The House of Twenty Thousand Books (24 page)

For thousands of years, Jewish communal life had been organised around the spoken and written word. Virtually every aspect of behaviour, both public and private, virtually every form of thought, every interaction – with kin, with country, with the earth, with the cosmos – was determined by the Holy Books, by an extraordinary body of commentaries and by rabbinic musings, and responses to those musings. Living in London, Chimen was at the epicentre of a different, much younger political culture, one which had built itself up around a set of common laws dating back to the thirteenth-century Magna Carta, and around a set of judicial writings dating back to Blackstone’s work in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Yet, surrounding him, in his own home, were hundreds of thousands of pages of Talmudic texts, of minutely argued belief systems, that had defined Jewish life since at least the Babylonian exile. Here were contained millennia of arguments about how to understand the word of God, how to
interpret history using these precepts, how to respond to any philosophical or ethical dilemma.

For Chimen, expertise in modern Jewish history meant having an intimate knowledge of at least five hundred years of history, from the time of the expulsion of the Jewish population from Spain under the Inquisition onwards. In fact, of course, he sometimes lectured on aspects of Jewish life dating back much further. Once, he gave a talk on the development of Hebrew biographical writing in the ninth century of the Common Era; elsewhere he made reference to the expulsion of the Jews from England in the thirteenth century. What fascinated him was the texture of communal life, the ways in which individuals intersected with their milieu, the mechanisms by which the wheels of history were turned. And, overwhelmingly, he was obsessed by the written evidence left by past centuries: books, Torah scrolls, manuscript fragments, letters, diaries, edicts, newspapers, poems and song.

Until he was well into his eighties, and already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Chimen travelled with Jack Lunzer to visit the great Hebrew manuscript collections of Europe, sharing with Jack his excitement over the books and manuscripts that they saw. After one of their expeditions, to a collection housed in Parma, Chimen wrote, in spindly, almost-out-of-control handwriting, to his friend, ‘I could have spend [
sic
] there not two and a half days, but a few months. Again, my profoundest thanks for such an exceptional treat.’ Chimen wrote of examining the Pentateuch of Constantinople; Hebrew Bibles from Soncino, Brescia, Naples, Pesaro, Lisbon and other cities; books from as far apart as Cracow and Salonica, Tubingen and Mantua. And, he added, he had ‘listened to the divine voice of the ten commandments and “schma Israel”’, the most important of all Jewish prayers. Writing of an early Jewish printer, Avraham Garton, he noted, ‘I hailed him as the Jewish Gutenberg. And I saluted to my “ancient” master –
Rashi – who enlightened millions of Jews with his exquisite clarity and exceptional brevity’. Where Lunzer could afford to buy such manuscripts, Chimen had, on the whole, to be satisfied with high quality facsimiles. Every so often, however, Lunzer would ceremoniously present an original manuscript to his friend as a token of his appreciation. Chimen would express great embarrassment, but the manuscript would be secreted away nonetheless on the sagging old shelves that lined the walls of the upstairs front room of Hillway.

Just as this room’s bookshelves were filling up with books and manuscripts printed and painted and penned hundreds of years earlier, in the early 1960s came the Jacobs Affair. When the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 split the British Communist Party, Chimen had been deeply engaged in the resulting debates. But when the Jacobs Affair fractured the Orthodox Jewish community in Britain, Chimen, despite his growing involvement with the study of Jewish history, did
not
become publicly involved in the theological dispute, and watched from the sidelines as the affair split British Jewry down the middle.

Louis Jacobs was one of the country’s leading younger rabbis, and a scholar of note. At a time when both Judaism and Christianity were faced with the conflicting demands of tradition and modernity, Jacobs argued for modernity within the Orthodox tradition. He believed that Orthodox education should be fused with secular education and wanted young Jews in Britain to know about the religion of their forefathers while also culturally assimilating into the British mainstream. In an argument that had something in common with the contemporary debates in both the Catholic and Anglican churches, he urged his co-religionists to recognise the trends of modernity, and to embrace change rather
than instinctively to resist it. His difficulties with the Orthodox traditionalists arose from his book,
We Have Reason to Believe
, published in 1957, in which he argued that the Pentateuch was not literally the word of God, as had been believed by the Orthodox for millienia; rather, he had written that it was divinely inspired, but also a human interpretation of God’s will – of how to live ethically and worship righteously. It was a similar conclusion to that reached by Maimonides eight hundred years earlier, and by Spinoza in the seventeenth century. Jacobs’s work, however, created a furore, as questioning the divine authorship of the Bible was anathema to an ultra-Orthodox rabbinate.

Jacobs had hoped to be appointed principal of Jews College, the country’s leading Orthodox seminary for rabbinic students and a stepping-stone to the position of Chief Rabbi. Instead, he found himself fighting for his professional survival. In 1961 the Chief Rabbi, Israel Brodie, issued a proclamation preventing Jacobs from taking up the headship of Jews College, and for the next three years, Jacobs and Brodie feuded, more or less in public. In 1964, Jacobs tried to return to a job he had held previously, as rabbi of the New West End Synagogue. Once again, Brodie intervened, refusing Jacobs a licence to take up a rabbinic position in a United Synagogue. Shortly thereafter, Chimen’s father stepped into the fray in support of the Chief Rabbi.

Yehezkel Abramsky had long retired from the Beth Din and was living in Israel, giving weekly Talmudic discourses to enormous crowds of followers; but from a distance he helped orchestrate the opposition to Jacobs. Where Jacobs, like Spinoza, espoused a more critical vision of religious observance and the role of ritual, Yehezkel clung to the Orthodox understanding of Torah as the literal word of God, to be obeyed in all its details. Schooled in the Musar yeshivas, he had never tailored his pronouncements to meet the shifting mores of the moment, and only very rarely had he doubted himself after taking a position.
One such case had occurred back in Byelorussia, when a sick man had asked him whether he could drink a glass of water on Yom Kippur. Rabbi Abramsky had told him he could not, and the man had subsequently died. Whether the lack of drinking water had anything to do with his death was beside the point; Yehezkel felt guilty about it. His biographer reported that, while he was in Moscow’s Butirki Prison waiting for the death sentence the courts had handed down against him to be carried out, he conducted a reckoning of his life and concluded that this was one of the actions for which God was punishing him. Of course, in the end the death sentence had not been implemented, and Yehezkel had had ample opportunity since to make amends for the Yom Kippur ruling. He was a stern
dayan
, but was widely regarded as a kind and humane man. When it came to Jacobs, however, he saw no reason to compromise his beliefs. The man was an upstart, a modernist railing against millennia of carefully worked-out ideas and traditions. The historian Miri Freud-Kandel believes that he considered Jacobs ‘an agitator’. It was, for Yehezkel, simply unthinkable that Jacobs could rise up the rabbinic ladder to the point where he would become a viable contender to be Britain’s Chief Rabbi. Louis Jacobs was denounced as a heretic by Yehezkel and others who shared his views. Not only was he excluded from the job at Jews’ College but, because of the opposition of the Chief Rabbi and of leading religious figures such as my
great-grandfather
, he was essentially barred from ever again serving as a rabbi of a United Synagogue.

The story caused a sensation in the British media, and has been described as the greatest schism in Anglo-Jewry’s long history. ‘The Jacobs Affair is
the
theological scandal of Anglo-Jewry’, Freud-Kandel explains. ‘Nothing compared’. Outraged at his treatment, with defectors from the New West End Synagogue Jacobs set up the New London Synagogue, where he founded a Conservative Jewish movement known as Masorti, outside the
control of the Chief Rabbi and the United Synagogue, promoting a modern Orthodoxy and eschewing the ultra-Orthodox beliefs that men such as Yehezkel Abramsky had brought with them from Eastern Europe in earlier decades. He became something of a guru to religious Jews of an assimilationist bent in London, something even, given the moment, of a counter-cultural hero to them.

What did Chimen, in full retreat from Communism, and starting out on a near half-century project to study and interpret the modern Jewish world, think about this? Without a doubt, in private he sided with Jacobs – although he did so without picking a public fight with his aged father. Nor did he take a public stand on whether Jacobs was qualified to be Chief Rabbi – throughout his life, Chimen, a non-believer, was averse to stepping into controversies within England’s Jewish religious community. But, quietly, he did reach out to Jacobs and, over the years, the two men eventually became friends. They would meet periodically and discuss trends in modern Anglo-Jewry.

In December 2005, the
Jewish Chronicle
conducted a poll of its readers: who was the greatest British Jew since 1656, when Jews had been re-admitted to England after centuries of exile? The winner, hands-down, was Louis Jacobs. No Orthodox contender came close. Seven months later Jacobs died, his reputation now secured. I doubt if Chimen voted in that poll; but he would have been, at the very least, intrigued by the result. It gelled nicely with the ideas he had developed in a raucous public debate with Chief Rabbi Jakobovits, in 1977, in which he had urged Britain’s rabbis to not shy away from the secular and to reach out to young Jews with a fresher message. One could be a good Jew, Chimen argued, without necessarily subscribing to Orthodoxy.

Indeed, despite his growing obsession with all things Jewish, Chimen never re-embraced Orthodoxy. To the contrary, what most interested him about the great Jewish religious commentaries
was how they related to the march to modernity: how Rashi’s interpretations of Biblical texts had segued into Maimonides’s ethics, and how Maimonides ultimately led to Spinoza, the greatest of all Jewish philosophers.

Nearly half a millennia after Maimonides published his
The Guide of the Perplexed
, Baruch Spinoza was shunned by the rabbinate for his heretical views: his belief in a God that was, in essence, ‘nature’; his conclusion that the universe was bound by inviolable rules of nature; and his argument that those rules, rather than miracles such as the parting of the Red Sea for Moses, truly represented the infinite power of God. Maimonides had depersonalised God yet retained the possibility of miracles; now Spinoza was, to all intents and purposes, turning God into another name for ‘the universe’. Spinoza’s God was everything; therefore, in some ways, the religious leaders who rounded on him realised that He was nothing. He existed so far removed from human concerns, so remote from human lives that the rituals of religion, the codes of conduct embodied in the Talmud, ceased to have any purpose. Infuriated by arguments for a God who seemed to have no need for coteries of rabbis and scholars to interpret His will, the rabbis excommunicated Spinoza from Amsterdam’s Jewish community; his very name became anathema. Ultimately, however, Spinoza’s ideas largely triumphed over those of his critics. Of course, many continued to believe in an activist, personal God; but, in the centuries following Spinoza’s death, an array of Jewish thinkers turned away from ultra-Orthodoxy and sought answers to ethical and scientific questions using Spinoza’s framework for understanding the universe.

In Chimen’s library, one could see how Spinoza, a man ahead of his time, had influenced the emergence of modernity. He was a philosopher of religion who helped pave the way for the triumph of the scientific mindset: he set the intellectual stage for Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity more than two hundred years
later, as Einstein himself acknowledged. His God and Einstein’s – the god who did not play dice, the god who presided over the space-time continuum – would have understood each other all too well.

In that overheated upstairs room, the ceiling of which would periodically suffer water damage after a particularly heavy rainstorm, Chimen would occasionally take out his first editions of Spinoza to consult: a
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
, printed in Amsterdam in 1670 and an
Opera Posthuma
from seven years later which was published by Spinoza’s friends shortly after his death. Also in that room, Chimen would lovingly examine his first edition of Descartes’
Meditations,
which he had acquired from his friend Piero Sraffa in exchange for a letter by Lenin and a rare book by Friedrich Engels. Unusually for a book in that room, it was not written by a Jewish author, but apparently it had earned its place in this room by virtue of Descartes’ intellectual affinity with Spinoza, a generation his junior. You cannot understand the Enlightenment without understanding how Descartes and Spinoza broke down medieval certainties. Nor can you understand the Haskalah and the emergence of modern Jewish culture and politics without understanding the Enlightenment. By extension, therefore, Descartes was as much a part of the modern Jewish story, or of Chimen’s particular version of it, as was Spinoza.

As Chimen’s curiosity grew, so he sought to venture down practically every byway of Jewish thought and history. He owned mystical Kabbalistic texts, and gorgeous Haggadot, some printed, some resurrecting the arts of medieval manuscript calligraphy, from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as a trove of rare documents relating to Sabbatai Zevi, a
seventeenth-century mystic who had allowed his followers to believe that he was the Messiah, only to grievously disappoint them by converting to Islam at the point of an Ottoman sword. Zevi was one of only a handful of Jews forcibly converted by the Sultans during this period, and his conversion was viewed by much of the rabbinic elite with something approaching relief, since they had long maintained that he was a dangerous false Messiah. Perhaps because of Zevi’s conversion trauma, many historians argue that he came to hold a profound appeal for Marrano families in the Levant, those Spanish and Portuguese families forced by the Inquisition to convert to Christianity, who had, in secret, retained some aspects of their Jewish heritage. Zevi’s humiliation was, they felt, theirs too. Spinoza’s family, exiles who had moved to Amsterdam generations before the philosopher’s birth, had been a part of this community.