Jewishness and the Human Dimension

4. Toward an Anthropology of the Twentieth Century

4 Toward an Anthropology of the Twentieth Century To Professor Edward Said, of blessed memory When Leslie Morris so generously invited me to speak at this conference , I almost instantaneously provided her with the tentative title ‘‘Toward an Anthropology of the Twentieth Century.’’ Of course, the twentieth century remains an awkward designation. It is split, from one perspective, between ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after’’ the defining cataclysm of World War II and its attendant genocide. Moreover, it is not clear, yet, that it is best understood as an epoch ending with the fall of the Soviet Union. Even less clear is that the attack on the Twin Towers, whose seductive proximity to the new millennium exerts a powerful historical magnetism, indicates a tectonic shift into a new era. Rather, when I referred to the twentieth century, I was thinking, to put it in the most prosaic terms I can, of our situation, today, yesterday, and at every moment between 1932 and the time, if it comes, when we collectively determine how to share this planet instead of burning it up. Let me echo once again, as it seems I will do my whole life as part of the quest for critically effective speech, Benjamin’s ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’: The pile of ruins continues to grow at our feet. Now, however, we must understand that it includes not only human ash and the ruins of cities (we should not have been shocked to discover that those ruined cities would 60 include our own) but literally our garbage as well—the kind of thing archaeologists love these days, along with the ruin of the long-stored petroleum energy that is our heritage from earlier geological ages. What I was hoping to do was to begin to articulate , though I am probably capable only of alluding to it, the question of how critical thought is limited by the assumptions that our species can and must survive. In this respect, the term anthropology is therefore to be understood as the study of the conditions of possibility of continued human life. After so much study of the poetics and politics of the memory of Nazi genocide in the last few decades, it seems odd to say it, but it seems to me that it remains very difficult for us to talk or think coherently about extinction and memory at the same time. This might have something to do with the fact that (and I speak somewhat speculatively now) in Jewish discourse, if not Western religious discourse more generally, the possibility of ultimate extinction , of the Jews or of humanity tout court, seems to be a taboo concept, rigorously absent even from our eschatologies. I really do invite debate on this point, by the way, both because it seems an important one that has not been considered, and because the first person I mentioned it to, Susannah Heschel, immediately contradicted it by pointing to the hymn ‘‘Adon Olam’’ (Master of the Universe) that Jewish congregations sing every week at the end of Sabbath services. For ‘‘Adon Olam’’ contains the phrase, ‘‘And after all has ceased to be, He will reign, alone and awesome.’’ And lonely? In this respect, as Jack Kugelmass and others have pointed out,1 genocide in Europe stands not only as an epochal event, but also as our closest collective encounter with annihilation. We will continue talking of it as long as there is breath within us, and each conversation will be an event in itself. Just three weeks ago, during the Sabbath of the intermediate days of Passover, I attended a conference whose theme and occasion both resonate with this toward an anthropology of the twentieth century 61 one. The conference, ‘‘Contested Memories of the Holocaust,’’ was held in conjunction with a seminar on the cultural memory of Nazi genocide that has been conducted jointly this spring, via videoconference, at Dartmouth College and at Tel Aviv University. One of the first speakers, Froma Zeitlin from Princeton, spoke about the journeys, by now often highly ritualized, that American and Israeli Jews take to the sites of their ancestral homes in Europe . She brought along a bit of show-and-tell, the one souvenir, of all the tshatshkes now available for tourists in the Polish city of Lublin, that she thought worthwhile retrieving: a torn fragment from a Torah scroll. She reported the response of a Jewish friend when...