T H E J E W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 95, No. 1 (Winter 2005) 7480

Confessions of a JewishAutobiography Reader

E L L I O T T H O R O W I T Z

PARAPHRASING THOMAS DE QUINCY, I might say that many haveasked how it was, and through what series of steps, that I became anautobiography reader. Whereas De Quincy was driven to the use ofopium not through any search after pleasure, but from mere extremityof pain from rheumatic toothache, my own addiction to the reading ofautobiographies began, so far as I recall, as a means of dealing with thecombination of tedium and anxiety that engulfed me on a bus ride fromNew Haven to Boston in December of 1980. I was a graduate student atYale, to which I had recently returned after two years in Jerusalem, andwas on my way to the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Stud-ies. Although I was not giving a paper, I was still nervous about being in(what I then thought to be) a high-powered academic setting in whichones professional future could be determined not only by the sort ofquestion asked but even by the cut of ones jacket.

Fortunately, on that day in deep and dark December I had a pleasanttraveling companionGershom Scholems From Berlin to Jerusalem: Mem-ories of My Youth, which had originally appeared in German three yearsearlier but was now available in Harry Zohns translation, published, ofcourse, by Schocken Books. My own decision to become a professionalJewish scholar had crystallized largely as result of reading the essayscollected in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, which came out in paperbackduring my first year in college. Leafing through that faded volume now,I note, among the many passages I had marked with a pencil, the follow-ing one (in Hillel Halkins evocative translation) from Redemptionthrough Sin, Scholems programmatic essay on Sabbatianism: The de-sire for total liberation which played so tragic a role in the developmentof Sabbatian nihilism was by no means a purely self-destructive force;on the contrary, beneath the surface of lawlessness, antinomianism, andcatastrophic negation, powerful constructive impulses were at work, and

The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2005)Copyright 2005 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved.

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these, I maintain, it is the duty of the historian to uncover. My previousschooling had been more in the tradition of the duties of the heart thanthe duties of the historian, and nihilism was something I knew only fromthe novels of Dostoevsky (I still had no clue as to what antinomianismwas), so this was heady stuff.

In 1980, after soaking up my share of Scholem stories during two yearsat the Hebrew University, and even sighting the Master occasionally inthe Hebrew University, I was doubly curious to learn about his life. Thevery first page indicated that, in true kabbalistic style, some things wouldbe revealed and others would remain hidden. The memoir would extendonly through 1925, when the twenty-eight-year-old native of Berlinbegan teaching at the newly founded Hebrew University in Jerusalem.No explanation was given for why it would stop abruptly there. Fromthe subsequent (and posthumous) publication of Scholems letters, how-ever, it became clear that the decade following 1925 witnessed the tragicbreakdown of his first marriage to Escha Burchhardt, who had come toPalestine six months before him (as the fictitious fiancee of Haifas futuremayor Abba Houshi), and who arranged, through the philosopher HugoBergmann, whose assistant she became at the Jewish National Libraryin Jerusalem, an equally fictitious appointment for her true fiance as headof the librarys Hebrew section. Ironically, in late 1936 the first Mrs.Scholem would become the second Mrs. Bergmann.

This was hardly the only ironic turn of events in Scholems life. In hiswritings on Sabbatianism, including the fiery essay Redemption throughSin (published in the year following his divorce and remarriage), Scho-lem had been an unrelenting critic of the nineteenth-century historianHeinrich Graetz. I learned, at the beginning of the third chapter (bywhich point my bus was approaching Hartford), that it was after firstreading Graetz that young Gerhard, who had been raised in a highlyassimilated family, had decided to learn Hebrew. He had been alerted tothe existence of Graetzs Geschichte der Juden by his (Jewish) religionteacher in high school, and after devouring the three volumes of thepopular edition in the Jewish Community Councils library, he requestedthemtogether with Theodor Mommsens four-volume Romische Gesch-ichteas a present from his parents and uncle for his bar-mitzvah, whichin his family was celebrated just before the thirteenth birthday.

Thus, already as a teenager, Scholem was constructing his own synthe-sis of Rome and Jerusalem. This synthesis, as was customary among Ger-man youth of the time, was comprised not only of intellectual elementsbut also experiential ones. If I ask myself, Scholem wrote, whether Iever had what one might call an Erlebnis . . . in my relationship to things

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Jewish, I can only give one answer: it was the thrill I experienced on aSunday in April 1913. It was then, he explained, that Dr. Isaak Bleich-rode, a great-grandson of Rabbi Akiba Eger, taught me to read the firstpage of the Talmud in the original, and later that day the exegesis byRashi . . . of the first verses of Genesis. Scholem was deeply drawn toparadox (see, for example, the epigraph to Shabbetai Zevi, in both theHebrew and English editions), and it is therefore paradoxically appro-priate that the formative Jewish experience of the greatest scholar ofJewish mysticism occurred while studying Berakhot and Rashi on Bereshit,rather than Bahya or the Bahirthe latter of which he later translatedfor his 1922 dissertation.

In the previous year Scholem, then still in his early twenties, had pub-lished a German translation of a story by S. Y. Agnon, whom he had firstmet during the spring of 1917 in the same Jewish Community Councillibrary in which he had earlier hungrily devoured the three volumes ofGraetz. Agnon, who had been born in Galicia but had come to Berlinafter several years in Jaffa, was also a voracious reader, and Scholemrecalled seeing him leafing tirelessly through the librarys Hebrew cardcatalogue. The great Hebrew writer, with whom he became close friends,later explained to Scholem, probably tongue in cheek, that he had beenlooking for books that I have not read yet.

The two resumed their friendship in Palestine, and would meet notonly in Jerusalem, where they both lived, but also in Tel Aviv, whereboth had an open invitation to the home of Chaim Nachman Bialik. Thelatter, Scholem explained in the penultimate chapter of his biography(when the bus was somewhere around Worcester), had been particularlydrawn by the rare (and perhaps to him paradoxical) phenomenon of aGerman Jew who could speak Hebrew and read kabbalistic books. Theconversation in Bialiks home was always scintillating, and Agnon wouldoften say to his younger friend, Dont forget to write down in your note-book what you heard. Scholem, however, tells us that he had open earsbut no notebook and did not write anything down.

Conversation, indeed, is one of those things that autobiographies are mostvaluable for recording, though rarely reliable for, in the scientific sense,if what we seek is verbatim transcript. Yet autobiographers often writeas if they had such a transcript before themas in Scholems quotationsof Agnons quips. One of the greatest (and most legendary) conversation-alists of the twentieth century was Isaiah Berlin, upon whose knighthoodin 1957 a former lover congratulated him (in what his biographer, Mi-chael Ignatieff, has called a feline letter) for his services to conversa-

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tion. Berlins collection of essays Personal Impressions (1981), waspublished shortly after the appearance of From Berlin to Jerusalem, and Idevoured it, still as a graduate student, no less hungrily. Though theseessays, on a rich array of figures ranging from J. L. Austin to ChaimWeizmann, are all purportedly biographical, each is also autobiographi-calsometimes to an equal degree. To know a great man is to changeones notions of what a human being can do or be, wrote Noel Annan inhis introduction to Berlins volume, and indeed the essays includedtherein often reveal how their authors own notions of what a humanbeing can do or be were changed by his personal encounters with thevolumes subjects.

This is true, for example, of the remarkable essay on the British histo-rian Lewis Namier, who had been born Ludwik Bersztajn vel Niemirow-ski to a wealthy and highly assimilated Polish Jewish family in 1888, thesame year as Agnon, and had spent most of his youth on his familysestates in Eastern Galicia, not far from the latters native town Buczacz,but had been raised, of course, under rather different circumstances. Na-miers parents never had their son circumcised and concealed his Jewishidentity from him until he was ten, giving him, as he later told Berlin,the education of a young squire. Like the young Gerhard Scholemsome years later, who noted that his own highly assimilated parents hadno Gentile friends, Ludwik came to realize as an adolescent that theconverted Jews in his circle lived in an unreal world, having aban-doned the traditional misery of their ancestors only to find themselves ina no-mans land between the two camps. Berlin learned all of this (andmuch more) when Namier, whose writing on Zionism he had memorablyencountered but whom he had never previously met, called on him in hisrooms at All Souls shortly after the twenty-three-year-old philosopherbecame, in 1932, the first Jew ever elected to a fellowship at the mostprestigious of Oxfords colleges.

Namierwho had recently published two highly acclaimed books onGeorgian England, which resulted in his appointment to a chair at Man-chesterhad earned a first-class degree in modern history at Balliol Col-lege but was afterward rejected by All Souls, to which he had applied asLudwik Niemirowski, a name he changed soon afterward upon becominga British subject, as may be learned from Linda Colleys incisive 1989biography. The ostensible purpose of Namiers 1932 visit with Berlin wasnot to talk about All Souls or anti-Semitism (two subjects on which hehad strong opinions) but rather Karl Marxabout whom he had heardthat Berlin was writing a book, which he thought was a very bad idea:

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He had some respect for the Fellows of All Souls. He believed them,for the most part, with certain exceptions which he did not wish tomention, to be intellectually qualified to do genuine research work.Marx appeared to him unworthy of such attention: he was a poor histo-rian and a poor economist, blinded by hatred. Why was I not writingabout Freud?

The latters books, according to Namier were, unlike those of Marx,works of genius, and far better written. Besides which, he added, Freudwas still alive, and could be interviewed. Marx, fortunately, was not.Berlins learned visitor was clearly a man who had strong opinions andfew qualms about expressing them in the strongest terms. He was alsodifficult to interrupt.

He stood in the middle of my room and spoke his words in a slow,somewhat hypnotic voice . . . with few intervals between sentences, astrongly central European accent and a frozen expression. He kept hiseyes immovably upon me, frowning now and then, and producing . . .a curious mooing sound which blocked the gaps between his sentencesand made interruptions literally impossible. Not that I dreamt of inter-rupting: the entire phenomenon was too strange, the intensity of theutterance too great; I felt that I was being eyed by a stern and heavyheadmaster who knew precisely what I was at, disapproved, and wasdetermined to set me right and to get his instructions obeyed.

Even after Namier was finally persuaded by his host to sit down, he keptcarping on the subject of Marx, a typical Jewish half-charlatan, heclaimed, who got hold of quite a good idea and then ran it to death justto spite the Gentiles. Berlin then asked whether Namier thought Marxsorigins to be relevant to his views. This, wrote Berlin, turned out tobe the stimulus that he needed to plunge into his own autobiography.The next two hours were full of interest. He spoke almost continuously.Namiers powerful impact, in person and writing, on Berlin may be com-pared to Agnons impact on Scholem: in both instances the younger andmore Westernized scholar, whose Jewish (and Zionist) identity, thoughstrong, is still in flux, meets a wondrously well-read and often willfullydifficult figure of East European origin, who seems to have a deepergrasp of what Jewishness is about than anyone he has yet met.

And in both cases, it may be added, the older figure had already trans-lated his Zionist commitment into praxis. Agnon arrived in Germanyafter several years in Palestine, where he had switched from Yiddish to

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Hebrew as his main literary medium, and Namier had served for twoyears (192931) as political secretary of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.Indeed, in his account of their first meeting, Berlin noted that Namierraised the subject of Zionism, about which he claimed he could not talkto English Jews, who were victims of pathetic illusions, whereas(Gentile) Englishmen understood its appeal and its justifications.

It is worth noting that Berlin made his first visit to Palestine in 1934,two years after the former political secretary of the Jewish Agency paidhim a long visit at All Souls. One wonders if Namier was no less inter-ested then in recruiting the young wunderkind to political Zionism than hewas in dissuading him from writing about Marx. This, after, all, was thesame decade in which, at Trinity College in Cambridge, Anthony Blunt(who was two years older than Berlin) and Guy Burgess (who was twoyears his junior and with whom he was quite friendly) were recruited asSoviet agents by another mysterious Jew from the East. This was ArnoldDeutsch, who went by the code name Otto, and who, like Namier (whohad been analyzed in Vienna by Theodor Reik), was powerfully drawnto Freudian psychoanalysis.

Namiers recommendation to Berlin, at their first meeting, that he shifthis interest from Marx to Freud seems to have had an uncanny influence.In October of 1938, shortly after completing the last revisions of his bookon Marx, Berlin made an appointment to visit Freud, who had recentlyarrived in London. The visit took place on a Friday afternoon, and, asBerlin later told his biographer, Mrs. Freud mentioned her religiouslyobservant cousin Oscar Phillip, who was a friend of his, and then com-plained that her antireligious husband did not permit her to light candleson Friday nights. Every Jewish woman wants to light the Sabbath can-dles on Friday night, but this monster she allegedly said, pointing to herhusband, forbids it. Says that it is a superstition. Freud, with mockgravity, acknowledged that he did indeed regard religion as superstition.

Berlins evocative essay on Namier was first published in 1966sixyears after the latters deathand was written more than three decadesafter their initial meeting, which it describes in considerable detail. LikeScholems recollections of his early encounters with Agnon, Berlin usesquotation marks to designate those words of his interlocutor that are al-legedly rendered verbatim; something he did also, although presumablythrough intonation, in his interviews with Ignatieff during the late 1980s.Yet how likely it is that either Berlin or Scholemespecially the latter,who was a famously (and ferociously) fastidious scholartruly believedthat these quotations were precise? It is perhaps possible that having toldthese stories so often, their respective raconteurs were convinced that

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their prodigious memories had retained them in their verbal as well asfactual detail. It is also possible that they used quotations marks in muchthe way that novelists doa means of distinguishing speech from narra-tion.

Although Berlin evidently told his biographer only about what he hadheard at the Freud home on that Friday afternoon in 1938, and not whathe himself had told the Freuds, I would like to imagine that Britainsgreatest conversationalist might have entertained them with a story ofNamiers response to the aristocratic German who had been visiting Ox-ford, and, in the common room of All Souls, defended his countrys terri-torial demands. Namier, who was visiting for tea as a guest rose, glaredround the room, fixed a basilisk-eye on one of his fellow guests whom hehad, mistakenly . . . assumed to be a German, and said loudly: We Jewsand the other coloured peoples think otherwise. This story, narrated byBerlin in his 1966 essay on Namier, was retold (on the basis of that essay)by Ignatieff in his 1998 biography, where he described it erroneously,however, as the first meeting between the twoand in his note gave thewrong page citation from Personal Impressions). Such errors can only serveto confirm the impression of addicts such as myself that autobiographersare the best biographers. And even when they are less than accurate, Iprefer their intentional lies to the unintentional errors of scholars. Thelies of autobiographers, after all, are part of the trutha paradox thatIm sure Scholem would have appreciated.