The Master of a Thousand Tongues said: ‘Go there, where the Jews live together, tightly packed into villages or small towns.’
So I went to the Jews.
And there I met people who were Jews, that is to say, all the world around them called them Jews. But I saw no difference between them and other people, except in certain traditions of everyday life and of religion.
And I wrote to the Master of a Thousand Tongues the following letter:
Having recently read Reza Aslan’s excellent book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, I find the suggestion that Jesus was a fiction created by the Romans to keep the Jews in check to be difficult, but not impossible, to accept. Aslan, despite making a strong argument that Jesus was an unsuccessful messiah (one of many) who became the impetus for other more ambitious Romans to base a new religion on, never doubts that Jesus was a real person.
Continue reading “Was Jesus Christ a Roman Fabrication?”Oh, here we go again with all that Jewish angst. Shoah, Shoah, Shoah.
That is one of the themes in The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson. The story involves three men: one Jewish, another Jewish but anti-Jewish, and a third goyim but thinking and acting like he might be Jewish. It might not surprise you then that this award winning novel is an exploration of what it means to be Jewish in contemporary culture. This isn’t really the Jewish religion but rather the Jewish culture and the contemporary attitudes towards Jews and Israel.
And underneath it all is a varied and nuanced representation of anti-semitism in today’s world. Whether it is the depiction of the “self-loathing Jew” which is decidedly overdone in the novel, or the events of out-right anti-semitism, or even the less obvious racism of a main character who in his confusion the possibility of his being or wanting to be a Jew, The Finkler Question is really The Jewish Question. As one character thinks:
“After a period of exceptional quiet anti-Semitism was becoming again what it had always been — an escalator that never stopped, and which anyone could hop on at will.”
I found The Finkler Question tedious and repetitious. True, nothing really happens in the novel but that doesn’t bother me: in fact, I rather well enjoy a good Erzälung but this one was dry toast. I know it won the Mann-Booker Prize so I went back to see what other novels were in contention. But even though I didn’t see anything that jumped out at me as a winner, I still can’t see how this one was chosen. I have read that Jacobson wrote this novel about anti-semitism and for whatever it lacked in originality or quality it made up in cute epithets and funny situations. As so often, however, I must have forgotten to laugh.
This one gets my Fibber McGee Award.
A Celebration of Reading 