Talking like a Jew: reflections on identity and the Holocaust

1. Debts and Acknowledgments

In the spring of 1990, I was in Jerusalem giving some lectures at the Hebrew University, and my wife and I signed up for a tour of the Old City run by a Jewish agency.(1) The guide was a compact, voluble, relaxed man. It was raining, and at a certain point we took refuge in a cafe in the Jewish Quarter. I bought the guide a coffee, and we fell into conversation, I cannot now remember about what. In any event, in explaining some point of his, he looked at me and added, "As a Jew you'll know exactly what I mean. At least I take it you're a Jew." I did not want to deceive him. I said, as I recall, something along the lines of "Well, I'm not a Jew, actually, I'm a goy; but I have a lot of Jewish friends." Unfortunately I had not stumbled two words into this inanity before it struck me how defensive it must sound. He looked at me, and I saw his eyes narrow and the corners of his mouth stir: it was evident that he did not believe me. But equally clearly, what was it to make a song and dance about, that some tourist should attempt to deny his Jewishness even to a fellow Jew? He let me finish and then said, with an air of finality, "Well, you talk like a Jew." Then he got up and thanked me for the coffee and we went on with the tour.

A curious, but not, one might think, a particularly interesting exchange. And yet odd, because a Jew in Jerusalem of all places ought, one would have thought, to be able to tell who is a Jew and who is not. The Arab in the Armenian Quarter, who shouted at my wife and me across the otherwise deserted street, "Jesus very bad man," knew very well with what species of infidels he had to deal. The other, elderly and dignified Arab in an astrakhan cap who showed us very kindly around the Haram al-Sharif plainly took me to be an English gentleman, and if he was wrong about the second of these things, as foreigners so often are, he was right about the first. We got on very well on that basis, and ended up having a conversation about the government of the Muslim holy places entirely redolent of Barchester.

What might seem odder, perhaps, was my own reaction to the episode. I felt, mildly but unmistakably, ashamed of myself. It was as if in telling him the truth I had told him a lie, or at any rate not the whole truth; and as if my motive had not, after all, been wholly that of undeceiving him: as if there had entered into it, somehow or other, just that element of withdrawal, of denial, of which his wary half-smile and his closing words seemed to convict me. And had I not shown, possibly, a certain evasiveness: a refusal to share with him, if not a common Jewish identity, then at any rate something perhaps more diaphanous, but still substantial and evident in the way of community, even if amounting to nothing more than the common way of looking at things which had struck him as worthy of comment in the first place.

Common sense told me that this was an oversensitive and scarcely rational reaction. For what could I possibly be hiding from myself in a case like this? Surely any man is the last court of appeal on his own identity? Descartes taught us that, and Kant turned it into the leading moral principle of the Enlightenment: that we are individually responsible for what and for who we are.

None of these considerations, though, sane and reasonable as they might appear at first sight, quite served to dispel my sense that in some deep way he was right to smile and I was right to feel rather ashamed of myself. How, after all, can a Jew in Jerusalem, a guide moreover, who sees hundreds of tourists every week, be altogether wrong about which of them is Jewish? Is it so clear that each of us knows who he is? That each of us is the author of his own identity, with sole rights to any royalties payable on it?

And really, when it came right down to it, I knew perfectly well what he had seen in me. Only I was startled to find it so visible to another. The identity of any man or woman is, after all, or often is, a palimpsest composed of fragmentary memories, imprints, of those he or she has loved. Other voices sound in ours, echo in the phrases we unwittingly choose. Ways of thinking which have charmed us in the hands of their originators reawaken later in the style of the thoughts which spring unbidden to our minds. Gestures of others stir in the unconscious movements of our hands. We are like trees in whose soughings can be heard obscurely the songs of the birds which have come to settle in our branches. In my case, for complicated reasons, many of those songs have been Jewish songs. The tree, it seems, has learned them, and now it sings them over to itself, happily and unwittingly, for they have become part of it.

And of course, once one begins to admit possibilities of that sort, the notion of identity begins to shift and shimmer in ways which let in just the kind of regrets and guilts I seemed to be feeling. "I told him the truth." Well, so I did, in a sense and up to a point. But may there not be, perhaps, more than one truth to be told in a case like this? And is truth the only criterion of adequacy which a declaration of identity must meet? Is a declaration of identity not also an acknowledgment? If Jewish ways of looking at and putting things have become recognizably a strand in my identity, have I not received parts of myself as a gift from Jews? And did I not deny that gift, refuse to acknowledge it, in uttering to this man, who so casually and kindly affirmed fellowship with me as a Jew, all that blather: "No, I'm a goy. . ." and all the rest of it? And in denying that did I not deny him? Deny myself?