European Judaism

It is a sad duty to record in this issue the death of three people who in very different ways contributed to contemporary Jewish life in Europe.

The Trialogue Conference is an interdisciplinary conference aiming to bring together the perspectives of literature, psychotherapy and religion. It was established in 1997 and has been held biennially since then. A novel is chosen as the basis for each conference and a theme drawn from it is suggested as a focus for discussion. Three speakers are invited, from a literary, a psychotherapeutic and a religious background. Each speaker gives a paper on the selected text from their own particular perspective. The conference occupies a weekend and is built around these three presentations, together with an introductory talk on the Friday evening by the chair of the conference.

A conference about André Schwarz-Bart's book The Last of the Just considered it from the perspectives of literature, psychoanalysis and spirituality. This introductory article offers brief reflections from all three viewpoints. The book's structure seems problematic because of its mixture of genres. It shifts from traditional folk tales to a description of adolescent torment, to a searing account of the Nazi persecution. The article suggests that there is nonetheless an underlying literary coherence to the book. In therapeutic terms the article explores an ambiguity about whether the picture of Ernie Levy, the book's hero, as a Lamed Vav is to be taken at face value, or whether it represents the desperate attempt of a disturbed young man to shore up his internal image of himself. From a spiritual perspective, the article discusses what it can mean that this almost unbearably dark book is framed by the statement that 'God enjoys himself'. When a Just Man takes all the evil of the world into his heart, Ernie's grandfather tells him, something changes for God. What God enjoys may, in Schwarz-Bart's vision, be His own dependence on the Lamed Vav, for something that He alone cannot make happen without the existence of the Just Men whom He has created.

This article explores André Schwarz-Bart's famous novel, The Last of the Just, as the expression of twin crises in literary and religious representation. Ernie Levy's words, 'there is no room for truth here', spoken on the transport to Auschwitz as he cradles and comforts a dying child with stories of an idyllic afterlife, become the point of departure for a reading of the novel in terms of the loss of just this 'room for truth'. The article considers the novel's reimagining of the legend of the Lamed Vav in the light of Gershom Scholem's criticism that Schwarz-Bart compromises the legend's 'moral anarchy' before casting the novel in the light of Freud's remarks on traumatic dreams in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as well as Emmanuel Levinas' ideas on 'useless suffering'. The last part of the article reads the novel's anguished theological motifs alongside Paul Celan's poem 'Psalm'.

André Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just has been both loved and vilified for its evocation of the timelessness of Jewish suffering. This article argues that what is timeless about The Last of the Just is not just its commitment to the longue durée of unrelieved sorrow, but something more uncomfortable and disturbing. Running alongside the novel's lachrymal mysticism is a very contemporary story about how modern racist violence produces a particular kind of misery, a uniquely oppressive, implacable, psychical and historical suffering that isolates its victims, whether individually or as a group. In Schwarz-Bart's writing, understanding this suffering means recognizing its difficult and complicated universalism.

The article takes André Schwarz-Bart's 1959 novel The Last of the Just as the starting point for an exploration of the trope of 'Jews are eternal victims of (Christian) anti-Semitism' and the theological question of suffering as part of God's plan for the Jewish people. The role of Jewish anger, conscious and unconscious, in relation to both themes is discussed, and linked to contemporary political questions in regard to Israel-Palestine. The history of the 'thirty-six Just Men' (lamedvovniks) is reviewed; and questions are raised as to whether, since the Shoah, the Judaic myth of salvation has been transferred from a deity to a land and a state.

The world is facing a multitude of interconnected issues, leading to avoidable starvation, poverty and death for hundreds of millions. Is Arendt's concept of the 'banality of evil', which she adopted in preference to Kant's 'radical evil', applicable here? Are we bystanders, addicted to 'growth'? The paper considers the central role of thinking and, with the help of Greek myth and Nietzsche, the relationship between evil and hope. Finally, there is an emerging concept of 'radical hope'. What is this, could it be of help and how would it connect with Judaism's teachings of the Messiah?

Following the First World War, writers sought to articulate both a personal position and a position within the public domain, well illustrated by the 'Prague Circle' in the heart of the failing Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jews occupied a liminal position in Czech society, straddling three identities: Jewish, Czech and German. Max Brod became the primary historian of this 'circle', which included writers as diverse as Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel, Leo Perutz and Gustav Meyrink. Prague was central to their writings. Here was a borderland position crying out for a voice in the contemporary world.

On the seventieth anniversary of the destruction of the Vilna ghetto I explore ambivalences in Holocaust memory in the Baltic states and troubling notions of a 'double genocide' while tracing train journeys of death that connected Vienna, Vilna and Tallinn and so western and eastern Europe. Exploring how memories are connected to place and investigating how family legacies of Litvak identity also travel, I show how Musar ethical traditions also journeyed as far as South Africa to influence the ethical politics of the African National Congress. Framing questions about the relationship between ethics and memory across generations I return to the painful warnings in the words of Elchanan Elkes at the destruction of the Kovno ghetto. I trace the possibilities that they help to frame a post-Shoah ethics and a vision of 'the human' that questions the rational self that informed Enlightenment thinking and that proved incapable of resisting the brutalities of Nazism.

The Book of Esther hardly needs an introduction. However, at first glance it is easy to dismiss it as belonging to the kind of extravagant storytelling we associate with the oriental world, something out of the ‘Thousand and One Nights’. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to project our western prejudices onto this kind of literature, which, in its own way, seeks to instruct as well as entertain. Within the Hebrew Bible the Book of Esther might be classified as wisdom literature, illustrating how a wise man turns the tables on his deadly enemy in the struggle for power in a world of palace intrigues. Moreover, it is especially significant as the only book to be set in the diaspora, exploring the implications of this new reality of exile with its opportunities and dangers.

The Book of Esther was written as a parody or farce. It has both appalled and appealed to its possible readership. The rabbis may have struggled with whether to accept Esther into the canon, but once it was in, they engaged in fanciful stories about the book. Christians also struggled with accepting the Book of Esther, but for them, too, it did become part of the canon. Esther does have some very dark sides, especially in its treatment of women and its bloodthirsty closing chapters. This article suggests that if approached carefully the Book of Esther offers possibilities for open discussion concerning some sensitive topics.

Little controversy appears to surround the canonization of the Book of Esther and it fits in comfortably as one of the Five Megillot. Read at Purim and enjoyed because of the opportunities if offers for 'carnival', nevertheless it raises both classical and modern issues. The former relate to the absence of God in the book, hence the additions in the Targumim and Septuagint to 'correct' this. Modern sensitivities are concerned at the violence it displays; however, Emil Fackenheim notes its renewed significance after the Shoah as a reflection of the realities of diasporic existence.

Whereas the Purim custom established in Judaism offers an annual space not only to celebrate but also to reflect the task assigned by the Book of Esther to remember what is told about Esther, Mordechai, their people and the existential threat they faced, no such tradition developed on the Christian side. By presenting three different Christian Esther readings stemming from different times, this article seeks to demonstrate that fulfilling the task to remember for Christians must not just imply a serious interest in the literary richness of the story, but also a clear idea about problematic ways of reading.

This introductory article acquaints the reader with a fascinating, ancient translation of the scroll of Esther, the so-called 'Targum to Esther'. This translation exists in several versions, and therefore it is better to use the plural and speak of the 'Targums to Esther'. The language and setting in life of these Targums will be discussed, their history will be traced, and some representative examples will be given to show the distinctive character of these translations.

If Esther is a secular work of fiction, what can we say about the author’s attitude to his characters? A whimsical sermon.

Leon Yudkin was born into a well-known Anglo-Jewish family and began his Jewish education at Carmel College where he was noted for his involvement in drama, debate and editing the school magazine.1 He studied at University College London and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He obtained his Doctor of Literature degree from the University of London in 1995 for research that went into his first book on the Israeli poet Isaac Lamdan.

Writing on the website of the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), Eva Schulz-Jander and Michael Korn record an outline of her life: She was born in 1924 as Ruth Grünfeld, the youngest daughter of Fritz and Hilde Grünfeld, the owners of the well-known Grünfeld department store in Berlin on the Kurfürstendamm. Raised as a Liberal Jew with a very strong Jewish identity, she was encouraged from early on, especially by her father, whom she liked to quote, to speak her own mind and not to be afraid. She followed this principle until the very end. The Grünfeld family was forced to flee to Palestine, where she lived from 1938 until 1958, when she and her new family moved to London, where she remained the rest of her life.

I was a child of about twelve years when in 1936 following the never-ending discriminatory legislation in the wake of the 1935 so-called Nuremberg Laws, it was decreed that Jews must return their weapons or medals from the First World War.1 No way was my father, although a life-long pacifist, willing to hand over his mementos of that dreadful war. And so I was allowed to witness how my parents retrieved an iron cross, a number of medals, among them incidentally one from the king of Bulgaria and the emperor of Austria who were German allies in the First World War, and in particular his cavalry sword, from a large trunk in the vast loft of our flat, wrapped them in what I think must have been a blanket, to ditch them later that night in the River Spree.

Solomon, Norman, The Talmud: A Selection, London, Penguin Classics, 2009, 822 pp., ISBN 978-0-141-44178-8, soft cover

Grossman, Avraham, Rashi, transl. Joel Linsider, Oxford, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012, 327 pp., ISBN 978-1-90411-89-8

Gilens, Alvin, Reconciling Lives, Berlin, Westkreuz-Verlag, 2012, 233 pp., ISBN 978-3-943755-00-8, paperback

Prayer

The Questions