"For Jews," the historian Jerry Z. Muller said recently, "Jewish economic success has long been a source of both pride and embarrassment." Very few Jewish writers have risen to even this level of ambivalence. The ground note of Jewish fiction has been hostility to business—the prooftext is The Rise of David Levinsky—and the story of Jewish success in establishing banks, department stores, and clothing lines has fallen to strangers (including anti-Semites) to tell.
SAVE"Retrieving American Jewish Fiction: Myron Brinig"
Several months ago, an article in the New York Times revealed that a much-venerated collection of images of pre-war East European Jewry, shot in the 1930's by the photographer Roman Vishniac, constituted a tendentious slice out of a much larger and more variegated body of work. In a 1947 book and later in the 1983 album A Vanished World, Vishniac himself, it seems, selected and captioned his images in such a way as to put forward a highly sentimentalized picture, retroactively suppressing the rich human diversity of his subjects and depicting them instead as uniformly poor, pious, and persecuted.
Books for women have been a distinctive and popular variety of Jewish literature at least since the early seventeenth century, when Ts'ena Ur'ena, a Yiddish "woman's Bible" embellished with amazing tales and pointed lessons, started its ascent toward becoming the most widely read Jewish book for the next 300 years. In America, the first writer to tap into this deep well was the Polish-born Anzia Yezierska (ca. 1882-1970). Her 1925 novel Bread Givers, frequently misinterpreted as a feminist attack upon Jewish patriarchy, is in fact the most successful attempt ever undertaken to reproduce in another language the half-serious, half-sensationalist brand of popular Yiddish fiction.
Third in a series on landmarks in American Jewish literature
In American literature, the critic Leslie Fiedler once quipped, nothing succeeds like failure. But among American Jewish writers, something like the reverse is closer to the truth: for many of their fictional characters, nothing fails so miserably as success. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in The Rise of David Levinsky(1917), the first classic of Jewish fiction in America.
The name alone conjures up story-book images of a horse-drawn carriage from which a pious Victorian benefactor alights to bribe a local official, endow an orphanage, or dedicate a windmill. Abigail Green's brilliant new biography—elegantly conceived, exhaustively researched, crisply written—presents a far more complicated and fascinating picture.
Montefiore was born in 1784 to a family embedded in the cosmopolitan network of merchant Jews linking London, Livorno, Amsterdam, and the New World: a Sephardi diaspora well-placed for the opportunities presented by the liberalizations of 19th-century Europe. Montefiore made deft use of the new dispensation, at first to make his fortune through his own talents and his marital ties to the Rothschilds and then to undertake a career of charity and activism on behalf of his fellow Jews.
Establishing himself early on as a leader of Anglo-Jewry, Montefiore, an inveterate traveler, undertook with his wife Judith countless trips all over Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Ottoman Empire. Their purpose was both to support local Jews and, more ambitiously, to win them greater political and social rights. This latter was a tall order—it took decades for British Jews themselves to achieve full civic equality. Montefiore scored his biggest success when, in the wake of persecutions of Damascus Jews after the blood libel of 1840, he won a royal firman granting equality to Ottoman Jewry.
Here as elsewhere, Montefiore's actions reflected his triple identity: a Jew seeking to improve the lot of his people, an Englishman seeking to further the Empire's interests in the east, and a humanitarian seeking to establish basic principles of justice and equality across national borders.
The last is among the most thought-provoking threads in Green's richly-drawn tapestry. For centuries, Jewish communities had offered each other mutual support and protection. But now the combination of new technologies (telegraph, newspapers, steamships) with democratic politics and the desire of British and French imperialists to see themselves as forces of progress gave a new complexion to self-help.
Like the Court Jews of old, Montefiore gained entry to palaces and ministries by dint of his wealth and connections; unlike them, he credibly represented not only Jewish concerns but national interests and enlightened public opinion. In his unrelenting philanthropic efforts, too, he was a transitional figure. His efforts in Palestine went beyond traditional alms-giving to the building of institutions; at the same time, for better or worse, he avoided imposing Western rationalism and discipline on his local beneficiaries.
By the time of his death in 1885, Montefiore had achieved a hitherto unimaginable degree of celebrity and public adulation. Both his successes and his failures were intimately connected to the emergence of transnational humanitarianism and the first stirrings of global Jewish politics in the modern era. Today's circumstances are very different, the challenge of leadership the same and no less urgent.
Montefiore's "Rabbi"Jessie Kurrein, Kurrein.com. A daughter memorializes the polymath scholar who was Montefiore's indispensable aide and intellectual companion. Read more about Loewe. SAVE
Daddy WarburgDouglas Bell. Globe and Mail. In Niall Ferguson's masterful new biography, Siegmund Warburg (1902-1982) emerges as a financier for whom the profit motive was never enough. SAVE
No PrizeAdam Kirsch. Tablet. A new biography charts the path of Joseph Pulitzer from penniless Jewish immigrant to newspaper magnate and political power broker. SAVE
The Montefiore SagaAdam Kirsch. Tablet. An exceptionally fine book brings to life a great 19th-century Jewish hero and apostle of liberal imperialism. SAVE
A Game of Chance?Neria Guttel. Haaretz. A learned and fascinating book delves into the significance of lotteries—and of coincidence and randomness—in Judaism. SAVE
The Legacy of Anti-SemitismKeith Kahn-Harris. Guardian. Pro-Palestinian campaigners who do not see themselves as anti-Semites need to "look seriously at the arguments" advanced by Anthony Julius in his new book. SAVE
Trials of the DiasporaVernon Bogdanor. Jewish Chronicle. In a new book, Anthony Julius asks why, if anti-Semitism in Britain is not respectable, attacks on Jews have reached a record high. SAVE
