Of Pearl and Portia

1. Saturday night we went to Tel Aviv for a concert in memory of Daniel
Pearl, the Jewish American journalist who was murdered by terrorists in
Pakistan in 2002. This was one of a series of concerts taking place around
the world at the same time, with the theme of "peace and harmony."
When we arrived at the concert hall there was a crowd milling around in
front of a desk. A man in a gray suit stood by the desk and I thought he
must be in charge, so I went up to him and asked him in Hebrew if this was
where we picked up tickets. He looked at me for a second and then in
English he asked me if I was from an Embassy, and when I said no, he
suggested that I wait on line. Later I discovered that he was the new
American Ambassador.
The US Embassy sponsored the event and the Ambassador spoke eloquently. He
pointed out that within 2 months of his death Daniel's killers were captured
and within 6 months they were tried and sentenced. But, that is not enough,
and this concert was part of his ongoing legacy. Dalia Rabin, the former
PM's daughter spoke, and emphasized that Daniel's last words were "I am a
Jew," and that he died because of this. But, from this fact we must take a
universal message against hatred and for peace and harmony (I am always
somewhat suspicious of universal messages).
The concert was given by the Alei Gefen choir, the official choir of Tel
Aviv municipality. Its director and founder, Eli Gefen, was born in
Bratislava, and left for Palestine in 1939 as a child. That was the last
time he saw his father, David Grosz, since the Nazis murdered him and his
whole family. Some years ago he received out of the blue from Austria a
package containing copies of his father's compositions that had been
discovered there. The first item on the program was one of his father's
works, entitled "Tabernacle of peace." It was an enjoyable concert.
2. Livia Bitton-Jackson is a Holocaust survivor, a Professor of Judaic
Studies at CCNY and an excellent lecturer. She spoke at AACI on Sunday on
"The contrasting images of Jewish males and females in European literature
from the 16th-20th century." In her research, she found a very persistent
pattern repeated in hundreds of book, plays and poems, namely the image of
the villainous, old Jew and his beautiful and virtuous daughter (there is
usually no wife/mother). Everyone knows of Shylock and Portia in
Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice."
The first major example was Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta" where Barabas (!)
the Jew was far more evil and one-dimensional than Shylock. It should be
noted that these English versions of Jews were written when there had been
no Jews in England for hundreds of years (they were expelled in 1290 and not
allowed to return until 1656 under Cromwell). But, there are endless
examples of this pattern, by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe, and in Spanish
(the story of Rachel), German, French ("la belle Juive"), Scandinavian and
Russian literature. Almost every major and many minor writers used this
theme.
The question was not so much why the old Jew was a villain, that is perhaps
obvious and certainly comes from Christian teachings, but rather why was the
daughter depicted as virtuous and beautiful? The simple explanation is that
she represents the virgin Mary, at the same time being a Jewish virgin and
an erotic prostitute. Usually she has many positive features and she has a
Christian lover (Christianity triumphing over Judaism), but she becomes a
fallen woman and usually her life does not end happily.
Unfortunately, the theme is repeated in contemporary literature, but with
the evil Jewish State taking the place of the Jewish villain, a case of
Israel being Shylock's great, great, great... grandchild.