for Thea Wieseltier I In the spring of 1866, on the front page of Ha’Carmel, a Hebrew literary weekly that appeared in Vilna for a few decades in the latter half of the nineteenth century and served as an important organ of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which was beginning its exhilarating and damaging march through the traditionalist Jewries of Russia and Eastern Europe, a poem was published. It was a manifesto-like summons to a more cordial relationship, even to a deep bond, between the Jews and Western modernity. It was called “Awake, My People,” and its author was Judah Leib Gordon, who had composed it three years earlier. Gordon was an extraordinary man of letters and one of the most controversial writers in modern Jewish history. (As is often the case, the controversies included injustices.) Though twentieth-century Hebrew poets came to despise Gordon for reasons of political or aesthetic doctrine, and though his poems now read with a quaintness that often crosses the line into archaism, Gordon was a founding father of modern Hebrew culture, which in some ways was an even more breathtaking creation than the modern Jewish state. There is an old story, se non è vero è ben trovato, that Gordon once called on one of the masters of the newly founded “science” of critical Jewish scholarship in Germany, another founding father, and when the old sage asked the young firebrand to identify himself, he declared “I am a Hebrew poet!” “Oh really?” came the reply. “When did you live?” Having exhorted its readers to participate in the societies in which they live, to speak their languages and learn their ways of thinking, to participate in the cultures that they proudly shunned, Gordon’s poem comes to its climax in its penultimate stanza whose infamous third line continues to reverberate in the interminable struggle of the Jews to find an honorable definition of who and what they are. “Become a man as you leave and a Jew in your tent” — from Deuteronomy 34:18, “rejoice Zebulun in thy going out, and Issachar in thy tents.” As I say, archaizing. By a “man,” of course, Gordon means a human being, and more specifically, an agent of universal principles that are shared across the society in which the Jewish community finds itself. (The idea that Western principles, or Eastern principles, or any principles, may call themselves universal is offensive only to those for whom the provenance of an idea is its most salient feature.) In modern parlance, Gordon’s line is most familiar as “Be a man in the streets and a Jew at home.” A great psychological and cultural bifurcation, though it should be added that Gordon was not calling for the abolition of either term and certainly not for an erasure of Jewish culture in favor of European culture: the development of Jewish culture was his holy if secularizing cause. In his hostility to Jewish religion, in fact, and in the hostility of other maskilim or enlighteners, one witnesses the birth of the very notion of Jewish culture: the culture is what one continues to adore when the religion is gone. Gordon regarded his prescription as a meliorist formula for a respectful integration. The irony seems to have been lost on him that he was insisting upon the revival of precisely the punishing spiritual structure wrought by the Iberian catastrophe centuries earlier, the eternally anxious double life of the crypto-Jew. A double life was anathema as much to traditionalists as to assimilationists; the warring camps both sought the same thing, which was a single life, a ringing consistency, one thing and one thing only. Gordon’s prescription at least had the merit of recognizing that there is no such thing as one thing. Who else would dream about uniformity, if not creatures who are multiple? The furiously (and learnedly) anticlerical poet was correct: a person’s identity is finally determined by the internal relations of the parts, all of which are real regardless of their respective ideological reputations — by the negotiations and the accommodations between the many elements of which every person is always comprised. There are no hollow humans. Radical exercises in self-amputation are invitations to psychological misery. Before one even arrives at the matter of one’s presentation to others, at home and in the street, there is the pressing question of one’s presentation to oneself: the inward arrangement of one’s influences and ideals, and how one’s inner tent shall comport with one’s inner street. The burning question of the seam. Gordon’s proposal was roundly scorned as a kind of soft treason, even though there is not a page in his writings that is not animated by the love of his people. In 1885, in Odessa, HaMelits, a Hebrew weekly that in the following year became a Hebrew daily, the first one in Russia, published an influential response to Gordon’s maxim by Moshe Leib Lilienblum, an early maskil who became an early Zionist. Be a man in the street and a Jew at home. The poet is not the first to give us such a lesson. Many are the writers who urged us to hide the “Jew” in us (that is, our being Jewish), this contraband stuff, in the secrecy of our tent, as if it were a disgrace for a man in the nineteenth century to be known as a Jew. Many have heard this cry and the results are evident in our children. It was Gordon’s luck, I suppose, that the notion of the “self-hating Jew” was still half a century away. (This call to order, this insinuation that development is defection, has been the stock-in-trade of American Jewish reactionaries, of “proud Jews,” for a long time. I first heard it from the lips of Meir Kahane.) (Already I regret mentioning Kahane, and certainly his lips, in the context of Lilienblum and these other Jewish nobles.) Other contemporary critics of Gordon were a little kinder. The beloved Hebrew writer Yosef Hayim Brenner complained
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