More on living Jewishly in Australia

I don’t normally share here what I’ve posted elsewhere, but I wrote something quickly for Facebook and realised that it meant more than I realised and so I’m sharing it. I suddenly saw that what I thought was unique and personal, told a story about Australia and Australians and the different places Jews hold in this country. It’s not a full picture, or even close to a full picture. It’s how much of Jewishness is out of sight in Australia and how some of us handle this.

In other places I am still the person I always was, in Canberra no-one wants me to give talks to to be seen in public. Most people don’t hate me, but folks who have known me for years and even decades have recently started demonstrating a whole bunch of reactions to my being Jewish. For some, I’m hurting others simply by being myself: a couple of people have recently informed me of how privileged and white I am and how much of the cause of problems (both in Australia and elsewhere) can be blamed on me. For others, I’m a low priority in their life where previously I was a close friend, and when these old friends cluster or when a group of those who think along these lines get together, if I say something it will be instantly contradicted before anyone stops to consider what I actually said.

A part of this is because I’m forever-unwell and Australia does not handle illness with much style. Most of the change has, however, happened since COVID (which taught so many of us to not be our best selves) and especially since October 7. There are whole social groups and work-related groups I’m now simply not reminded of or invited to because I’m Jewish, and there are others I may share as long as I do not assert myself too much. The most amusing part of the whole shebang (and it really is amusing) is that I am not considered an expert on much at all in the circles that do not want me round. Given that I have two PhDs and another one about to be submitted and all kinds of books written and conference papers delivered and research done and talks delivered and… I am an expert in those topics, this is a very peculiar kind of wilful blinkering.

All of this is local. It has led to big lifestyle changes and those led to some thoughts on Facebook. Those thoughts (with amendments) are the rest of this post.

I’ve talked before about being a giraffe. My giraffehood comes from being the first Jew many Australians have met.

Oh, I’ve never met a Jew before,” a person informs me, and looks at me as if I am in a zoo. This is why I call it being a giraffe. I’m willing to talk openly about my Jewishness, so I’m a giraffe who answers questions. The questions and comments used to be mostly kind and fair. They are less so right now. At the moment, after the surprise that I’m actually Jewish, I’m informed who I am and what I think and how horrid I am if I don’t use the words they tell me to use and announce my self-hate at once. Once a week, without fail, I’m told that either I worship Satan or murder children. (For anyone wondering, I have not done or ever have wanted to do either of these things.) These questions and comments, when experienced several times a week, make me feel as if I’m on show.

Today something provoked a very different memory.

In the days before COVID and before the current rise in antisemitism (so any time until the end of 2019) I gave talks and was on panels at a couple of larger functions a year on average. Every single time, it being (mostly) in Australia people would chat with me in the foyer or over coffee afterwards. Australians chat over drinks. It’s a part of who we are. Mostly the discussion leads with comments like “I didn’t know Australia had any Jews before” or, on one very special day “Do you really have horns?” When I was much, much younger, children would actually feel my head for those horns.

Every second chat (again, on average) someone would look around to make sure that everyone else was out of earshot. They would confide in me. Sometimes they had Jewish parents but were brought up Christian “for safety”. Sometimes they were happily non-religious, but knew that their parents had been Jewish and were curious. I have enjoyed many conversations about how OK atheism for different branches of Judaism with this group of interesting people and even more conversations about why parents would choose to leave the Judaism behind and even to hide it. Sometimes those who confided in me were practising Jewish but didn’t know anyone outside their family because it was safer to be not-Jewish when out in the world. Most of these individuals had parents who were Holocaust survivors. Some were from other backgrounds but their families had also memories of persecution, often very recent. The real discussion began when they discovered we could talk about these things but that it wasn’t the whole story. I was brought up to understand that the persecution is a part of our history but (sorry Cecil Roth) the lachrymose version of Jewish history hides so much more than it explains. My history self is working on this reinterpretation of Jewish pasts for the next little while, and that’s partly because it was so important to the individuals who came to me and talked about Jewishness in secret.

I was a different kind of giraffe for these folks. I was the Jew they could talk to safely. I never tell enough about them for anyone to be able to identify them. I have many conversations after panels and after giving talks or keynotes, and these people were among the many. Their privacy is important. No-one hides such a large part of themselves without very good reason. I use my not-very-good memory to forget their names and where they live. I would have to work hard to remember those details and I simply don’t try to remember. This has led to me being very forgetful of names and addresses and friends have to always remind me, over and again. This is not a large price to pay for the safety of others.

Occasionally (like now) I will mention their existence. I’m often and usually the first person they have every spoken to outside their immediate family about anything Jewish.

The number of people who shared their confidences with me diminished somewhat when the Australian census changed its collection style. The number of people who admitted to being Jewish in Australia also dropped dramatically. It was no longer possible to guarantee addresses and names would be detached from information collected and so identifying as Jewish carried different baggage to earlier. I suspect there are many Jewish Australians whose background is not known to the Bureau of Statistics any more. I once estimated that there were around 200,000 of these people, but there is no real way of knowing. Since I don’t think those who let me know they’re Jewish are more than the tiniest % of those who don’t talk about being Jewish Australian, I know the thoughts of a few dozen people, not of everyone who hides their Jewishness in Australia.

The number of confidences diminished to zero after October 7, but this is partly because I’m no longer invited to give many talks. I’m the wrong kind of Jew for Canberra or East Coast Australia, or my expertise is no longer valued, or people want to avoid problems, so I’m not invited to the sort of meetings where someone can seek me out quietly and find out more about their heritage.

What I miss most about those conversations is the recipe-swapping. I have two really wonderful Crypto-Jewish recipes that I’ve dated to the 17th century from a person who identified publicly as Latin American Catholic. I gave them information about books and websites where they could place their heritage and understand it better without having to break their public face. This was a win-win. Once a year I cook a 17th century Jewish recipe from that hidden tradition, to celebrate how much this person knew (and still knows!) and how amazing it was to hear about it. (I also cook these dishes to honour those who were murdered at the command of the Inquisition, and this is my normal public reason for cooking: today is not normal.) At moments like that I understand why I might be a safe person to talk to about things.

Since October 7 and the diminution in places in Australia that want to hear me, there has, as I’ve said been no-one sharing these secrets. This means that there are fewer people who touch base with those who are isolated and scared. Those who found comfort in me chatting about how to write family stories or how to teach cultural differences respectfully or how to interpret foodways or all those stories about the Middle Ages are not going to talk to a rabbi or visit a community centre when hateful slogans are painted on the walls or there was a fire bomb or anywhere where there is a crowd chanting Jewhate slogans outside.

Australia has always been somewhat antisemitic. It was also one of the important places where Shoah refugees came. It’s always had a Jewish population that feels safer unseen. Moments when strangers can reach out and share their identity are so very important, given all of this.

I think one of the reasons I was considered safe might have been because it’s not been wise to wear a magen david in Canberra for about 20 years, so I wasn’t flamboyantly Jewish… I was just Jewish. Or it may be for another reason. Thinking back, I had my first conversations along these lines when I was pre-teen, so it may be something about the way I hold myself. I honestly don’t know. Several people have said it’s because I talk so much, so maybe it’s that.

When I first started having those conversations I used to feel so guilty, because I couldn’t understand why these people hid their identity. I always kept everything secret because someone had asked it and because I respected them.

These days, life in Jewish Australia is far more problematic. I can see the wisdom in being a hidden Jew.

Stories of stories of stories are embedded in Jewish history

I am supposed to be asleep. In six hours I have to wake up and buy all my fruit and vegetables at the farmers’ market. It’s the last day I can do this and… I’m tired. My body announced that we’re getting another heatwave. It announced this by pushing my mind into fastplay. Then I got excited by my thoughts: I finally had a reason for something that has been plaguing me for decades. This is why I am writing you all this blogpost at an unholy hour when I ought to be asleep. I’m not at all certain that anyone but me will be excited, but I’m very excited, so this is fair. The world is balanced.

Also, I may be entirely and completely wrong about everything I say here. If I am, please don’t just say “You’re wrong” – tell me how and why. (I’m a bit tired of being I’m wrong with no explanation. This is not you, this is the wider public which is full of opinions on all things Jewish right now. Most of the opinions are not nice.)

Once upon a time, in a moment a bit like the one we’re in now, when the rulers of France and its church demanded that all Jews be their kind of Jew, this view was challenged. “Their kind of Jew” was one which supported that particular branch of Christian theology and the rulers and all sorts of related things. By “supporting” some Jews were expected to engage in very specific debates that were not supposed to demonstrate truths, but demonstrate the Christian truths that were important in that moment and place.

The learned Jews of Paris and its nearby regions had little choice but to engage in the debate because, to be frank, Jews were not given a fair go. They were not full citizens with full rights. What they were is complex to explain so I’ll cheat a bit and explain one view of what Jews were expected to be. We were expected to be (and still are, in some circles) the remnant of those who witnessed the coming of the Messiah. We were important as people who had seen. But Jews are fractious and difficult and were a lot more than that, and, for a variety of reasons, the French king became very aware of this. He was a holy bloke, was Louis IX, and he loved showing off his piety. Place an image in your mind of a rather splendid thirteenth century French king. We will return to him.

Now we travel back in time. We will return to Louis IX.

The thing is, Jewish history is often part of the history of the lands where Jews live, but it also goes its own way. When something troubling happens, we respond.

Once upon a time (an earlier time) Judaism had the Written Law (the Torah) and Oral Law. There was trouble. Much change happened. This was when the Second Temple fell and Jews were enslaved and became part of the Roman Empire. It caused many learned folk to ask, “What happens if we lose all these experts who know the Oral Law?” They also asked, “What do we do without the Temple?” There were answers that had already been considered (because we had lost the Temple once before, I suspect), but that’s a different story. Related, but different. Stories breed stories. History is never simple. And Gillian is full of aphorisms today.

The learned folks who maintained the oral law began writing it down. It took a while. A long, long while. About five hundred years.

Not only was there a lot of oral law to write down, but learned Jews are, were, and always will be opinionated, so those doing the documentation added stuff and it was talked about and… the Talmud is the most amazing document. One of the great feats of literature and story and argument and religion, all bound together into a wildly difficult set of books. I was once told that whoever studies the Talmud is learning about humanity, and to me that sounds about right.

The Talmud comes in two versions of considerably different lengths with considerably different material. One was written in what is now Iraq, by diaspora Jews, and the other was written in Jerusalem. Finally, finally, it was written down (handwritten, all those volumes written down then copied by scribes, one letter at a time) and, as far as I know (this is not something I know enough about) determinations were made about what words and thoughts were part of the official document. And so we had both the Torah and the Talmud in written versions, by the end of the early Middle Ages.

That wasn’t the end of it. Jewish culture contains story and discussions and finding a stupid example and using it to teach and a whole bunch of culture at its core. Also bad jokes. I find it very difficult to explain to the highly serious why one festival incorporates getting drunk and also mocking the story of the Book of Esther, but the heart of this sense of humour and the ability to take religion both very seriously and very lightly can be traced back through the Talmud. What happened next followed the general cultural lines of Jewish thought, and takes us right into the Middle Ages.

The Talmud in its modern printed version occupies whole walls of the houses of very highly learned religious people of Judaism (not me, I am not of the Jewish scholarly elite at all). It takes seven and a half years to read it through once in the regular way, at a page a day. It, in its modern version, is probably the longest written work every published. The Talmud is beyond brilliant and beyond stupid and the best way to read it is in discourse (and probably argument) with other people. I don’t know whether to be infuriated to amused at those idiots who share one page of translated extracts and say “Look how foul Judaism is: their holy book says this.” It’s using a few words to hide the whole document.

You can find a complete translation of the Talmud (but not of the one page that misleads) here. https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud

The Torah is the law, and the Talmud is where the law is explained so that we know what to do with it. Medieval rabbis helped us understand how to interpret the Talmud, because placing yourself in front of thousands of pages with no guidance is the sure way to not understand the law.

This is where Europe joins the party. A bunch of learned European Jews gave ordinary Jews (such as myself) technical guides to help with the interpretation. The code breakers that most people know of and may use are the Mishneh Torah, written by Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides 1135-1204) who was wildly controversial when he lived and whose legacy has been profound. He lived in what’s now the south of Spain but was forced to move to Egypt and its environs by antisemites. At the end of the Middle Ages or in the Early Modern era (depending on how you define periods) an easier to read codification was written, first in 1563 by Joseph Caro (living in what is now Syria from 1488–1575, he was actually born in Toledo and thrown out along with all other Jews in 1492) and then annotated for Ashkenazi Jews by Moses Isserles (born in Krakow in 1530). I’ve used the English translation and it really is a codification of the complicated that makes much of the standard part of Jewish law accessible to the masses.

How the Talmud began to be read included more than those codifications. This is where things start to get funky. Also, my timeline is warped.

The Talmud as we know it is not simply what was written by 800, of material that was commonly used for Jewish law and education earlier than that. The Medieval book contained commentaries. The most important one is by one of my favourite rabbis of all time, Rashi (Shlomo Yitzchaki, or Solomon son of Isaac 1040-1105). He was trained in what is now Germany (and if he was born there, he may well have had a secular name as well as a Hebrew name), but most of the work that we know of was done in Normandy. This has a rather important implication for the return of Louis IX, so hold the thought: the most important commentary on the Oral Law was done by a Frenchman.

Rashi’s vineyard helped him earn the money to teach and to study and to write brilliant philosophical, legal and other stuff. He was a genius.

Why do I love Rashi? He gave me proof that young women wore blue eyeshadow to look sexy and how they carefully laced the sides of their dresses to also look sexy. He gives us evidence of hot water machinery and foot braziers and even paper clips. His answers to religious questions incorporated the everyday of his congregants and the general Jewish public. He taught his daughters and they played an important part in the transmission of Jewish learning during his life and after his death. Also, he liked a good pot roast.

Rashi wrote a commentary that was written as part of the frame around the Talmud when it became what we know know it as. His legacy-scholars, the Tosafists, also wrote commentary and that was also made part of the frame. To read the Talmud, then, is to read a chronicle of the thoughts of many major rabbis from the third century to the thirteenth century as a documentation of non-documented Judaism from earlier.

Now we’re back to Louis IX, who lived from about 1226 to 1270. Christianity changed throughout the Middle Ages. By the thirteenth century western Christianity had become very interesting indeed. It accepted Judaism, as I said earlier, within limits. There was much debate of the public sort and Louis decided (with the help of those difficult public debates) that the Talmud with all its commentaries transgressed those limits. It was material that Jews had developed since the time of Jesus and this was not permissible.

Twenty-five cartloads of these amazing books were burned. Twenty-five. Cartloads. Each volume had been written by hand and was worth, in modern terms, at least as much as a good EV.

None of this is my big revelation. My revelation is that I finally realise why Louis felt burning books was so imperative.

He didn’t want to destroy Jews. Unlike some other rulers at other times, Louis had a place for us in his theology. What he didn’t have a place for were culturally-developed, successful Jews who did not fit stereotypes. It’s as if Mr Not-Quite-Bright from next door can only accept Jews who are moneylenders or part of a secret cabal that controlled the world. When his Jewish next door neighbours admitted that he was a schoolteacher and she a lawyer, he could not cope and set fire to their shed.

This isn’t an insight into Louis IX. We already knew this about him. He wanted to world to fit his (occasionally generous but usually religious) world view. What has kept me up far, far past my sensible bedtime is that this means that there may have been more Jews in northern France than I thought and that they must have been culturally amazing. I knew this deep down, because scholars like Rashi don’t just appear out of nowhere and leave a vast legacy of learning and writing.

Late in life, Rashi saw some of those who went on the First Crusade murder many, many people he know. I think we underestimate how much hurt was done because we are so used to the world of Jews being torn apart and Jews being murdered. I suspect I need to visit my first area of specialisation and rethink the culture of Northern France. I did this for Germany recently and … I suspect that France was not a Christian country, but a country under Christian rule. Those books were written by people and studied by people and did not emerge from a vacuum. It was, I suspect, the fact that Jewish life was in an amazing stage of growth and learning that triggered Louis the Pious.

When I finish my current projects (this may take a year or so) I shall return to my intellectual homeland and analyse the evidence I thought I knew. Instead of saying, “There are no Jews in the chansons de geste, so there can’t have been many Jews” I shall look for evidence of growth and change and disruption and sudden discovery. I suspect there may be a novel in this, and if there is, I suspect it may contain fairies. I have Reasons.

Before I can explore those Reasons, though, I need to get my paleography books out and find out just how many people we’re talking about when we’re wondering about who copied those Talmuds and how different Hebrew manuscripts were (in terms of labour and time and money spent creating those manuscripts) were to the Latin and Old French manuscripts I know much more about. Look at the dates. Rashi died in 1105. The books were burned in 1242. I need to do some sums. And more. Much more.

I can’t even begin the research until I have finished all my current projects. This is why I am so kindly giving you my sleeplessness. I am sharing the pain of something I can’t even begin to work on at this moment. I’m a very kind person.

Such a week…

Part of the annual report into antisemitism in Australia was released last week. Also last week (just before I left Melbourne to come home, in fact) a synagogue was firebombed. Thankfully there were no casualties in the attack. But..

I am now facing the deluge of comments one gets after the news was released. So many of those talking about the attack believe it is by “Zionist Jews.” I want to stand up and shout that every single one of these people is a bigot. They’re using the fourth definition to “Zionist” to replace most of the poison inherent in the words they’re using to replace “Zionist”, such as “Jews.” This definition reflects the emotion and hate in the mind of the user. It does not reflect Australian Jews at all. Take my siblings: some support Israel, some don’t, some are quiet on the subject because they believe it’s not anyone else’s business. And one of us (not me) is Ultra-Orthodox and has links to the burned synagogue. None of us have any wish to burn down any synagogue, much less one filled people books we love and people who know members of our family.

I saw walls of Talmud charred to black and it reminded me of the times when (in Europe) supersession saw Jews expelled from their homeland of hundreds (possibly up to 1400) years, and in other places saw cartloads and cartloads and cartloads and cartloads of Talmuds burned. Those burnings were to make certain that Jewish culture and religion was frozen at the time of Jesus, because that was the only relationship with Jews that these particular Christians could handle. Note I said “these particular Christians.” Most contemporary Christians and contemporary Muslims do not condone barbaric acts. They are not the people crying that all Jews need to be deported from Australia, to make way for a return of the old White Australia.

The ‘old White Australia’ is a fiction. “White Australia” is complex but has very little in common with what those shouting think. I want to sit down and teach them some history. Literally, in terms of people, before Europeans came it was not White at all, and when the First Fleet arrived… there were Jewish convicts on it. The members of the public shouting about Australian Jews not being White and not being wanted here has returned, but I’m still told I have White privilege. Most of those telling me I have White privilege and should be deported came from families who arrived here after my own. And the shouts are louder right now.

I can give you the old and new definitions of Zionism if definitions can help you deal. I can also give you a photograph. The photograph is more, fun, so I’ll only give you the definitions if you want them (just ask!).

Why the photograph? The Myer Christmas windows are a feature of the Melbourne landscape at this time of year. This year, the pro-Palestinians marchers (some of them are the same people who want me deported and blame Jews for everything that hurts) protested against them. We all looked for reasons. Maybe it was because Myer was founded by someone Jewish… except Sidney Myer converted to Christianity. Maybe they hate all people who have Jewish ancestry? That’s the purity of blood notion, used to hurt those who could not shake off their Jewishness enough in Early Modern Spain and Spanish territories. If you’re not familiar with this long moment in the history of the Spains, look up ‘Torquemada.’  Jewish ownership of business? Myer is not owned by Jews. This means that either the Christmas windows themselves are deeply offensive (and aimed at children, therefore problematic) or those protesting them are idiots. I’ll let you decide:

 

The Irwins looking at parrots in the Australian Outback, Myer windows 2024
Melbourne, December 2024