Highway Zekhtsik-Eyn Revisited: Paul Kriwaczek's "Yiddish Civilization."

The late Paul Kriwaczek is one of those people I really wish I'd had the chance to meet. He was a fascinating guy who lived one of those big, bold lives that the more conventional among us envy. The son of Viennese-Jewish refugees who made it--barely--to London when he was three, he grew up to be a dental surgeon (who practiced in Kabul, of all places), and later became a radio and TV producer for the BBC. In his later years, he wrote histories--wonderful histories, wide-ranging, beautiful, personal, eminently readable, witty, erudite, and engaging. His books are the result of a lifetime of reading, listening, learning, thinking, synthesizing, and then finally turning it all loose on paper--tour-de-forces of the retentive and synthesizing mind.

It's the sort of mind that another late hero of mine, the shamefully unappreciated speculative fiction writer Avram Davidson, had. Shortly before he died, he produced a strange and rather marvelous book--Adventures in Unhistory--wherein he sifts through the accumulated data of a lifetime of reading and divines connections between them to trace the origins of legendary beasts like dragons, phoenixes, mermaids, the Rough Beast Slouching Towards Jerusalem, werewolves, etc--to their decidedly unlegendary and mundane origins. And so did my idol, the legendary Joseph Pulitzer, who was famous--in some quarters, feared--for his truly prodigious memory, for his eerie ability to recall from it the smallest, most niggling, and most arcane of data, and for his ability to draw connections between, and see patterns in, the seemingly unrelated bits of data residing in the massive storehouse of his powerful brain.

It's the kind of mind one might flippantly describe as "Talmudic," although, since Davidson, Pulitzer, and Kriwaczek were all Jewish, perhaps not as flippant as it might seem at first. Because their mental processes and methods--cramming the mind full of data and then training it to make connections between seemingly disparate and unconnected bits of information--are, in fact, precisely those utilized by generations of Talmud scholars of Central and Eastern Europe.

Which brings me back neatly to Paul Kriwaczek.

He died too soon, having written only three books. I wish he'd been able to write more. But the three that we do have--In Search of Zarathustra: The First Prophet and the Ideas that Changed the Word, Babylon, Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilizations, and Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Civilization--are magnificent. They are all about the fluidity of human civilizations, about how of ideas move from people to people, and the resulting transmutations of those civilizations themselves--how they shape, and are shaped by, the ideas which they transmit and to which they give rise, and all about the strange things that happen at those borders. These are the kinds of things I'm interested in. Yiddish Civilization--his second book, and the one he was most proud of--powerfully engaged me, perhaps because he says something I've been thinking about for a long time, and in doing so challenges something that's bothered me ever since I started thinking about it.

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I watched the film Schindler's List with a granddaughter of victims of the Babi Yar massacre, which magnified the emotional effect of the movie a thousandfold. We were not romantically involved, but our hands sought out each others', and long after the movie was over, we continued to cling to each other.

But when I saw it a second time with my mother, the experience had much less of an impact. It didn't move me, it irritated me, and I wasn't sure why. But I realized what was bothering me later, as I watched Hollywood roll out a parade of other Holocaust-themed movies--Jakob the Liar, The Pianist, Life is Beautiful, etc.--in Schindler's wake.

The much maligned historian Norman Finkelstein, himself the child of Holocaust survivors, maintains that the Holocaust has been cynically suborned to drum up support and sympathy for what is essentially an apartheid state. While I don't agree completely with Finkelstein's analysis, I too am bothered by the emphasis placed on the Holocaust for two reasons.

First, it implies that Jewish suffering is unique, which is untrue. The Roma were also nearly wiped out by Nazis, and given enough time, the Slavs wouldn't have fared much better--the Nazis planned to murder half and use the other half as slave labor. And moving beyond the Holocaust, the Armenians, the Anatolian Greeks, the Kurds, the Tutsis, and many other peoples have suffered attempted genocide.

Secondly, this unrelenting emphasis on the Holocaust reduces three thousand years of a people's history to the six worst. If you ask any non-Jewish American one thing he or she can tell you about the Jewish people, chances are very few of them will be able to tell you about the aforementioned Joseph Pulitzer. Or Albert Einstein, or Sigmund Freud, or Benjamin Disraeli, or Jonas Salk, or Karl Marx or Moses Mendelssohn, or Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Franz Kafka, or David Ricardo or Judah Cresques, or Benedict Spinoza, who more or less singlehandedly ushered in the age of modernity, or Moses Maimonides. Or Jesus and Saint Paul, or Moses. Or any of the other Jewish luminaries whose ideas helped shape the world. But they WILL be able to tell you that the Jews are awfully good at getting killed.

Viewing Jewish history from our post-Holocaust vantage point only strengthens what Salo W. Baron, the great Columbia Jewish historian, called the "lachrymose interpretation": the tendency to read Jewish history as an unbroken chronicle of suffering, one long stretch of pogrom after expulsion, a long and miserable slog through the Valley of the Shadow of Death beginning with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

It's a depressing and, to be honest, rather self-indulgent view of Jewish history, leading, as it does, to the conclusion that the Jews survived as a people due to some inherent superiority of the culture or traditions, which is nonsense--Jewish exceptionalism is as pernicious and dangerous as is any other kind--or because of divine protection, which is also nonsense.

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Kriwaczek opens his book by noting the amnesia among the Jews of his generation in regard to the most recent chapter of their past, which was Eastern Europe. If that first generation of immigrant Jewish children, and their children, identified with any aspect of Jewish history of all, it was with the Biblical rather than the more recent, a tendency perhaps strengthened by the re-establishment of a Jewish state in the land of the Bible itself, in 1948. Many of them had (or feigned having) no idea of, and no interest in, where in Europe their parents or grandparents had come from. It's a phenomenon I observed firsthand--only grudgingly did my grandmother reveal that she knew where her father, my great-grandfather, was born (in the Polish city of Plock). She was an American. The Old Country was irrelevant and an embarrassment. It was almost like incest or alcoholism--a dark and tragic episode of family history that we'd all be much better off forgetting, thank you very much, so let's not speak of it again.

Yiddish Civilization, I hope, will serve as at least a partial correction to that attitude, because it challenges this paradigm and paints a radically divergent picture of Jewish history.

Kriwaczek's opening contention that today's Jews are the descendants not only of Judaean exiles, but are a duke's mixture of many different peoples, isn't a new one. It's ground already well-trodden by many, including the Marxist historian Abram Leon (who wrote that "the most superficial examination of the question leads us to the conclusion that the Jews constitute in reality a mixture of the most diverse races. It is evidently the Diaspora character of Judaism which is the fundamental cause of this fact. But even in Palestine, the Jews were far from constituting a 'pure race'”) and Arthur Koestler, who, in his mischievous Thirteenth Tribe, suggested that the bulk of Ashkenazic Jewry descended not from exiled Judaeans but from a Turkic people, the Khazars, at least some of whom converted to Judaism somewhere around the 7th century.

The idea has further been explored by Kevin Brook, in his book The Jews of Khazaria, and by the Israeli linguist Paul Wexler, who self-hatingly claims, in his snarky and mean-spirited book The Ashkenazic "Jews"--A Turko-Slavic People in Search of an Identity  that Yiddish is nothing more than a Slavic dialect with a German vocabulary. And Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People contests the idea that there is actually a Jewish people at all.

Kriwaczek is more measured and humane than any of these, and his contentions less calculated to inflame. Certainly the Jewish people, even before the destruction of the Second Temple, was already both widely dispersed, with large communities in Babylon, Persia, Greece, Egypt, and even Rome itself, and highly heterogeneous, having already absorbed a fair amount of their neighbors, like the Aramaeans and the Idumaeans (the Edomites of the Bible). Moreover, they were at that time pretty active proselytizers as well. Many early Diaspora communities were comprised largely--in some cases, entirely--of local proselytes. And it is at this point, against the backdrop of the early Diaspora, that the Yiddish civilization and people begin.

Ethnogenesis--the beginning of a people--is a messy and imprecise process. Every national or ethnic group is, undoubtedly, made up of a bunch of different peoples who, over the course of time, a few shared experiences, and the gradual adoption of a genesis myth and a single language, begin to think of themselves as one people. The Ashkenazic Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were no different. Kriwaczek identifies two ancestral strains--the Latin-speaking Jews of the Roman Empire's west, and the Jews of the Empire's east, Greek by language, culture, and in many cases, ancestry--which moved across Europe in two different directions. Along the way, the Latin Jews moved north and east into the Germanic regions, abandoning Latin for German as they did so; the Jews of the Greek sphere moved north and west into the areas around the Black Sea, picking up Greek, Slavic, and Turkish converts on the route as well, abandoning Greek for Slavic as the Latin Jews ditched Latin for German, and settled across Slavic Eastern Europe.

Eventually, the two strains met in the middle--at Ratisbon, as the city was called by its original Celtic inhabitants, renamed Regensburg by the Germans who eventually came to possess it--and hammered out a shared language: Yiddish, that weird and wonderful hybrid of German, Slavic, and Hebrew. It is in Regensburg, he says, where the two strains: the western-Latin-German Jews and the eastern-Greek-Slavic Jews--came together in what became known as the Heym, or "homeland": the great Jewish nation within the Catholic Slavic heartland of Europe.

The fusion was a little imperfect. The German Jews looked down on their Eastern co-religionists, who were rather unlearned and whose "Judaism" was idiosyncratic at best, and certainly not according to Hoyle. This faultline persisted right down to the present day. But even if there was a little snobbery on the Germans' part, the two strains melded, creating one of the great nations of Europe--a nation not of eternal wanderers and aliens, guests in someone else's country, but just as "indigenous", and in some cases more so, as any of their neighbors.

Thinking of Yiddish Jewry (as differentiated from the Ladino-speaking Sephardim of the Mediterranean, or the Arabic-speaking Mizrachim of the Middle East) within the context of broader European history--as an emerging European nation alongside many other emerging European nations--gives us the opportunity to consider Jewish history comparatively instead of in a vacuum. And from that perspective, Jewish history doesn't look quite so bad.

Jews, along with many other peoples, poured into Eastern Europe in the medieval period the way American pioneers moved west, and for the same reason. Thinly-populated Eastern Europe, much like the American West, was the land of opportunity. And the Yiddish Jews of the Heym made out pretty well in Poland, Lithuania, and elsewhere throughout Eastern Europe. They enjoyed a remarkable amount of autonomy, regulated their own affairs through their own national government--the Council of the Four Lands--and on the local level through the Kehillot, the local self-governing units of individual Jewish communities. They outnumbered Christians in many places, and generally did better economically, enjoying favored status and exclusive control over certain economic functions, like tax-farming. granted by kings and noblemen who valued their expertise. They weren't merely a part of the emerging Eastern European economy, they WERE the emerging Eastern European economy, advantaged as they were by a long mercantile tradition and connected culturally and economically with other Jewish communities across the world.

Was there suffering? Undoubtedly. But those were brutal times, and everyone suffered, some peoples far worse. Nor, says Kriwaczek, were Jews generally singled out for persecution. The Inquisition, for example, didn't target Jews specifically. It went after everyone who deviated from orthodox Catholicism, including Muslims, Cathars and Bogomils (whose history as secret Zoroastrians he traces most enjoyably in his Zarathustra book), Albigensians, and everyone else. Jews may have been expelled from time to time and in certain places, but they weren't alone. Lots of people were expelled from lots of places, and in most cases, the Jews were let back in pretty quickly. The Crusaders may have gone after them, but they also went after Albigensians, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and, on occasion, each other. And being Jewish may actually have spared the Jews a good deal of suffering as well. As non-combatants in the Catholic-Protestant wars, they missed the worst of Christian internecine fighting, and even made out pretty well, numbers-wise--whole communities of Czech Protestants, when the fighting went against them, converted en masse to Judaism instead of returning to the Catholic fold, and were absorbed part and parcel into the Heym.

Kriwaczek is too much of a gentleman to say it aloud--his books refrain from attacking other historians--but there runs throughout Yiddish Civilization a sort of good-natured implied rebuke to those historians who concentrate on the Jews exclusively, throwing context out the window; and who extrapolate the worst events to befall them as emblematic of their entire history. In contrast to the picture presented by the "lachrymose interpretation," Kriwaczek reimagines the Heym as a large, vibrant, and in many ways quite powerful member of the European family of nations.

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When things did go south in Eastern Europe, the Heym too suffered. Eastern Europe's economic collapse in the 17th century hit the Heym hard, as did the Khmelnitsky massacres in Ukraine (although, as Kriwaczek is quick to point out, the Cossacks who murdered Jews killed a lot more Poles, and generally did it far more brutally). The Heym's long, slow decline mirrored that of Eastern Europe's, culminating with the Third and final partition of Poland in 1795, which brought much of the Heym under Russian domination (although, as Kriwaczek also points out, the end of Poland was disastrous for the Poles as well). The Russians penned the Jews into the Pale of Settlement, severely circumscribing their movement, barred them from certain professions and from land ownership, and abolished the Kehillot (the Council of the Four Lands had been done away with earlier), ending their self-governing communal autonomy and hastening the Heym's demise. Under the Russian Tsars, the Yiddish Jews of the Heym became how they are viewed today: a despised, marginalized, downtrodden, and alien minority existing at the fringes of society, suffered only grudgingly, if at all, by the Christian masters of Europe.

It got worse after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 (the assassins included within their number one Hessie Helfman, a Jewish girl), the ascension of the reactionary Alexander III, whose Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedenostsev, enacted policy designed to bring about what he thought would solve Russia's Jewish problem: one-third of the Jews should be killed, one-third forced to emigrate, and one-third totally assimilated into Russian society. Pogroms broke out, instigated, as Michael Aronson argues in his book Troubled Waters, by the Tsarist government.

In response to the latest wave of Tsarist persecution, much of the Heym, already reeling, simply uprooted itself. Millions of Yiddish Jews just picked up and left, going either West to Europe and America or south to Palestine. And the disasters of the 20th century simply finished the job. World War I, the Russian Revolution, and, finally, the Holocaust, conclusively killed off what was left of the Heym.

The great Jewish nation of the Heym is now one with plenty of other communities, Jewish and non-Jewish, which have moved elsewhere, merged with other communities, or ceased to exist altogether. But even if it no longer exists except as a fading (and often suppressed) memory, the Heym was the crucible of the modern Jewish people. It's where the vast majority of today's Jews originated, forming modern Jewry's attitudes and informing its identity. It is as as crucial a chapter in Jewish history as was the Babylonian, Greek, or Spanish chapters, and will, G-d willing, someday be remembered that way. 

Deconstructing Ann Coulter

Andre Maurois, in his beautiful, impressionistic biography of Benjamin Disraeli, writes of the words of consolation that Disraeli's great rival, William Ewart Gladstone, wrote to him upon the occasion of Disraeli’s wife’s death: “He was sincere, and for an instant, no doubt, each of the two rivals appeared to the other in his true light, no longer distorted by passion. Thus it happens that from time to time, a madman may have a few minutes of relief, during which his phantoms flee away.”

So it occasionally happens. Every so often, we are given the grace to view those whom we despise and detest with understanding and compassion. I recently had that sort of moment concerning Ann Coulter, whom I’ve never met and most likely never will, since I’m not famous, and whom I regard as the absolute worst, out of a strong field of contestants, of the far-right-wing political commentators and pundits.

There aren’t really words strong enough to describe the depths of my antipathy for Ann Coulter. Her smugness, her shrillness, her stridency, her mean-spiritedness, the jawdroppingly stupid outrageousness of her public statements, elicit in me a visceral disgust and a rise in my gorge not unlike the one I experienced when, as a child, I picked up the body of a dead bird I’d found in the woods, and saw its underside crawling with maggots.

Ann Coulter today, the snarling darling of the Far Right fringe. 

The sheer banality and calculated offensiveness of the stuff this detestable bitch says (“Liberalism is a mental disease,” “Enthusiasm for soccer is a sign of moral decay,” etc.) are shocking even to someone like me, who enjoys being offensive and appreciates the quality in others, and who is, as Robert Benchley once described himself, “an old public school boy with a strong stomach.” The terms she uses in reference to Arabs and Muslims—“ragheads,” “jihad monkeys,” “carpet merchants,” “camel jockeys,” and her demand that Muslims be barred from airplanes and suggestion that instead “They could use flying carpets”—are worse than racist, they’re not funny. She goes for the cheap shot—cheap shots like “Man Coulter,” “Stan Coulter,” “Dan Coulter,” and Ann-Drogynous Coulter.”

On one of these occasions, she reminded me forcibly of an asshole I knew in fourth grade who used to call a biracial friend of mine “nigger,” “zebra” and “Oreo,” as we rode the bus to school, looking around quickly after each insult to gauge the other kids' reaction to his bons mot. 

It was at that moment that my Mauroisian moment hit me like a ton of bricks. In one second, I got Ann Coulter. I understood her completely, right down to what I’m certain are the cracked and leathery soles of her greyhound-like feet. At that second, I could read her whole history and psychology like a book.

I don’t know anyone who knew her in her youth, so I’ll probably never get confirmation of my hypothesis, but I don’t really need it. Even if I were proven wrong about her, it wouldn’t do any good. Much as a religious zealot, confronted with unassailable evidence that his faith is malarkey, digs in his heels and continues to keep the faith, so would I. The following is purely hypothetical, but I’m sure as shootin’ that I’m right. But you judge for yourself.

Ann then, as a high school student at New Canaan High School. 

Ann Coulter was, throughout most of her childhood and adolescence, a painfully shy, gawky, awkward, clumsy girl who looked like she was built out of kneecaps and tinkertoys. She would have been mousily invisible had she not shot up to adult height somewhere around seventh or eighth grade, and thus became a magnet for mockery—not that of the genuinely cool kids, who probably ignored her, but that of the second-tier cool kids, the hangers-on and toadies. Throughout adolescence, she kept her mouth shut (no doubt to hide her braces and retainer as much as to keep quiet), and she walked with a stoop to try and hide her Amazonian height. She moved with the quick, small, mincing steps of a person both hurrying to class and petrified of her own clumsiness. Once, perhaps several times, in spite of her caution, she tripped over her own feet going down a staircase, scattering the books, notebooks, folders, pens, and pencils she usually kept clasped tightly to her chest all over hell’s half acre, to the hilarity of whomever happened to be standing around. She probably spent most evenings weeping herself to sleep.

When she got to college, however, that all changed.

At Cornell, she quickly discovered that some men like tall, blonde, blue-eyed, willowy women, and she, to quote Naomi Wolf, bloomed in the sunlight that is male sexual attention. Or to put it more concisely and less poetically, she slutted out. Once she realized she was desirable, she gave it away like candy at Halloween. She threw it out there like nobody’s business. She took all comers. She not only became easy, she became notoriously so.

Eventually, though, she realized her mistake. It was the wrong kind of attention. She’d been reduced to nothing but a slampiece, a toy, a three o’clock girl, a skank, a cooze, a disposable momentary diversion, a dehumanized walking means of the relief of unbearable urges.

Or maybe she just got a dose of the clap. Either way, it made her mean.

I’ve often thought that conservatism is the default political position of the mean. Political affiliation, most likely, is as much a due to temperament as it is to upbringing or conviction, and modern American conservatism is the preserve of the bilious and dyspeptic. Immigrants? Send ‘em back. Blacks? Cut ‘em off. Welfare, Affirmative Action, all of it. Let ‘em sink or swim. Hopefully sink. Gays? Don’t let ‘em marry. Women? Send ‘em back to the kitchen. Prisoners? Fry ‘em. Other countries? Bomb ‘em. Poor kids? Let ‘em starve. The environment? Trash it. Spotted owls? Shoot ‘em. Pristine wilderness? Drill, baby, drill!

It’s an ugly, selfish, and nihilistic political philosophy—hell with everyone except me. The only entity for which American conservatives seem to have any sympathy at all is the fetus, most likely because it hasn’t yet committed the sin of becoming the thing conservatives hate most, which is a person.

And, just as Gollum went to Mordor because Mordor draws all evil things, so did Ann Coulter, the embittered former fucktoy, gravitate toward the far right.

But she still craved the attention. Being desired made her feel pretty—the things those college boys told her to get into her pants made her feel good. Now that she’d tasted attention after an adolescence of being either ignored or derided, she still wanted it, even if she’d grown a little tired of the threesomes, the gangbangs, the fulfilling of humiliating requests, and having to walk home across campus after being told, “Okay, you can leave now,” at two in the morning. And she realized that she could still get that attention by saying outrageous things as loudly as possible.

It was sort of a perfect storm of personal discovery. She discovered that spewing filth, which she enjoys, brought her attention, which she also enjoys. I suppose we should count ourselves fortunate she got into conservative political commentary instead of scat porn (although I don’t see much difference between the two), but I’ll bet it was a horse race between the two career options.

Read one of her books sometime and tell me I’m wrong. I’ve read a couple of them. There’s nothing profound there. She doesn’t have an original thought in her head. There’s no research, no analysis, no synthesis, nothing worth reading. Her books are nothing but long, strident screeds, insult-fests that garner attention the way a toddler throwing a tantrum or a monkey its feces does. They are self-evidently, if inadvertently, pleas for attention.

It’s even more evident when you see her in action. Watch her on a talk show sometime—everything she says and does is calculated to bring attention to herself. The flamboyant, overblown and overenunciated manner of speaking. The ludicrously plunging necklines (which expose her bony ribcage). The laughably short skirts (which expose her camel-like knees and thighs). The constant tic of tossing her long, lustrous, luxuriant blonde tresses. The affected, insincere laughter. And most damningly, the tiny, tiny little pause that follows almost every statement she makes and the furtive little peek around to see how her witticism was received—the very same mannerism of the nasty little fourth-grade tormentor of my friend on the school-bus.

Try as I might to hate her—and I do, make no mistake—I can’t help but pity her, because she is pitiable.  Under her paper-thin veneer of bravado and belligerence, she’s brittle as hell. Fragile as a Ming vase. She’s morbidly vain, but blind to the laughable spectacle that she presents to the world. Incessant self-regard without a millisecond of self-awareness. As much as she insults and belittles, she desperately craves approval and appreciation. It’s as plain as the Adam’s apple on her neck.

Norman Mailer, in his last book, The Castle in the Forest, imagines the childhood of Adolf Hitler as a phantasmagorical, horrifying, scatological and squalid chronicle of demonic activity, incest (some of it between Hitler and his brother), rape, animal torture, violence, cruelty, coprophilia, murder, and sexual and emotional degradation, all of which turned an innocent child into the greatest monster that the human race has ever produced or witnessed. One reviewer called it “an utterly strange work of naked, wild empathy,” and it is. It’s tough to have compassion for an evildoer, but it’s much easier to have compassion on the child the evildoer used to be.

If my reading of Ann Coulter’s background is correct, and I bet it is, it illustrates the fundamental irony of her existence. If I’m right, she’s a deeply scarred and wounded being, the product of cavalier cruelty, a woman whose experiences crushed all the decency out of her, and who now trumpetingly advocates and celebrates the same lack of compassion that turned her into the miserable thing that she is.

She’s probably beyond redemption, but, properly interpreted, she serves as a terrific object lesson. If we want to keep others like her from spawning and germinating, all we must needs do tune her out, ignore her screeching prescriptions, and extend respect, compassion, and empathy in all arenas, personal and political, to those who need it.