Israel Zinberg: The Scholar As Folk Hero
Roskies, David G.
ISRAEL ZINBERG IK SCHOLAR AS FOLK HERO DAVID G. ROSKJES Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature. Translated & edited by Bernard Martin. Hebrew Union College Press & KTAV Publishing House,...
...By day he ran a laboratory in Leningrad...
...Now individuals emerged for the first time and the symbiosis of national and popular literatures was broken...
...the sudden burgeoning of Jewish literary activity in Russian and Polish...
...Even today there are those who reject the notion of a Jewish literature and insist on separating it into Hebrew, Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish components...
...In this novel, the reader's appreciation is greatly enhanced by knowing the extraordinarily adverse conditions under which the author labored...
...Thus, on the roster of those who dared go against the grain, we find not only Schneour Zalman of Lyadi, the founder of Habad Hasidism (vol...
...While from a strictly scholarly viewpoint, much in the History is by now outdated, in the areas of Zinberg's particular expertise—Yiddish literature and the Russian Haskalah—his work is still indispensable...
...The true spiritual heirs of Wissenschaft, writing in the 20s and 30s, likewise derived very little comfort from Zinberg's approach...
...Zinberg worked against time to complete the task, but the Gulag swallowed him up before he could, and only an American-Jewish scholar's intervention some thirty years later rescued an additional installment from the junkheap of history...
...Not that he openly antagonized the regime...
...X, chapters 1, 9...
...One of these was a giant in the realm of philosophical thought...
...Zinberg was the first to recognize the internal bi- and tri-lingual-ism of Ashkenazic Jewry, to place Chassidism alongside the Has-kalah, to challenge the distinctions between the sacred and secular...
...the use of chap-books and sensational potboilers as vehicles of maskilic propaganda...
...The pattern is established for all future generations with the two giants of the Arabic-Spanish period: Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides...
...The astonishing fact about Zinberg, the chemist by day and the supposed heir of German-Jewish scholarship, is that the mystics and dreamers are always claimed the winners...
...At the final stage, individual personalities appear "who are to a certain degree able to free themselves from the boundless sovereignty of the collective...
...Zinberg uses this general pattern to highlight what he sees as the distinctiveness of Jewish culture, namely "the boundless dominion of the community over the individual" and the blending of popular, anonymous creativity with the canonized works of the national literature...
...David G. Roskies teaches literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America...
...Halevi defends the sacred tradition, the religious-ethical legacy which calls for a "categorical imperative" of the heart, while Maimonides' vision of perfection is the solitary way of the individual human personality who holds the free pursuit of philosophical thought higher than the tradition of the fathers (vol...
...Volume I of the History begins at this critical juncture...
...The trick is to demonstrate that such parallel traditions have been around since the very beginning and are now indispensable for negotiating the rough terrain of modernity...
...Zinberg had a keen sense of the audience he was never destined to meet...
...The tradition that Zinberg unearthed was not of codes and commentaries but of Literature: that is, major works of poetry, prose, philosophy and criticism, produced throughout the ages by great men (and a few women) of the spirit...
...A work of such breathtaking scope, written with such passion and pedagogical skill, was produced in the evening hours by a chemical engineer in the midst of a totalitarian regime at odds with everything he stood for...
...Finally, as in every great novel, Zinberg's magnum opus is profoundly autobiographical...
...Now emancipation had already spawned a generation moving rapidly away from the old sources of authority...
...Zionist historians such as Klausner and Lachower, and Yiddishist historians such as Erik and Schipper had an avowed secularist and unilingual slant...
...The History stood completely alone in its day and remains unsurpassed in our own...
...Sometimes an entire chapter will focus either on a catastrophe, such as the Crusades, the Black Death, the Spanish Inquisition or the Chmielnitsky massacres, or on the social upheavals wrought by emancipation and industrialization...
...English readers especially have nowhere else to turn for most of the ground covered in the last six volumes which take us up to the late 1860s...
...the other was an imaginative dreamer, an exalted mystic...
...Only he could include Moses Leib Lilienblum, the Talmudic prodigy turned fiery maskil, and Israel Salanter, the founder of the Musar movement, in one and the same chapter...
...Zinberg wrote his History in order to argue the relevance of this literary heritage even in an emancipated age, and wrote it in Yiddish to stress the central place of Yiddish culture in the thousand-year continuum of European Judaism...
...Here they will discover the rapid pace of modernization within the Pale of Settlement...
...Similarly, five volumes later, Marx is faulted for his narrow-minded attack on the Jewish bourgeoisie, while Heinrich Heine is held up as a shining example of Jewish loyalty (vol...
...When Zinberg waxes eloquent While the Greeks were producing playwrights, poets and philosophers, Jews produced the ultimate collective work...
...And while the Greeks were producing playwrights, poets and philosophers, Jews, at an equal cultural plateau, produced the ultimate collective works, authored by an entire people: the Talmud and Midrash...
...over the great mystics, poets and visionaries, his identification is nearly total...
...Zinberg was the first Soviet Jew to discover that the only book worth writing is a book that could never be published in the Soviet Union...
...But there is one additional criterion for a major personality which comes even closer to the author's self-portrait: he must be "a whole man of one mold who knew of no compromises...
...But it is Zinberg's theory of personalities that bears the burden of proof and represents his most original contribution...
...As an heir of French and German theorists, Zinberg too saw literature as an expression of society, or as Taine formulated it: of race, moment and milieu...
...Such a highly endowed personality rises above the environment...
...It is the catholicity of this work, therefore, that constitutes its greatest achievement, a tribute and testimony to the integrity of its author...
...When, in 1919, he began to rework the completed chapters from Russian into Yiddish, he understood that the tone and orientation of the work would have to change as well...
...But this derives as much from overspecialization as from ideology, for which living scholar can speak with equal authority about Judah Halevi and Abramovitsh, Hasdai Crescas and Isaac Meir Dik...
...This is the procedure followed by Michael Astour in the posthumous volume of the History which he published in 1966...
...In fact, the founders of that school would have turned over in their graves to see piety and mysticism— even radical messianism—upheld over philosophy and rationalism, and to see that hated jargon— Yiddish—receive so much attention...
...No wonder Zinberg was ostracized from the Soviet academies of Jewish research...
...As proof he cites the Book of Proverbs which entered the biblical canon on the strength of its unknown authorship (only later ascribed to King Solomon), as opposed to the Proverbs of Ben Sira which were banned...
...Zinberg's enormous popularity outside the Soviet Union does not in any way dull the fighting edge of his cause...
...Twelve volumes (volumes I-III published by Case Western Reserve...
...There is no better overview of Old Yiddish literature than volume VII of the History...
...In each volume of the present edition, the translator pronounces Zinberg's debt to the school of German-Jewish scholarship known as Wissenschaft des Judentums...
...1972-1978...
...Therefore historical events and social developments figure prominently here...
...This can account for the didactic and effusive style of the original...
...X, p. 139), and— most daring of all—even of the false messiah Shabbetai Zvi over his celebrated contemporary Baruch Spinoza: "At that critical moment [the aftermath of Chmelnitsky] there appeared on the arena of Jewish communal life two antithetical personalities . .. each of which wished to place its stamp on Jewish culture...
...of Samuel David.Luzzatto, the lone romantic among nineteenth century rationalists (vol...
...and of course, a whole gallery of major personalities...
...These men were Baruch Spinoza and Shabbetai Zvi...
...Hebrew Union College Press & KTAV Publishing House, Inc...
...At particular junctures in our history, when the world suddenly looms into sight, we stop to recapitulate, to map the distance traveled and the destination reached...
...the differences between the German and Russian Haskalah...
...One must however question the need for Martin's lengthy bibliographic notes at the end of each volume...
...I, pp...
...It is both a rationally ordered Guide through the complex course of Jewish creativity and a Book to Delight the heart with words of comfort, concern and transcendence...
...In preparing the work for the English reader, Bernard Martin wisely edited the more unwieldly passages, though the translation comes out a bit lugubrious nonetheless...
...The great personalities are able to transcend the claims of the collective, although to compound the problem, the personalities write not for their own benefit, but to vie for the loyalty of that same collective...
...When full-fledged academies of Jewish research were established in Minsk and Kiev, each with its own publishing outlets, Zinberg shied away...
...The turning point came during the Arab conquest of Spain, which launched the cultural ascendancy of European Jewry...
...the Emancipation, another...
...V, p. 130) Spinoza's case is marred by his vendetta against the Amsterdam community...
...Instead, he incorporated the achievements of Soviet Jewish scholarship and defied the slogans of the New Society by writing an epic on the glories of the Old...
...To find fault with the scholarly apparatus of this edition is simply to emphasize that Zinberg's is a book for the people...
...Nothing in this work is neutral...
...202-226...
...He gets a mere seven pages as compared to fifteen for Shabbetai Zvi...
...Zinberg cast his net wider than anyone before or since, encompassing events, genres and personalities in one fell swoop...
...Culture, he argues in his introduction, follows a progressive development from its primitive, eclectic beginnings to its full maturation...
...Ill, pp...
...vol...
...Zinberg's History reads like a novel...
...Greater is his emphasis on genres: parody, romance, ethical and legalistic works, custom books and storybooks, all with a critical eye for innovation and for poor imitation...
...Were there a comparable list for the twentieth century, Israel Zinberg, the defender of the faith and of an integrated Jewish culture, would surely be right at the top...
...IX), but also the great enlightenment figures Moses Mendelssohn (VIII), Leopold Zunz, Nahman Krochmal (X), Isaac Baer Levinsohn (XI) and Abramovitsh-Mendele (XII...
...148-9...
...And when such a personality produces a poetic work, it expresses not only the consciousness and world outlook of the community but of its own soul...
...For a non-specialized reader, it would have been preferable to update Zinberg's footnotes with more recent studies, editions and available translations...
...The Renaissance was one such time...
...Its central themes are the struggle of rationalism and piety, the rise of great leaders and Jewish survival in a hostile world...
...Thanks to this cultural cartography, we discover scenic routes and hidden trails that run along and across the king's highway of rabbinic tradition...
...This is true of Hasdai Crescas in his battle with the utilitarian rationalism of Ger-sonides (vol...
...And vie they do, for in each era and area of Jewish creativity, Zinberg sees the mystics battling the rationalists, men of the heart opposed to men of the mind...
...Henceforth popular works would be relegated to the Jewish vernaculars (J udezmo, Yiddish), while the national works would continue to appear in Hebrew...
...Israel Zinberg's massive History of Jewish Literature is a response to the emancipation of Central and Eastern European Jewry...
Vol. 5 • September 1980 • No. 8
