The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel by Steven Fine (review)

Steven Fine, an art and cultural historian, Jewish studies professor, archeologist, and rabbinics scholar, has written an outstanding new book, The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel, that is a well-researched, vitally important contribution. It employs Fine's method of marshalling diverse sources with a broad chronological visionary scope toward a diachronic, object- and text-centered comparativist and international approach to interpreting the Jewish past with implications for the future. Fine, a master writer and storyteller, reveals the story of a living and transforming object of memory from antiquity through the medieval world to the present politics in Israel, "in the belief that all of these contexts are necessary for understanding each context individually as well as the whole picture." This book is a welcome, refreshing, and erudite piece of work that coherently and creatively integrates many diverse genres of primary and secondary texts from piyyutim, midrash, and the whole corpus of the rabbinic treasury of wisdom to modern Israeli newspapers, classic literary works such as those by Agnon and Coynan Doyle, to pulp fiction and postmodern social media tweets, emails, interviews, and youtube videos. It is carefully illustrated with many important archeological finds and artistic and archival factoids that speak a million words in the concise representation that art can give.

The book is written in a collegiate and inviting manner, avoiding technical academic jargon. Fine reveals his inner thoughts when standing in the presence of the Arch of Titus depicting the menorah, for instance, when personably noting, "It was as if the Romans marching forward, carrying the menorah and the other Temple vessels were actually moving as the field of the relief moved deeper and deeper in the white marble—and the vessels of the Jerusalem Temple disappeared forever into the stone. How much more vivid—and ghastly—would this scene have been in full color, I thought." Fine in his conclusion confesses, "This has been a personal history—the history of my own search to understand the menorah, and my attempt at using the tools of my discipline to make sense of my beloved lampstand for our own complicated times. It began as early in my life as I can remember, and reached its heights—quite literally—standing on scaffolding within the Arch of Titus, within centimeters of its grey stone. It has been a place of discovery—not just of the polychromy of the arch menorah, but also of the many paths and palimpsest that are the menorah. Having brought to bear primary sources from across the human experience, from biblical Israel to ancient Rome, medieval Europe to North Africa, America, and even Indonesia and Brazil, I conclude this exploration with an explicit primary source, of my own making, drawn from my own Facebook posts of a research trip I took with my then thirteen year old son, Koby, to Rome and Israel in May 2014." In this post Fine asserts, "You see, the Menorah IS at the Vatican—just not the one brought to Rome by Vespasian!" with the post climaxing in the tag, "we write this from the plane to Israel! Maybe the menorah is there after all! Shalom, the Menorah men."

While Fine is a cultural historian, specializing in Jewish history in the Greco-Roman period, there is nothing truncated, narrow, or myopic about this book. Its scope is broad, multifaceted, diverse, and weaves a fascinating story that needs to be told, exploring the journey of how a Temple religious almost theurgic object, lit by the high priest, became over the course of 3000 years of Jewish history a unique symbol and indeed an icon signifying and speaking of Jews, Judaism, God of Israel, Torah, Jewish locals, and the modern Jewish state. There are many scholars that know a lot about a little. Fine knows a lot about a lot. His work focuses mainly upon the literature of ancient Judaism, art, and archaeology and the ways that modern scholars have interpreted...