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The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination
A Case of Russian Literature
By Leonid Livak
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7055-2
Chapter One
One "The jews" in Christian Theology and Myth
As theology and myth pay unequal attention to events and personages within one religious system, the importance of references to "the jews" in creeds may vary by writer, but the actor called "the jews" is central to the Christian myth. The narrative structure of this myth shapes one's idea of "the jews" even without exposure to theology, permitting the image's survival in post-Christian cultures. The Christian myth originates in Paul's doctrine, which combines Jesus' deification with the view of his death as a cosmic sacrifice whereby Evil tries to defeat Good, unwittingly causing a salvific event (I Cor. 2:8). In this myth, "the jews" commit deicide, "killing the Lord Jesus [...] and opposing all men" (I Thes. 2:14-16). In other words, "the jews" are cast in the stock mythic role of a power that brings about the necessary redemptive death of a deity. Pairing Jesus and "the jews" in a deicidal relationship, the Christian myth continues the tradition of such pairs in world mythology (compare Osiris and Set, Baal and Mot, Balder and Loki, and so on).
As Jesus' persecutors, "the jews" serve Satan, whose narrative role is transparent in his very name-the Hebrew stn and the Greek diabolos both have the root meaning akin to that of the English opponent. Such identification with a narrative function makes the motives of "the jews" as an actor quite incidental-narrative logic overshadows motivation. Indeed, as Frank Kermode shows, the basic Christian story is driven by actants, not actors. In Kermode's estimate there was no Judas in the earliest accounts of Jesus' death. Judas materialized only gradually, reflecting the Christian myth's fusion of the figure of betrayal, committed by all the apostles who did not share Jesus' fate, with that of ritual sacrifice. Judas is chosen as Satan's proxy in the basic Christian story because his hellenized name derives from the patriarch and tribe of Judah, making him a symbol of "the jews." This etymology is still evident in the homonymous relationship of the terms [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Jews) and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Judas) in east Slavic folklore and early modern Russian drama, which often combine them into one phrase: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Judas-Jew), [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Jews-Judases).
In the Gospels, "the jews" are a negative signifier referring to the Jewish religious community as a symbol of all that resists Christ. Luke's "jews" deliver (3:13), deny (3:13-14), betray (7:52), condemn (13:27), kill (2:23; 7:52; 10:39; 13:28), and crucify (2:23; 2:36; 4:10; 5:30; 10:39) Jesus, while the Romans are exonerated (3:13; 13:28). In John, this usage implies that "the jews" as a people oppose Jesus, clamor for his blood (19:14f.), and execute him (19:16). Matthew, likewise, suggests that not just their leaders but "the jews" as a whole wish Jesus dead: "All the people answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!'" (27:25). Like Luke, John exculpates the Romans. His Pilate refuses to crucify Jesus under Roman law, but "the jews" insist that he die under their own law of blasphemy. The intimidated and aggrieved Pilate gives Jesus "to them to be crucified" but has Jesus' title, "King of the Jews," affixed to the cross in confirmation of his messianic claim (19:6-22). The same exculpation of the Romans marks the apocryphal gospels and European folklore. East Slavic traditions see "the jews" as the only persecutors of Jesus, unlike the Romans, who either appear as his helpless friends or become indistinguishable from "the jews." Thus, Pilate figures in the popular imagination as "a Jewish prince" and "a Jewish bishop" (compare "the rich Jew named Pilate" of English ballads) flanked by "the Pilate-Jews" (zhidy-pilatyri, zhidy-stropilaty).
Algirdas Greimas's view that an actor can personify several actants is especially pertinent for the narrative functions of Helper and Opponent. Secondary by definition, both functions are contingent on the Subject, being the projections of the Subject's desire to act (Helper) and of the Subject's doubt vis-à-vis this desire (Opponent). Such narrative logic informs the basic premise of the Christian myth: since Jesus' death is paramount to universal redemption, his slayers play simultaneously the Helper and the Opponent. Paul deals with this axiological paradox, wherein the executioner is both a villain and a benefactor, by arguing that Jesus' foes act unwittingly, as "God's enemies for your sake" (Rom. 11:28). His view enables Luke (7:52), Matthew (26:54), and Mark (14:49) to present the crime of "the jews" as an act that both challenges God's authority and follows God's plan. This logic also goes into explaining Satan's actions as part of the divine plan to strengthen the true faith (Helper) by putting it to test (Opponent). Using Greimas's schema of narrative functions, the structure of the basic Christian story can be represented as follows:
Immanent level (actants) Apparent level (actors) Subject Jesus Object Redemption Sender God Receiver Humanity Opponent Satan, Judas, "the jews" Helper God, Mary, Joseph, Apostles, Followers, Romans, Satan, Judas, "the jews"
The Evangelists' appointment of "the jews" as an actor embodying two opposite functions is dictated by Christianity's paradoxical dependency on its rejected ancestor-faith. Judaism is so crucial to the Christian self-image that even the hatred its practitioners allegedly nurture for Jesus and his religion serves to reassure Christians in their identity. This hatred shows that "the jews" pay unremitting attention to Christianity, fearing and therefore confirming its righteousness. "Judaism defines itself in opposition to Christianity. [...] The Jews are not and cannot be indifferent to Christianity," intones Sergei Bulgakov, projecting his obsession with the false cult of "the jews" on the Jewish tradition, whose attitudes toward Christianity historically range from complete indifference to defensive polemics in the periods of increased Christian attacks.
In Rosemary Ruether's view, Christian anti-Judaism expresses a need to legitimize the new religion in Jewish terms by insisting that Christological reading reveals the true meaning of the Jewish Scriptures. As long as the practitioners of Judaism do not share this reading, the validity of Christianity remains problematic. Such a role makes "the jews" a repository of religious doubt. "In this sense," writes Ruether, "the Jews do indeed 'kill Christ' for the Christian, since they preserve the memory of the original biblical meaning of the word Messiah which must judge present history and society as still unredeemed. For Judaism, Jesus cannot have been the Messiah, because the times remain unredeemed and neither he nor anything that came from him has yet altered that fact." Let us qualify this statement by adding that even if Judaism had ceased to be actively practiced, Christianity would still have needed its hermeneutic "jews" to deal with its basic aporia, namely, that Christ's coming did not restore humanity to its prelapsarian state. But in the context of Judaism's coexistence with Christianity, the deicide charge indeed articulates the awareness that Jewish disbelief challenges Christian belief. Consequently, the quality of "the jews" as a theological scapegoat reinforces their narrative role, since the Opponent is little more than the destination for the Subject's displaced doubt about the attainment of the Object.
The scapegoat is a repository for the negative part of the human psyche, which it helps to purify by making evil visible (conscious) and therefore removable. John Chrysostom articulates this scapegoat function of "the jews" when he refers to their worship as polluted and diseased. But if theology projects on "the jews" the doubt about its own validity, the Christian myth sends their way the guilt of all those who implicitly benefit from Jesus' death, which has all the trappings of a human sacrifice, as confirmed by John's chronology, where this death coincides with the slaying of the Passover Lamb (19:32-36). As key participants in this human sacrifice, "the jews" act out the mythical role described by Hyam Maccoby as "the sacred executioner" and by René Girard as "the secondary scapegoat"-they perform a socially required yet reprehensible task, assuming the blame for the slaying, which benefits the society at large.
Like the mythical Sacred Executioner, "the jews" are both untouchable and degraded. This degradation is expressed by the metaphysical dispossession that strikes "the jews" as divine punishment for their deicidal crime: God's covenant with Abraham passes onto Christians, who become the new and true Israel. As a result, the Christian revision of Jewish sacred history focuses on the polemical appropriation of the Jewish tradition and pushes the problem of authenticity to center stage. The correct (authentic) interpreter of the Jewish Scriptures is also the rightful heir to God's promises. Thus hinging on the metaphysical dispossession of "the jews," Christian identity is firmly anchored in the logic of a family feud over inheritance, a feud in which "the jews," in their quality of the carriers of the ancestor-faith, are alternately imagined as a parent-figure and an elder sibling.
This imaginative dynamic of filial strife was especially urgent in cultures that valued patrilineal heritage, considering that the mystery of Jesus' birth was far from universally accepted in early Christianity. Repressed doubt about the authenticity of Jesus' claim to divine parentage is echoed in the ambiguous status of God the father in the Christian myth. God's insistence on the death of his son to expiate the sins of humanity is a figure of anxiety at the unutterable thought that he is rejecting Jesus' filial claim and with it the Christian claim to the status of the verus Israel. This anxiety is taboo in Christian theology, which speaks instead of God's love for humanity as manifest in the sacrifice of his son. As a result, the taboo apprehension and animosity toward a cruel and rejecting God the father are displaced on his devotees and ever-suspected favorites, "the jews." Dominated by the male imagination, the basic Christian story thus furnishes the dramatis personae to animate the private oedipal psychodramas of its recipients. A Christian male, encouraged to identify with Jesus, can associate God the father with "the jews" as Christianity's parent-figure, given that ambivalence toward parents, expressed in simultaneous gratitude and resentment, is mirrored in the dualism of the narrative role of "the jews" as Christ's Opponent-Helper.
Take, for example, the memoirs of Russia's grand duke Aleksandr Mikhailovich Romanov, who wrote, recalling his childhood:
Before coming into contact with the official Church, I associated the word Jew with the figure of the old smiling man who used to bring chickens, ducks, and other poultry to our Tiflis palace. I felt sincere affection for his kind, wrinkly face and could not have thought that Judas had been his forefather. My catechism teacher, however, told me daily about the suffering of Christ. He corrupted my infantile imagination until I saw every Jew as killer and torturer. He impatiently rejected my timid appeals to the Sermon on the Mount: "Yes, Christ told us to love our enemies," father Georgii Titov would say, "but this must not change our view of the Jews."
Ostensibly, this is an account of formal religious instruction. But the author must have had prior exposures to the basic Christian story, being aware of Judas as the forefather of "the jews," who are described here in tune with their mythical status-an aged paternal figure that both nourishes and slays (the fowl has been or will be killed). Furthermore, there is no proof, other than the writer's assumption, that the purveyor of poultry was actually Jewish. The claim is doubtful in light of the Russian imperial court's intense Judeophobia and its consequent fear of "jewish" pollution. It is probable that the child saw the purveyor as "jewish" because he had the qualities that the young Christian associated with "the jews."
Such examples of the place of "the jews" in the oedipal imaginary of male Christians are aplenty. We find one in Johann Wolfgang Goethe's memoirs, Dichtung und Warheit (Poetry and truth, 1811). The author recalls his childish horror of "the jews" imagined as a parent-figure whose "cruelty toward Christian children" he knew from the ritual-murder mural in Frankfurt's bridge tower. Another example hails from Nikolai Leskov's unfinished autobiographical sketch whose young hero, living far from the Pale of Settlement, is acutely aware of the danger posed by "the jews" to Christian children. It may not be an accident that the oedipal role of "the jews" was first laid bare and parodied in art by a woman. Resentful of his father's sacrifice of paternal duties to "the affairs of the nation" (compare God's sacrifice of his son to the greater good), the young hero of Maria Edgeworth's novel Harrington (1817) is given to hysterical fits at the sound of "jewish" old-clothes men under his windows. After his mother bribes one such trader to make him disappear, "the jews" arrive en masse to seek similar rewards, until it turns out that they are actually Christian beggars dressed up "as like [...] a malicious, revengeful, ominous-looking Shylock as ever whetted his knife."
* * *
The initial rationalization for the actorial appointment of "the jews" is provided in the New Testament and patristic literature. By the fifth century, the Church doctrine about Judaism and its practitioners was in place. Scattered in literature from Paul to Augustine and never set forth in one document, this doctrine nevertheless shapes ecclesiastical teaching about Judaism and civil legislation concerning Europe's Jewish communities. Moreover, this doctrine's principal themes furnish the invariant situations and rudimentary lexicon to describe "the jews." These situations and vocabulary, in turn, sow the seeds of the homiletic, artistic, and folk narratives in which "the jews" receive further imaginative development through analogical thinking informed by psychological archetypes, animal symbolism, and human stereotypes. The principal themes of the Church doctrine about Judaism and its adherents include: the substitution of Judaism by Christianity; the inability of "the jews" to understand their own Scriptures; the deicidal nature of "the jews"; the divine punishment visited upon them; and the role of "the jews" as witnesses to the truth of Christianity.
Examining these themes with an eye on their narrative and descriptive potential, we must keep in mind that the transformation of the theological abstraction called "the jews" into the eponymous actor of homiletic, popular, and artistic narratives follows two basic principles: the realization of metaphors through the literalist application of symbolic language, and the possibility of a dual interpretation for each quality attributed to "the jews"-a duality engendered by the actor's narrative function of the Helper-Opponent.
The Replacement and Supersession of Judaism by Christianity
Christian substitution theology holds that at the time of Jesus Judaism was a degenerate cult which had traded spirit for matter; and that the revelation of Jesus as the Messiah fulfilled God's covenant with Israel, making the Jewish Scriptures valid only insofar as they predicted the advent of the Church. Jesus replaced Israel in God's eyes, and Christians became the new chosen people. The Mosaic Law was abrogated and replaced with God's Grace. The revelation of Jesus as the Messiah voided the religious praxis of "the jews" of all spiritual significance by contrast to the spirituality of Christian worship.
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Excerpted from The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination by Leonid Livak Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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