Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

For Tom at seventy in Zion Sergio Sierra was born in Rome in the winter of 1923. When he was twenty-six years old he received rabbinical ordination, after which he assumed a rabbinical post in Bologna, where he assisted in the reconstruction of the shattered Jewish community. The embers of history’s wildfires had not yet cooled. The great synagogue in Bologna, built by a well-known local architect in a sensitively adapted Art Nouveau style, had been destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943, and it was not until a decade later, and under Sierra’s supervision, that its restoration would be complete. Sierra served in Bologna until 1959, when he left to take up a prominent pulpit in Turin, and to direct its rabbinical college. His talents were not only clerical. The community rabbi also published erudite papers in scholarly journals on modern and medieval themes in Jewish literature. He produced a translation into Italian of Rashi’s commentary on Exodus, and a translation of Bahya ibn Paquda’s eleventh-century masterpiece Hovot Ha’Levavot, or The Duties of the Heart, a monument of Jewish reason and piety, and a translation of Keter Malkhut, or The Kingly Crown, an epic philosophical prayer in rhymed verse by the eleventh-century poet Solomon ibn Gabirol, who has been beloved by readers of Hebrew for a millennium. He also produced a critical edition of one of the most curious works of medieval Jewish literature, the Hebrew translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy by an early fifteenth-century Jew in Perpignan named Azariah ben Yosef ibn Abba Mari, also known as Bonafus Bonfil Astruc, who fled to Italy from persecution in southern France and was one of the very last figures of the golden age of Provencal Judaism. Sierra was yet another of the many rabbinical figures in the annals of Judaism who managed to combine a pastoral calling with an intellectual one, leadership with learning. He served in Turin until 1985, and in 1992 he moved to Jerusalem, where he died in 2009. In Rome, immediately after the war, when he was twenty-two, Sergio Sierra bought a book, a small book, about a hundred pages long, and small in format too. It was a translation into Hebrew of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. It had been published a year earlier in Tel Aviv under the auspices of the Department of Youth Affairs of the Zionist Federation, and the fine translation was by Asher Barash, a distinguished Hebrew writer and editor who came to Palestine from Galicia in 1914 and became a founding father of Israeli literature. (He was also the author of perhaps the first Hebrew work on literary theory, which is a terrible responsibility to bear.) When the young man acquired the volume, he proudly stamped his name and address all over it, including on the dust jacket, right above the canonical image of Herzl with his weirdly Assyrian beard. I know all this because I discovered the book in the basement of an antiquarian bookshop in Jerusalem. No doubt Sierra’s heirs had rid themselves of his library. We latecomers fill our shelves from the philistinism of the sons and the daughters. But I did not acquire this book — I did not seize on it — for bibliophilic reasons. Herzl in Hebrew is not hard to find. And at the time I had no idea who Sergio Sierra was. What happened was that I opened the book and was shaken to my core. On the front endpaper Sierra had inscribed his name in Italian and in Hebrew, Sierra Yosef Sergio, in a fine hand, and next to his signatures he recorded the date of his purchase. “1945,” he wrote — but not just that; he also underlined “1945” — but not just that; next to “1945” he also added an exclamation point. “1945!” The exclamation point undid me. The entirety of a man’s spirit and the entirety of a people’s spirit was in it. It denoted astonishment: we are still here. It denoted ferocity: we really do intend to exist. It denoted resolution: we are still in our fight for the mastery of our fate. It denoted vitality: even now we are strong. It denoted politics: a state