Jewish-Christian Relations in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature: A Preliminary Sketch
…The Yiddish and early Hebrew poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg (1894-1981) radicalised the complex Jewish attitude towards Christianity.[52] In Albatros, a Yiddish literary almanac edited by Greenberg himself, he published long poems which expressed his attitude toward Christ with such force and audacity that the editorial office had to stop publication. Greenberg was a frontline soldier in the Austrian Army during the First World War, but deserted it and lived in hiding. After experiencing a pogrom in his hometown of Lemberg (L’vov, L’viv), he became an ardent Zionist.
In his early poems Greenberg often refers to Jesus as “my brother” or “our brother”.[53] In this context Jesus is a symbol of universal human suffering. In his long poem, “The Mystery Man”, published in 1922 in Warsaw in Albatros, Greenberg expressed his universalism with the words:
A man, Uri Zvi, or Ivan or Mustafa
with Shadai in his blood,
or with the cross in the head
or with half a crescent
at the trembling temple.[54]
In the poem “In the Kingdom of the Cross” (1923) Greenberg writes:
“At the churches/ Hangs my brother/ Crucified (…) Brother Jesus, a Jewish skin and bones shrinks”.
Greenberg identified himself with the historical Jesus, whom he – like Klausner – saw as a Jewish nationalist, who had been tortured and killed by the Romans because he was a leader of an anti-Roman revolt. But he detested historical Christianity, which had gone far away from Golgotha. He described Christ as being emptied from his humanity by two thousand years of distance from Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the Galilee. Jesus, who for Greenberg was a symbol of Jewish suffering, had been crucified by Christianity, and he was still being crucified in the Christian churches and cathedrals.
He gives vent to his attitude toward institutionalised Christianity with the words:
Oh Christ’s bald priests!
No man has cut the veins of your hands
And no one has driven his nails in your throats
No one has brought one of you to Golgotha
And hanged him naked on a blossoming tree.
Whose is the lament?
Not yours! It is our pain, the pain of the Jewish redeemer!
Not your agonies! It is our wound.[55]
In 1922 Greenberg published in his Albatros a “concrete” poem in the form of a cross, which was entitled Uri Zvi Before the Cross/ INRI (Jesus the Nazarene King of the Jews).[56] In this poem the poet turned to Jesus, saying:
You have become inanimate, my brother Jesus. You have two thousand years on the cross. Around you the world stopped. But you have forgotten everything. Your frozen brain does not reflect…You have become inanimate, you have tranquillity on your cross. I do not have it. Not me.[57]
The poet sees the Christian cross, a symbol of sympathy with suffering, as an empty, meaningless symbol. For him Jesus became the representative of the Jewish fate: “Ancient Jewish distress, Golgotha, my brother, don’t you see, Golgotha is here: all around.” Pilate places phylacteries on Jesus’ head, which are “a new crown of thorns”.
In the poem “A World on a Slope” (1922) the poet expressed his nihilistic loss of his former faith in Christian ideals. In this poem Jesus is fiercely attacked by a band of invalids and madmen who curse him and mock at him. They demand that he should get down from his heavenly cross to earth and join them, the real sufferes. They cry:
Get down from the cross,
you man, in our image!
Get down! The world has chimed: thirteen![58]
In this poem Christ is described as being emptied from his humanity by two thousand years of distance from Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the Galilee. Never before did any Jewish writer dare to directly attack and caricaturise the image of Christ.
At a time when many European intellectuals believed in a pacifist future, Greenberg prophesied the destruction of Europe together with the Jews. He wrote:
But I am telling you the prophecy – the black prophecy:
From our valleys a pillar of cloud will rise
From our dark breaths, woe to us how bitter they are!
And you will not realize the terror in your flesh.
And will go on prattling from burning palates
The Jews!
The Jews!
While poisonous gases will enter into palaces
And suddenly icons will scream in Yiddish.[59]
The Jews have nochance to survive in Europe. “Ten will remain, ten pain-stricken Jews … in order to prove: there was such a nation, on the Christian earth of distress”, he wrote in his “In the Kingdom of the Cross” (1923).
Greenberg describes the metamorphosis he went through:
I have been long meditating in the inwardness: is it possible
That those who kneel in Europe toward Bethlehem
And sanctify the bible – are those, these barbarians,
Whose dream is to annihilate the Jews completely?
Now he must admit that what the elders used to say about gentiles is true:
Oh, true-true-true is what my elders say:
The dead in the kloister is not my brother, he is Jezus.[60]
In 1925 Greenberg had written scathingly, “The land of enlightened Europe is not enlightened for the Jews. We are the most contemptible of humanity, as is well known”[61].
Now Greenberg perceived Christianity to be one element of a suspicious anti-Jewish world: “We [the Jews] are the only lonely ones in the world”, he wrote.
When aleady in Palestine, Greenberg wrote in a Hebrew essay (in his characteristic expressionistic style):
Hey, it should be said once and for all: the pain of the pure Christianity is the pain of the stabbed Judaism. The wound is in our flesh under the skin, not theirs. The problem: Jesus of Nazareth, who was crossed when he was thirty-three years old – this is our problem, from us it arose.[62]
His fierce attacks on Christian Europe reach their climax in his post-Shoah collection of poetry in Hebrew Streets of the River (1951). Greenberg’s emotional attitude toward the gentile world represents the psychological disastrous results of the Jewish experience in antisemitic Europe. The memory of this cruel experience is still active in the collective psychology and in political decisions in Israel and outside it.
[52] In the 1910s and early 1920s Greenberg wrote expressionist poetry mostly in Yiddish, and edited the avant-guard Yiddish almanach Albatros (Warsaw 1922- Berlin 1923). He began writing in Hebrew after his emigration to Palestine in 1924. On Greenberg’s attitude to Christ, Christians and Christianity see Noah H. Rosenblum, “Ha-Antitetiut Ha-te’ologit-Historit Shebanatsrut Beshirat Uri Zvi Greenberg” (The Theological-Historical Christian Antithesis in Uri Zvi Greenber’s Poetry), Prakim 4 (New York, 1966), pp. 263-320; S. Lindbaum, Shirat Uri Zvi Greenberg: Kavei Mit’ar [The Poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg: Contours], (Tel-Aviv: Hadar, 1984), pp. 117-159.
[53] Lindbaum, ibid., p. 118.
[54] “Di misterie mentsch”, trans. by H. Bar-Yosef, Albatros 2 (1922), p. 14.
[55] Ibid..
[56] This poem might have been the inspiration for Chagall’s The White Crucifixion (1938) where the same letters, INRI, appear above the cross).
[57] “Uri Zvi Greenberg faren Tslav INRI”, Albatros, 2 (1922), pp. 3-4.
[58] “Velt Borg-Arop”, Kholiastre, (Warsaw 1922), p. 17.
[59] English translation quoted from Baal-Teshuva, chagall: A Retrospective (New York 1995), pp. 301-302.
[60] Here Greenberg uses the Polish pronounceation of the word “Jesus” (in contrast to the Hebrew “Yeshu”), to emphasize Jesus’ otherness.
[61] “Etsleinu ba-olam” [At our place in the world), sadan 4 (August 1925), p. 5.
[62] Editorial column of Sadan, edited by U.Z. Greenberg, 1-2 (Jerusalem, 1935), p. 2, trans. By H. Bar-Yosef.
an do you read Polish?
^
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment