Gershon Hundert on Jewish History

Gershon, we met at a recent festival in Riga celebrating the centenary of Isaiah Berlin’s birth, where I heard you speak about "Berlin and Eastern European Jewry". I asked for an interview and you, very kindly, offered to get a short list of recent books together that revise the ‘metanarrative’ of Jewish history. But before we talk about them, could you tell me what the metanarrative of Jewish history consisted of in the first place?

I can’t! The whole thing? What I tried to do was to choose some books that change the story in some fundamental way, or at least call it into question. But to give a précis of the whole metanarrative of Jewish history? That’s too much to ask!

It’s a big question, but the reason I ask it is that the books you’ve chosen are revising a received history, and that received history, I suppose, depends on a stereotype which actually can be summarised, right? It’s the stereotype of the Jew as the alien, the ‘other’, the interloper and saboteur, from the perspective of established Western Christian culture and of established Islamic culture. I don’t want to provide any kind of coercive structure to this, but it seems to me that the books you’ve chosen revise that view by showing how Jewish culture has grown up simultaneously with Christian and Islamic cultures and how each has influenced the other. So the first book on your list shows how Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism actually emerge at the same time; and that they emerge as solutions to the same problem.

Yes, Daniel Boyarin’s Border Lines. The standard story is that Christianity is the daughter religion of Judaism. I don’t know why they use feminine metaphors but in any case… what’s happening in that field is a rethinking of the whole story of the evolution of Judaism and Christianity. Two thousand years ago various groups of people who accepted the Hebrew Bible and the God that’s represented there and believed that He resided in the Temple, saw that Temple destroyed. And once the Temple was destroyed they had to figure out a way to maintain their beliefs. And there were many, many people who tried to figure out how to do that in various ways.

Daniel Boyarin is the most outspoken and the most interesting historian of all this—not always dead on—but he provides a picture of all of the questions that are now open. People would say, once the Temple was destroyed, that the Rabbis created Judaism and St Paul broke away from the Rabbinic Jews and Pharisees and created this new religion. But in fact it took a very long time for these two groups to be teased out of each other.

So the idea is that there’s been some retrospective tidying up there—which in terms of cultural history is a familiar pattern. But your second book, by Steven Wasserstrom, switches focus to Islam. It’s called Between Jew and Muslim: the Problem of Symbiosis Under Early Islam. What does that mean? Does it continue the same theme of retrospective refinement; that just as Jews and Christians had much more in common for far longer than we have been taught to suppose, so did Jews and Arabs?

Well if you were to phrase that "Jews and Muslims", that would be absolutely true. One of the things that comes out of Boyarin’s book is precisely the vast difference between Christianity, which can say "render under to Caesar…" and separate church and state, and Judaism and Islam where there is no such conception. And that’s really the fundamental thing. Those divisions don’t exist. There’s no word for religion in traditional Jewish language at all. And that’s something shared by Islam. The head of the state is the defender of the faithful….

What’s the central thesis of the book?

Wasserstrom is talking about some remarkable parallel developments between Muslims and Jews in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries—one of which is an attempt by the Persians to reassert their cultural independence in the face of the domination of Mecca, Damascus and then Bagdad. This attempt takes the form of religious dissent, so it’s not accidental that the centre of Shiism is Persia.

But at the same time that Shiism was arriving, which was frequently Messianic, there were Messianic movements amongst the Jews, one of which lasted four or five centuries. The name of the Messiah in question was "Abu Isa", which means "Father of Jesus". It’s hard to get at his message because it was only recorded by people who didn’t like him, but he seems to have preached a tolerant or even a synchronistic approach to religion. But it’s all resisting the centralising efforts of the Rabbis who want to unify and homogenise Rabbinic Judaism. There’s all kinds of resistance to that attempt.

The idea that these two strands of Judaism and Islam emerged simultaneously is consistent with the first book. The idea of separate, competing and yet curiously similar strands emerging from - what? We’re talking about a very sociological reading of these events I suppose. But they emerge, these religions, from a common root—that’s to say, a single God. Do you think that’s relevant? That if one follows all these strands back then one is looking at a group of patriarchal religions competing for a single father figure?

Well no. You’re getting too Jungian for me there. No, it’s not the sort of language that I feel comfortable with. What’s happening here is that religious language is being used—because I’m sociological, as you’ve correctly pointed out—religious language is being used to mask other kinds of resentment and resistance. And what’s striking is that the Muslim dissenters, the Shiites and so on, are rejecting the oral traditions of the Sunni, of the orthodox Muslims.