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  • Jewish Literary Treatments of the Apostle Paul:The Novels of Shalom Asch and Samuel Sandmel
  • Daniel R. Langton (bio)

Introduction

Jewish attitudes towards the Apostle to the Gentiles have been the subject of a number of studies in recent years. These have tended to focus on New Testament or Pauline studies, on theologians and religious leaders.1 Those conducting the surveys have been interested primarily in interfaith dialogue, but little or no interest has been paid to Jewish artistic or literary endeavors despite the fact that they have also engaged heavily with relevant theological issues. For those interested in Jewish-Christian relations in a wider cultural context, this bias towards the academy and scholarship is unfortunate. After all, non-scholars have as much to contribute to the inter-communal debates as anyone else. And, arguably, literary and artistic treatments of Paul offer a quite distinctive perspective on the dramatic events of the first-century "parting of the ways" and the controversial figure of Paul. Examples include Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio St Paul (1836), Ludwig Meidner's painting "Paul's Sermon" (1919), Franz Werfel's play Paul Among the Jews (1926), and Avraham Melnikoff's sculpture "St Paul" (1935).2 One possible explanation is the marginal Jewish status of a number of the artists and writers concerned. While Jewish-born and maintaining a Jewish self-consciousness, some also exemplify what might be described as complex or multiple identities. But the fact that, along with so many other Jews in the modern world, they cannot easily be fitted into religious or national pigeon-holes is precisely what makes them so interesting when studying their empathetic interpretations of the similarly complex character of Paul. In the case of the Yiddish author Shalom Asch and the New Testament scholar and amateur novelist Samuel Sandmel, both were particularly pre-occupied with the so-called Gentile Problem, that is, the relationship of the non-Jewish world to the God of Israel and to the People of Israel. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that they were drawn to Paul and used their literary engagement as an opportunity to work through [End Page 284] such theological issues as universalism within Judaism and the reality (or otherwise) of a Judeo-Christian religious essence. In the following examination of Asch and Sandmel's largely appreciative portrayals of this founding figure of Christianity and his theological deliberations, considerable emphasis will be placed on their respective social backgrounds and cultural milieus. It will be seen that these rare Jewish artistic renderings of Paul represent two very different attempts to improve interfaith relations and, in so doing, reflect the complex nature of Jewish identity in North American culture in the twentieth-century.

Asch and the Misunderstood Apostle

The Polish-born novelist, essayist and dramatist Sholem Asch (1880-1957) had enjoyed an Eastern European traditional Jewish upbringing before becoming interested in secular literature and eventually emerging as the first Yiddish writer to boast a truly international reputation. He lived in America during the first and second world wars, where he published most of his works, but also spent time in Poland, France, and Israel, and in his writings he drew upon the experiences of both Jews and Gentiles from these countries. His profound attachment to and wide-ranging interests in the legacy of the Jewish past colored all his works, ranging from a timeless and romanticized Shtetl, to seventeenth-century pogroms, to the challenges of modern Jewish life in Russia, Germany and Poland, to the pioneer experience in Palestine, to the Nazi persecution, to treatments of biblical figures such as Moses and Isaiah. A constant theme was the inner beauty and freedom of Jewish spirituality; another focus was his subjects' moral dilemma and religious challenges. Concerned to expand his horizons throughout his career, he composed a trilogy about Christianity's founding figures, Jesus, Paul and Mary, a universally familiar theme which emphasizes a shared Judeo-Christian spiritual heritage;3 quite possibly, he was angling for a Nobel Prize in literature.4 But while the English translations of these sympathetic studies met with critical acclaim generally, the Jewish press was hostile. The American Yiddish daily The Forward not only refused to publish them, but...

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