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Chapter 2. Apocalyptic Historiography And The Messianic Hopeful
- State University of New York Press
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Chapter 2 Apocalyptic Historiography And The Messianic Hopeful The apocalyptic historiography of the poetry discussed in this book must be placed within the context of the work of some of the most creative historians of the modern period. This theory of history depends on a contemporary interpretation of the Holocaust. For instance, the literary critic, theologian, and historian, Walter Benjamin, has referred to a "messianic standing still" of events, indicating the sense of stasis associated with the messianic evaluation of history.' Most theories of the impact of the Holocaust on the twentieth century call it the seminal event of this century, one that in Benjamin's terms causes time to stop, for it transforms our understanding of man and God, and makes us reevaluate what preceded that event and perceive differently what came after that event. Even more influential in the understanding of contemporary apocalyptic historiography is the great reinterpreter of Jewish history, Gershom Scholem. Scholem does not write of the Holocaust per se, rather of the reinterpretation of the apocalyptic and mystical antinomianism, which delineates the philosophy of most of the false messiahs from the Middle Ages to the present. Born of an assimilated Jewish family of Berlin, Scholem, more than any other man in the twentieth century has changed our ideas about Jewish history and peoplehood. In direct opposition to his heritage and to most historians of Judaism, Scholem spent his life in the study of kabbalah, apocalyptic 37 38 Apocalyptic Messianism and Jewish-American Poetry literature, and false messiahs. Rather than arguing for the rationalization of messianism, Scholem maintains that this significant Jewish doctrine was always associated with catastrophe and revolution .2 Therefore, the apocalyptic expectation of the Messiah presupposes a hope for the end of time, an end to history. For Scholem, this break with the present implies a belief in a new law, a new Torah. He sees the apocalyptic sense in the tradition of kabbalah from Merkabeh to the Lurianic preparation for the antinomianism of Shabbatai Zevi. According to Scholem, the moving forces in history are the demonic and the destructive. A history moves not by logical development but by surprising contrasts and negations.3 Messianism , itself a contradiction, an impossibility, expresses "life lived in deferment," for when the messianic life is explicit, Scholem writes "then it is foolishly decried (or one might say, unmasked) as pseudoMessianism ." This contradiction makes of Jewish messianism "the real anti-existentialism idea."4 Scholem's counter-history, then, balances exoteric and esoteric traditions, with the esoteric, the hidden , often negating the exoteric and indeed directing true history.5 References in recent Jewish-American poetry to specific messianic hopefuls far outweigh similar references in prose. However, several recent novels relating the life of a false messiah bear on this discussion. Their more literal expression of the tales of the Messiah will help the reader see the significance of the more poetic transformations manifest in the poetry. These pieces of historical fiction should be placed in the theoretical framework of Georg Lukacs's The Histoncal Novel. He first articulated the tenuous but essential balance between accuracy of fact and individual creative interpretation .6 Historical circumstances, the facts of the event cited, the concrete details, therefore, cannot be thought of in the same fashion as those same facts, circumstances, or details when they appear in a historical narrative. The aesthetic function in fiction transforms them.7 The individual creative mind interacts with subject matter in all writing, but it does so in a more subjective fashion with any story of fiction than it does with the biography or the history of a period. Undoubtedly, there must be some personal identification of the novelist with the historical era chosen as background for the story.B But the author will express this identification in a variety of manners . Apocalyptic Historiography 39 Practitioners of historical fiction have often defended the truth of their narrative by arguing their right to recreate history. One of the most successful of historical fiction writers, Leon Feuchtwanger, writes that in writing historical literature "the creative writers desire only to treat contemporary matters even in those of their creations which have history as their subject. ... Such writers want only to discuss their relation to their own time, their own personal experiences and how much of the past has continued into the present."9 A similar impulse permeates the work of these JewishAmerican writers, both poets and novelists, who write of the messiahs of the medieval period. They really wish to...