Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries

Chapter 2. Joseph Salvador's Jerusalem Lost and Jerusalem Regained

CHAPTER 2 Joseph Salvador’s Jerusalem Lost and Jerusalem Regained L. Scott Lerner In the summer of 1819, Joseph Salvador, then a young doctor in Paris, happened upon a newspaper account of a bloody attack on the Jews of a small town in Germany. The dispatch deeply affected him, especially the ‘‘war cry’’—Hep! Hep!—uttered by the assailants. The author of the article had glossed Hep as an acronym for the Latin phrase Hierosolyma est perdita, which Salvador understood to mean ‘‘Jerusalem is forever annihilated.’’1 To judge by Salvador’s writing over the four decades following the incident, this threat of annihilation presented itself in psychic, no less than political and social, terms. In spite of the violent character of the incident, he did not fear mostly for the physical security of the Jews; at stake was ‘‘Jerusalem ,’’ which symbolized the modern legacy of the Jewish past. Lifting the phrase from its local context, he asked himself: What if the attackers were right? What if Jerusalem were ‘‘lost’’ not at the hands of its historical foes but because, in the drama of human history, the Jews had already exited the stage for the last time? Born in Montpellier in 1796, Salvador, who was the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother and who identified as a Jew, was keenly aware that he counted among the first Jews in history to possess from birth equal rights in a modern state. For all the tumultuousness of the years between 1789 and 1819, he was no less certain that the Revolution had opened the door to modernity. The Hep! Hep! riots impelled him to examine whether the Jewish contribution to the world had played its course—whether, as he Jerusalem 45 put it, ‘‘Jerusalem is annihilated on the basis of truth and right.’’ If such were the case, the implication was clear: ‘‘the Synagogue should dissolve itself and be buried, if not with honor, at least without violence.’’2 Here is how he describes the task he faced: It was important to concern myself with the best path to choose, the best plan, in order to obtain or at least prepare for the solution. It was inevitable to drink from the common source of our three established and rival religions, inevitable to return to the foundation of things ex imis fundamentis, as Bacon used to say. In short, only procedures based on the most methodical observations and the surest rules of analysis could enable me to undertake, with some advantage , a new theoretical and practical act of confrontation between Jerusalem and Rome, between Judaism, Christianity and philosophy , between the principles of religion, politics and science.3 Rejecting the idea of intervening directly in the legal and political arena, as his coreligionist from nearby Nı̂mes, Adolphe Crémieux, would do, Salvador states his intention to apply a scholar’s ability to probe deeply into things. His declaration is notable for his explicit commitment to the scientific methodology—observation and analysis—on which his medical training depended. Ultimately, he did not conclude in favor of the dissolution of the synagogue, but rather devoted the rest of his life to this counterthesis: ‘‘The role of the Hebrew people in the history of humanity that has been subject to a state of war is immense. An inevitable character in this complicated drama, it appeared in all the acts, and we may be certain of the necessity of its presence for the dénouement.’’4 Salvador wrote four major, multi-tome works over four decades. The first, published in 1822 and reworked and republished in 1828, is a History of the Institutions of Moses and of the Hebrew People.5 Here, Salvador highlights the central role of Moses the legislator, describing ‘‘Hebrew’’ society as a model republican civilization. Ten years later, in 1838, he published Jesus Christ and His Doctrine, in which he argued that the trial of Jesus had been legal and consistent with the law of the land.6 He also showed the extent to which Jesus’ teachings had their source in Judaism. Salvador’s third work, of 1847, History of the Roman Domination in Judea, and of the Ruin of Jerusalem, is a retelling of the Josephus narrative in a mode more sympathetic to the Jews.7 As James Darmesteter put it, it is the story of 46 Chapter 2 how, in the Temple fire, the Pantheon burned...