The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (34 page)

Bernstein was never reluctant to tell the world through his careful manipulation of the media and musical materials, pop and symphonic, stage and screen, what or how he was feeling. He felt that if he wanted to tell us, we would want to know, and although some found his message overheated or superficial, most flocked to hear his prophecies. He did not want to simply conduct or simply compose or simply teach. He wanted us to want him do it all, all at once, so we would want more.

Bernstein taught the world that music could stand for something other than just notes. With blood, sweat, and often tears, he converted hordes of tone-deaf heathen into passionate music lovers, transfiguring popular stage shows into meaningful arenas of social thought and children’s TV into fun orchestral play. His lasting influence on art may well be that conviction, expression, and love count in making the greatest music in this “best of all possible worlds.”

I
t was known throughout the Roman Empire as the Jewish War. As the reign of Nero was ending in chaos, Jewish rebels, called Zealots, sensed a weakness in Roman strength and organized a revolt to end the empire’s military occupation of Judea. The war that followed resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, son of the general Vespasian (soon to be crowned emperor). The official Roman history of this savage period was written by a participant, the Jewish general and traitor, Joseph ben Matthias, who took the Latin name Flavius Josephus in honor of his emperor’s family.

Josephus’s history is one of the most vivid works of literature from antiquity. Although his historical method and accuracy have been challenged for centuries, this account remains the most important record of the great revolt, which together with the Bar Kokhba rebellion in 135 C.E. effectively ended the Jewish state until its resurrection in 1948 from the ashes of the Holocaust.

Josephus was born in Jerusalem to a family with royal roots, was well schooled in the Torah, and viewed himself as an authority in the oral law, sought out for his opinion and guidance. He spent three teenage years under the tutelage of a holy man, who may have been an Essene, a member of a sect practicing a rough, ascetic life in the wilderness (familiar to many from tales about John the Baptist).

On a visit to Rome at the age of twenty-six, seeking to free some Jewish priests, Josephus made the acquaintance of Nero’s wife, Poppaea. Josephus was enthralled with Rome—and secured the priests’ freedom. At this time he evidenced an ability to negotiate and free himself from a tight place, which would later save his life and establish his fame.

When the Jewish War began in 66 C.E., Josephus was appointed commander of Galilee. He set about fortifying cities, preparing for the Roman onslaught. Regrettably, in what was a useless power play, the Jews fought each other almost as much as they fought the Romans. The Galilean leaders resented Josephus’s appointment over them by the authorities in Jerusalem. When Vespasian arrived with his legions in 67 C.E., the Jews were unprepared for the relentless and professional Roman soldiers.

Vespasian’s conquering advance slowly swept away all resistance in the Galilee. Josephus’s troops fought their final battle in a town called Jotapata. When Jotapata fell, Josephus fled with forty survivors to a cave. The rebels decided to commit suicide together rather than be executed by the Romans or sold as slaves. They chose lots to decide who would kill whom and in what order. Josephus may have rigged the drawing as he and one other man were the only survivors brought before Vespasian and his son, Titus.

Vespasian ordered that Josephus be kept in the closest custody so that he could be brought to Nero in Rome at the earliest possible moment. Always quick on his feet, Josephus addressed Vespasian, enthusiastically predicting that the Roman general would become Caesar (the Talmud has Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai doing the same thing!). Vespasian gradually began to believe the prediction, especially after the deaths in rapid succession of Nero’s three hapless successors, and favored Josephus’s advice. Josephus became an aide-de-camp of Vespasian and later of Titus, of special assistance at the siege of Jerusalem (Josephus was wounded while trying to convince the remaining rebels in Jerusalem to lay down their arms).

After Vespasian was crowned emperor by his troops and Titus had defeated the rebels and burned the Temple (stealing the master Torah scroll from the holiest of its chambers), Josephus was granted Roman citizenship and property. Seeking to warn all enemies of Rome of its invincible might, Vespasian commissioned Josephus to write an official eyewitness account of the Jewish War.

First written in Aramaic, the everyday tongue of Babylonian Jews, Josephus’s
The Jewish War
was meant to threaten as much as inform. That version is lost. Josephus later translated the book into Greek, a version that served Vespasian’s needs, legitimizing his merit (and that of his progeny) to be ruler of all men (despite his common birth).

Later in life, Josephus wrote
Jewish Antiquities,
an autobiography, and
Against Apion,
a defense against anti-Semitic writings. Although bitterly regarded by his people as a traitor, Josephus, when growing old and perhaps out of a deep guilt, defended Jewish tradition and the future of Judaism.

A Slavonic version of the
Antiquities
contains a famous passage about a certain Jesus of Nazareth. Over the centuries this passage was viewed by many in the Church as historical proof separate from the Bible of the existence of the Christ. However, most historians consider it a forgery of the third century when the Josephus manuscripts were in the hands of monks. Ironically, the works of Josephus were preserved for future readers primarily due to the commitment of the Roman Catholic Church to this passage, dubious though it may have been.

Josephus’s work (particularly
The Jewish War)
greatly influenced the development of European art, drama, and fiction as an essential source of legend for Slavic-speaking peoples (heroic literature), Italian Renaissance painters (Mantegna), English dramatists, and Russian novelists.

W
hen he learned in 1940 of the suicide of his friend Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, the great playwright and collaborator of composer Kurt Weill, is reported to have said that this death was the first loss suffered by German literature at the hands of Hitler.

Walter Benjamin was a literary critic, journalist, activist, translator, and philosopher. He is best described by the French term
“homme de lettres,”
a man of letters. Rarely published during his lifetime, his writings were known only to a small circle of friends, some who had distinguished careers after the Second World War. Since the publication of some of his works in the 1950s, Benjamin’s influence on contemporary perceptions of culture, history, metaphysics, and literature has grown exponentially. He is rightly viewed as one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century. His criticisms and viewpoints are often as illuminating for what they say as for how they are said. His paper “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is among the most commonly referred to and influential cultural manifesto of contemporary writing. Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire, Kafka, Goethe, Leskov, Proust, and Brecht’s epic theater continue to affect how modernist literature is understood and developed.

Benjamin’s father was a well-to-do antique and collectible dealer. Walter inherited an ardor for collecting, obsessively wandering through used bookshops, writing over and over again about his obsession. His parents were not religious. Assimilated German Jews living in bourgeois Berlin, Emil and Paula Benjamin sent Walter to progressive schools at home and in Freiburg and Munich. He became active in student movements. Before the slaughter of the First World War, many educated youths believed that solidarity through communal hiking and athletic activities would bring about cooperation and understanding. The war destroyed this optimism. Two of Walter’s closest young friends, revolted by the world and the increasing jingoism of German youth, together committed suicide. Benjamin withdrew from association with youth groups, fled conscription into the army for school in Switzerland. During the war, he studied philosophy in Bern, returning to Germany in 1920. He attempted to secure a position teaching at the university in Frankfurt, but his thesis on German tragic drama was rejected.

During these early years Benjamin wrote essays on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from art criticism in German Romanticism, various literary figures such as Dostoyevsky and Goethe, and problems of language, to the role of the translator. He developed new concepts of literary criticism, whereby texts were viewed by themselves, the text for the text’s sake alone, not in artificial contexts of culture or genre. Such criticism was undertaken as a form of expression. Indeed, criticism became for Benjamin a kind of philosophical investigation, though not a heavy Germanic philosophy based on Kant. Benjamin was creating something else, something ineffable, not easily pigeonholed.

His approach was profoundly Jewish, God-filled. Benjamin’s writings sought the fundamental meaning underlying words, in essence, the theology of expression.

Walter Benjamin’s essays often probe basic problems of communication and knowledge. We can only know the world through what is told to us. What is told to us is our world. What was written before our time was in a language peculiar to that time. To translate such older language into a language of our time requires that the original be capable of being said again. Yet, when a translation is made, the text becomes something far different from its origins. (Benjamin’s translations of Proust’s works were burned by the Nazis.)

Benjamin, the revealer of stories, was captivated by the storyteller Franz Kafka. Benjamin was one of the earliest critics to acknowledge the unique voice of the Czech Jewish novelist. Kafka, Benjamin believed, related experience through parable. Truth had to be foregone, to be foretold.

Benjamin the Marxist was also greatly marked by his friend Brecht. He admired Brecht’s fresh poetic voice. Brecht’s art lay in the immediacy of his words, naked of any historical dressing, language disillusioned with any meaning other than its bare truth.

Benjamin the secular Jew was surely influenced by his friend Gerhard (later Gershom) Scholem, the masterful author, educator, and expert on Jewish mysticism who emigrated to Palestine in 1923. The magic of the sacred text, the holy character of words, entranced these men. To reveal the hidden meanings of words expressed in Holy Scripture or epic drama was to make plain the presence of God.

Fleeing through France from the Nazis and Vichy French collaborators, Benjamin journeyed over the Pyrenees into the Catalan border town of Port Bou. The Spanish border patrol, learning of his arrival with a group of refugees, threatened to return him to France into the Gestapo’s reach. One day earlier or later Benjamin would have been permitted to stay. In poor health from a weak heart and exhausted from his trek, Benjamin committed suicide. The site of his grave in Port Bou is not known. There is no memorial erected in his honor.