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Brief Lives

Sholem Asch (1880-1957)

Brad Rappaport considers a very philosophical novelist.

Can a novelist be a philosopher? Kant in his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose advocated we should assume the idea of history heading inexorably towards a condition of world peace. He thought this would help motivate us to make it happen, rather than surrendering to helplessness. However, he admitted that it seems rather more like how we think of the story in a novel than history. While we are liable to think of Kant as one of the architects of secular modernity, this prophetic element, this deliberately hopeful and admittedly unfounded account of future historical progress has something of religion about it. But if Kant’s speculative philosophical history is like a novel, perhaps there’s no reason why a historical novel should not pack a philosophical punch.

By contrast with this narrative of history moving towards a harmonious future, we’ll see that Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene (1939) – a best-selling novel in its day about the life of Jesus, by a Jew – suggests a diversity of narratives, the common origin of which lies in the past, and the wellspring of which is the human heart.

Sholem Asch portrait by Gail Campbell

Biography

Sholem Asch was born on November 1, 1880, into a Hasidic Jewish family in Eastern Europe. Hasidism is best thought of as enthusiastic and traditionalist, and organized loosely around charismatic central figures, the ‘rebbes’. This is hardly an auspicious beginning for someone with the ambition of novel-writing, as such frivolity is forbidden in a strict Hasidic household.

Salman Rushdie said that an atheist is someone who is obsessed with God. Just so, for the secular Jew, the Jewish past is a subject for infinite mining. It can be received with antagonism, as in the case of Benedict de Spinoza, the seventeenth-century philosopher of Jewish ancestry, or with tender regard, as was the case with Asch, who moved away from the world of observant Judaism without losing sight of it. God is useful in a world that seems meaningless without Him, and while this does not guarantee that He exists, it is unquestionable that the story in the Torah – call it Hebrew Scripture, if you must – is as powerful as any narrative, with the crucial difference that any Jew can see it as a story told about himself in which he has the power to enact what it enjoins, as a character in its unfolding story who brings it alive. ‘If I call myself a Jew,’ Asch might reason, ‘then surely I must do what I take it that a good Jew does, if I wish to be true to my word: who cares if the Torah is true in the sense of making factual historic claims?’ A novel conveys emotional truth from its heart to the heart of the reader. To dismiss it on the grounds that the events it relates are fictional is to be obtuse. So too the Torah.

Asch travelled widely, seeing the now-extinct Soviet Union. He lived in diverse places too, ranging from his birthplace of Poland to New York, France, and Israel, where his house has since been turned into a museum in his memory. He courted scandal throughout his life – as when he wrote a play about a brothel owner who attempts to raise his daughter to be upright, only for her to fall in love with one of the prostitutes, and kiss her onstage. Perhaps predictably, the 1915 Broadway production of the play was shut down for obscenity. A hundred years later, in 2015, another Broadway play, Indecent, told that story.

Asch died in London on July 10, 1957. The eulogist at his memorial service acknowledged his controversial life while praising his work.

The Nazarene

There is a Hasidic story of the proverbial enlightened Jew, full of science, who comes to the village rabbi and asks him, mockingly, where God is. The rabbi answers that He is wherever a heart is ready to admit Him. This kind of homespun wisdom is of the essence of the Hasidism that Asch grew up with, and he brings it to his novel The Nazarene, in the sense of welcoming Christians, fellows in the spirit, into his Jewish world – provided that they respect its distinctness and priority.

Accounting Spinoza antagonistic to Judaism does not dispense with him in the context of recent Jewish history. He is valuable for his contribution to the secular mindset that will make religion a thing of the private sphere, and allow someone provocative like Asch to thrive without threat of retribution. Punishment for questioning rabbinic authority or operating beyond its sphere can be found even today in the form of public opinion; but in the kind of state Spinoza had in mind for his model republic, this is the fullest extent of the power it would have.

For Spinoza, philosophy may critique religion, and delineate its limits in relation to secular, or scientific knowledge, to which it must yield place when it comes to the objective verification of facts. Asch takes account of this in his telling of the life of Jesus.

Jews and Christians differ concerning Jesus’s divinity. This difference is the leaven of Asch’s novel, for he threads the needle between the two faiths, offering an account of the gospel narrative while well aware that the story of his own people continues alongside it.

The Nazarene is set both in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe – the present-day of Asch’s time – and in gospel antiquity, alternating back and forth between the two through a flashback narrative. One of the main characters in Eastern Europe, a Polish count, is anti-Semitic in the manner of a baptized pagan. In the narrative of antiquity, he has an alter ego as a Roman centurion who appears briefly in the gospels (in Mark 15:39 to be precise), and, in Asch’s telling, is at once attracted to and repelled by Jesus. The narrator of The Nazarene is himself a Jew who cares for the count in spite of the count, and he too has an alter ego in the older story. After the course of the events narrated in the gospels, the centurion converts – a change of heart that is mirrored by the Polish count as he lies on his deathbed. The narrator places a bouquet of flowers over the heart of the count after his passing.

Asch took a lot of flak for this novel, perhaps unsurprisingly. It came out in English translation before it ever came out in his native Yiddish, and was a best-seller in the US. The Jewish press, however, received it coldly, with reactions ranging from puzzlement that he would write such a novel, to concern that it might lead Jews to convert to Christianity. The outcry was such that it occasioned a book from Asch in response, What I Believe (1941), in which he outlined a view of Christianity’s relationship to Judaism that looked very much like what the Catholic Church would later adopt in its postwar understanding of Jesus as (among other things) a signpost to the faith of the Jews. And in another non-fiction work, One Destiny (1945), Asch can be read as suggesting that he anticipates something even greater – a reconciliation of Judaism and Christianity that would bring them fully together. If this is a valid reading, it seems to vindicate the suspicion of Asch voiced by his some of peers.

Universal Histories

The philosophical claim implicit in The Nazarene – and later brought out explicitly in What I Believe and One Destiny – is that a diversity of narratives can coexist, telling different stories about the same events. Rabbinic Judaism, to take one case, emerged in the wake of the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, when scholarly Jews took the opposite tack from those who sought to fight Rome, and meekly asked Vespasian, the conquering Roman general who would become Emperor, for permission to build a house of study outside Jerusalem at Yavne. This studious strand of Judaism then became the reigning form of Judaism for two thousand years, taking the Torah narrative and the laws related therein for granted, and elaborating upon them in a continuous tradition, even as the early Christians would treat Jesus as the culmination of the prophecy of a Messiah, and the Scriptures they classed as the Old Testament a book closed by the addition of the New. By contrast, Zionism looks to reconnect with the nationalist spirit of the very rebels who fought Rome, circumventing the intervening two thousand years of Jewish history. It aims to resurrect the kingdom of old as a modern nation-state after the European fashion. While the idea of a sovereign state would seem to clash with the idea of a sovereign God, Zionists are arguably more concerned with safety and security amidst the hostility of history than with intellectual consistency. In Israel today, there are both people who reject religion as outmoded, and people who reject the sovereignty of the state as an abomination against religion, and they live side-by-side. The point is that Zionism is a novel way of viewing the modern Jew’s relation to Judaism. This gives us at least three ways of viewing Jewish historical events soon after the time that Jesus lived: as leading to Talmudic Judaism; as leading to Christianity; and as sowing the seeds of Zionism.

Kant’s historical narrative presents itself, by contrast, as looking forward to the end of all particular narratives in favor of one that’s universal. Yet for Asch, the universality of a historical narrative is not derived from its objective truth, but rather from its specificity – that is, as the one among many narratives that is our own. It is its pathos that is universal, contrary to Kant’s assertion that feeling leads us away from the universal.

A novel also aspires to transmit universal truths through the specificity of its narrative. It is a comparison of novels to one another that would be scientific, bringing out what is true of them all. This is what it means to say that objective truth stands in relation to no one narrative, the diversity of them being consistent with a science distinct from any single one. Hence the attribution of objectivity to science alone. Hence also the usefulness of a Spinoza, who might seem cold-hearted, but who is a realist about the abuses of political power to which religious faith can be put – and whose ideal public sphere is universally accessible to those of all faiths.

Conclusions

Kant shrank back from Spinoza on the grounds that Spinoza’s philosophy left no room for purposiveness. But while Aristotle’s idea that an organism is shaped to serve its life purposes is seen by Darwinists as an illusion of design fostered by natural selection, the idea that history has a purpose is also unscientific. Kant’s assumption that history necessarily progresses towards universal peace because it would be intolerable to think otherwise, is also opposed to the religious spirit that sees humility as the essential lesson of monotheism, including humility about what we can predict. Rather than supposing a future in which history will inevitably culminate in human triumph, Asch is suggesting that the possibility that it should go well for us is contingent on human change. This requires a theology of sin and repentance such as is scorned today, rather than lovingly preserved as a bequest to be cared for as a story about ourselves that, if not super natural in origin, nevertheless holds out the prospect that our natural disposition is not in super able. Nineteenth-century Europeans romanticized the Greeks as childlike and praised their naturalism in philosophy and art, but failed to remark upon the cruelty of children. The story of the conversion of the Roman centurion and the Polish count is that of a turn away from a hatred of the monotheist’s rejection of paganism. When, at the outset of the Republic, Socrates asks an elder of the city (in both wealth and years) to give an account of justice, foremost among the notions set forth is that of paying one’s debts. The natural human disposition to take while giving nothing in return can be overcome through a timely suffering of the consequences. The Nazarene tells a story of the universal accessibility of religious feeling as a historically significant development from which there is no retreat.

Asch wrote many works besides The Nazarene, and as with Yiddish literary fiction generally, his best stories are those which focus on the drama of the human spirit – on questions of conduct – which is of the essence of Judaism. Accordingly, one need not have a God behind the scenes pulling the strings in order that morality should be victorious at all times; the question is how we choose to respond to it. If wonder is the beginning of philosophy, as Plato would have it, then it was all but ordained that the Greco-Roman world should be absorbed by this question into the fabric of a monotheism that now counts Christianity as a counterpart to Judaism.

Brad Rappaport holds a BA in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, and also studied philosophy at the University of Essex and Vanderbilt University. Further writing of his can be found at vainphilosophy.com.