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IS IT 'JUDAICA MINUS TH4
JEWS' IN Europe?
Aufbach, 4 April 2002
http://www.aufbauonline.com/aktuell/pages7/14.html
A Review of Virtually Jewish by
Ruth Ellen Gruber
On my first visit to Kraków in
1994, I was shaken up by the Jewish Museum in the Old
Synagogue in the former Jewish quarter of Kazimierz.
What surprised me was the way the displays - mannequins
of shtetl Jews, a collection of ritual objects - were
presented as remnants of a culture long dead. For a
moment, I saw myself as a rare specimen of an extinct
species. I knew better, of course. Jewish life was flourishing
in many places in the world and, in fact, a small but
growing Jewish community existed in Poland. But it was
absence - not presence - that was on the mind of those
who had put the exhibit together.
This memory surfaced while reading
Ruth Ellen Gruber's Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish
Culture in Europe, a provocative study of the recent
explosion of interest in "anything to do with Judaism,
Jews, the Holocaust and Israel" in countries where
the Jewish populations are small and, in some places,
dwindling.
As Gruber documents in detail, a plethora of Jewish
festivals, seminars, conferences, workshops, readings,
lectures, etc., now take place from "Milan to Munich,
Kraków to Kluj." Jewish Museums have opened in
cities as varied as Berlin and Bologna, and Jewish Studies
form part of the curriculum in universities in twenty-two
European countries and count over a thousand Europe-based
scholars doing research on the subject. Throughout the
continent, numerous films are produced, books published,
and TV shows aired that focus on Jewish issues. And
everywhere, crowds fill concert halls and arenas to
hear performances of Jewish music.
What became clear to Gruber was that the very size and
extent of this phenomenon went far beyond the capacities
of the small Jewish populations. Both organizers and
audiences tend to be largely Gentile, and that raises
the troublesome question of what Gruber calls "Judaica
minus the Jews."
To describe the engagement with Jewish history, memory
and the Holocaust in the absence of Jews themselves,
the scholar Diana Pinto developed the useful term "Jewish
space." Gruber takes this formulation one step
further, declaring the space to be the void in European
life created by the Holocaust. This is what is now being
filled by a "virtual" Jewishness, some aspects
of which draw on authentic sources, while others are
based on the outsiders' needs and perspectives. Indeed,
the motivations of the promoters and consumers of this
surfeit of "Things Jewish" are as diverse
as the manifestations themselves. What is disturbing
is that some of the most successful organizers who profess
to embrace Jewish memory and culture, do not even seek
out contact with living Jewish communities.
In a book of only 239 pages, Gruber's attempt to be
encyclopedic can be overwhelming. The density of description
and richness of reference make it almost impossible
for the reader to take in all she has explored. The
sections in which the author has divided the book -
"Afterlife," "Jewish Archaeology,"
"Museum Judaism?" and "Klezmer in the
Wilderness" - are almost small volumes in themselves.
Most heartening are the pages on "Jewish Archaeology"
describing the significant restoration of Jewish sites
- synagogues, cemeteries, ritual baths, occasionally
whole neighborhoods - after decades of neglect in countries
on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. Some preservation
and restoration had taken place as a result of the efforts
of a few individuals before 1990. But it was in that
year, when a meeting of the Jewish Heritage Council,
a division of the World Monuments Fund, took place,
that a more official impetus began. More than two hundred
participants from fifteen countries attended, including
several from the former Communist countries. What emerged
was "an unprecedented public, international statement
that Jewish monuments were part of the global cultural
heritage, not meaningful solely to Jews any more than
Egyptian, Greek or Roman monuments are meaningful solely
to Egyptians, Greeks and Italians." Since then,
national monument authorities as well as local organizations
have taken active part in restorations, while tourist
bureaus have put the awakening interest in the Jewish
heritage on the sightseer's maps.
Movers and performers of "Things Jewish"
For this reader, one of the more fascinating aspects
of the book were Gruber's depictions of some of the
prime movers and performers of "Things Jewish,"
both Jews and non-Jews. Moni Ovadi, a Sephardic Jew
who was born in Bulgaria in 1946 and grew up in Milan
draws crowds throughout Italy with his Yiddish-punctuated
performances based on Eastern European culture. Gruber
describes an evening in Trieste where she first attended
a Simchat Torah festival in the old synagogue with the
small congregation that remains in that city. From there,
she went on to Ovadi's performance which included excerpts
from books about the Jewish experience in Trieste, Jewish
songs and jokes. But, as she points out, no mention
was made that this was a major Jewish holiday, nor was
there any awareness that a service was going on at the
same time a few minutes away. Ovadi concluded his performance
by turning off all the lights to symbolize that Jewish
life in Trieste no longer existed.
The disconnect with the lived Jewish life is only one
level of the artifice Ovadi cultivates. The culture
he professes to represent, and which the non-Jewish
Italians take literally, is not only not his, it has
no connection to the Jewish life as it was ever experienced
in Italy. The authenticity his audiences believe they
are applauding is a series of stereotypes with no connection
to the present or the past. This is "Yiddishkeit"
as a universal and Ovadi speaks like a guru when he
says the music he plays speaks of "man's holy being,
his possibility of facing the universe, weak yet sublime."
In 1988, two young non-Jewish Poles - Janusz Makuch
and Krzysztof Gierat - launched the first Festival of
Jewish Culture in Kraków. It is now such a successful
annual with audiences in the thousands that it has even
been dubbed a "Jewish Woodstock." According
to Gruber, "Makuch sees no contradiction in his
role as a non-Jew directing a Jewish cultural festival
for other non-Jews in a former Jewish neighborhood that
today is a Jewish ghost town."
Makuch's conversation is replete with Jewish words and
Yiddishisms, "The Jewish Culture Festival is a
special kind of prayer," he tells Gruber. "For
me, it's a Kaddish, which you pray once a year. The
festival is a mitzvah, a good deed a Jew would do. This
is my world, this is my life." There is no doubt,
that Makuch is sincere, even though he is refering to
the new "world" of the virtual Jew.
Yet another variation on "Things Jewish,"
in Europe is the strange symbiosis between American-Jewish
klezmer musicians and their enthusiastic German fans.
Michael Alpert of the American group Brave New World
wrote a Yiddish song titled "Berlin 1990"
to express his ambivalence about this connection. One
verse went as follows:
I'm proud of my heritage
Yet I envy you,
Today's children of yesterday's enemy,
Because yours is the future
One land and one language
While we are left here speechless …
Inevitably, in the virtual Jewish world, the song became
a hit. "We [Jews] are the vanished race of Europe."
Alpert sums up. "[We are] on the national conscience,
romanticized and ascribed wisdom".
In her conclusion, Gruber cannot resist the old question.
"But is it good for the Jews?" And in proper
talmudic fashion, her answer is yes and no. Many in
Europe have learned to appreciate Jewish culture as
part of their own heritage. However, there is the danger
that the "Jewish Thing" is moving too far
out of Jewish hands. Active Jewish input is essential
to keep "Jewish cultural products" from replacing
the living reality.
Gruber has written a solid and fascinating account of
a paradoxical moment of Jewish history.
Monica Strauss
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