Ludwig Lewisohn is nearly forgotten today, but in his day he was a literary celebrity. He was so well-known, in fact, that his marital scandals—multiple divorces, an accusation of bigamy, flight to Europe with a decades-younger woman, a second wedding interrupted by a hysterical jilted lover—made national headlines. Through it all, he kept writing, publishing 35 books by the time of his death in 1955. A passionate champion of   sexual freedom, Lewisohn was equally zealous to promote Zionism and "Jewish self-realization." The novel The Island Within (1928), based on his own Jewish reawakening, was a polemical summons to American Jews to return to their "native tradition."

D. G. Myers

Ludwig Lewisohn is nearly forgotten today, but in his day he was a literary celebrity. He was so well-known, in fact, that his marital scandals—multiple divorces, an accusation of bigamy, flight to Europe with a decades-younger woman, a second wedding interrupted by a hysterical jilted lover—made national headlines. Through it all, he kept writing, publishing 35 books by the time of his death in 1955. A passionate champion of   sexual freedom, Lewisohn was equally zealous to promote Zionism and "Jewish self-realization." The novel The Island Within (1928), based on his own Jewish reawakening, was a polemical summons to American Jews to return to their "native tradition."

D.G. Myers

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.  

D.G. Myers

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.

Steinberg's early thought was molded by three teachers. At City College, the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen imbued in him a commitment to philosophical rationalism. Rabbi Jacob Kohn taught him that the life of the mind was inconceivable without faith in the very existence of truth. At the Jewish Theological Seminary, he became a disciple of Mordecai M. Kaplan.

Kaplan's monumental work, Judaism as a Civilization (1934), marked the summit of what a recent historian has called "sociological Jewishness." Rescuing non-Orthodox American Judaism from the tepid pieties of ethical universalism, this new dispensation recast Jewish identity and practice in functional terms as a way of maintaining and preserving such American values as pluralism, social justice, and civil society. Sidestepping the hard questions of theology, sociological Jewishness held sway over Conservative and Reform Judaism for decades.

Steinberg's The Making of the Modern Jew (1933) was written in the spirit of Kaplan's desire to combine critical and historical thinking about God and religion with an embrace of Jewish peoplehood, history, and moral concern. In his best-known and still popular work, the novel As a Driven Leaf (1939), the figure of Elisha ben Avuya, a talmudic sage whose mysterious persona has tantalized scholars and skeptics for centuries, dramatizes the tensions between reason and faith. By the novel's end, it is clear that reason cannot live without faith—albeit a faith couched in terms of "a pattern of behavior" for an ethical life, hardly the stuff of prophecy and martyrdom.

Steinberg was an eloquent and prolific writer and lecturer, and his mix of a reasonable deism with a commitment to Jewish life and ritual made him one of American Judaism's most popular expositors. But in his final years—he died at the age of just forty-six—his tone shifted. For him, as for others, the Holocaust shattered confidence in human reason and its ability to face evil. He found an echo to his questions in the Christian thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, began to study mystical texts, laid greater emphasis on prayer, and in a 1949 address called for a return to theology. His last, posthumous work was titled Anatomy of Faith.

Steinberg's lesson, wrote his friend Arthur A. Cohen, was that "any authentic Jewish theology must combine the wise innocence of the Jew, the intellectual rigor of the Greek, and the irresoluble ambiguity of the modern Christian." To this we might add another, central element: a commitment to the Jewish people, past, present, and future.

Born in Montreal in 1915 to Russian-Jewish parents, Bellow moved at age nine to Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood. Doubly migrant, the multilingual boy (French, Yiddish, Hebrew) became an avid student  and celebrant of that most American city. After university, wartime  service in the Merchant Marine, years in Europe and New York, he returned to Chicago in 1962 with five novels, including The Adventures of Augie March (1953), behind him and more to come.

Herzog (1966) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), among his greatest, saw the ripening of Bellow's distinctive literary idiom, a mix of extravagant comedy with anguish and of Latinate with Jewish registers of speech, the whole animated by ideas pushed to their limits and contradictions: a mix we take for granted today but that first had to be achieved against, in particular, the massive influence of Ernest Hemingway on American writing. In putting a brake on that influence, Bellow created a new mode of apprehending reality through the power of words.

He also rang the changes on Jewish historical types: the garrulous luftmensh, the amorous shlemiel,  the despairing witness.  He was preoccupied with Jewish fate in its own terms and as a marker for the (often shaky) prospects of Western democratic civilization. Artur Sammler, a Holocaust survivor, blinded in one eye, is "a registrar of madness" in the unraveling New York of the late 1960's. In his late, brief masterpiece, The Bellarosa Connection (1989), the Jewish fate takes center stage in a deep Bellovian meditation on the Holocaust, America, Israel, and the power and inadequacy of Jewish memory.  

In his declaration of independence, Augie March added that he would "go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way." His creator did.

Born Shmuel Yosef Czazkes in the town of Buczcacz, S. Y. Agnon, who died 40 years ago today at the age of eighty-one, moved to Palestine in 1908. Four years later, not quite suited to the pioneering milieu, he left for Berlin, in whose culturally vibrant atmosphere he thrived. In 1924, a fire having destroyed his home, library, and manuscripts, he headed back to Jerusalem; again his home would be destroyed, this time in the Arab riots of 1929. Rebuilding, he kept up a stream of novels, stories, and sketches. A visit to his native Buczacz in 1930 was the basis for a haunting masterpiece, A Guest for the Night (1937), considered his greatest novel alongside Only Yesterday (1945), a panorama of early 20th-century Palestine. Agnon's lifetime productivity continued unabated until his death; his posthumous output may have been every bit as large.  

Agnon mined the whole of Jewish literature, sacred and secular alike, and all the world literature he could find, to forge the deceptively traditional idiom with which he created his unique imaginative world. His pages mix deadly realism with haunting fantasy, humor with anguish, nostalgic  lyricism with bitter irony and social critique with spiritual ecstasy. His portraits of traditional Jewish society are as merciless as they are loving; his observations of his own time and place cut to the quick. 

The fabulist was also a chronicler. Like his Hebrew predecessors H.N. Bialik and Micha Berdyczewski, he eventually turned to anthologizing. In that medium, writing in his distinctive style, he would preserve the vast legacy he had himself inherited and bequeath to future readers (and writers) the textual resources with which to follow him. In perhaps his greatest such compilation, The City and the Fullness Thereof, he returned once again to Buczacz, preserving in language a world now irretrievably gutted and lost. 

Still, for Jews as for others it truly was a period of amazing cultural creativity and accomplishment, all the more astonishing in light of convivencia's constraints. Under Muslim rule, the most innovative Jewish achievements lay in the realms of poetry and philosophy. Standing at the summit of both, and creating an intellectual synthesis all his own, was Yehuda Halevi (ca. 1075–1141). In a shimmering gem of a new book, the critic and translator Hillel Halkin has brought to life, with vibrant and personal immediacy, the passions, ideas, sensibilities, convictions—and the voice—of this emblematic Jewish spirit.

A galaxy of extraordinary Hebrew poets wrought the Golden Age literary revolution, yielding a bounty of new secular genres and religious sensibilities. But for lyric beauty, emotional resonance, spiritual power, and sheer memorability, Halevi stands out. No less indelible is his prose magnum opus, the Kuzari. Written in Arabic, and reworking medieval philosophy in a distinctively Jewish key, it asserted the world-historical significance of Jewish particularity and physical existence with a fresh—and still provocative—vehemence, and left its mark on Jewish thought for all time. As for Halevi's personal saga, complete with his late-life turn against Golden Age Andalusia, his perilous pilgrimage to the Land of Israel, and his mysterious death, it quickly became the stuff of myth and legend.

Our own period has seen renewed interest in Halevi, of which Halkin's book, coruscating and compulsively readable, is an undoubted masterwork. It has also witnessed vigorous debates over his legacy. Was he a cosmopolitan humanist? A solitary mystic? The quintessential assimilated Jew? A proto-Zionist? The first Jewish romantic? A dangerous chauvinist, even a fascist? Such debates mirror the fractured perspectives of modern Jews themselves. Reviewing each of them before advancing his own bold readings, Halkin brings home both the tantalizing elusiveness of Halevi's life and the vital pertinence of his example.

D.G. Myers

The first installment in a series about landmark works of American Jewish literature.

When was American Jewish fiction born? The credit usually goes to Nathan Mayer's Civil War novel Differences, published by Bloch in 1867. But a more likely date is 1892, when the Christian-owned house of A. C. McClurg released the first American novel written by a Jew, on a Jewish subject, but aimed at a general audience. Other Things Being Equal is a romance of intermarriage. Its author, Emma Wolf, twenty-seven at the time of publication, was a wheelchair-bound San Franciscan and the spinster daughter of a well-to-do tobacco merchant from Alsace.