Foregone Conclusions: Narrating the Fate of Austro-German Jewry

I think there are as many ways of surviving survival as there have been to survive.

—Philip K., quoted in Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies

For centuries it was in large part through the common telling of its stories and the imaginative loyalties they fostered that Jewish survival was ensured. But the two enormous and linked transformations of Jewish existence in this century—on the one hand, the Zionist move-ment and the establishment of the state of Israel, and, on the other, the previously unimaginable horror of the Shoah—profoundly altered the patterns discovered in—or, as I will argue, imputed to—the nar-ratives that are now constructed to articulate the meaning of Jewish history. ¹

Because the kinds of stories we tell ourselves and one another are a central portion, perhaps even the core of who we are, and, more technically, because the ways we narrate and order those stories are as significant in their effect as is their thematic content, the impli-cations of literary techniques go far beyond what strictly formalist considerations suggest. Especially when the story is one of a com-munal historical catastrophe, there is an urge to make sense of it by relying upon one of the most basic of all narrative techniques: foreshadowing. Yet, implicit in foreshadowing is the image of a closed universe in which all choices have already been made, in which human free will can exist only in the paradoxical sense of choosing to accept or wilfully—and vainly—rebelling against what is inevitable. This is the case whether the foreshadowing takes place at the theological, historical, or psychological level.

Christian apologetics, Marxist teleology, and psychological determinism are striking instances of how powerful our impulse toward foreshadowing can be, and illustrate how it is bound to seem arbitrarily colonizing of, and condescending to, any moments that threaten to exceed its interpretive grasp. Thus, the Christian Church Fathers’ reduction of the Hebrew Bible to a cycle of prefigurations of and preparations for the Gospel story is, for all its intellectual dexterity and inventiveness (especially the elaboration of figural allegory), rightly viewed by Jews as a brutal impoverishment of the original texts. “Supersessionist” theology necessarily reduces the predecessor text to an “Old Testament,” whose independent signi-ficance is annulled once it is construed as only the first stage of a process culminating in the annunciation of a “new” and more complete truth. Think for a moment of the Pauline Epistle in which the wandering of the Jews in the desert is read as a figura of the challenges facing the first Christian communities, or the ways in which the Christian exegetical tradition interpreted the story of Jonah as a prefiguration of the Savior’s Passion, with the three days in the belly of the whale foreshadowing the three days when Christ harrowed Hell. In its encounters with the Hebrew Bible, Christian hermeneutics read the central events of Jewish tradition as “witnessing,” in the sense of foreshadowing, the authority of its own stories. Hence, for example, the pressure to rename a narrative like the Hebrew Bible’s Akedah or “Binding” of Isaac as the “Sacrifice” of Isaac, in order to make the Jewish story interpretable as an anticipation of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. ² Indeed, there is a strong sense in which the very idea of history as a linear unfolding from darkness toward light, and from ignorance toward truth is rooted neither in Jewish nor in classical thinking, but, as Jonathan Boyarin has argued, entirely in “the early church fathers’ idea of the progression from Judaism to Christianity.” ³ And, much as the Jewish and pagan world found the claims of the first Christian missionaries incomprehensible, to someone not already persuaded of the truth of their secular revelations, the conventional Marxist explanations of why the working class stayed so loyal to their national governments at the outbreak of the First World War, or of why large sections of the German proletariat adhered to Nazism, often against their own economic interest, can seem astonishingly dismissive of the peculiarities of each specific circumstance.

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