithuania. . . . However, we have seen what we never believed we would see. A great upheaval took place in a short period of time. The terrible days of war came and the whole world was thrown into confusion. . . . I was shocked to see when I returned to Lithuania that it was twice stricken: its physical and spiritual foundations were torn asunder, and the spiritual destruction was even greater than the physical destruction.37

Whatever dangers the modern period had presented Orthodoxy prior to 1914, their effect was insignificant, according to Grodzienski, in comparison with the spiritual havoc wreaked by the war. Whether prewar Lithuania really remained the stronghold of religious purity he claimed it was is open to historiographic debate; perhaps he was consciously (or unconsciously) engaging in rhetorical hyperbole. Even so, the deterioration of religious observance and commitment to Torah study that he encountered upon his return was undoubtedly severe and is confirmed by both secular and religious sources.38 II. T HE R ABBIS R EACT During the war years, neither Graubart nor Landa was content merely to bemoan declining religious observance, or to polemicize against it. Precisely because the problem was caused by material circumstances rather than ideological or cultural factors, they believed hope remained. They felt that if they could build mikvehs, heders, and other institutions, they could return lost sheep to the fold. Landa wrote that the refugees in most of these places are dissatisfied with their schools [shkoles] and public kitchens. There are those who are very embittered about this matter and greatly desire its correction, and there are those who understand well that this is not a good thing. Yet, despair has overcome them so that they do not devote their attention and will to it, as with all spiritual matters. However, if one could provide them with a heder or Talmud Torah in the old style, they would certainly wholeheartedly hand over their children to them, except in Zemliansk and Kirtiak, where the refugees are 37. Grodzienski, Ah.ie‘ezer: kovets igrot, ed. Suraski, vol. 1, 121. 38. E.g., Graubart, 162–71, 180–83; Lunski, Fun vilner geto, 8–45 passim, 66–69; Abramowicz, Farshvundene, 299; Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 133–62, 115–27.

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Andrew N. Koss content with the schools and desire only their upkeep, and only a small number can be found there who even recognize the defectiveness of the schools and desire religious education.39

Rather than leaping to condemn the refugees, Landa expressed his sympathy for Jews who were unable to obtain religious educations for their children. In a similar vein, he described conversations with children who desired to return to their religious studies. Believing that the majority of refugees preferred religious to secular education, he felt that the decline in traditional education could be reversed. During his travels, Landa distributed funds put to his discretionary use by his rebbe in order to build or support religious schools and mikvehs. Graubart was simultaneously involved in a similar project and had turned to Grodzienski and other senior rabbis for help. These rabbis realized that a much larger effort would be required if they were to accomplish what they considered to be the rescue of Judaism itself. This effort would involve coordination among and between hasidim and mitnagdim, as well as cooperation with nondenominational Jewish relief organizations.40 The mobilization of Orthodox rabbis in response to the crisis brought about major and long-lasting changes in East European Orthodoxy. As much as the war was a destructive event for Orthodox Jewry, it was also an opportunity for creation. It led to the building of new institutions, the expansion of old ones, and fundamental shifts in attitudes toward issues invested with great consequence, especially education. For transformations to occur, the rabbis had to be more involved in communal affairs than ever before. Part of their response would entail shtadlanut, the petitioning of non-Jewish authorities by distinguished communal leaders. Increasingly, rabbis would engage in this practice themselves, rather than rely on wealthy laymen as had been the long-established practice.41 As Graubart did in Staszów, rabbis sometimes engaged in shtadlanut at a local level to prevent violence against Jews or to obtain permission to carry out various religious practices.42 But shtadlanut went well beyond the local level. Beginning in the summer of 1916 there was an orchestrated campaign, with Schneerson at its forefront, to exempt rabbis and ritual slaughterers from conscription into the military or auxiliary labor battalions. Petitions to the Ministry of the Interior continued after the February Revolution. Schneerson devoted considerable time and energy to this campaign, and was joined by several prominent mitnagdic rabbis. His numerous letters on the 39. Igrot Rasha”b, vol. 5, 69. 40. Ibid., 56–137. 41. For the history of shtadlanut in Russia, see Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 42. E.g., An-sky, Der yudisher, in Gezamelte shriftn, vol. 4, 97–101; Graubart, 17; Abramowicz, Farshvundene, 165. It is hard to know whether this sort of behavior was exceptional or widespread.

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War within, War without: Russian Refugee Rabbis during World War I subject show that he did not merely delegate the task to a trusted hasid skilled in such dealings, but took an active and hands-on role in the campaign. The fight for the rabbis and ritual slaughterers was not wholly unprecedented, but it was an example of a new kind of political involvement on the part of the highest echelons of rabbinic leadership.43 In struggling to protect their fellow Jewish clergymen, rabbis realized that they could no longer rely exclusively on the wealthy, well-connected, and generally acculturated shtadlanim who had represented Jewish interests to the tsarist regime since the eighteenth century, and who dominated major Russian Jewish charitable organizations such as the OPE. In 1914, these shtadlanim mobilized to form the Central Jewish Committee for Relief of Victims of War (EKOPO) in order to coordinate and fund Jewish relief efforts in Russia.44 While the rabbinic leadership appreciated the efforts of EKOPO to provide food and shelter for the impoverished Jewish masses, they were also wary of what they saw as EKOPO’s secular orientation. In an effort to release the rabbis and ritual slaughterers from military service, Baron Alexander Ginzburg—a member of EKOPO’s board of directors and the archetypal Russian Jewish grandee—and others were sympathetic and willing to help, although never with enough zeal to satisfy Schneerson. Similarly, the Social Revolutionary, Jewish activist, and folklorist S. An-sky spent considerable energy providing Jewish paupers and refugees with kosher food and Jewish soldiers with matzot on Passover.45 During this time of unprecedented disaster, both the religious and the secular wished to cooperate. However, the interests and priorities of those who dominated EKOPO and its affiliates were a far cry from those of the rabbis. Because the war left huge segments of the Russian Jewry dependent on charitable relief, the power of EKOPO and affiliated organizations increased exponentially. Simultaneously, the war shattered local institutions and organizations. Previously, those who wished to reform Jewish life—whether maskilim and assimilationists of the nineteenth century or Zionists, Bundists, and Folkists of the twentieth—had engaged in a protracted struggle with the entrenched power of tradition and its attendant social structures. Suddenly, however, they found themselves in a situation in which they had the upper hand both socially and institutionally. As rabbinic leadership became aware of this shift in the balance of power, the rabbis realized that they had to take immediate action. Nowhere were the differences between the rabbinate and the relief leadership so stark as in the realm of education. When EKOPO or the OPE established 43. Igrot Rasha”b, vol. 5, 83-119 passim; “Ravviny i voinskaia povinnost’,” Novyi put’, no. 16 (April 30, 1917):16. 44. Zipperstein, “The Politics of Relief,” in Frankel, Studies in Contemporary Jewry,” 23–27. Zipperstein emphasizes the collaboration between the wealthy Jewish establishment and a younger generation of activists committed to radical Jewish politics within EKOPO. As far as the rabbis were concerned, both groups were dangerously uncommitted to tradition. 45. An-sky, Der yudisher, in Gezamelte shriftn, vol. 4, 65–66, 69–70, vol. 5, 160, vol. 6, 120–55 passim.

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Andrew N. Koss schools for refugees (as Landa and Graubart noted), they created modern schools that emphasized secular over religious studies. After all, the original mission of the OPE was to reform and modernize Jewish education. In response to this problem, rabbis engaged in what might be termed internal shtadlanut, petitioning relief committees to devote equitable funding to religious schools and in general to give proper consideration to religious issues. Rather than condemning the modern schools set up for the refugees in the fire-and-brimstone terms of nineteenth-century antimaskilic polemic, Orthodox leaders merely asked that their own schools receive funding from EKOPO (which channeled money through a variety of other organizations) alongside others. In the spring of 1916, Graubart, frustrated by previous efforts to gain support from the Moscow Jewish relief council, traveled to Petrograd to petition EKOPO’s Central Committee to support his cause. Although the committee was not unanimous in its support for his proposal, it agreed to allocate some funds for traditional schools and mikvehs. A few months later, Grodzienski began relentlessly lobbying EKOPO, and Ginzburg personally, to increase funding for heders and ritual baths, demanding equality between the funding given to traditional schools and that granted to other types of educational institutions.46 Even early on, however, the rabbinic leadership did not believe that internal and external shtadlanut would be sufficient to combat the widespread effects of World War I. East European Jewish Orthodoxy would need to develop a new and modern institutional structure that would operate on a national and international level to stay afloat in the current situation. Traditional local institutions, such as the h.evra kadisha (burial society) and the hekdesh (poorhouse), were no longer sufficient, or even relevant. The impetus for a new strategy came from the United States. In the fall of 1915, Orthodox Jews in the United States, responding to a desperate letter from Grodzienski and Yisra’el Me’ir Kagan (known as the H.afets H.ayim),47 established Ezras Torah, a foundation that would raise funds for Jewish clergy in Eastern Europe—rabbis, yeshiva students, ritual slaughterers, and other religious officiants. Just as the war led to the creation of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to coordinate fundraising for European Jewry, so too the Orthodox created their own parallel, trans-Atlantic organization. For the first time, the flow of funds from America to Europe was channeled through centralized communal institutions.48

46. Grodzienski, Ah.ie‘ezer: kovets igrot, ed. Suraski, vol. 1, 116–24; Graubart, 38–40, 51–54. 47. The H.afets H.ayim (1838–1933), in addition to being a prolific author of rabbinic works, was viewed as a living symbol of saintliness. Although he was even more revered than Grodzienski, it was the latter who had the active leadership role, while the H.afets H.ayim himself generally deferred to Grodzienski’s knowledge of current affairs. 48. The JDC was founded on November 27, 1914. It was, in fact, the product of a merger between the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering through the War and the American Jewish Relief Committee. The former was closely associated with the Orthodox leadership and mainly represented East European immigrants and their descendants, while the latter was connected to the more established German Jewish community. Ezras Torah was not meant to be an Orthodox relief organization, but a relief organization designed to meet religious needs. Efraim Zuroff, The

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War within, War without: Russian Refugee Rabbis during World War I Ezras Torah’s founding documents state that its goal was not to divert money from existing relief organizations (such as the JDC and EKOPO), but to supplement concern for Jews’ material well-being with financial support for their spiritual well-being. Furthermore, while Russian rabbis lobbied EKOPO in the name of religious interests, Ezras Torah believed its duty was to lobby the JDC in a similar fashion. Over the course of the sub