Significant Jewish Books

by Steven Schnur

Our Significant Jewish Books column, inspired by UAHC President Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie's Reform Movement Literacy Initiative, challenges all Reform Jews to read at least four books of Jewish substance a year. In each issue we are recommending two titles representing the best of Jewish literature, both fiction and nonfiction, selected in cooperation with the UAHC Department of Adult Jewish Growth.

It is our hope that you will read at least one of these selections on your own or with others in a synagogue study or book group. Connect with thousands of other Significant Jewish Books readers by accessing the Significant Jewish Books website, where you'll find discussion guides and more.

"In the eleventh century, Isaac ibn Yashush, a Jewish court physician of a ruler in Muslim Spain, pointed out that a list of Edomite kings that appears in Genesis 36 named kings who lived long after Moses was dead. Ibn Yashush suggested that the list was written by someone who lived after Moses. The response to his conclusion was that he was called "Isaac the blunderer.'" And so, Richard Friedman reports, the first seeds of the higher criticism were sown, casting doubt on the divine authorship of the Bible and setting in motion the process of textual analysis that underlies our modern perception of its complex fusion of voices. Not to be staid by epithets, excommunication, or even threats of death, the evidence of human authorship was slowly amassed over the next nine hundred years by both Christian and Jewish scholars and philosophers asking such questions as: How is one to explain Moses's use of terms he would not have known in his day, descriptions of places he had never seen, the use of the third person to describe himself, the account of his own death? Why are biblical events often cited more than once, each instance utilizing dramatically different and sometimes contradictory language? And, most tellingly, why is God sometimes referred to as Yahweh (Jehovah) and other times as Elohim?

The formal study of these questions culminated in the work of Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), who synthesized the earlier investigations of Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, J. G. Eichhorn, Karl Graf, and others into the Documentary Hypothesis, the assertion that the Bible was written not by one author but by four. Identified by the initials J (for Jehovah), E (Elohim), P (Priestly), and D (Deuteronomy), the four authors are believed to have lived at different times and in different places several hundred years after the events they describe. But the greater task of these and subsequent theorists has been to discover "why four different versions of the story were written, what their relationship to each other was, whether any of the authors were aware of the existence of the others' texts, when in history each was produced, how they were preserved and combined, and a host of other questions," among them, who was the editor responsible for combining these separate narratives into one apparently seamless text, and what can we learn about the evolution of Judaism from them?

Who Wrote the Bible? not only synthesizes and makes accessible this long history of biblical scholarship, but also offers several hypotheses of its own. Friedman, professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, has devoted most of his professional life to the pursuit of the authorship question and how it affects our understanding of the Bible (extending the fundamental insights arrived at in Who Wrote the Bible? to two subsequent studies, The Hidden Face of God and, most recently, The Hidden Book in the Bible (reviewed on page 91 of this edition).

Simply and lucidly, Friedman presents the evidence for both the 19th-century claims of multiple authorship and his own refinements of that view, among them that the book of Deuteronomy was not the work of a committee but rather of a single author, possibly Jeremiah or his scribe Baruch; that the redactor who combined these four strains into one was Ezra the priest; that the J author might have been a woman (a theory later developed by Harold Bloom in his Book of J); and that certain aspects of earlier texts were altered to conform with later beliefs. Like his 19th-century predecessors, Friedman believes that the splitting of the Kingdom of Israel into two realms after the death of Solomon accounts for the J and E texts, E belonging to the northern kingdom, where the use of the tetragrammaton, YHVH, was considered sacrilege; J to the south, which observed no such prohibition. Ingeniously, the redactor combined these seemingly disparate strains into a single unified whole sacred to all, including parallel versions back-to-back in some instances, as in the creation story, and weaving the two voices into one in other cases, as in the flood narrative. So skillfully was this knitting accomplished, Friedman asserts, that its artistry was not fully appreciated for 2,500 years."For those of us who read the Bible as literature, this new knowledge should bring a new acquaintance with the individuals who wrote it, a new path to evaluating their artistry, and a new admiration for the book's final beauty and complexity. For those of us who read it in search of history, this enterprise continually opens new channels to uncovering what was happening in various historical moments, and new sensitivity to how individuals in biblical society responded to those moments. For those who hold the Bible as sacred, it can mean new possibilities of interpretation; and it can mean a new awe before the great chain of events, persons, and centuries that came together so intricately to produce an incomparable book of teachings. And for all of us who live in this civilization that the Bible played so central a part in shaping, it can be a channel to put us more in touch with people and forces that affected our world."

Here is an excerpt discussing the combination of J and E:

One might ask why the person or persons responsible for this did not simply exclude one or the other. Why not just make E, or more probably J, the accepted text and reject or ignore the other version? A common answer to this question is that the biblical community had too great a respect for the written word to ignore a received document that bore the stamp of antiquity. The problem with this view is that neither J nor E is complete in the text as we have it anyway. The editor(s) clearly were not averse to applying scissors and paste to their received texts. It is therefore difficult to argue that they retained texts that they did not want simply out of reverence for documents that had been passed down.

A more probable reason why both J and E were retained is that both of them may have become sufficiently well known that one simply could not get away with excluding one or the other. One could not tell the story of the events at Sinai without referring to the golden calf incident, for example, because someone in the audience (especially a former northerner) would remember the story and protest. One could not tell the story of Abraham without telling the story of the events at Hebron, because someone else in the audience (especially someone from Hebron) would object. To whatever extent J and E narratives had become known by this time, to that extent it was necessary to preserve both.

One may ask then: why combine them at all? Why not just preserve both J and E separately? Why were they cut and combined in the manner that we observed in, for example, the flood story? Presumably, because preserving J and E separately would challenge the authenticity of both. If both were to be kept side by side on the same shelf, that would be a reminder of the dual history that produced two alternate versions. And that would diminish the authoritative quality of each of them.

In short, the editing of the two works into one was as much tied to the political and social realities of its day as the writing of the two had been in their days. The uniting of the two works reflected the uniting (better: the reuniting) of the two communities after two hundred years of division.

The Periodic Table
Primo Levi

"We were cold and hungry, we were the most disarmed partisans in the Piedmont, and probably also the most unprepared. We thought we were safe because we had not yet moved out of our refuge buried under three feet of snow: but somebody betrayed us, and on the dawn of December 13, 1943, we woke surrounded by the Fascist Republic." Thus began Primo Levi's two-year ordeal in what Elie Wiesel refers to as "the Kingdom of Night." Born in 1919 in Turin, Italy, the descendant of generations of Italian Jews who first settled in the Piedmont in 1500 after the expulsion from Spain, Levi was trained as a chemist but quit his job to join the Partisans in the fall of 1943 following the German invasion of northern Italy. "I was not a very good Partisan," he later wryly remarked. After his unit was captured, Levi was turned over to the Nazis, who deported him to Monowitz-Auschwitz, site of a synthetic rubber plant manned by slave labor. Levi attributed his survival to his knowledge of chemistry, to luck -- "I did not get sick" -- and to the kindness of a fellow Piedmontese prisoner, a gentile bricklayer (for whom he later named his son) who brought him and others bread and soup.

Following his repatriation, Levi resumed his work as a chemist, devoting the next thirty years of his life to a paint and varnish factory in his native Turin. During that time, he began to record his wartime ordeal, publishing the first volume of his autobiography, Survival in Auschwitz, in 1947 and the second, The Reawakening, in 1963. "It has been observed by psychologists," he later wrote, "that the survivors of traumatic events are divided into two well-defined groups: those who repress their past en bloc, and those whose memory of the offense persists, as though carved in stone, prevailing over all previous or subsequent experiences. Now, not by choice but by nature, I belong to the second group. Of my two years of life outside the law I have not forgotten a single thing."

With the appearance in 1975 of The Periodic Table, linking Levi's fascination with the basic elements of chemistry to further autobiographical reflections, his reputation was secured. In 1985, the year in which The Periodic Table was first translated into English, Levi shared the Smilen fiction award with Saul Bellow. Novels, short stories, poems, and further memoirs followed, including If Not Now, When?, The Monkey's Wrench, Collected Poems, and Moments of Reprieve. "After Auschwitz I had an absolute need to write," Levi remarked, "not only as a moral duty, but as a psychological need." As the Yiddish proverb that serves as the epigraph for The Periodic Table asserts, "Troubles overcome are good to tell."

But on April 11, 1987, following several severe bouts of depression, Primo Levi was found dead at the foot of a stairwell in his Turin home, an apparent suicide. On learning of Levi's death, the novelist Philip Roth said, "With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a 20th-century titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contemptible."

Excerpt:

I was a chemist in a chemical plant, in a chemical laboratory, and I stole in order to eat. If you do not begin as a child, learning how to steal is not easy; it had taken me several months before I could repress the moral commandments and acquired the necessary techniques, and at a certain point I realized (with a flash of laughter and a pinch of satisfied ambition) that I was reliving -- me, a respectable little university graduate -- the involution-evolution of a famous respectable dog, a Victorian, Darwinian dog who is deported and becomes a thief in order to live in his Klondike Lager -- the great Buck of The Call of the Wild. I stole like him and like the foxes: at every favorable opportunity but with sly cunning and without exposing myself. I stole everything except the bread of my companions.

From the point of view, precisely, of substances that you could steal with profit, that laboratory was virgin territory, waiting to be explored. There was gasoline and alcohol, banal and inconvenient loot: many stole them, at various points in the plant, the offer was high and also the risk, since liquids require receptacles. This is the great problem of packaging, which every experienced chemist knows: and it was well known to God Almighty, who solved it brilliantly, as he is wont to, with cellular membranes, eggshells, the multiple peel of oranges, and our own skins, because after all we too are liquids. Now, at that time, there did not exist polyethylene, which would have suited me perfectly since it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable: but it is also a bit too incorruptible, and not by chance God Almighty himself, although he is a master of polymerization, abstained from patenting it: He does not like incorruptible things.

Since I lacked the proper packaging materials, the ideal loot would therefore have had to be solid, not perishable, not cumbersome, and above all new. It had to be of high unitary value, that is, not voluminous, because we were often searched at the camp's entrance after work; and it should finally be useful to or desired by at least one of the social categories that composed the Lager's complicated universe.

I had made various attempts in the lab. I had stolen a few hundred grams of fatty acids, laboriously obtained by the oxidation of paraffin from some colleagues of mine on the other side of the barrier: I had eaten half of it and it really took the edge off my hunger, but it had such a nasty taste that I gave up the idea of selling the remainder. I had tried to make fritters with sanitary cotton, which I pressed against an electric hot plate; they had a vague taste of burnt sugar, but they looked so awful that I did not consider them marketable. As for selling the cotton directly to the Lager's infirmary, I had tried this once, but it was too cumbersome and not much sought after. I also forced myself to ingest and digest glycerin, basing myself on the simplistic reasoning that, since it is a product of the splitting of fats, it must after all in some way be metabolized and furnish calories: and perhaps it did furnish them, but at the cost of extremely unpleasant side effects.

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