Other and Brother: Jesus in the 20th-century Jewish
literary landscape
Neta Stahl
OUP £45
(978-0-19-976000-8)
Church Times Bookshop £40.50 (Use code
CT344 )
I DOUBT whether many readers of the Church Times have
asked themselves the question with which Stahl introduces her work:
"how, at the beginning of the 21st century, an Israeli Jew can
write a poem in the first person in which Jesus is the speaker".
The answer, as she shows in this fascinating work, marks the
profound changes and tensions that underlie the formation of the
modern Jewish Self.
Stahl argues that, for Jewish writers growing up in Europe,
Jesus was associated with anti-Semitism. But, for later authors
raised in Palestine/Israel, the figure traditionally identified
with the menacing god of Christianity comes to be embraced as
brother. It is not the Holocaust, but the creation of the State of
Israel, which is the catalyst for this modern Jewish fascination
with the figure of Jesus.
It was the Zionist project that enabled writers in the first
half of the 20th century to use the figure of Jesus as a Jewish
pioneer in the land of Israel, seeing him no longer as the
threatening Other, but as Jewish son or brother, so negating the
long history of hostility between Christianity and Judaism. In
Yiddish and Hebrew works, Jesus becomes the main icon for Jewish
victimhood. Even in art, Jesus is portrayed as the eternal Jewish
martyr.
While pre-Holocaust modern Hebrew literature is ambivalent
towards Jesus, exhibiting both attraction and rejection,
identification and alienation, post-Holocaust writing adopted the
figure of Jesus and completely identified with him as brother
rather than Other, embraced for his humanity. Further, more recent
Israeli literature perceived Jesus not as a Christian or indeed a
real historical figure, but rather as a representative of Western
art and culture, associated with an exotic aesthetic world that
posed no threat. Indeed, it is his foreignness that makes him
attractive.
Stahl analyses in depth the works of three writers whose own
background inevitably influenced their approach to Jesus, a central
image in their writing. Uri Zvi Greenberg contrasts the Jewish
Jesus with the European Christian Jesus, who, like Greenberg
himself, needs to be "rescued" from Christian Europe in order to
become part of his own people. Indeed, Greenberg's return to Israel
and his subsequent isolation caused by his extreme views is pivotal
to his writing. So he identifies with Jesus as a brother in
suffering, similarly rejected by his own. For Yoel Hoffmann,
prepared to engage with the Holocaust, a hitherto off-limits
subject, Jesus functions more as a metaphor than as a real
character.
Abandonment is the great theme of Avot Yeshurum's writing, the
author plagued by his guilt at leaving his family in Europe, all of
whom perished. The poet can become Jesus himself, a victim who
cries out in vain. Indeed, for many 20th-century Jewish writers,
the figure of Jesus functioned as a kind of mirror reflecting the
image - and in many cases the desired self - of the author.
Changing gear in her final chapter, Stahl notes that irony has
provided Jewish writers with the freedom to take a stand on the
question of Jesus's metaphysical nature. Indeed, in many modern
Yiddish poems, Jesus is openly mocked. She contrasts the work of
Shmuel Yosef Agnon and Itzik Manger, the former finding the
attraction to Christianity an imminent threat to modern Judaism,
while Manger sees no reason for not embracing the cross as a symbol
of suffering.
Stahl herself concludes that Jesus serves "as the ultimate Other
- whom, for a century, many Jewish writers have struggled to bring
back home and transform into a brother". This is not an easy book,
but it deserves serious study by anyone interested in
Jewish-Christian dialogue.
Canon Anthony Phillips is a former headmaster of The King's
School, Canterbury.