Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture by Ilana Pardes (review)

In her vital contribution to Agnon studies, Ilana Pardes delivers a richly multifaceted exploration of the novelist’s illumination of the role of the Bible in early Zionist culture. Venturing beyond both early critics and contemporary scholars’ ardent attention to analogies between Agnon’s relation to midrashic hermeneutics and poststructuralist understandings of textuality would be a substantial achievement in itself, but Pardes has a more expansive ambition here, challenging the familiar conviction that in formative Zionist culture the Bible was an exclusively secular presence.

For Pardes, the interplay between secular and religious exegetical practices (the literal and the allegorical) in Palestine of the Second Aliya and after the establishment of the state of Israel, was far more intricate and fecund than often realized. The golden age of Israeli biblical culture throughout the 1940s and 1950s forms the stage for the compelling story she tells about both the Song of Songs and Agnon’s critical instincts about his society’s relation to one of its most seminal narratives: “Agnon’s deep commitment to Zionism only propelled him, with a greater sense of urgency, to hold up a critical mirror to its underlying utopian and messianic delusions” (pp. 28–29). Even as Zionists “sought to find in the land of Israel a Pompeii in which the actual biblical past was kept intact,” argues Pardes, “their quest for a new uplifting secular literalism… could not do away with the haunting presence of the more somber verses of the ancient love poem, nor could it limit the lingering impact of traditional allegorical configurations and the formation of new national allegories” (p. 29). Pardes’ point of embarkation on this journey is Balak, the enigmatic canine of Only Yesterday (Tmol Shilshom, 1945). In one of the most famous episodes of modern Hebrew literature, the protagonist Isaac Kumer inscribes the fateful epitaph “mad dog” on his back, an act that inspires a frenzy of hermeneutic decoding both by Balak and the diverse and isolated Jewish communities of modern Palestine (ranging from the ultra-Orthodox press in Jerusalem to the secular Zionist intelligentsia in Jaffa).

Pardes’ masterful reading of Agnon’s language in this novel profoundly illuminates his use of irony and multiple perspectives, setting the stage for her subsequent exploration of the author’s responses to Zionist culture’s literalist engagement with the Song of Songs. Why did this become the seminal biblical text for both Agnon’s literary art and the Zionist cultural imagination? According to Pardes, that owes in part to Ben-Gurion’s insistence on its primacy as the biblical text most commensurate with Zionist secularism, his touting the “Song’s original, secular grandeur” (p. 15) once the detritus of its allegorical layers, imposed over the centuries by rabbinic tradition, were (ostensibly) expunged. Whatever the appeal of such doctrinaire pronouncements, on a more visceral level (in the realms of art, music, and dance), the Song clearly proved irresistible to the Zionist imagination: “a founding text for imagining a new erotic freedom in the Orient, for defining the liberation of the senses from stifling European norms” (p. 49).

Pardes sees Agnon responding with relish to satirize Zionism’s own allegorical orthodoxies in its uses of the text in rendering the erotically earthy dalliance of the Shulamite and her lover in the Song as an expression of the ancient/new love of the land. Especially given these warring certitudes, for a writer as playful and observant as Agnon it is clear that the Song of Songs would have proved a highly desirable touchstone, for its own inherently diverse and contradictory impulses must have seemed analogous to his own practice.

To clarify just how Song of Songs came to be employed by Zionist culture, Pardes nimbly traces earlier critical developments such as the exegetical revolution of the European Enlightenment in which readers such as Johann Gottfried Herder took a literalist turn emphasizing the Bible’s expression of Oriental realities...