The Netanyahus

 There is no waiting for revelation, no waiting for a miracle. By contrast with religion, the discipline seems reliable. History makes no promises or covenants beyond telling how something from back there arrives at here. At us in the present. The front of the room, where the teacher is. But history, I have to tell you the bad news, is not always reliable. And Jews, whose life was the communication of God’s words from generation to generation, and from faith to faith, knew this better than most. This was because they lived under foreign rulers. Their history in Christian lands was a Christian hiscory; their history in Muslim lands was a Muslim history; written by non-Jews under the patronage of despots who insisted on being flattered, or at least who insisted on the centrality of their roles. It was the Jews who first understood the impossibility ofa truth shared by all people. They were the first who understood that all that was possible was a truth shared by the dominant people, the group or subgroup or family in power. Universal truth, if it could exist, could only be found in the Bible, whose claim to divine provenance and authority demanded its accurate preservation. This realization resulted ina firm distinction being made in Jewish culture between preservation and interpretation, which is the psychic adumbration of the trauma that results from a fanaticism of accuracy. Once the Bible had been commended to other faiths, it’s the interpretation that interested the Jews. Interpretation was, in many ways, their only freedom. This interpretative capacity allowed them to remain outside history and dwell in myth, which instructed about morals and ethics and structured the calendar and community life. The Jewish preference for the instructive and aesthetic story over the accurately documented history was a direct outgrowth of the circumstances of Diaspora, in which Jews were exiled and oppressed and denied the right of self-rule. In exile, where non-Jews made the history that Jews had to suffer, could the details matter? Why care about the facts, when you can’t create them? What would be the point of recording the name and coordinates of every city that kicked you out and the exact specific date of your every misery and slaughter? When it came to chronicling Jewish life, what difference could there be between Rome and Greece and Babylon? Weren't they all just ultimately variations on Egyptian bondage, and all of their rulers essentially incarnations of the Pharaoh? Through this process of repeatedly relating the Bible to the present, history was negated; the more these stories were repeated—every weekly recurrence of the Sabbath, every annual recurrence of a holiday—the more the past was brought into the present, until the past and present were essentially collapsed and each next year was rendered identical to the last, with all occurrences made contemporary. This collapsing of time imparted a certain messianic quality both to the daily lives of individual Jews and to the collective spiritual life of the Jewish people. In other words, through interpretation these preservers of God's word were preserved themselves. Take, for instance, Zion, a historical kingdom that in its destruction was transmuted into myth, becoming in the Diaspora a story and poetic trope that reigned supreme in the Jewish imagination for millennia. The world is full of real events, real things, which have been lost in their destruction and are only remembered as having existed in written history. But Zion, because it was remembered not as written history butas interpretable story, was able to exist again in actuality, with the founding of the modern state of Israel. With the establishment of Israel, the  Poetic was returned to the practical. This is the 1st example ever in human civilization in which this happened in which a story became real it became a real country with a real army real essential services real treaties and real trade packs real supply chains and real sewage. Now that Israel exists however the days of The Bible tales are finished and the true history of my people can finally begin and if any Jewish questions still remains to be answered it's whether my people have the ability or appetite to tell the difference.

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Ferdinand and Isabella .....their own union of 1469, their chief opposition was nobiliary, the princes, grandees, and hidalgos who resisted having to cede their local authority. What resulted was a struggle in which the monarchy attempted to systematically impoverish and disempower the nobility, but because a direct attack on the nobility was inadvisable and tantamount to civil war, the monarchy decided that the best approach would be a sort of proxy: They'd get at the nobles by oppressing the Jews, who managed the nobles’ estates and farmed their taxes. Having decided upon this method, they realized that full subdual of the nobility could only be accomplished by oppressing the Jewish converts to Christianity too, because while so many had changed their religion, they'd retained their familial professions and ties in the realm of international finance. At the same time, the monarchy sought to arouse the intrinsic anti-Semitism of the commoners and parlay it into anti-converso sentiments as well, instigating libels and riots that disrupted civic order and depleted the resources of any nobility that sought to quell them. 

Depriving the nobility of the services of the Jews was easy: the Jews could always just be slaughtered. But depriving the nobility of the services of the conversos was a different matter, because the conversos were, officially, Christians, and any attempt to disenfranchise them and invalidate their conversions would have threatened the integrity of the Church. The Spanish Inquisition was founded to provide a way out of this bind, and a justification for conversooppression. It did so through offering the monarchy a simple redefinition: Judaism had always been defined, and defined itself, primarily as a religion—as a set of tenets, and a set of practices—but the genius of the Spanish Inquisition was to insist it was a race, with the implication that even a convert to Christianity, even a fervent new Christian, was still a Jew at heart, because Judaism inhered in dhe blood. Once these new Christians were racialized back into s Jewish identity, they could once again be oppressed: they could be exorbitantly taxed; they could have their property and assets seized; snd, with the nobility rendered too impotent to protect them, they could be expelled from the country entirely. 

That was Netanyahu’s thesis, in reckless synopsis: that Iberian Jewry was perennially caught between a native host populace that rarely changed and an absentee host rulership that changed consantly with conquests. Whenever tensions arose between these bodies politic, they were taken out on the nobility-enabling Jews, whose oppression restored civic balance. The main requirement of this process was merely that the Jews stayed Jewish, which was why when they began to convert—willingly, for the first time in their history—they were punished and admonished that they could never be other than what they originally were. 

.....The revolutionary influence of this redefinition must be insisted upon—Netanyahu insisted, launching himself into this new mode with a podium-slap. The Spanish Inquisition, he claimed, introduced the idea that a person could not essentially change or be changed, but was in fact defined and determined by corporeal factors, by how many degrees tainted they were from that prelapsarian or just pre-miscegenated state the Spanish called Limpieza de sangre: blood purity. In promulgating this idea, the Spanish Inquisition became the first institution in world history to treat Judaism primarily as a race, as a sanguinary quantum and heritable trait that could not be lost or abrogated; setting the precedent for subsequent genocidal and quasi-genocidal regimes so numerous and notorious, he said, that I don’t have to name them. And then he named them: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Arab Ummah, the lattermost of which had expelled nearly all of its Jewish population in only the last decade, sending refugees coursing from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt into Israel. 

Thinking about this turn of rhetoric now, I find it poignant, though at the time it struck me as strident. And I knew, somehow I knew, that this new pitch he was making in this new firebrand style was the one he'd perfected in countless “addresses” and “orations” and “public chats” in heartland synagogues and chapels and schools on Jabotinsky’s tent-revival circuit—that the only way out of gentile history was through Zion. 

He banged the dais full-fisted, leaned over it, and with all the gross abstraction of fanaticism spoke of Poland, where he was born and grew up during the first of the century's two great European wars, at a time of fracturing empires. The decline of Austro-Hungary caused, or was caused by, or both—in his frenzy, he seemed to say both—provincialism, parochialism, and a rise in desire for nationstate autonomies. This was always the case with marginal identities in the context of empire: identity on the racial or ethnic or religious or merely linguistic level is what you revert to after the transnational project fails; only after you can no longer conceive of yourself as a citizen of Austro-Hungary, and as having been dignified and elevated by that citizenship, can you begin conceiving of yourself as, say, a Pole, a Czechoslovak, a Romanian, a Bulgarian, or a Zionist Jew. Now, after the second of the century’s wars, with the new European empire being Asiatic-Soviet, the same thing would eventually occur, sooner than anyone thought: socialism, communism, woul fragment back into its tribal constituencies. This was also why an Arab League would never survive, because no people were more clannish than the Arabs, whose basal loyalties weren’t even sectarian but familial. It was the function of empires to furnish a common identity to disparate peoples and whenever they couldn't, they failed. This would even be true with America, where everyone if they're asked who they are answers Irish, or Italian, or preposterously three-quarters Scottish, half-Belgian-Dutch, and at most one-drop Mexican black, anything but American. If the American empire couldn't persuade allegiance to democracy over origin, it would fail. He said that while staring at me, unblinking: It would fail. He might even have been pointing at me: You will. What was true for Europe at the emergence of Zionism will one day be true for America too, once assimilation is revealed as a fraud, or once it’s revealed that the country contains nothing to assimilate to—no core, no connate heart-—not just for the Jews, but for everyone. This, at least, was his implication, the text behind the text of his lecture, which he continued to speak to me with his hooded steppe eyes even after his prepared remarks were finished and he was making his acknowledgments and bowing to the light, deferential, and relieved applause: This is what I chink of America—nothing. This is what I chink of American Jews—nothing. Your democracy, your inclusivity, your exceptionalism—nothing. Your chances for survival—none at all You, Ruben Blum, are out of history; you're over and finished; in only a generation or two the memory of who your people were will be dead, and America won't give your unrecognizable descendants anything real with which to replace the sense of peoplehood it took from them; the boredom of your wife—who’s tearing her program up into little white paper pills she'd like to swallow like Percodan isn’t merely boredom with you or her work or with the insufhciency of options for educated women in this country; it’s more like a sense of having not lived fully in a consequential time; and the craziness of your daughter isn’t just the craziness of an adolescent abducted from the city to the country and put under too much pressure to achieve and succeed; it’s more like a raging resentment that nothing she can find to do in her life holds any meaning for her and every challenge that’s been thrust at her—from what college to choose to what career to have—is small, compared to the challenges that my boys, for example—whom she’s been condemned to babysit —will one day have to deal with, such as how to make a new people in a new land forge a living history. Your life here is rich in possessions but poor in spirit, petty and forgettable, with your frigidaires and color TVs, in front of which you can munch your instant supper, Jaugh at a joke, and choke, realizing that you have traded your birthright away for a bowl of plastic lentils... 

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He told me about his childhood on the Grand Concourse and first reading the poetry of Moyshe Leib Halpern and Jacob Gilaestein: the fish would come from the market wrapped in newspapers (che Forverts, the Morgen Frerbeit), and he'd unwrap it and sometimes the ink would have run and lines of poems would be imprinted on the side of the fish and he'd try to read them; he'd try to read the fish and guess the author, from backwards Yiddish impressed onto wee iridescent scales. He told me about first reading the New Testament in Yiddish in a free copy brought to his door by intrepid missionaries (“I remember Jesus was Yeshua, but all the shlikhim [apostles] called him rebbe [rabbi]”); and about his earliest encounters with the Romantics (“The name, the epithet, continues to attract me”). There were stories about writers he’d known; about Bernard Malamud, who used to clean Harold out in poker; about Saul Bellow, who preferred Allan Bloom to Harold and had a kleptomaniacal streak when it came to bowties; and about Philip Roth, who created the protagonist of Sabbath’s Theater by asking himself, “what if Harold, instead of making his parents proud and going to the Ivy League, had gone to seed in the Village in the ’50s?”—this by Roth's own admission, apparently. Harold told me about fighting a bat infestation in a summer cottage he'd shared with John Hollander; a car crash he'd gotten into with Paul de Man; skinnydipping with Jacques Derrida (“he was quite fit”); croquet with Delmore Schwartz (“quite crazy and inviting of parody but never a self-parody”); and tippling with Dwight MacDonald (“a sincere Trotskyite—though one can't imagine an insincere Trotskyite—who was never sober”). There were anecdotes about T. S. Eliot (“it was unfortunate, his rejection of Milton”); Northrop Frye (“the rare colleague of mine who did not believe that Eliot was Christ’s terrestrial vicar”); Susan Sontag; Camille Paglia; Toni Morrison; and Cynthia Ozick; and disquisitions on anti-Semitism at Cornell, where he was educated, and at Yale, where he was the first Jew ever tenured by the English Department. What else? Arguments with Anthony Burgess over limbo and purgatory (“as a lapsed Catholic, Burgess was going to hell, whereas I am still here and going nowhere”); chess with Nabokov (“it astonished no one that I did not emerge the winner”); and conversations with Don DeLillo (“I conversed, he didn’t”), Cormac McCarthy (“he would call me on the telephone while soaking like a cowboy in the bath”), W. G. Sebald (“gentle, maybe too gentle”), and Gershom Scholem, “who when I'd visit him in Jerusalem at his apartment on Abravanel Street would invariably speak of himself in the third person...so a typical English sentence would be, “The judgment of so-and-so on this-and-that is such-and-such, but Scholem says’...a habit he shares with our current president, who likes to say, ‘Nobody has done more for Israel than Donald Trump’... In literature, referring to yourself in the third person is called illeism.’ On my bachelorhood: “I urge you, dear Joshua, to reconsider”; on bachelorhood in general: “on the whole, dear Joshua, the literature on the subject does not recommend it”; on the homosexuality of Jewishness; on the Jewishness of homosexuality; on the intelligence of former students employed by The New Yorker, and on the incongruity of that intelligence with the mediocrity of The New Yorker; on John Ashbery: “I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that / Of Avignon’; on Hart Crane: “Migrations that must needs void memory, / Inventions that cobblestone the heart.” What else? Feuds over identity politics (which he called “resentment politics,” and of which he said,