Culture

Exile and the Prophetic: Zen and the art of special book collections

This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

Last night a heavy rain with thunder and lightning.  Up this morning and out for a walk while still dark, stars clearly visible in the sky.  Then beachside, walking, passing the early-to-rise fishermen, past a couple who slept on the beach, then sitting cross-legged waiting as the sun began to filter through the clouds.

The sea-turtle remains on the beach now marked up with red paint to be studied by marine biologists.  The scientific battle for survival continues.  We now know more about disappearing species than ever before in history.  Especially when they weren’t disappearing through human degradation of the environment.  Like the transparency that is another cover for corruption, our studied planet is yet another ironic part of our time.

Skyped with Aaron and Isaiah last night before the rains, catching up on things and chatting about the year ahead.  Against my will, Isaiah confessed that he is now studying German.  A rebellious child!

Isaiah also just finished reading Zen in the Art of Archery, an assigned text for the Asian religion class he is embarking on.   Initially I thought the book was an offshoot of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  But rooting around on the internet, I see the reverse is the case. 

Another interesting and disturbing tidbit. Zen in the Art of Archery was written by, Eugen Herrigel, a German, who, after teaching philosophy in Japan during the 1920s wrote a short essay on the subject.  He, then, returned to Germany, expanded his essay and published it as a book in 1948. Though credited by some as bringing Zen to Europe, the other shoe, his Nazi past, has apparently been hushed up.  I came across this response in the journal Encounter, February 1961, by the noted German-Israeli Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem:

Zen-Nazism?

With reference to the article by Arthur Koestler,”A Stink of Zen,” in your October issue, I think I ought to make a remark illustrating his point concerning the amoralism of Zen teaching. Koestler goes in for a lengthy criticism of Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery and some other texts by Zen adherents. About one he says that what he quoted could “come from a philosophically-minded Nazi journalist.” It has obviously escaped Koestler’s attention that Eugen Herrigel, who wrote this widely-discussed treatise, had in fact become a member of the Nazi Party after his return from Japan and having obtained whatever Zen illumination he might have got there. This fact has been carefully hushed up by the circle of his admirers after the war and it is thus small wonder that Koestler did not hear about it.

Herrigel joined the Nazi Party after the outbreak of the war and some of his former friends in Frankfurt, who broke with him over this issue, told me about his career as a convinced Nazi, when I enquired about him in 1946. He was known to have stuck it out to the bitter end. This was not mentioned in some biographical notes on Herrigel published by his widow, who built up his image as one concerned with the higher spiritual sphere only. Herrigel’s case is an excellent illustration of what happened to many high-minded German intellectuals.

On the other hand, when in 1954 I asked Dr. Suzuki point-blank whether someone who had passed through a true Zen experience could have become a Nazi, he flatly denied this possibility. At the same time, however, he also denied having known any Westerner who–in his opinion—he had achieved true Zen illumination or satori. This left me not a little baffled–which of course may be just the right state of mind for a student of Zen, or for that matter, for any student of the history of mysticism in general.

GERSHOM SCHOLEM

The Nazi can of worms again, this time relating to Zen and the university-industrial complex. Where does the naiveté end? Not that Scholem isn’t a handful.  A German Jew, Scholem immigrated to Palestine at the same time that Herrigel was in Japan.  Scholem was an artful scholar and dodger on the subject of Jewish mysticism, a subject he pioneered in the academy. He also spent a lifetime lecturing others on the value of Zionism.  Like many others, Scholem changed his name when he arrived in Palestine, in this case only his first name.  Gerhard became Gershom. 

Shortly after exposing Herrigel’s Nazism, Scholem questioned Hannah Arendt’s Jewishness.  This criticism – essentially charging Arendt with self-hate – was in reference to her writing on the Eichmann trial.  Scholem’s criticism reads like a laundry list.  Scholem accused Arendt of exposing the dirty laundry of Jewish leadership during the Holocaust, not being Zionist enough and thinking that the mass murderers of Jews were careerists.  Scholem’s deepest cut was that for Arendt, Nazis like Eichmann weren’t unadulterated Jew-haters.  

The self-hate/Jew-hater dynamic that Scholem introduced continues to play big-time in the Jewish war of ideas. I noticed a recent celebration of Scholem’s teaching and life at Hebrew University.  Apropos of the Great Book Robbery documentary I first saw in the program in Austria – remember Hebrew University collecting the books in Palestinian homes after the Palestinians had been cleared out–check this out from Yehudah Mirsky on the celebration of Scholem’s book collecting after the Holocaust:

Several weeks ago, Hebrew University, in whose development he played a formative role, marked his 30th yahrzeit with several days of discussions of the man and his legacy.  The topics were as wide-ranging as he was, including magic in antiquity, early medieval mysticism, the Lurianic Kabbalah, Sabbatianism, Hasidism, and Zionist intellectual history, and the list could have been longer. Some of the most fascinating presentations concerned not Scholem’s Kabbalistic research as such but other facets of the man.

One of those facets, discussed by the great paleographer and historian of the Jewish book Malachi Beit-Arieh, was Scholem’s book collecting, the stuff of legend. Arriving in Jerusalem in 1923 with 2,000 volumes, at his death, he left 20,000 to Hebrew University and Israel’s National Library.  One of the National Library’s first librarians, he traveled to Europe after World War II to retrieve the Jewish books that survived the Nazis and was among the first to grasp the need to create a microfilm library of the manuscripts holding the hidden treasures of Jewish history.

Then there was Scholem’s Zionism.  The writer and kibbutz historian Asaf Inbari observed  that Scholem’s enterprise negated the “negation of the Diaspora,” classic Zionism’s view that the New Jew could take what he needed from the Bible, leapfrog over 2,000 subsequent years of Jewish history, and land securely in the present.  Zionism would have to reckon with Judaism, Scholem thought, including its darker, even demonic dimensions, while the religious would have to deal with the myth, sensuality, and freedom deep within the tradition.  Precisely because Scholem was so schooled in the history of messianism, he feared its effects on politics—and knew that a blithe dismissal of the non-rational forces in human history was a dangerous delusion.

Hmm.  Hebrew University.  The hidden treasures of Jewish and Palestinian history.  Both “rescued” by Jews for posterity.  One rescued from the ethnically cleansed of Europe, the other from the ethnically cleansed of Palestine, at more or less at the same time.  Did Scholem know of the Palestinian book “rescue?”   If so, what did he have to say about it?  What did he do about it?

Where was Scholem during the 1948 war?  What were his views about what he witnessed happening to Palestinians?  Polemics aside, what were his views about Israeli expansion in the 1970s and beyond?  He died in 1982; what were his views of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon?

What a hoot, rooting around for Scholem and the Palestinian question, I googled “Scholem and Palestinians.”  Up came the National Library of Israel site which features two special collections.  Here they are as described in Wikipedia: 

Special collections

Personal archives

Among the library’s special collections are the personal papers of hundreds of outstanding Jewish figures, the National Sound Archives, the Laor Map Collection and numerous other collections of Hebraica and Judaica. The library also possesses some of Isaac Newton‘s manuscripts dealing with theological subjects. The library houses the personal archives of Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem.

Palestinian Books

Following the occupation of West Jerusalem by Haganah forces in May 1948, the libraries of Palestinian notables who fled the country were transferred to the National Library. These collections included those of Henry Cattan, Khalil Beidas, Khalil al-Sakakini and Aref Hikmet Nashashibi. About 30,000 books were removed from homes in West Jerusalem, with another 40,000 taken from other cities in Mandatory Palestine. About 6,000 of these books are in the library today indexed with the label AP – “Abandoned Property”. A campaign has been launched by Benny Brunner to return the books to their owners.

Love the footnotes, don’t you?  But I wonder if the librarians there have checked the site recently.  Obviously some conscientious hackers have made sure that the National Library of Israel is accorded its due.  Scholem must be rolling over in his grave, his collection, and then the Palestinian collection, one after the other.

The Scholem rescue mission in Europe, how should those books be classified?  Abandoned Property (AP)?  Or Rescued Property of the Cleansed and Murdered (RPCM)?  I suppose the designation on Palestinian books would be more accurately rendered, Stolen Property of the Cleansed and Denigrated (SPCD).  Or better, Stolen Books of the Cleansed and Denigrated Palestinians (SBCDP).  Though that’s too many letters for book spines.  See if this works:  Stolen Palestinian Books (SPB).  If the letters are already taken we can change their capitalization – (sPb).  Or (sP) for stolen Palestine.

Still working on it.  The mind races.  Perhaps a special designation “P” with an olive tree next to it. That would simplify the design and free up plain “P” for other books.  The olive tree is also a nice touch for a special collection. When cruising the stacks, Jewish students will wonder what’s up with the olive tree. (But then, as we’ve seen, the olive tree, now also stolen and placed in Israeli settlement boulevards, may be mistaken as Israeli.  Like most of Israeli – really Palestinian – food.  So many problems when the Wheel of Ethnic Cleansing spins!)

I certainly had no idea that checking in on the kids  would lead to Zen and Nazism then further down the road to the question of what a great Jewish scholar (and other Jewish scholars) were doing/thinking as Israel and its national library augmented its (surprise, surprise) two special collections.

You do have to ask the Watergate question in its Jewish covering to Scholem -on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, on the Palestinian book front and beyond.   What did Scholem know and when did he know it?

Applied now:  What did Jewish scholars know about Palestinians and when did they know it? 

I think of the great reversal of the Germans’ sons and daughters relationship in the aftermath of World War II.  They never knew what their fathers did.  No one was talking.  No one wanted to know.  Thus the void – Europe without an identity – what I experienced in the last weeks in Austria.  Or rather, Europe with an identity infected by atrocity.  Uprooted.  Uprooting others.

Jews, too?  The Jewish identity void, now covered by a Holocaust and Israel conveniently outside history.  Some of that history is to be found in the special collections of the National Library of Israel. 

Cruise the stacks.  Go to (sP).  Then compose your prophetic letter.  Make it confessional.

What you knew and when you knew it.

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Dear Prof. Ellis,

I think those who are labeled as “self-haters” may actually fit within the idea of the Old Testament righteous or those who called the people to righteousness, depending on what aspects are being labeled self-hate. One of the things, for example, that Scholem points to is Arendt’s criticism of the community’s leadership. You write:

Shortly after exposing Herrigel’s Nazism, Scholem questioned Hannah Arendt’s Jewishness. This criticism – essentially charging Arendt with self-hate… Scholem accused Arendt of exposing the dirty laundry of Jewish leadership during the Holocaust… The self-hate/Jew-hater dynamic that Scholem introduced continues to play big-time in the Jewish war of ideas.

This is not to pick on Jews or Judaism, since the New Testament also considers the peoples to be sinners. Don’t you find Isaiah 59’s words to be relevant:

No one calls for justice,
Nor does any plead for truth.
They trust in empty words and speak lies;
They conceive evil and bring forth iniquity.
They hatch vipers’ eggs and weave the spider’s web;
He who eats of their eggs dies,
And from that which is crushed a viper breaks out.
[etc.]

Most of Isaiah 59 is like this. In fact, alot of Isaiah is like this.
So wouldn’t you agree that the prophets in the Bible portray the people, and probably peoples in general, as sinful, and it is natural for those who seek good to confess their sins and those of the people?

I can see such passages and criticisms being labeled as hatred, because it makes a very negative portrayal. But ultimately communicating such criticisms itself seems positive because it tries to lead to redemption, which is what alot of the prophet Isaiah was trying to lead to.

Peace.

“Against my will, Isaiah confessed that he is now studying German. A rebellious child!”

What is required to liberate Mr. Ellis from the Holocaust?

Latin re-ligion means –reconnection. Meditation, or stopping the internal dialogue allows the mind and body to reconnect. The 3 ME “religions” are dominated with nationalist ideas. Zen is not mysticism–as wikepedia tells us cabala is—above the intellect. Re-ligion isn’t above the intellect; it is a moment of its death–the death of the word–which allows the mind to reconnect with the body in holding things, dancing, observing an intuition. So what is the cabal hiding behind its cabala?
carlo-suares-cabala.weebly.com

What is our evidence for thinking that the atrocities of WW2 were not known or discussed in the postwar world?