My Amazon Review of Joshua Cohen's "The Netanyahus:....................."

 

A Snarky and Humorous Look at the Netanyahus

 

Joshua Cohen has written a snarky and humorous book of speculative fiction about Benzion Netanyahu’s job interview at the fictional Corbin College in western New York during the winter of 1959-60. One of the buildings at the college is called Fredonia Hall. True there a town in New York called Fredonia, but I believe the real reference to Fredonia, the mythical country in the 1933 Marx Brothers movie “Duck Soup.” The book is patterned after his real-life visit to Cornell where he was hosted by Harold Bloom. Netanyahu brings his whole family with him including is wife and three kids, one of whom is his son Binyamin.

 

Much of the book has to do with his host, economic historian Ruben Blum, his family, and his identity as the only Jewish faculty member. Because he is Jewish, he is chosen to host Netanyahu who is an expert on inquisition Spain, a subject Blum knows little. Blum comes from the family of an East European garment cutter, while his wife Edith comes from a German-Jewish family of a small factory owner. The conflicts are obvious and their teen aged daughter pines for a nose job. Here we have all kinds of identity issues rapped up into one family.

 

The Netanyahus overwhelm the Blums wreaking havoc with their home and breaking their color TV, an anachronism here because in 1960 there were very few assistant professors who owned a color TV. Color television did not become a mass consumer product until 1964. In another anachronism he has Blum’s former employer CUNY, which was not formed until 1961. Further, Ruben condescends to call the Netanyahu family the “Yahus.”

 

The book is serious when it discusses Netanyahu’s thesis that antisemitism in inquisition Spain was racialized. It did not matter whether or not a Jew converted to Catholicism, it was their blood that kept them from being true Christians. Hitler would adopt a similar view 450 years later and to me that was reinforced when I visited an exhibition on converso Spain at the New Mexico Museum. Thus, if Judaism was racialized the only solution for Jews was to have a state of their own.

 

I sense that Cohen really does not understand the Revisionist Zionist philosophy of Benzion Netanyahu. I did learn that Netanyahu was Jabotinsky’s, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, man in the United States until he died in 1940. Several years ago, I reviewed Hillel Halkin’s biography of Jabotinsky. ( See:  Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Hillel Halkin's "Jabotinsky (Jewish Lives)   There I learned that Jabotinsky and Netanyahu by implication understood that 1) there would be an inherent conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, 2) Nazism was going to destroy European Jewry and 3) the Labor-Zionist socialist model was not going to work in Israel. Simply put Jabotinsky and Netanyahu were clear-eyed realists. I wish Cohen grasped that fact.

 

Nevertheless, when you get beyond the issues I have raised, I believe the reader will learn much from the issues concerning the role of Jews in America, especially in a very non-Jewish community and will enjoy the comedic touches throughout the book.

For the Amazon URL see: A snarky and Humorous Look at the Netanyahus (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Jane Gerber's "The Jews of Spain: The Sephardic Experience"

The Spanish Legacy

CUNY Jewish history professor Jane Gerber has written a marvelous history of the Jewish experience in Spain from Roman times through the Inquisition and the diaspora that followed. I read this book just prior and during my recent trip to Spain. Because the focus my trip was largely on Spain’s Sephardic legacy her book brought a great deal of context to my travels through Toledo, Cordoba, Granada and Seville. One obvious legacy is the ubiquitous presence of Iberian ham as proof that Spain was no longer Jewish or Moslem.

Gerber begins with a discussion of Columbus who wasn’t Jewish, but likely had many Jewish contacts. After all the leading cartographers of his era were Jewish. Further because the Mediterranean under Moslem rule was one giant free trade area it was ideal for Jewish merchants to ply their trade throughout the region. Those trading contacts would become crucial after the expulsion of 1492.

Although I once thought that the Jewish golden age in Spain ran from 711-1492, it really ended in 1086 when the very strict Islamic Almoravid dynasty replaced the more relaxed Umayyad dynasty. The great Maimonides leaves Spain for Egypt around this time. There is a statue of him in Cordoba.  It was under the Umayyad’s that the Jews of Spain thrived. With the Christian reconquest underway Jews sought refuge with some of the Christian kings and some actually thrived. In particular the Abravanel family were the reigning court Jews of the era. What I learned from the book is that 1492 was a culmination of Jewish hatred that had long antecedents. Specifically there were mass pogroms stirred up by local priests throughout Spain in 1391 where Jew were massacred, most notably in Seville.

After the exile Gerber follows the Jews as they remain in Spain as Converso’s move on to Istanbul, Salonika and Sarajevo with a few moving to Safed. It was in Safed that exile Joseph Caro wrote his guide to Jewish practice, “The Shulchan Aroch.”Later they move to Holland and then on to the New World. The Sephardim initially thrive in the eastern Mediterranean, but then gradually decline as the Ottoman Empire falls into its long term decay.  She then follows their expulsion from the region after the establishment of the State of Israel to Israel proper where they now represent about half of the Jewish population.

What Gerber’s book lacks is a discussion of the Converso Jews who settled in the American southwest and Mexico.  The Inquisition followed them to the New World. Today there are Catholic families in New Mexico who practice such Jewish traditions as lighting candles on Friday night, avoiding pork and sitting Shiva for the dead. A few of those families have actually returned to Judaism.

To sum up, Gerber has written a very informative book about the Sephardic experience that few Americans in general and Ashkenazi Jews in particular have very little understanding.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R233CYL4H9J2AT/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv