Alan T. Levenson, Maurice Samuel: Life and Letters of a Secular Jewish Contrarian

Oblivion is the usual fate of even the most conspicuous and influential figures of the past. Their own reputations often sink as others succeed them (only to be forgotten in turn, as the generations replace their predecessors). Maurice Samuel deserves to escape this glum pattern. If his legacy can still be appreciated, Professor Alan T. Levenson merits the thanks of anyone seeking to reckon with a singular career. In 1935 Ludwig Lewisohn ranked Samuel as “probably the ablest Jewish intellectual of his time.” His oeuvre is certainly multifarious enough to command retrospective attention. With six novels and twenty books of nonfiction under his belt, he “was a true belletrist” (p. 8), whose works the nation’s most eminent publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, disseminated. Samuel also earned special gratitude and admiration as a fluent translator from four languages. In the Jewish communities of the U.S., he was close to ubiquitous. They knew Samuel primarily as a lecturer, a nondenominational “employee of the Jewish people” (p. 168), though that was not an occupational category that the U.S. Bureau of the Census recognized. Whether on the podium or in print, he pursued the goal of advancing the vitality of the Jewish collective through cultural enlightenment and political efficacy.

“For more than three decades,” Robert Alter wrote in 1964, “Maurice Samuel has been a kind of one-man educational movement in American Jewish life.” In elucidating its cultural inheritance, he aimed at no particular niche of the American Jewish milieu. He could readily be classified as a popularizer; he was also enormously knowledgeable, civilized, and sensitive to the calibrations of the best writing. Because Samuel did not specialize in any particular subject, the author believes that such promiscuous erudition helps explain the current invisibility of Samuel’s achievements. Perhaps the more accurate assessment would be that he specialized in several subjects. Levenson counts four: the case for Zionism, the rescue of Yiddish fiction, the literary achievements of the Bible, and the defense of Jewish distinctiveness against antisemitism. Such commitments required Samuel to be polyglot; and he was—starting with Yiddish, French, German, and English, and then adding Hebrew and Italian. To the rabbis who were occupying pulpits, to the academicians who were earning salaries on campuses and to the staffers who were working for the Jewish civil service, Samuel must have seemed like someone destined—as he would have put it—to lebn fun vint (to live on wind). Somehow he held only one steady job, as a functionary and publicist for the Zionist Organization of America. His main income, Levenson reveals, usually came from public speaking as much as from royalties. The lecture fees typically ranged from $250 to $350, plus expenses. Although it was not until 1958 that the sociologist C. Wright Mills coined the inescapable phrase “public intellectual,” Samuel had long personified that status, despite the modesty of his own formal education.

His origins were humble too. He was born in 1895 in remote Măcin, Romania; his father was a cobbler, and his mother a homemaker. As the last European country to emancipate its Jews, Romania set severe limits on aspirations for escape from misery. Hence little explanation is needed for the family’s decision to flee to Paris (1900–1901). From its immigrant Jewish quarter, then called the Pletzel (and now the Marais), the family moved to Manchester, where Samuel’s father ascended into the petty bourgeoisie by owning a shoe store. The family was nevertheless too impoverished to afford two sets of dishes. Samuel attended Manchester University, but did not graduate, although he claimed to have learned much from its faculty. They were quite distinguished—with Flinders Petrie in Egyptology, and Ernest Rutherford in physics. Niels Bohr was his assistant, and the anthropologist J. G. Frazer occasionally came over from Liverpool to deliver lectures as well. Chaim Weizmann tried in vain to teach Samuel chemistry there. Weizmann would play so large a role in Samuel’s life that the latter devoted an entire chapter of his elegant autobiography, Little Did I Know: Recollections and Reflections (1963), to Israel’s first president. In Trial and Error (1949), Weizmann had earlier thanked “the gifted writer and lecturer” Maurice Samuel for his editorial work in making that book so readable.

Little Did I Know mentions an incident—which Levenson omits—that occurred on an evening very early in August 1914 in Paris. Samuel had returned there to try to become a writer, and was sitting in an outdoor café when he heard the sound of a bullet being fired. The victim of the assassin was Jean Jaurès, the socialist tribune who might—perhaps—have been the only politician able to stop Europe from descending into the carnage of the Great War. The consequences of that failure could scarcely have been more awful. Out of the war emerged the two totalitarian regimes that would, in their different ways, almost terminate about two millennia of Jewish life on the continent. A historian whose own reputation has gone into serious eclipse, Arnold J. Toynbee, had predicted that 1914–1918 would be Europe’s last major war. Would that it had been so.

Samuel himself had moved from Manchester to New York, where, in 1915, he met Marie Syrkin. She would be the first of his three wives, and their brief romantic life together is poignantly recounted in Carole Kessner’s 2008 biography. Samuel’s own war was an easy one. He enlisted in the American Expeditionary Force, and because of his linguistic skills he worked for army intelligence in Bordeaux. In Berlin in 1920, Samuel met Gertrude Kahn, an artist who belonged to the German Zionist youth movement Blau Weiss. They were married for four decades, lived briefly in Palestine at the end of the 1920s, but were divorced in 1961. His third wife, the former Edith Silberman of New Jersey and an editor for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, survived him.

Levenson hints that Samuel’s private life was not entirely satisfactory, but this biography is primarily a study of ideas and how they fit within the context of American Jewish history. In seeking a wide audience for his own views, Samuel suffered from bad luck. His one work of narrative history, for example, examined a notorious frame-up for ritual murder in Tsarist Russia, Blood Accusation: The Strange History of the Beiliss Case (1966). The book got favorable notices. But in that same year, Bernard Malamud published a fictionalized version of the case, and The Fixer got virtually all the critical and popular attention. Malamud’s novel won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award—plus a Hollywood adaptation, released in 1968. In that same year, Leo Rosten published a lexicon entitled The Joys of Yiddish; its author, another figure who seemed to live on the wind, thanked Samuel “for reading a draft of the manuscript.” The last book of Samuel’s career appeared in 1971: In Praise of Yiddish. But by then, The Joys of Yiddish had already been bobbing on the best-seller list for three years, and simply could not be dislodged. The market for a second explication of the mameloshen was evidently saturated.

But Samuel did achieve fame for his translations. although Levenson argues that “transmission” is a better word. In The World of Sholom Aleichem (1943) and in Prince of the Ghetto: The Stories of Y. L. Peretz Retold (1948), Samuel “championed the literary worth of these Yiddish classics and rendered them into English—not just translated but edited and shaped by him” (p. 79). Without yielding to the temptation of sentimentality, these books are loving evocations of a world that did not merely vanish, it was murdered. One reader compared Samuel’s enterprise to “an act of rescuing the Torah scroll from a synagogue that was being consumed in flames” (q. p. 91). Samuel’s salvage operations often changed the authors’ meaning, rather than satisfy an austere test of fidelity, Levenson warns. Samuel was a modernist, an admirer of Proust and Joyce, a product of an industrialized city like Manchester rather than of a shtetl. Yet no one else made Yiddish literature so accessible and so appealing to American Jewish readers. His translations of Israel Joshua Singer were pioneering; and his defense of the Nazarene trilogy of Sholem Asch, whose detractors accused him of apostasy, was gallant. So deftly did Samuel absorb himself into the Yiddish canon that the translator was once introduced to an audience as Sholom Aleichem. The blunder was almost excusable.

Samuel translated the Passover Haggadah, but he never translated the Bible. But it made him something of a star on the radio. On that medium Samuel collaborated at mid-century with Mark Van Doren, the Columbia University literary scholar and poet. For eighteen years the duo discussed the Bible on NBC’s The Eternal Light, which the Jewish Theological Seminary of America sponsored. Samuel once insisted that “the Bible is more difficult to understand than any other human writing.” A skeptic might wonder—more difficult than, say, the Bhagavad-Vita, or the Koran, or the Book of Mormon? The pair’s relaxed but resonant conversations—once praised as emblematic of how a mass medium could justify its use of publicly-owned airwaves—allowed Samuel to “celebrate Yiddishkeit and humanism alike,” Levenson declares (p. 172).

This weekly program also led to the exegesis of Certain People of the Book (1955). Himself a biblicist, Levenson notes that Samuel showed greater interest in the narrative and prophetic sections of the Bible than in its laws. His faith was instead invested in Zionism, from which he did not waver. Harvest in the Desert (1944) became the single biggest first printing till then in the history of the Jewish Publication Society. Samuel’s last book on Israel, published a year after the stunning victory in the Six-Day War, acknowledged the problematic effects that would follow from the retention of the territories. A permanent occupation, he wrote in Light on Israel (1968), could not be squared with the character of a state that was intended to be both democratic and Jewish. He nevertheless minimized the demographical and political difficulties that Israel would confront in dealing with its Arab minority. In this particular misconception, Samuel was hardly alone.

“The tragedy of recent Jewish history,” Arnold Toynbee asserted, in a response to Marie Syrkin’s defense of the formation of Israel, “is that, instead of learning through suffering, the Jews should have done to others, the Arabs, what had been done to them by others, the Nazis.” What the Zionists did to the Palestinians, he added, constituted “a common human tragedy, like the Jews’ own sufferings at the hands of the Nazis” (q. p. 125). This egregious passage typified the obtuseness and malice that inspired Samuel to respond with The Professor and the Fossil (1956). In eviscerating both the scholarly pretensions and the biased distortions of Toynbee’s treatment of the Hebrews, as well as of their modern descendants, Samuel performed a singular service. There may be no book quite like it. By comparison, Jacob Robinson’s And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1965), a polemic against Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), is plodding and pedantic. Her book was in any case merely “a report,” Arendt insisted, whereas Toynbee’s multi-volume Study of History was hailed as “an immortal masterpiece,” “the greatest work of our time,” and “probably the greatest work ever written.” A decade or so after Time Magazine had put Toynbee on its cover in 1947, another British historian, H. R. Trevor-Roper, as well as the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl, demolished Toynbee’s inflated reputation. But it was The Professor and the Fossil (which is this reviewer’s favorite among Samuel’s works) that vindicated Jewish honor. He exposed such characteristic misreadings that Toynbee’s antisemitism needed to be summoned to account for it.

As though that were not enough, Samuel made a fresh contribution to the diagnosis of antisemitism itself. The Great Hatred was published in 1940—not only in the shadow of the catastrophe in Europe but also near the end of the interwar rise of bigotry facing American Jews. Yet Samuel made a crucial distinction between the sort of intergroup prejudice that commonly occurred in minority relations and the peculiarity of antisemitism. In its paranoia and its aptitude for conspiracy theories, in its ideological intensity and its lethal intentions, and in its roots in the cosmological accusation of the killing of the Son of God, antisemitism was what Samuel called a “hallucination” (p. 71). That sense of Jewry as exemplifying a metaphysical evil, he claimed, must be categorically separated from what one of his relatives once compared to a common cold—no cure exists, but it won’t kill you. Plausible and powerful as this distinction is, however, Levenson offers some cogent criticisms of The Great Hatred. It does not account for the hostility that erupted on the left, nor for the virulent expansion of Judeophobia into countries that are not primarily Christian. The Final Solution exposed a chasm with the very different social discrimination that country clubs and prestigious colleges had practiced against American Jews. But the Holocaust also led to the dramatic decline of such snobbery, and to the formal repudiation—two and a half decades after Samuel’s book appeared—of the historic animus of the Roman Catholic Church.

Samuel died in New York City in 1972, having donated his papers to the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and to the Central Jewish Archives in Jerusalem, and elsewhere. “He was cosmopolitan,” Professor Levenson concludes, “but he was never rootless” (p. 170). In a eulogy in the New York Times Book Review, Irving Howe could not resist speculating that all those lectures that were delivered at synagogues and at community centers must have depleted the energy that Samuel might better have devoted to substantial writing. This is unfair. He dispelled ignorance in many ways and in many forums. What Samuel bequeathed on the printed page was formidable enough, to which Levenson’s very illuminating biography testifies.