THE PROFESSOR AND THE FOSSIL

by Maurice Samuel ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

The ""professor"" of the title is Arnold J. Toynbee; the ""fossil"", the Jewish people. And the author, a serious student of the issues involved, attempts to cut through the ""arabesques of erudition"" of Toynbee's monumental Study of History to expose the misrepresentations of the Jewish past and present, the state of mental confusion revealed in the volumes, and to show the positive side of the Jewish contribution to world history, the contradiction of the charge that the Jews constitute a ""fossilized remnant of a perished civilization"". To those whose reading of the Somerville Abridgement revealed Toynbee as failing to recognize the fundamental roots of Christianity in Judaism, this further study is a shocking indictment, meticulously documented, and showing in Toynbee a seeming ignorance of fact, misinterpretation of evidence, ambivalence and double talk which would suggest deliberate perversion of known historical fact to an end that serves the cause of anti-semitism to a dangerous degree. He has presented only those aspects of Jewish history that prove his three central ideas:- that the period of the prophets was the only phase of value in Jewish history; that the rejection of Jesus as the Messiah was their fatal error; that thereby they condemned themselves to everlasting sterility. He offers misstatement after misstatement:- on the source of the Yiddish dialect and the value of Yiddish literature; on the facts of records of sheer survival through enslavement, exile, dispersion; on the evolution of Christianity from the Judaic to the Hellenic; of the place of the central focus of Jewish religion, the belief in One God which survived 4000 years of continuing drama; of the dominance of the nationalist not the racial antipathies, and so on. Contradiction after contradiction muddies the waters of scholarship. Samuel charges Toynbee with accepting a stereotype in his analysis of the Jews in the Middle Ages and their place as traders ""who made the most of it"". In his later volumes Toynbee shifts ground, but never acknowledges error, and throughout one gathers a sense of implacable hostility, a determination to belittle achievements, deny vitality, establish the fact of fossilization by stating it unequivocally. The absurdity of his theory is proved by historical evidence, as Jewish schools continued secretly in devastated Palestine; the Hebrew M and the Aramaic Talmud survived and study was continuous in Southern France and the Northern Rhine; Spanish Jewry carried on. The Crusades produced, by compulsion, mass conversions, but flourishing Jewish communities persisted, despite assimilation, peripheral defection, apostasy. When Toynbee gets into modern Judaism, his unaroundness of historical accuracy is a matter of degree. His charges against Zionism ignore the long history prior to today's version, which he views as a reaction against Hitlerism, and ignores the needs for new techniques of survival, the restless groping of young Jews for their heritage. He sees only the conflict within Israel, between the orthodox and the secular. He calls the revival of Hebrew as a living language a ""linguistic archaism""- ignoring the psychological value. The mere existence of Israel today is a testimonial to the dynamics of purposive development, but Toynbee ignores this in his efforts to distort the situation between Jew and Arab, omitting all evidence against the Arabs, the very sequence of events as reported by his own agents. His record climaxes in poisonous innuendo, violent partisanship, a coupling of the Nazi crimes against the Jews with the Jewish crimes against the Araba. Samuel concludes with a personal tribute to the astounding achievement of the laraelis against impossible odds, against overexpansion in an effort to absorb the fragments of shattered Jewry, against hostility on all sides. His book, while inevitably falling into the pitfall of imbalance, is a powerful document, and one that deserves close study.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 0548384169

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1956

Categories: NONFICTION