BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
44 | w w w. n a t i o n a l rev i e w. c o m OCTOBER 30 , 2017P
HILIPJENKINShas given us, in
this book, a brilliant new
account of Judaism’s mostly
temporary but still highly in -
fluential transformations during two
centuries, from 250 to 50 B.C.E.Among
modern scholars, the literary works he
draws on have usually passed for mere
extracanonical curiosities, but they have
such coherent themes, and ones so famil-
iar to Christians and Muslims, that they
seem to demand a rethinking of the
Western religious heritage. In particular,
to speak of thoroughgoing discontinuity
between “traditional” ancient Judaism
and “radical” early Christianity no longer
makes sense—though I will need to
come back, later, to the shuddering
deal-breakers for ancient Jews that
Jenkins downplays.
During the centuries after Alexander
the Great’s death (323 B.C.E.), control of
Jewish territory passed between the
Ptolemaic dynasty based in Egypt and
the Seleucids based in Mesopotamia:
The Jews endured the misfortune of hav-
ing their religious and political center
between the two most ambitious and
aggressive houses of Alexander’s suc-
cessors. The Maccabean rebellion in the
mid second century B.C.E. famously
threw off the foreign yoke, but the result-
ing independent Jewish dynasty failed,amid violent misrule, after about a hun-
dred years, and its successor, Herod the
Great, was a client king of the Romans.
Despite direct imperial control of greater
Judea, including military occupation,
from the early first century C.E., Rome
didn’t work her usual stabilizing magic
here, and the Temple was destroyed and
the Jewish nation extirpated in 70 C.E.
The Jewish culture responded with
creativity to these bewildering changes
and fearsome pressures. Longstanding
limitations must at first have been
daunting: monotheism with a distant,
all-powerful God whose name could not
even be spoken; centralized sacrificial
ritual under the control of an inherited
priesthood; scripture whose promises of
vindication for a lawful and faithful peo-
ple remained unfulfilled.
But, generation by generation, there
appeared new sacred literature, such as
the Books of Enoch and Tobit. In these
stories, angels are no longer shadowy
and ambiguous intermediaries but busy
helpers of the righteous. Opposite
them, the mere talking snake of the
Garden of Eden and the minor deities
referred to with contempt coalesce into
Evil Incorporated. The evil ones are much
worse than their closer forerunner Satan
(“Adversary”) of the Book of Job, who is
a cooperative functionary of God in
heaven. (Jenkins compares him to a pub-
lic prosecutor.)
A dualism was developing that fed
the apocalyptic material of the Dead
Sea Scrolls. At the end of the world, the
armies of light and darkness would face
off, and light would triumph. Mortals
would be raised from the dead, judged,
sent to eternal reward or eternal tor-
ment. The kingdom of God would be
here at any moment, brought into being
by the Anointed One, the Son of Man,
or the Son of God. The Dead Sea Scrolls
anchor these ideas in disapproval of the
venal Temple hierarchy that truckled to
infidel foreign power.
Thus, ideas we are apt to attribute to
Jesus the revolutionary, or to Jesus and a
few other rabble-rousers, might have
been quite common—and institutionally
well grounded, too. The synagogue as a
gathering place for teaching, reading,
hymn-singing, and prayer is an innova-
tion of this period. Nobody had regularly
and communally prayedbefore, Jenkins
points out. The Christian church service
was substantially there already.years, the baby Jules saw nothing of
the world outside this room. When at
last the German army retreated,
Jules’s father came out of hiding and
celebratedby playing Bach’s Sei Lob.
An SS major finding the way out of
Reims was surprised to hear German
music played in a France brought to its
knees by Germans. Investigating, he
caught on that Jules’s father and moth-
er were Jews who had survived in
secret and he shot them dead. One of
the men in his detachment clubbed the
little boy with his rifle butt but failed to
kill him.
In due course conscripted into the
army, Jules is posted to Algeria, when
nationalists there were fighting an ugly
war for independence. On sentry duty in
the Jebel, he catches an Arab man and a
young woman spying out the French
camp. Rather than shooting them as he
should, he lets them go, an act of con-
science that other French soldiers will
have to pay for with their lives.
More time passes, and, as Helprin
puts it, “French Jews felt the fear and
darkness of the Thirties rolling in.”
Massive crowds marched in Paris, chant-
ing “Death to the Jews.” Strolling along
the Seine one night, Jules comes upon
three young Arabs, one of them holding
a knife, attacking someone already
down on the ground. Spotting that this
victim was wearing a yarmulke, or
skullcap, and therefore had to be an
Orthodox Jew, Jules comes to the res-
cue. By the time the brawl is over, the
Orthodox Jew has vanished and two of
the Arabs are dead. Lying to the police,
the surviving Arab says he is the victim
of a racist who shouted at him in
German. It is implausible that Jules’s
father would have fled to Reims lugging
an inconvenient cello all the way, and
even more implausible that a musician
in his seventies would have overpow-
ered three young men so easily. Never
mind: Fables make demands on the
imagination. The young Arab who sur-
vives enables detectives to identify Jules
as a murderer and he dies without wife
or fortune. Helprin might be saying that
justice comes at a terrible price; or pos-
sibly that people, especially Jews, must
kill those who intend to kill them, but
only those.
The words most appropriate for this
novel happen to come from French: It is
a tour de force.Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That
Made Our Modern Religious World, by Philip
Jenkins (Basic, 336 pp., $30)Sarah Ruden is the author, most recently, of The
Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and
Meaning in the Bibleand a translator of
Augustine’sConfessions.Origins and
Ruptures
SARAH RUDENText