Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (review)

Hebrew Siudies 37 (1996) 221 Reviews lacking. Sometimes, Bar-Asher is not clear enough (see above, on the use of the Arabic plural, or transcribing lav with I rather than IS, p. 41). Aside from these remarks, though, this volume is a pioneer work of the Hebrew elements in North African Judeo-Arabic. It is an important contribution to the study of Judeo-Arabic in particular and Jewish languages in general. The book also sheds light in other areas: it makes a contribution to the understanding of earlier Hebrew traditions in the Jewish Arab world, and it makes a good start toward a North African Judeo-Arabic dialectology atlas. As the Jewish communities of the Arab world are almost totally dismantled and Judeo-Arabic native speakers are getting older and fewer, this book is a salvage operation in many respects, and here lies our gratitude for Professor Bar-Asher. Benjamin Hary Emory University Allanla, GA 30322 FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS: AGAINST APOCALYPTIC HISTORY. By Michael Andre Bernstein. Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society. Pp. xiii + 181. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Cloth, $22.00. One might think, at first glance, that a book "against apocalyptic history " is a work against fundamentalist belief. Foregone Conclusions by Michael Andre Bernstein, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, certainly contains biblical motifs set in a teleological framework (e.g., calling the Akedah in Genesis 2 the "Sacrifice" and not the "Binding" of Isaac reflects Christian supersessionist theology), yet, because the book's emphasis is on how properly to read events and narratives of the Jewish experience in history, it is more literary criticism and cultural history and less religion and theology. The author challenges an accepted position of seeing ordinary and extraordinary issues and circumstances as well as understanding the relationship between our individuality and group association (race, gender, ethnicity) as a product of chance or fated by a predetermined goal. He opines on the nature and importance of causal relation and speaks out against the attitude that says there is a necessary connection between cause and effect. For him, all events are wholly distinct and separable from one Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 222 Reviews another. To be sure, a certain effect follows a certain cause. But what guarantee do we have that if we repeat a cause the same effect will always follow? There is absolutely no certain clue in past experience to what will happen in the future. Certain causal sequences may have held in the past, perhaps necessarily, but is there any evidence for assuming that they must hold in the future? To illustrate, religious orthodoxy, in particular Hasidism, and secular Zionist ideology practice "foreshadowing" in an attempt to make sense of the Shoah. The former sees the Event foreordained/caused by the sins of assimilation and nationalism; the latter depicts Shoah victims as complicit ~on latebalJ ("sheep to slaughter") who chose not to heed "liquidate the Diaspora" and ultimately were silenced by the Great Catastrophe. Also, judiciously condemning is the skill of politicians, professors, and other pundits who postulate post-Auschwitz signs of genocidal tendencies back into the Shoah, an art Bernstein calls "backshadowing." Rather than foreshadowing and backshadowing, the writer posits "sideshadowing"-an alternative position which asserts a certain power or force residing in every present with the potential of determining separable, mUltiple futures. For example, on the murdered Jewish children, he writes: It is essential to recognize here that whenever our sense of what the Shoah destroyed includes, along with their actual deaths, the potential achievement and never realized futures of the children who were murdered, we are already engaged in sideshadowing. The logic of historical inevitability, on the other hand. explicitly suggests that the murdered children were already doomed to perish in the Shoah the instant they were born. hence it would be inconsistent to mourn the adult lives they never experienced or the accomplishments they never attained . Yet a genuine grief for this loss is voiced in books on the genocide that rely on premises of historical inevitability and exploit the narrative techniques of foreshadowing. (p. 15) Bernstein's salvo makes an interesting contrast with proponents of...