REVIEWS

...At this point the "scenario" went awry, and in such a way as to suggest the internal ideological struggle that still continues in the Soviet Union...

...Scholem has been criticized by more orthodox scholars as being overly interested in the more bizarre and destructive aspects of Judaism...

...Who organized the scenario...

...The emphasis was on the individual's day-today life, without major reference to national or social redemption...

...In our own time To Contributors Like other periodicals, we have asked forstamped self-addressed envelopes with submitted articles but sometimes have returned them when such envelopes weren't included...

...GG As a matter of fact, I have observed that your brother suffers from a split personality...

...The emphasis is on the yearning for something totally unprecedented rather than on the adaptation of past revelation to the present...

...This was particularly true after Solzhenitsyn's crucial letter, "This Is How We Live," defending Z. Medvedev and attacking repression through psychiatry...

...This volume, written in alternating chapters by the two brothers, reports on the scheme to confine Zhores Medvedev as a madman...

...Ideas are not automatically adapted to any given age—they involve a commitment which may sometimes take dangerous and bizarre turns...

...While Stalin could rule by purge and arbitrary terror, his successors require the imposition of terror by other means...

...THE MESSIANIC IDEA IN JUDAISM AND OTHER ESSAYS ON JEWISH SPIRITUALITY, by Gershom Scholem...

...Scholem criticizes Martin Buber for depicting Hasidism as a form of religious existtentialism...

...Z. Medvedev nowhere expresses a sense of horror at the ceremonies of degradation involved in his physically painful seizure by the police, his wife being hustled from the scene, or his transformation into the striped uniform of a mental patient...

...Scholem himself has discussed the price demanded by Messianism in a passage which is worth quoting at length: The magnitude of the Messianic idea corresponds to the endless powerlessness in Jewish history during all the centuries of exile, when it was unprepared to come forward onto the plane of world history...

...In a particularly dramatic instance the academician A. D. Sakharov wrote on the 404 blackboard at an international symposium on genetics that he was collecting signatures to protest the illegal committal of Z. Medvedev...

...Attempts at undermining political dissent by describing oppositionists in mental health terms (character assassination of the New Left by some psychoanalysts) have occurred in the U.S...

...Although the direct connection may be tenuous, another aspect of this argument is important—rabbinic Judaism was basically destroyed from within, not simply by secularist criticism...

...The answers provided to these questions, and the meanings thereby attached to human actions, have had profound historical consequences...

...These contests with Soviet bureaucrats are chronicled in the Medvedev papers—an attempt to make public the BOOKS procedures by which decisions are made affecting the rights of Soviet citizens and to force a justification of the way administrative procedures are related to general legislative pronouncements...

...Both raise questions about forced subordination and draw analogies to caste and slavery...

...The very applicability of their ideas in this age of supposed sexual liberation serves as an unhappy reminder that concerning women at least, the more things change, the more they remain the same...

...This building up of expectation augured an explosion...

...Precisely understood, there is nothing concrete which can be accomplished BOOKS by the unredeemed...

...Too many of the arguments he refutes are still raised today, though they are currently masked in Freudian and ethological scientism...

...He escaped...

...Harriet Taylor Mill asks instead what right one group has to decide what another wants and should do...

...Especially since the early 18th century, rabbinic authorities have battled these tendencies, see ing them—and not without reason—as a threat to the survival of the Jewish people itself...

...THE EDITORS BOOKS 402 this tends to be couched more in political than religious terms, but the spectrum of choices is very similar...

...Where previously redemption had concretely meant the return of Israel to its land, now it came to signify a universal reestablishment of things in their proper place...

...What was problematic was no longer just the displacement of a people, but rather the general disarray of the cosmos...

...Meanwhile the psychiatric apparatus for "settling accounts" moved forward...

...John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, seems wedded to the notion of wife as helpmate, does not even consider the notion of a working wife (though he argues that single women should be permitted to work to the fullest of their abilities), and feels women should be educated so that the minds of their husbands will not deteriorate for lack of intelligent discussion...

...Its very coolness seems a conscious political decision to demonstrate mental competence...

...The ferment in Soviet intellectual life became sufficiently visible so that the case took on an international character...

...Caught in the vortex of a conspiracy, neither brother raises his voice (though there are some barbed remarks about the sanity of the neo-Stalinist writer Shevtsov, and by indirection about Stalin and Lysenko) nor do they give in to the kind of nattering paranoia that afflicts many radicals in the U.S...

...It may also be owing to a strategy adopted by certain dissidents in Russia: to take at face value the democratic protestations of the Soviet Constitution and thereby force the authorities into the embarrassment of explaining their deviations from it...

...Internal regeneration was emphasized...

...Although Rossi does not solve this historical puzzle (indeed, for dearth of adequate materials, no one really has), her analysis of the controversy concerning Harriet Taylor Mill's role in the work of her friend and husband is of particular merit...

...As a result there is a constant unresolved tension in religion...

...First, the apocalyptic element—which stressed the relationship between the coming of the Messiah and new moral conduct—was strengthened...

...For the Messianic idea is not only consolation and hope...

...Both saw the coming of the Messiah as ushering in an age where the law or Halakah would be truly fulfilled, including many commandments that could not be fulfilled in exile...

...Redemption then is the restoration of harmony or the setting of things back into their proper places...

...Given the choice between the external facts and their personal experience, they chose to follow the latter...

...Rossi points out that John Stuart Mill's writings on women stand as seminal work...

...As Robert Alter has pointed out, once the Jewish people believed redemption was at hand, it could never again be content with the confined world of the ghetto Jew...

...Not only was the conversion of Sabbatai Zevi a necessary step in the coming of redemption, but that redemption had already begun despite the fact of the exile still continuing...

...This contained quality is perhaps brought about by the fact that the struggle still goes on to increase the predictability and surety of personal life for the Soviet citizen...

...Following the well-known dictum that authors reveal as much of themselves as they do of the subjects whose ideas they analyze, Rossi argues convincingly that authors who wish to discredit Mill's socialist ideas attribute them to his wife, while socialists wishing to emphasize his later, socialist period, disclaim her influence...

...Scholem claims that this destruction of old values paved the way for the Haskalah or Jewish enlightenment and for the 19th-century reform movements...

...In one way or another, the belief evolved that the apostasy of the Messiah had been a necessary development...

...it never bums itself out...

...It diminishes the singular worth of the individual, and he can never fulfill himself, because the incompleteness of his endeavors eliminates precisely what constitutes its highest value...

...External factors provide the settings or opportunities within which inner transformations unfold...

...For two themes consistently emerge from these writings...

...There's something preliminary, something provisional about Jewish history: hence its inability to give of itself entirely...

...Although her introductory essay concerns questions of intellectual history, Rossi makes it abundantly clear that her interest is heavily political...

...Most striking about this book is its curiously calm and legalistic tone...

...edited and with an introduction by Alice S. Rossi...

...Every religion has its City of God or spiritual utopia...

...At one point in "Subjection," to refute notions of innate inferiority, he parades a panoply of female rulers who have been abler than most male rulers, an impulse almost avoided in "The Enfranchisement of 406 Women," which is attributed to Harriet Taylor Mill by Rossi...

...At the core of every religion is the problem of making sense out of injustice, imperfection, disorder, and human limitation...

...There was thus an implicit threat to the Torah and Halakah in this apocalyptic speculation...

...Itshould be noted that his writing is remarkablyclear and accessible to nonspecialists...

...For Scholem, tradition is not simply a cultural patrimony handed down over the generations...

...When, a year later, Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam under the threat of martyrdom, the result was traumatic...

...He is a biologist, but is also involved with many other things which bear little relation to his immediate responsibilities...

...Hasidism was another reaction to this Messianic disappointment, one which aimed at the neutralization of the Messianic element...

...that have a conservative animus against all psychological explanations...

...THE SMALL VICTORY is evidence of a change in the balance of power between the individual Soviet citizen and the state...

...And it came...

...If these two views had simply been separate and opposite, the conflict would have been clear-cut...

...This edition is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to present the Mill-Taylor materials as a comprehensive and self-contained unit...

...But whichever way it went, the brunt of the nihilistic thrust was that "externals were no indication of true faith...

...Ignoring Engels's later contribution (although it is indeed about the family, not explicitly about women), she identifies "Subjection" as one of three landmark volumes on women published within the past 100 years, the only one written by a man...

...Indeed, one notes with some sadness the conBOOKS tinuing relevance of the Mills' arguments for the equal treatment of women with men...

...There are papers on Jewish Messianism, on aspects of Jewish tradition, on Jewish symbols and sects, and an important critique of Martin Buber's approach to Hasidism...

...But now it was seen as a logical outgrowth of history—something toward which progress is made—signifying its completion and giving it meaning...

...In the Biblical prophecies this consisted of the restoration of the House of David...

...Yet at no point do either of the Medvedevs use expressive language to detail their personal response...

...What had previously been important—the historical and national aspects—came increasingly to be regarded as merely the visible external confirmations of this moral regeneration...

...The cost of doing so has become prohibitive, and we have to announce that from now on we will not return any manuscript unless itcomes with a stamped self-addressed envelope...

...For although one occasionally tastes a 19thcentury flavor in these essays, drafted between 1831 or 1832 and 1861, they speak forthrightly and touch on 20th-century concerns...

...Medvedev was not accused of a crime, therefore no forensic psychiatrist should have been involved...

...Scholem didn't publish his first major work until he was in his forties,' because he had spent the first two decades of his scholarly career searching for and analyzing lost or neglected manuscripts...

...It is an occurrence which takes place in the visible world and which cannot be conceived apart from such a visible appearance...

...his two-volumework on Sabbatai Zevi will be published in translation next year by Princeton University Press...

...The uncomfortable point of this was that the utopian view saw a change in man's nature—the Messianic age would be an age of true freedom in which fulfillment would be spontaneous, coming freely and naturally from the individual...

...She uses a similar principle to dissect the assessment of Harriet Taylor made by the Mills' contemporaries...

...THE MAIN THEME that ties these essays together is the historical yearning for redemption...

...These are scenes that seem to demand the language of a Kafka, a Dostoevsky, or a Wright...

...This more general notion of redemption and exile, which developed in the 16th century, had a widespread influence among the masses of Jews, and at least one reason was that it met a need for an explanation of the recent catastrophe in Spain...

...As a result, many documents have been destroyed, suppressed, or simply forgotten in various libraries or repositories...

...Enfranchisement of Women," reprinted from Westminster Review...

...The more radical wing saw the true faith as one which must be denied outwardly and concealed...

...two short essays by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, reprinted from F. A. Hayek's John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage...

...Messianic apocalypticism opened the window through which an anarchic breeze blew in...

...The Soviet Constitution and high-level legal pronouncements securing individual rights are quite visible, but not so the infrastructure that makes day-to-day decisions which conform, if they do conform, to the principles of Soviet legality...

...it is, rather, a complex, living phenomenon, with its inner tensions working themselves out in history...

...Beginning in February 1970 a series of attempts, of decreasing subtlety, sought to get Z. Medvedev to an interview with a psychiatrist...

...Wreckers" who would have been executed in the three decades of Stalin's rule are now described as possessing an "obsessive delusion of being...

...Hasidism was not "redemption from exile, but redemption in exile...

...It is in this difficult struggle that the Medvedevs and many others in the emergent Soviet middle class are engaged...

...But one saw the restoration of an idealized past, while the other saw a more radical transformation...

...One thing that has characterized legality in the Soviet Union has been that it is almost impossible to discover bow low-level and interBOOKS mediate decisions affecting individuals are made...

...historical destiny...

...Apart from apologist motives and a rationalist bias, there is also the fact that it has been extremely difficult to obtain detailed information on these "irrational" elements...

...q John H. Gagnon Terror by Other Means A QUESTION OF MADNESS, by Zhores Medvedev and Roy Medvedev...

...His release was ordered on June 17...

...Scholem is concerned with abstract ideas—but what is important is these ideas as experienced dilemmas and ways of looking at the world...

...His other important book inEnglish is On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1965...

...5.95...

...The more moderate Sabbatians interpreted this to mean that, although they should not follow their master's apostasy, internally they were free...

...The answer is that only by looking at the whole spectrum of historical responses can we really understand the main tradition...

...This makes for the greatness of Messianism, but also for its constitutional weakness...

...the destruction of exile by its spiritualization...

...With these words the head psychiatrist at Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital justified to Roy Medvedev the confinement of his twin brother Zhores Medvedev...

...John Stuart Mill argues that it is impossible to distinguish between socialized and innate gender characteristics (to use contemporary sociological terms), since the rearing and status of the sexes have always been dissimilar...

...What happened was that potentially anarchic and antinomian tendencies that had long been dormant now burst into the open...

...When this need becomes widespread, the dynamics of faith come into sharper focus...

...Under the guise of contacting Medvedev's older son (suffering from the malaise of the children of the new class, he is a "hippie"), Z. Medvedev was "accidentally" locked in a room at the local psychiatric clinic...

...The findings of this committee were inconclusive and it became clear that the bureaucratic apparatus was unable to press its case against Z. Medvedev...

...In the face of rising new elites the apparatus seems to be losing its nerve...

...If it was the latter, a hard-line faction could have been testing the ideological situation by experimentally imprisoning Z. Medvedev...

...Several of John Stuart Mill's arguments may appear objectionable...

...Knowing that these compulsory psychiatric contacts have been used to imprison dissidents, he carefully avoided other interviews...

...Intellectuals, writers, film-makers, academicians, old Bolsheviks protested by sending telegrams, visiting Z. Medvedev in the hospital, and contacting friends in ministries...

...The picture of Judaism that emerges from this work is that of a religious tradition which is constantly trying to make sense of a unique 1 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941...

...Both dismiss condemnations of women by female writers by noting the extent to which these women are dependent on men...

...Ever since the underground circulation in the early 1960s of Biology and the Cult of Personality (published in the U.S...

...As a madman, condemned for his "obsessive reformist delusions," his challenges to the structure of Soviet legality would have been tainted...

...And high time it is too...

...This view, not, of course, unique or original with Scholem, explains his interest in the nonrational, emotional, or uncodified aspects of Judaism: for it is this dimension that gives us an insight into the aspirations of a people at a historical moment...

...Given the historical situation of the Jews, 400 it is not surprising that this visible appearance has always been seen in terms of the end of exile...

...Finally, on May 29, 1970, the police and a psychiatrist forced their way into his flat and after a rather Chekhovian debate with Z. Medvedev, his wife and neighbors, he was seized and taken to the Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital...

...Beginning with his first volume, an attack on Lysenkoism which was, perhaps, allowed to be circulated as part of the struggle in the Central Committee to discredit Khrushchev's agricultural policies, Zhores Medvedev has been actively involved in discussions about restrictions on foreign travel, contact with foreign scientists, and censorship of mail...

...Besides, he is always dissatisfied about something, always fighting against something...

...In her introductory essay, Alice Rossi asks how John Stuart Mill came to write about women, a question that inevitably leads to the thorny issue of Harriet Taylor Mill's intellectual influence on his work...

...It could have been the Lysenkoists occupying scientific posts of great power, the censorship sections of the Postal Services, the scientific and tourism agencies, or even competing factions of the Central Committee...

...Judaism has traditionally been seen as a highly ethical and legalistic religion...

...But this should not be misunderstood—redemption was still seen as mystical and its universalization was spiritual and metaphoric...

...Judaism, on the con trary, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community...

...Perhaps more important, it is this dimension that serves as a counterforce to established authority and so can be seen as a source of the dialectical tension which makes a tradition a living one...

...Two of those who protested his incarceration were called before the Union of Writers and the Union of Cinematographers to be disciplined...

...Religious institutions try to channel spiritual aspirations by prescribing correct behavior in this world, but some individuals seek a direct personal redemption...

...But Soviet citizens face an entire landscape of inscrutable decision-makers whose normal procedures are institutionalized Stalinism...

...1.95...

...In one very modem passage, she argues that the full employment of women and men is preferable, even if the income of individual families would remain the same, and she writes of housework as an unpaid job...

...For if traditional law is to a large extent restrictive, it would appear to dissolve and lose its meaning in the Messianic age where, in fact, a new Torah might be required or where, in a negative twist, previously rejected interpretations of the Torah might now become more relevant...

...Nihilism, for example, is not simply an abandonment of belief, it is a particular solution to a crisis of faith...

...There is something grand about living in hope, but at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about it...

...Chicago: University of Chicago Press...

...The volume is divided into four parts: a lengthy introductory essay by Alice S. Rossi...

...At last John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill's writings on the condition of women in Victorian society have been made available to the general reading public...

...champions of truth and justice" and are sequestered in madhouses...

...Although the previous century had seen a host of local Messianic movements, this one spread like wildfire throughout the various Jewish communities...

...Almost always, the religious solution has been a sort of denial of this imperfect world—the world is seen as anteroom or stage, and men's conduct in it interpreted in the light of another, purer reality...

...It was not the fleeting moment or the immediate present that man entered into relation with, but "with what is hidden in the essentially irrelevant garment of the here and now...

...The emotional commitment had been so deep that for large sections of the Jewish people it took the form of refusing "to submit to the sentence of history by admitting that their own personal experience had been false and untrustworthy...

...Yet many of the Mills' arguments remain fresh...

...Especially after the expulsion, there was another important development in Messianic thought—this time within the mystical tradition...

...Increasingly there developed a more purely universalistic interpretation of the galut or exile...

...So long as utopia was the far future, it was merely intellectual speculation and while it might cause some unease, it was not an active threat...

...It is this other, more harmonious reality that provides meaning and in its terms the thwarted potentialities of this world are seen...

...Such arguments are today reminiscent of abolitionists parading "exceptional" ex-slaves before rallies to prove that blacks are not intellectually inferior...

...And even this weapon is weakening as the Medvedevs and others loyal to the Soviet Union and the idea of Communism mobilize to create that procedural legality which implements abstract ideals...

...Within Christianity, redemption has been seen as occurring essentially in the spiritual realm, in the private soul...

...q Gaye Tuchman Pioneers of Liberation ESSAYS ON SEX EQUALITY, by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill...

...Although Scholem is concerned with Jewish history, these essays have broader implications...

...In other words, what was important in Hasidism was not to enjoy life as it is, but rather to extract from it a sense of transcendent unity...

...Medvedev notes that the Serbsky psychiatrist had been wellbriefed on his past and that extended investigations had apparently been conducted to develop evidence of his mental instability...

...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...

...Unfortunately, such materials are not available, and Rossi's argument appears quite plausible and well-reasoned...

...Second, that prejudices concerning the inferiority of women must be dismissed as just that—prejudices...

...After the protests mounted still another examining committee was organized, which met a day early to avoid the presence of a legally required independent psychiatrist selected by Roy Medvedev...

...If any one person has been responsible for a major reinterpretation of Jewish history in this regard, it has been Gershom Scholem, now professor emeritus of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University...

...DESPITE SUCH SIMILARITIES, the essays by Harriet Taylor Mill and by John Stuart Mill remain quite distinct from each other...

...One may wonder about the basis of Rossi's attribution of "Enfranchisement of Women" to Harriet Taylor Mill...

...Murder will not do, though "psychoadaptation" is still possible...

...There was a return to what had existed before—yet something had ended...

...They prefer, perhaps healthily, a rhetoric of good and evil...

...John Mill in particular amasses in "Subjection" a plethora of arguments with which to dismiss evidence concerning the inferiority of women and then demonstrates that even if women are inferior, they are still ill-treated by society...

...This captivity was, as Zhores Medvedev says, the culmination of a carefully worked out "scenario" to discredit dissent in the Soviet Union...

...IF ONE HAD TO PICK A YEAR to mark the beginning of modern Jewish history, 1665 would be better than most...

...223 pp...

...The consequences were significant...

...This hope presupposes the feeling that things are askew—that the soul is in disarray and the world out of order...

...But after the destruction of the Second Temple and during the Middle Ages a new conception began to develop, and much of the subsequent tension within Judaism can be seen as a conflict between two visions of redemption—one restorative, the other utopian...

...Harriet Taylor Mill's early essay and the "Enfranchisement" attributed to her are by far the more radical...

...Earlier Jewish historians tended to see this element as aberrant and atypical...

...but so far such practices do not characterize the repressive forces in the U.S...

...Such attributions are notoriously tricky, and the analysis of hand-written draft materials would certainly be more reliable...

...Every attempt to realize it tears open the abysses which lead each of its manifestations ad absurdum...

...When Z. Medvedev was released he was assured that no further issue would be made of his alleged madness, yet papers were forwarded to the local psychiatric agencies indicating that he was neurotic and needed treatment...

...On Saturday, May 30, Z. Medvedev met with the local hospital's psychiatric committee, and on May 31 a second meeting included a forensic psychiatrist from the Serbsky Institute, an agency deeply implicated in the use of psychiatry against dissent...

...Given the political nature of these materials, even in our own time, this interest is more than appropriate...

...and the famous "The Subjection of Women...

...That year Sabbatai Zevi was proclaimed the Messiah by Nathan of Gaza...

...In the redeemed world what once was obscure is clear, behavior that had to be prescribed flows freely in the right direction, frustrated potentialities are realized...

...From a Western point of view they seem almost too good, too sturdy, too noble...

...While the issuance of passports to dissenters in the U.S...

...The Messianic Idea in Judaism provides the best introduction to Scholem's work, with essays that span his career from an early one on Sabbatianism to a whimsical piece on the computer as Golem...

...BOTH MEDVEDEVS offer compelling arguments for the existence of a deep conspiracy including the local party headquarters and the Procurator's office in Obninsk, the Kaluga region educational and medical agencies, and extending to the KGB and the Ministries of Education and Medicine at the national level...

...Although traditionally it had been held that the coming of the Messiah could not be calculated, now there were increasing attempts to do just that...

...Had the "scenario" succeeded, Z. Medvedev would have gone the way of Grigorenko and many other nameless or less famous people...

...Second, a new relationship was seen between the coming of the Messiah and history...

...for others it meant the deliberate violation of the Torah and the path of "redemption through sin...

...has been a matter of controversy, at least the procedures by which a legal challenge could be made were known...

...rather, redemption was seen almost as a miracle, a gift of God...

...But when Messianic expectations became more widespread—especially after the expulsion from Spain in 1492— the threat became manifest...

...First, that political, legal, and moral issues concerning the family cannot be "solved" without broaching and solving questions about the status of women...

...Thus in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished...

...Yet coexisting with this dominant strain there has also been a very strong mystical and apocalyptic undercurrent...

...One may say, perhaps, the Messianic idea is the real antiexistentialist idea...

...Jewish so-called Existenz possesses a tension that never finds true release...

...Despite these ticklish issues, the introductory essay should be particularly worthwhile reading for those unfamiliar with the Mills' work on sex equality, as well as for those in the women's movement...

...The Medvedevs' response to this continued harassment has been to publish this dispassionate report of the "facts that are of such public importance...

...She explains it is based upon "an internal analysis of this essay, a comparison with the earlier 1832 essays, and Mill's later famous one in 1869," and she also draws upon the Mills' correspondence...

...THE PLOT WENT WRONG when Roy Medvedev succeeded in mobilizing a widespread protest among the Soviet elite...

...Judaism is seen not just as reacting to external forces, but also as possessing an internal dynamic or immanent development that takes place within the limits set by those forces...

...as The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko), Zhores Medvedev has been a central figure in the civil rights movement of the Soviet "new class...

...242 pp...

...For some this meant converting and becoming Marranos...

...Previously, the dawning of the Messianic age had no connection with what preceded it in history...

...And while Kabbalistic speculation had at first been mainly concerned BOOKS with personal redemption, this feeling of personal disarray increasingly merged with a feeling of universal disorder and exile...