European Judaism

Gabriel Josipovici first contributed to European Judaism during its third year of publication in the Summer 1968 issue. In his role as Managing Editor, Rabbi Michael Goulston z'l sought to use the journal to provide, among other things, a place for outreach and dialogue between those who represented the religious leadership of the Jewish people, in this case rabbis of his own generation who belonged to ‘progressive’ movements in the UK, and Jewish ‘intellectuals’ perceived as being alienated from, indifferent to or somewhat marginal within their own Jewish tradition. Thus, the same issue includes the proceedings of a symposium on ‘Judaism and Marxism: The First European Dialogue’.

In this brief introduction to the Symposium to celebrate the 75th birthday of Gabriel Josipovici, held at the University of Sussex on 10 September 2016, the author recalls his first meeting with Gabriel during the 1960s, when literary criticism was dominated by a particular English perspective. As a cultural outsider, Gabriel introduced new approaches, particularly from France, that became part of transformative changes to the discipline as taught at the university.

There are many approaches to reading the Hebrew Bible, from the pietistic in both Jewish and Christian traditions to the scholarly. Gabriel Josipovici's approach is not about seeking the reductive ‘meaning’ of a text, but encouraging readers into an open relationship with the text in order to preserve the ambiguities and mysteries that adhere to such texts. Joseph's encounter with an unnamed stranger in Genesis 37 is used as an illustration of this approach. Standing ‘face to face’ with the text requires humility, and trust in the storyteller.

Written against the backdrop of Brexit, this short article examines the long history of British disregard for modernist and experimental avant-garde aesthetics, one frequently commented upon by critics and artists over the past century. In What Ever Happened to Modernism? Josipovici added his voice to this chorus, but his focus on British insularity went unremarked by reviewers. In addition to considering this more recent text, the article lingers over Josipovici's ‘English Studies and European Culture’, an essay written in the 1970s that presciently explores the symbiotic and primary relationship between England and the continent.

This article focuses on some of the themes and questions at the heart of Gabriel Josipovici's fictional and critical writing, most notably the idea that reading is a matter of participation rather than understanding. It asks what is distinctive about Josipovici's relationship with other philosophically inclined critics and theorists. It offers a participatory reading of one of his critical writings demonstrating the care with which it is arranged. The article concludes with a brief consideration of how other writers and works are brought into Josipovici's fiction.

The present article seeks to analyse the place of Shakespeare's work within the oeuvre of Gabriel Josipovici, starting with the latter's first published critical book, The World and the Book, and ending with his most recent, Hamlet: Fold on Fold. In the early work Josipovici sought to establish a direct line between the Middle Ages and Modernism, yet Shakespeare was already a presence whose plays obliged that line to deviate. In his later critical work, such as On Trust, Shakespeare becomes one of the figures who allows Josipovici to exemplify clearly the crucial gap he wishes to explore between saying and doing. This gap is most fully explored in the recent book on Hamlet, where the protagonist is seen as the supreme literary example of what happens when the traditions governing doing have fallen away, leaving the character adrift in a sea of possibilities of utterance and action, none of which has the feel of necessity.

This article explores three central figures that recur in Gabriel Josipovici's critical writing. All three are essentially solitary. First, there is the creative figure – the artist, the composer, the writer – alone in their study or studio. Second, there is a curiously impersonal figure, more elusive, harder to pin down. Not the writer or artist but an anonymous figure walking down the road, Wordsworth's solitaries in The Prelude and Paul Klee's Wander-Artist. And, finally, there are Jewish figures, especially from Kafka and the Hebrew Bible. What are these bare, elusive anonymous figures doing in Josipovici's writing? Why do they come up so often, throughout his work, from the mid 1970s to the present? And are they lifeless or are they full of life, deeply human, rooted in history and literature?

This article tries to elucidate Gabriel's story ‘Steps’ to some extent. Here, as elsewhere, the narrator's deliberate failure to clearly separate actual from imaginary facts and incidents causes problems of understanding. Initially, we are told that the protagonist has long been living in Paris. A little later, however, we hear that he has moved to Wales with his second wife. So where does the man live? While other stories remain ambiguous throughout, ‘Steps’ seems less impenetrable. The protagonist, we learn, often indulged fantasies when he went for his strolls in Paris and is quoted as saying ‘Going up and down steps lets the mind float free’. When at the end of the story the narrative suddenly shifts to the present tense – ‘…he climbs the steps of the rue St. Julien’ – this seems to suggest that most of the story represents aspects of the protagonist's ‘alternative lives’, as envisaged during his walks.

This article, as a tribute to Gabriel Josipovici, describes his impact on the author over many decades, initially as his teacher and thesis supervisor, later as colleague and friend at the University of Sussex. This impact included broadening his knowledge of contemporary French literary critics and of writers engaged with criticism, and opening up European dimensions to otherwise insular English academic approaches to literature. A study of Josipovici's novel Migrations (1977) shows how it manages to explore the many dimensions of the condition of migrancy, even though held here within the bounds of a novel that is tightly packed but opens into a whole world.

He climbs the stairs. I know him by his tread. My brother! The door creaks a little as he pushes it. Now he steps inside and says hello. He stands by the door and looks round. What a funny place to be, he says. Not the house, he adds. The house is very nice. Very nice indeed, as far as I can judge. But why do you sit here in the dusk like that? I knew it was you, I tell him. He comes forward into the room. There is nowhere for him to sit.

It takes time to look at an image. He spreads the paper flat on his desk and leans over it to try and get a better view of the small black and white photograph in the top right hand corner which has caught his attention.

Revisiting the Balfour Declaration, this article offers a threefold argument: first, challenging those who read the Declaration as symbolizing a new dawn of Jewish political history, the article proposes an alternative reading that considers it as a continuation of familiar patterns of Jewish political behaviour based on the forging of ‘vertical alliances’. Second, it argues that this perspective led many Jews to treat the Declaration as an unsigned ‘contract’, and it was not until the 1940s, with the rise in popularity of a discourse concerning Britain's ‘betrayal’, that this view began to be challenged. Third, explaining how and why the vertical alliance perspective was pushed to the margins of Israeli collective memory, the article looks at the rise of the ‘security paradigm’ in Hebrew literature and examines the ways in which the creation of a Jewish army was imagined as marking the end of old forms of Jewish politics.

Antisemitism is hostility to Jews as Jews, but defining antisemitism is complicated by Zionism and the existence of the State of Israel. The fundamental right to freedom of expression is threatened by the misuse of a definition of antisemitism and claimed examples of antisemitic conduct that encourage confusion between antisemitism and criticism of the policies and practices of the Israeli government and its institutions. The right to express criticism and to debate such policies and practices must not be suppressed by reliance on unsubstantiated claims of antisemitism.

As the child of Holocaust survivors, I had thought that after more than seventy-five years little else could be learnt. But I was wrong. After my second journey to Ukraine and Transnistria in order to discover how my family had survived when hundreds of thousands of Jews had perished, I realized just how much so. Bukovina's Jews from Romania, Ukraine and Bessarabia had faced horrific pogroms, forced evacuations and death marches, and had then crossed the Dniester River into Transnistria. These are lesser known topics in Holocaust history. Of the 450,000 Jews sent there, approximately 250,000 died, not by guns, gas or ovens but through thirst, starvation, disease and bullet-free mass murders carried out by the Nazis and their Romanian allies. Transnistria's Holocaust history must be visited and revised. We owe it to the survivors, ourselves, our children and to history itself, before altering what has been written, or not, becomes impossible.

Progressive liturgists seek to introduce gender parity into the first paragraph of the Amidah by adding the names of the Matriarchs immediately after those of the Patriarchs. I argue that this misrepresents their marriages and the role played by the concubines. A more balanced understanding is made possible by distancing the names of the Matriarchs from those of their husbands, and inserting them in the form of a brief piyyut, composed of biblical citations, just before the concluding blessing formula. The proposed insertion reflects the agency displayed by the Matriarchs and alludes obliquely to the concubines. Account is taken of the appropriateness of the piyyut for use in traditional settings.

Bar Mitzvah: A History, by Rabbi Michael Hilton, University of Nebraska Press/Jewish Publication Society, 2014, ISBN: 978-0-8276-0947-1, 360pp., £22.99

The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers, by Olga Borovaya, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-0-253-02552-4 (hardback), 317 pp., $60.00

Deep Calls to Deep: Transforming Conversations between Jews and Christians, edited by Tony Bayfield, London, SCM, 2017, ISBN: 978-0-334-05512-9 (paperback), 368 pp., £40.00

Confessions of a Rabbi, by Jonathan Romain, London, Biteback Publishing, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-78590-189-8 (paperback), 306 pp., £12.99