I have found John Barton’s defence of “biblical criticism” as a fundamentally semantic or literary enterprise extremely helpful in clarifying what I mean by a narrative-historical hermeneutic. The biblical text relates, on the one hand, to how things really were, and it is the task of historical-criticism to examine that referential relationship: is the text what it purports to be? does it give an accurate and trustworthy account of the people and events to which it refers? But the text relates, on the other hand, to the communities which produced and read it. This is also a historical relationship, but the critical task in this case is primarily to understand what is being said by and for the benefit of the original communities. It is this emphasis on what is being said that is so valuable in [amazon:978-0664225872:inline].
I plan to look more broadly at Barton’s argument in a further post or two. Here, I want to highlight his discussion of R. Kendall Soulen’s book [amazon:978-0800628833:inline], because it reinforces the point that I made in this post and in a session at the Christian Associates conference recently about the tendency of our theologies to reduce the biblical story to a stylized triptych of personal redemption. I don’t have Soulen’s book to hand, so I am reliant on Barton’s discussion.
In Barton’s words, Soulen argues that “Christianity has construed the Old Testament as containing the first two steps in a four-stage history of universal providence, consisting of creation, fall, redemption through Christ, and final consummation”. This scheme is found in virtually all theologies, but it “actually falsifies the natural shape and progression of the Old Testament story”. For the Jewish reader, the Hebrew Bible is not about creation and fall but about “God’s providential guidance of Israel”.
If it is open-ended, that is not because it requires completion through the work of Christ to reverse the results of the fall, but because it leads into the subsequent history of the Jewish people. (107)
Christians have imposed an extraneous meaning on the Old Testament. Soulen argues that the Jewish reading is to be preferred and—again in Barton’s words—that “Christians ought to revisit their own scheme of things and change it accordingly”. Barton appears to detect something of a pro-Jewish bias behind Soulen’s argument: on the one hand, the Hebrew Bible belongs to the Jews so they should set the rules for reading it; on the other, it makes “some reparation for centuries of supersessionism”. But the basic point is that the Jewish reading “does better justice to the contours of the text”. It gives us the “plain sense” of the text, which is what Barton’s book is all about.
The plain sense of the Hebrew Bible, Soulen would argue, is better conveyed by the Jewish interpretation of it as concerned with the providential history of the people of Israel—to which the primeval history in Genesis 1-11 is a kind of prologue—than by the Christian sense that creation and fall provide the key and the entire subsequent history is little more than comment on that, or merely provides a matrix for the prophetic promises of the coming of Christ. (108)
I think that Soulen’s emphasis on the “providential history of the people of Israel” is broadly correct, and I would argue further that the Christian Bible should be thought of in similar terms: it is, all the way through, the theological interpretation of the history of the people of God, not the narrative—or worse, allegorical—embodiment of prior theological truth. This is part of what it will mean for Christians to “revisit their own scheme of things”: we will have to learn to read the New Testament in the light of the Old Testament, rather than vice versa.
As far as I can tell, however, from Barton’s brief summary of Soulen’s argument, he appears not to have allowed for the emerging eschatological element in the providential history of the people of Israel. The story is not quite as open-ended as he suggests.
The clash between Israel and the nations gives rise to the hope that eventually YHWH will judge and rule over the empires which had over the centuries invaded, defeated, exiled and oppressed his people. The Psalmist calls on God to “judge the earth; for you shall inherit all the nations” (Ps. 82:8). Israel’s king will be given the nations as his heritage, the ends of the earth as his possession; he will “break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel” (Ps. 2:9; cf. Ps. 110). The ends of the earth will bow the knee to YHWH and swear allegiance to him (Is. 45:22-23). The nations and peoples which had once served the mighty idolatrous empires will serve the faithful people of the saints of the Most High (Dan. 7:13, 27).
This is the large political-religious “goal” of the providential history of the people of Israel as it is narrated in the Old Testament. The telos, the end, is not Christ. It is the rule of YHWH, the living creator God who chose Israel as his own people, over the nations. It is the kingdom of God. The claim which the New Testament makes is that this extraordinary transformation of the ancient world would come about only through faithful and painful witness to the fact that YHWH raised his Son from the dead and gave him the right to receive this eschatological glory from the nations.
For the Jewish reader, the Hebrew Bible is not about creation and fall but about “God’s providential guidance of Israel”. — See more at: http://www.postost.net/2013/08/john-barton-biblical-critici…
Do you think someone, eg Barton or Soulen, should ask a Jew, eg Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, exactly what a contemporary (that means now, not then) Jewish interpretation of Israel’s story is — if the story is meant to be about Israel and for Israel?
I think the problem is that Israel’s story was clearly leading somewhere, especially after the exile, until around AD 135, when the expectation of national redemption and triumph against pagan, idolatrous empires, seems finally to have been abandoned.
A telos, but not of a national nature, was not abandoned by Jews, and subsequently Gentiles, who were followers of and believers in Jesus, however. So I don’t know where Barton and Soulen are taking the story, but I think there is a big problem for readings which attempt to put boundaries around the narrative by restricting it to ‘Israel’s story’.
I’d love to ask Jonathan Sacks what he makes of the Exodus as a story in search of a conclusion, how that fits with current Jewish thought and practice, and why Jesus is rejected as one who led that story its telos.
@peter wilkinson:
The exodus story reached its conclusion. The people entered the land of Canaan. What are you talking about?
@Andrew Perriman:
The exodus story reached its conclusion. The people entered the land of Canaan. — See more at: http://www.postost.net/2013/08/john-barton-biblical-critici…
Really?
@peter wilkinson:
That’s not very helpful. Please explain what you’re getting at.
@Andrew Perriman:
I was wondering what you were getting at! The Exodus is a story in search of a conclusion, which was not the entry of the Israelites into the promised land.
The climax of the Exodus story was the giving of the law at Sinai. Yet even while the Law was being given, Israel was in rebellion. This story required an exceptional conclusion, if it was to be concluded successfully, and entering the land in itself was by no means the conclusion which the story was seeking. It needed a better conclusion.
The conclusion which the story was seeking is introduced already in Deuteronomy 10:16, expanded in Deuteronomy 30:6, developed further in Jeremiah 31:31-33, and reprised as an accomplished fact in Hebrews (Hebrews 10:16/17). This conclusion is a new covenant, in which the wrongs of creation, recapitulated repetitively and incrementally in Israel’s tortuous history, are righted by Israel, in the form of one person, Jesus.
Creation, of course, was not a biological concept as raised by the natural sciences of today, but the inhabited world, and the people of God in their land and in their history in particular. Creation’s destiny, like the destiny of the land, depended on the destiny of the people of God. This kind of creation-consciousness is particularly felt in the Psalms, but is amply illustrated throughout the OT.
The Exodus story and giving of the Law was re-enacted in the passover meal Jesus shared with his disciples. Luke 22:20 has “the new covenant in my blood” at its centre, Matthew and Mark likewise (where “new” is added in variant manuscripts, but is scarcely needed to illustrate the focal point of the theme).
The Exodus story is wedded to the Sinai ceremony in the Passover meal — the two are indissoluble. Taking up the strands of the OT mentioned, in my opinion from very earliest times, through the prophets, Jeremiah in particular, and with increased focus from the return from exile onwards when the question of YHWH’s return to the temple was added to the complex of ideas, the sense of a story in search of a conclusion is heightened further.
The OT timeline illustrates the momentum towards a “fulness of time” in Jesus: from Abraham to Moses at Sinai circa 500 years (the years of the patriarchs); from Moses to David circa 500 years (the years of the judges); from David to the Exile circa 500 years (the years of the kings); from the return from Exile to the coming of Jesus circa 500 years. Each period was in its own way one of failure, nevertheless adding crucial elements to the story whose lines would converge in Jesus himself.
From the point of view of a Jew looking at Israel’s history today, which was my initial question about Barton and Soulen’s thesis, I would have to ask how the Hebrew scriptures can be the scriptures of a people who do not embrace this sense of a story seeking a conclusion. Where and how and in whom do they expect such a conclusion? I suspect that most have no such expectation, or if they do, it is only as an insubstantial distant horizon with little relevance to everyday faith.
@peter wilkinson:
Circumcision of the heart in Deuteronomy 10:16 is a figure for the repentance of stubborn Israel before they take possession of the land. In Deteronomy 30:6 it is a figure for the transformation of the heart that will come with the return from exile. The exodus journey is a journey in fulfilment of the promise to Abraham that God will given his descendants the land of Canaan. It is the return from exile that arguably remains unfulfilled at the time of the New Testament, which is of course Wright’s contention. The exodus is never construed as a journey towards freedom from sin. It is a journey of liberation from slavery to life in the land according to the Law. It is exile which requires a new covenant, not the exodus.
@Andrew Perriman:
Deuteronomy is the covenant charter of Israel, of which possession of the land was a part. It actually provides an overview of Israel’s history, in the light of experiences already recounted, and warnings about the future. Deuteronomy 10:16 sounds the same warning which is taken up in the language of Deuteronomy 30:6. You don’t comment on how this is also taken up in Jeremiah, and the new covenant anticipated in Deuteronomy 30 is announced as an accomplished reality in Hebrews 10. Exile was the ultimate sanction for disobedience, reminding us of the original exile in Genesis. There is one story in the OT, not several disconnected stories. The new covenant was God’s provision for Jews and Gentiles, and forms the centrepiece of Jesus’s own theological explanation of the cross at the passover meal with his disciples.
I think the problem with the historicists, for all their good intentions, and probably some provision of helpful insights, is the assumption that because something was not clearly part of a discourse then, according to reconstructions of history from the texts, such as freedom from sin and renewal of creation, it cannot be projected back onto the text from a later date. I think this assumption is mistaken, and have shown that there are far more grounds for such an exercise than are commonly accepted, even on the terms of the historicists. Israel could not see what she was part of, because she was blind to it. God’s intentions were nevertheless there to see, even if in previous ages they were what Paul calls a mystery to them. Even the prophets, according to Peter, searched intently trying to find these things — the sufferings of Christ “and the glories that would follow”.
With most contemporary scholarship, I don’t accept the Documentary Hypothesis, that Deuteronomy especially was a late concoction, attempting to explain retrospectively the experiences of the 6th century by reference to writings purporting to be from 1000 years previously. Until the time of Josiah, it appears that Deuteronomy, and possibly other covenant documents had been lost. Israel was acting in ignorance of her own covenant charter and history. After the exile, it appears that far more attention was paid by Israel to her covenant charter, but it didn’t seem to penetrate very deeply, as the prohecies of Malachi demonstrate. Israel remained largely deaf to the central accusation of the prophets, that there was an on-going heart problem, which underpinned spiritual deafness and responsiveness to covenant sanctions.
My contention remains, that there are very good gounds for seeing the Exodus as a story in search of a conclusion, which cannot be detached from the giving of the Law, or from Israel’s faithless response at that time and throughout her history, and that the new covenant was God’s provision from the time of Deuteronomy onwards, not simply for Israel, but through Israel for the world, which was also his plan for creation, depending as it did upon the people of God for its fulfilment. We are still part of that story. To change the metaphor, the watershed was the coming of Jesus in history, for Israel and the world.
I’d still like to know how Jewish believers today interpret their own story, and suggest that we might listen to them whilst talking about how their forefathers understood their own writings. I suggest that the latter didn’t understand clearly, and that the former are missing the crucial key to understanding their own covenant documents.
@peter wilkinson:
I was responding to my own question about whether it would be interesting to hear a Jewish reflection on the relationship between their history and their scriptures. The question was entirely my own, arising out of an observation about the focus of narrative historic procedure on the limited history of Israel. It’s probably a very inappropriate moment to be doing so here, but an opportunity for such reflection seemed to present itself last night with the beginning of Simon Schama’s 5 part television series (BBC 2) ‘The Story of the Jews’.
The programme was slick, well presented, broad in its scope and enlivened by the personality and experiences of Simon Schama himself, whose personal investment in the subject he was not backward in bringing out. I did keep falling alseep for the odd moment or two, but I think I got the gist of things. It was both revelatory and frustrating.
Revelatory in that it showed through Schama a sense of the preservation of Jewish identity through history by the power of the words of the Jewish scriptures, and the story they contain, re-enacted in every Jewish home and by Schama himself in the rituals of the Passover meal, and in every Jewish synogogue, including Schama’s Reformed synagogue, by the ceremony of reverence for and reading from the scriptures.
Frustrating in that it increasingly failed, in my view, to relate the significance of what those scripures actually say, in relation to Jewish history and experience, to Jewish practice and identity today. Also frustrating in that comments were presented as archaeological fact, or packaged to be received as such, without substantiation.
Solid archaeology only began, we were told, around 1500 BC with hill forts which had apparently been built during the Israelite/Philistine conflicts. The David and Goliath story, according to an Israeli archeaologist, was a mythical metaphor of these conflicts, and Schama encouraged us to agree with this, by describing the viewpoint as ‘nuanced’. Earlier archaeological explorations (by evangelical Christians) were treated with gentle mockery as theatrical inventions.
We were shown Schama cruising idyllically up the Nile in an open boat to the spot where Jewish exiles from the Babylonian invasion had settled, building a fort and their own temple in the employ of Egypt as mercenaries. The significance of Jeremiah’s prophecy against going to Egypt in the story were ignored. This was one example of the survival of the Jews apparently contradicting the words of their own scriptures — to which Schama attributed their survival.
The scriptures themselves, according to Schama, were only preserved in written form from around 700 BC. These were interesting assertions, but frustrating in that they were made without substantiantion, or presentation of alternative viewpoints.
An Ethiopian Jewess who had migrated with others to Israel in the 1980’s was interviewed. The 1980’s were a time when the survival of Jews in Ethiopia was at risk, and again, the story of the Jewish scriptures, in this case the Exodus, was presented as the motivation for migration to Israel, and the grounds for Jewish survival (in this case of Ethiopian Jews). Yet there was no contextualised relation of the narrative then to the current situation, apart from in the most general of ways, by Schama or anyone else. We were simply left with the presumption of the power of the preserved words of the Jewish scriptures in accounting for the survival of those people today.
Josephus came into the programme, somewhat ambivalently. Schama made no secret of Josephus being regarded as a traitor by Jews, and that he himself was brought up with this view. Nevertheless, Josephus was presented as providing the only contemporary account of the Jewish wars of AD66-70, which was largely to be believed. Cut to shots of the arch of Vespasian in Rome, where depiction of Jewish captives being brought to Rome in AD 70 with temple artefacts was shown, but none, sigificantly, of their scriptures. Cut to a postcard sent by Sigmund Freud, an unbelieving Jew (who had his own psychological interpretation of Jewish history), showing the arch, with the written comment: the unconquerable Jew.
Schama himself was shown taking part in a Passover meal, in a happy, prosperous, probably North American setting, and attending a Reformed Jewish synogoogue, probably in London, and appreciating the ceremony of reverence for the scriptures.
So Schama presented a case for the remarkable survival of the Jews, concluding with an impassioned personal pitch for the power of the words of their scriptures in that survival. I found it very contradictory, that much of the substance of the scriptures so revered speaks against the people whose history they describe and to whom they were entrusted. Also frustrating that the sense in those scriptures, particularly, but not exclusively, as they move towards the 2nd Temple period, describes a history with a destiny, a sense of moving towards a climax or a conclusion, with the fulfilment of God’s purposes. It is historical fact that this sense was reinterpreted following the disasters of the 1st and 2nd centuries, and even today there is very little sense that the formation of Israel as a nation state for Jews has anything to do with that history, Maybe Schama will address this subject later. I just don’t see how the scriptures themselves can be revered by the people who seem oblivious to much of their content. I’m bemused. Schama is a very intelligent man, very personable, and a great communicator. How can he be making such an oversight?
Once again, I apologise for making an overlengthy comment at an entirely inappropriate time. It’s just a way of getting it out there, as it were. I’ve nowhere else to go.
@peter wilkinson:
Anyway, continuing this mini-blog within a blog, striking off at a tangent to the original critical response to John Barton, last night was Part 2 of Simon Schama’s “The Story of the Jews”, tracing their medieval history. My original comment did have some faint bearing to the post which prompted it — asking whether Jews should be consulted about the narrative historical reinterpretation of their history, especially because the interpretation limits biblical interpretation, OT and NT, to their history, at that time, rather than seeing it as directly applicable to the church (or Judaism) to day.
Last night looked at Judaism in Europe and North Africa, following the destruction of the temple, and the diaspora. Again, as far as the episode looked at biblical interpretion and history, it was disappointing. Paul was the evil genius who fashioned Christianity into a new, worldwide faith, and developed further, we were told, the anti-Semitic sentiment of the NT (quoting Matthew 27:25) into an even more vicious rhetoric of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’. Quite where and how Paul does that we were not told.
Christianity made the Jewish faith, we were told, first into a bi-theistic, then a tri-theistic belief. A rabbi friend of Schama’s was produced to back up the theological content. The Jewish God was one and “indivisible”. This is not new territory, and forms part of the basis of historic Jewish prejudice against Christianity. There was no informed discussion of what the “one-ness” of God in the Shema might have meant in its context. Whatever it meant, it certainly wasn’t an Enlightenment mathematical concept implied in the developed rebuttals by Judaism of the Trinity.
The rabbinic friend helped Schama cover the public debate which took place before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The courage of the advocate for Judaism against Christianity was not in doubt. The central plank of his argument, that Jesus could not have been the Messiah since the age of plenty and peace had not been ushered in, was enthusiastically regarded as clinching by Schama and the rabbi. Nevertheless, the Jews were expelled. Schama did not try to conceal his anger at the King of Spain’s decree that Jews were not to be molested as they departed, saying bitterly: “How considerate!”.
On the broader canvas of history, Christianity and Islam were presented as the worldwide anvil and hammer between which Judaism was caught in the medieval period. The one had a ‘modern messiah’, the other a warlike prophet. Christianity was a religion packaged for the word with little relationship to its Jewish origins. Judaism was something archaic and ancient, not fit for the modern stage. So how did it survive? Schama’s explanation was that this was down to the preservation of the Hebrew scriptures, and their re-interpetation into a form which could be practised anywhere in the world, through first the Mishnah, then the Talmud. Through these, and the development of the synagogue, Judaism could and did survive without its land and temple.
On expulsion from Spain, Jews settled around the Mediterranean, giving us the infamous word ‘ghetto’ from their confinement to a quarter of Venice. The Ottoman empire in particular welcomed them. A running theme of Schama’s was the cultural expression of Judaism in synagogue architecture and secular poetry, wherever it went.
Jews also became the world’s bankers. Lincoln Cathedral was built on loans from a local Jewish financier, it was said. The account of Lincoln Cathedral also raised the story of the infamous ‘martyrdom’ of Hugh of Lincoln, supposedly by Jews, 19 of whom were hanged in judicial reprisals for the death. The medieval historian Matthew Parris recounted the ‘event’ and helped to establish the myth as history. Only in 2009 was the memorial to Hugh in Lincoln Cathedral altered, with an acknowledgment of the blatantly anti-semitic miscarriage of justice it enshrined, if justice it can even be called.
I’m rattling this off before breakfast, so it’s not as carefully written as I’d like. In the series, we are moving away from the immediate context of the 1st century as biblical history, or even the Old Testament as the historical basis of Judaism. It is painful to see a historian like Schama enthusiatically embracing caricatures of Paul, and Christianity within history, although the oppression and persecution of Jews by ‘Christians’, whilst hypocritically embracing their financial and trading acumen and commercial benefits, are fact. Yet it is also fact that ‘Christendom’ oppressed and persecuted all dissent, including dissenting Christians, not simply the Jewish variety.
But this would be history as ‘nuanced’. While it might suit Schama to be ‘nuanced’ when looking at the relationship between archaeology and the Old Testament in the late Judges period, it does not suit him in looking at Judaism and Christianity in medieval European history. Neither does it suit him in looking at figures like the apostle Paul, nor any ‘nuanced’ understanding of Christian beliefs about the messiah, nor even of the Trinity, and, I would argue, the Jewish scriptures themselves.
We are a long way now from the starting point of the proposition which prompted this review, which was how Jews interpret, scripturally, their own history, as it leads to the destruction of the temple and the worldwide Jewish diaspora (which was already well underway in New Testament times, of course), and how that history bears on a ‘narrative historical’ intepretation of Israel. Whether it’s worthwhile continuing with further contributions we shall see.
@peter wilkinson:
My original intention in pursuing this offshoot of a post was perhaps not very clearly explained. The focus of a narrative historical interpretation of scripture as Andrew develops it, although having consequences far beyond its immediate context, nevertheless insists that the scriptural context is the limited history of Israel, and how that people’s future was secured beyond the destruction of the temple and the expulsion, voluntarily or involuntarily, from the land.
But the limited history looks at a secured future for an Israel beyond national or racial Israel. There is also a future of a historic racial if not national Israel, which also survived the disaster. My suggestion is that this history deserves at least as much attention as the other, if the original terms of the narrative historical proposal are to be observed. If we are looking at the limited history of Israel in the bible, OT and NT, it is logical that the limited history of Israel is followed subsequently. Should they also not be included or consulted in the narrative historical proposal? They also have a continuing history. How do they explain their own continuing history in the light of their own scriptures?
Earlier, I expressed my incredulity that Jews today could adhere to their founding documents whilst ignoring the impetus of those documents towards a distinct climax or conclusion. I was being disingenuously unfair, but on the other hand, it seemed incredible to me that Simon Schama showed so little awareness of how Christianity maintains that the telos of the documents has been fulfilled in the person of Jesus, and continues to be fulfilled as it moves towards its greater conclusion — new heavens and new earth. Paul, the Jew who had the greatest understanding of his own scriptures, and was the greatest communicator of this view, is dismissed as a hater of the ‘Christ-killers’ and the inventor of a religious novelty.
Tonight, Simon Schama looked at the post-Enlightenment history of Judaism in Europe; the aspirations of assimilation of Felix Mendelsohn, the cultural identification and contributions of Iacomo Meyerbeer, and the nationalistic rumblings of the anti-Semitic avalanche started by Richard Wagner, propelled across Europe by nationalism, intensified by the financial crash following the Prussian invasion of France, and brought to the heart of the centre of Enlightement with the dishonourable discharge from the French army of Albert Dreyfus before a crowd of 20,000.
Theodore Herzl, an observer of the Dreyfus discharge, took to heart the lesson of what was happening, and began to plan towards the foundation of a Jewish state and homeland. Another believer in the possibility of Jews being part of and contributing towards a European culture, Arnold Schoenberg, was disabused of such a notion when his supporter and friend Wassily Kandinsky also began to write about ‘the Jewish problem’ in Europe. Schoenberg fled Germany for America, and returned whole-heartedly to the Jewish community and identity.
At this point Schama, in a surprise move to me, laid his cards on the table as a Zionist, a believer in the need for a Jewish homeland. In the light of European history as he presented it to this stage, it was hard to disagree with him. This episode finished at this point.
I wasn’t expecting to watch tonight’s episode, and only switched on 20 minutes into the programme. I expected even less to be writing this. But the story has suddenly seized my attention. I need to know which way it will go next time, and on into the final episode. It can only go one way, surely. 4. will look at the grisly story of the Nazis and World War 2; 5. will look at the establishment of the state of Israel. I have long held the view that this last development has little to do with the biblical story, incurring as it does the declamations of the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures themselves against injustice and unrighteousness, which the victims of European injustice and unrighteousness meted out, and continue to mete out on Palestinian victims in their turn. But from a historical perspective, which way were Jews to turn?
@peter wilkinson:
With apologies again for this uninvited intrusion onto the website. I’m only replying to myself to maintain continuity for the posts, which are following Simon Schama’s ‘The Story of the Jews’ on BBC 2 (9.00pm Sundays). I’m not trying to take over the website. The starting point was relevant to the narrative historical issues under discussion: namely, if the narrative historical proposal envisages the bible as the limited history of Israel then, with the crisis of the destruction of the temple in AD 70 threatening the very survival of the people of God, how does the story accommodate the continuing history of the ethnic Jews alongside the ‘reconstituted’ people of God now? If the story is largely that of Israel and the Jews in the first place, shouldn’t we at least take some account of the continuing story of these same Jews after AD 70?
The series by Simon Schama just happened to appear after I had asked whether someone like Jonathan Sacks (Chief Rabbi of England) should be asked how they saw the place of Judaism now in the light of the story of Judaism then.
Last night was Episode 4 of the 5 part series. I was convinced that, having laid his cards on the table as a Zionist, Schama would proceed through the 20th century with the holocaust and then the founding of the state of Israel. In fact, last night looked at the phenomenon of the Shtetl, small towns of mainly Jewish inhabitants, which sprang up in Europe after the Middle Ages, and their contribution to culture. The sweep of history was familiar; Jews were expelled from the countries of Western Europe but found favour in Poland, where their skills and contributions to the nation and its economy were welcomed. This changed with the partition of Poland between Prussia, Austria and Russia in the 18th century, and Jews largely found themselves in a new swathe of territory governed by Russia, where they were restricted to the Pale of Settlement, a sweep of land extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Also familiar, by now, was the response of Jews to their new situation. On the one hand they retreated deeper into their culture, profoundly affected by the rise of Hassidism, which emphasized the joyous and mystical dimension of faith. On the other hand, ‘progressive’ Jews entered the world of popular culture and politics, becoming active in left wing movements, especially in the latter part of the 19th century. The membership of one Jewess in the gang responsible for the assassination of Czar Alexander II led to a dramatic increase of persecution of the Shtetls in the Pale of Settlement, reaching a climax in the bloody pogrom of 1905, which included the relatively advanced and enlightened haven for Judaism of Odessa.
Schama then looked at the phenomenon of Jewish emigration to America, and the success of Jews, first in the manufacturing industries, then in the spheres of politics, cinema, Broadway, and music.
So an unexpected, to me, turn of the story as pursued by the series. My initial questions as to how the thinking of Judaism now accommodates the biblical story then are almost as far from being answered as they were at the outset. The phenomenon of Judaism and its survival is remarkable, and in some ways just as remarkable as the growth of its offspring, Christianity. There is a story here, and its relationship to the biblical story framed by the narrative historical paradigm deserves attention — especially as that paradigm presents the alternative between non-survival and survival, according to whether the narrow way of suffering was followed by believing Jews at that time. Here is a group of people, far more directly connected with the biblical story as framed by the narrative historical perspective than the church, who have a continuing story.
Should any wayward traveller, lost in the deepest and darkest woods, thickets and undergrowth of Postost, stumble across this solipsistic discussion by one who despairs of ever finding his own way out of the labyrinth, any contributions towards enlightening the dark mysteries of this conundrum might be welcomed.
Meanwhile just one more episode of The Story of the Jews to go. I wonder where Schama will take it next? I’m not making any predictions.
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