Jews: The Essence and Character of a People (review)

Bqok Reviews ,Book Reviews 137 Jews: The Essence and Character of a People, by Arthur Hertzberg and Aron HirtManheimer . San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998 (c); 1999 (p), 294 pp. $25.00. Jews: The Essence and Character ofa People demonstrates its authors' great erudition but is not intended for a scholarly audience. In Jews Arthur Hertzberg and Aron HirtManheimer offer their contribution to the modern publishing tradition of distilling the essence of the Jewish experience into a single volume. I have found some of these attempts, especially Robert Seltzer's magisterial, 900-page Jewish People, Jewish Thought (1982), far more successful than others. Another, Thomas Cahill's The Gifts ofthe Jews,' How a Tribe ofDesert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (1998), spent many weeks on best-seller lists, and its author toured Jewish book fairs. These affIrm the wide appeal of such books. Hertzberg and Hirt-Manheimer's contribution falls closer to Cahill than to Seltzer, and presumably its authors hope for a similarly large audience. The authors are superbly qualified to present their assessment of the Jewish experience. Senior author Arthur Hertzberg (whose name appears in a larger font on the title page) has had a long and distinguished career blending service to the Jewish community with scholarship and university teaching. A pulpit rabbi and former vicepresident ofthe World Jewish Congress, he has also seen two ofhis books, The French Enlightenment and the Jews and an edited collection of readings on The Zionist Idea, become classics. When Aron Hirt-Manheimer, editor ofthe Union ofAmerican Hebrew Congregations' quarterly Reform Judaism, suggested their collaboration, the men agreedthatHertzberg's "viewpointand scholarship would drive the arguments put forth in this book" (p. xvii). They also agreed upon their thesis: that they can define the Jewish character which, even though it evolved over millennia, "has remained essentially the same since the time, some four thousand years ago, ofthe founding patriarch, Abraham" (p. 2). Given this argument, one which attributes the essence ofthe Jews to God's having chosen this people and to Jews' encounters with those who sought to oppress and destroy them, it is not surprising to read that a number ofAmerican and European publishers refused to publish this book. The authors contend these publishers feared "the wrath ofthe Jewish establishment" (p. 2). I find it equally plausible that discerning editors rejected the authors' attempt to sweep across the most salient and determinative features of Jewish history, theology, and culture in less than 300 pages. Surely some pre-publication readers shared my concern that, in traversing the path from Abraham to the fiftieth anniversary ofthe birth ofmodern Israel, Jews presents an idiosyncratic interpretation 138 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 of the Jewish experience, one resting on the authors' biases, not on the plethora of Jewish Studies scholarship. Attempting to distinguish Jews from the field ofsimilar books, Hertzberg and HirtManheimer assert that the authors of other works make the mistake of writing "about Jews from a modem perspective looking backward" (p. 4). Yet I would contend that Hertzberg andHirt-Manheimermake the same mistake. The modem Jewish experience, especially the Holocaust and Zionism, drives their reading ofthe Jewish past and their interpretation of the Jewish character. For example, the Holocaust figures in most chapters. The authors discuss its implications for Jewish self-understanding of the concept of the chosen people. They use a joke about German Jews reading a Nazi newspaper to reflect upon the character trait of Jewish divisiveness. They show Hitler and Goebbels parroting canards circulated in antiquity against the Jews. They introduce their discussion ofmedieval Spanish Jewry with the fall of France in 1940. Each ofthese examples appears in a different chapter. They suggest that Jews too reads the past through a modernist lens. While Jews cannot appeal to the scholarly reader and should not interest those well versed in Jewishhistory and culture, several features recommend this book above others of this geme. First, Jews is stylistically imaginative. When Hertzberg recounts his personal experiences, the authors speak in the singular voice of the memoirist. We thus hear Hertzberg tell an archbishop in the Vatican that the only Polish words he remembers are the words for "dirty Jew." We see...