By Diana Brement, JTNews Correspondent
History is a means of placing current events in context. Can looking back also help us glimpse the future?
During the Golden Age of Spain, one man’s vision created a haven of cultural and religious tolerance and sharing between three religions. Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little Brown, $14.95, softcover) may make you sigh with nostalgia for a time which brought a renaissance of Hebrew literature, and when Jews and Christians served at the Caliph’s court. Unfortunately, it was also a time of war and conquest, and in the end, intolerance won out. This Yale professor wonders if the same thing is happening today.
The book begins with the arrival of Abd al-Rahman in Spain in 755 C.E. and ends “somewhere in La Mancha” in 1605. There, a young writer wanders Toledo in search of an ancient Arabic scroll, wondering about the Old Jews, the Old Muslims and the New Christians and why people call a windmill a giant when it is actually a windmill.
Intolerance was on many minds during the recent sack of the Iraqi national museum. I had an additional thought, aside from dismay and horror, that we had now lost any possible historical evidence of Abraham and Sarah.
Mercer Island resident and former National Review editor, David Klinghoffer has no such concerns. Cuneiform text or no, to him there is no doubt of Abraham’s existence, so he provides us with a patriarchal biography.
The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism (Doubleday, $26, hardcover), available next week, pieces together Torah, Talmud and Midrash with history and opinion in a way that I believe has never been done before. Klinghoffer provides us with a birth to death narrative, including a familiar-sounding story of the foretelling of Abraham’s birth to an evil king who then seeks to destroy Jewish babies.
Many of these stories are familiar only to those who have plumbed the depths of the Talmud (i.e., not many), and will certainly increase the reader’s knowledge of Jewish texts.
However, there is something discomfiting here. Perhaps it is Klinghoffer’s wholesale bashing of Biblical scholarship — his favorite target is Harold Bloom. Perhaps it’s his reliance on the “bicameral” mind theory — where 3,000 years ago, our improperly connected brains allowed us to “hear” idols speak, like schizophrenics, not recognizing our own inner voice — to explain idol worship. Perhaps it is the image of Abraham, the shaggy prophet, half king, half exile, leading his small group of disciples around the desert, preaching and proselytizing.
Speculating about Abraham — and Sarah — is as old as rabbinical scholarship, probably older. Klinghoffer puts his two cents in here.
If you often find yourself at a loss for contemporary facts when discussing the Middle East, you’ll want a copy of Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Mitchell G. Bard (American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, $14.95, softcover). This post-9/11 revised edition brings readers up to date.
If being condemned to repeat the past for failure to learn it worries you, then read The Anti-Semitic Moment (Hill & Wang, $35, harcover) by Sorbonne professor Pierre Birnbaum. Recent anti-Semitic incidents in France chillingly echo Birnbaum’s extensive details of the anti-Semitism that plagued France in 1898 following the Dreyfus affair.
Many readers may be looking for a respite from world affairs, A few new novels and lighter non-fiction may offer diversion.
Great Neck, (Knopf, $27.95, hardcover) by Jay Cantor is a novel of Russian proportions, a complexity of characters and events. It’s the 1960s — one reviewer called it “The Big Chill” without the music — seen through the eyes of a group of friends, mostly white and Jewish, from the upscale Long Island town of Great Neck. When a freedom rider friend is killed in Mississippi, each is inspired to pursue social justice in varying ways, from joining SDS to creating comic books.
Comics are an enduring theme for Cantor, who used them in both Krazy Kat and The Death of Che Guevera.
David Milofsky’s A Friend of Kissinger (University of Wisconsin Press, $24.95, hardcover) is a different coming-of-age story. In bleakly drawn 1970s Milwaukee, we live the lonely adolescence of Danny, whose father’s illness has left the family impoverished. Benign neglect leads him to an odd assortment of friendships with adults, including one with mob connections.
Milofsky’s writing is languid and unhurried. By omitting any cultural icons of that turbulent time, the author gives the book the feel of the 1930s or ‘40s. This is a first novel for the Colorado State University professor of English.
Are the rich really different from you and me? You can decide for yourself with this diversionary biography, a Victorian romance with social and political overtones. Charlotte and Lionel: A Rothschild Love Story (Free Press, $27.50, hardcover) by Stanley Weintraub is the story of this arranged — but successful — union of fabulously wealthy Rothschild cousins. Charlotte and Lionel worked hard in Victorian England to overcome social and political barriers to their Judaism. She hosted salons and he was elected to Parliament, which eventually forced the end to that governing body’s required “Christian” oath. On the way they had lots of children and bailed out a few countries.
Weintraub, a professor at Penn State, is also the author Victoria.
Finally, join Mimi Schwartz in Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (University of Nebraska Press, $14.95, softcover), due next month, as she recounts the enviable and unenviable aspects of a long marriage, and reflects on growing old and growing up together.
This is one of the American Lives series, edited by Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life), a Jewish Book Council selection and a top pick of the JCC Association Book Club Network.