Surviving Shakespeare, Dreaming of Michelangelo, Honoring Arendt

Figure 1: Michelangelo, Achim and Eliud, Sistine Chapel lunette. https://www.wga.hu/html_m/m/michelan/3sistina/6lunette/03/index.html 

This painting by Michelangelo [Fig 1] is one of several lunettes and spandrels in the Sistine Chapel featuring the Ancestors of Christ. Overshadowed by the more famous depictions of God and his Prophets, the Ancestor series consists of small family groups skootched into leftover spaces in the Chapel’s upper walls. Deprived of the knowledge that vest the Prophets with their dignity and momentum, these minor characters from Matthew 1:1-16 are trapped in an interminable before-time. The cramped, divided picture planes yield a range of comportments not exhausted by New Testament typology, from ennui and alienation (notice the backs turned to each other and the viewer) to tenderness and care (the mother on the right prepares a makeshift meal for her baby).

The Ancestors of Christ rank for me among Michelangelo’s most compelling images. They have also long struck me as evocatively Jewish, so I was excited to learn in recent work by Asher Biemann that Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) chose to view these works as portraits of “Jews in exile.” In other words, the Jewish Neo-Kantian from Marburg read these scenes as images of survival, in the sense developed so brilliantly by Adam Stern in his new book. The category of the Holocaust survivor, stripped of shame by writers such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, became a veritable “secular saint” for both diaspora communities and the state of Israel after World War II (4). Yet survival, Stern argues, is not a Jewish idea at all, at least in any straightforward sense, but rather a complex by-product of Christian theology which has been unreflectively reabsorbed by modern Jewish thinkers as well as embraced by Israel’s state project. The process of constructing Jewish survival began long before the Holocaust, when Church fathers such as Augustine reread the “Old” Testament as prophecy and prefiguration of the New, to whose truth the survival of the Jews and their books bear witness (27). This fateful strategy authorized Christendom’s repressive toleration of the Jews as a necessary if reviled corpus mysticum, both dead and alive, embedded in salvation history (29).

Reaching back into Paul and the early church but focusing on modern German Jewish thought, Stern’s central tactic is to find the Christianity in Jewish thinkers, exposing the complicity of their survival narratives with the Eucharistic manufacture of presence, Christ’s resurrection, and the king’s two bodies. Thus, he writes of Arendt,

far from suggesting that a secularized Christianity bears some responsibility for producing this hell on earth, Arendt again sees in the archives of an abandoned Christian theology the critical resources for the world’s salvation. That is why, at the end of a long investigation into the elements and origins of total sovereignty, she famously closes with a citation from Saint Augustine. She reminds her readers that human beings are the created and never the creators: “Initium ut esset homo creatus est— ‘that a beginning be made man was created’” (47).

Because Christianity for Stern is ultimately synonymous with capitalism and imperialism, or what he calls, following Derrida, globalatinization, Arendt’s recourse to Christian figures such as Lazarus, her citations of Augustine, and even her turn to the English language (20) ultimately limit what she has to offer on the history of anti-Semitism and the birth of biopolitics. Although Stern says that he “follows Arendt by asking about the history of survival” (18), he finds her guilty of “secreting (in the double sense of the word) a singularly Christian topography of survival” (20).

But what is Arendt actually saying when she quotes Augustine? Arendt certainly did not think that human beings are incapable of creating; art occupies a key transitional bridge between work and action in The Human Condition. Arendt is arguing rather that the creation story thematizes the introduction of the unpredictability of human actors into the totality of the world considered as a made thing, and any attempt to treat human worldliness as the object of social engineering, household management, or military calculation is bound to fail (or at least reach a terrible stalemate). In The Human Condition, Arendt places the origins of the bureaucratic, post-political state in the Christian Middle Ages, and she explicitly criticizes the translation of Greek political terms into “Roman-Christian thought.” What she is trying to retrieve from humanity’s created status, in other words, is the capacity for politics, whose manifold contingencies are bound up in doing, speaking, and appearing to and before others (Eve to Adam, Adam to Eve), a fundamentally dramatic scene that the biopolitical state only imperfectly manages. 

In Arendt’s 1933 essay “Original Assimilation” (note the ironic Augustinian title), she compares the Jewish salon hostess Rahel Varnhagen to Adam: “Purely independent, because born into no cultural world, without prejudice, because it seemed no one judged before her, as if in the paradoxical situation of the first human being, she was compelled to appropriate everything as if she were meeting it for the first time.” Varnhagen’s assimilation is “original” because it flows out of and gives shape to the disengagement from Jewish tradition predicated by emancipation and enlightenment. In this secular midrash, Arendt uses creation and its discontents to analyze the Jewish predicament, deprived of a politics, in the early 1930s.

In The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig notes that whereas the first days of creation are judged by God to be “good [tov],” the creation of humanity on the sixth day is “very good [tov me’od]” (Gen. 1:31). Building on rabbinic commentaries, Rosenzweig identifies this “very” with a “supercreation” within creation, a surplus he identifies with human mortality, which “portends the revelation of a life which is above the creaturely level” by introducing historicity and the possibility of renewal into the teeming yet closed world of creation’s earlier stages. This de-completion that completes creation is doubled in the institution of Shabbat, a messianic interim or “time that remains” that opens a clearing for human action by suspending everyday work and labor. Arendt emphasizes birth or natality, whereas Rosenzweig emphasizes death or mortality, but both find in Genesis a torsion within creation that introduces historicity into the world conceived as a made thing. Eric Santner argues that German Jewish thinkers developed the topos of createdness and creaturely life because it allowed them to conceptualize “a specifically human way of finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonisms in and of the political field.” German-Jewish writers including Arendt, Auerbach, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin take up createdness in its Christian formulations but loosen Biblical typology’s grip on the story in order to accommodate other voices, vistas, and questions. 

Stern exposes the Christian core of modern Jewish thought by troubling Arendt’s reliance on Augustine and Rosenzweig’s affinities with Pseudo-Dionysus. Hermann Cohen’s response to Michelangelo as processed by Asher Biemann suggests a somewhat different tactic: how does Jewishness continue to resonate within Christian art and thought? How do such remainders suggest paths into and beyond secularization for both Jewish and Christian artists and thinkers? 

Let’s take Shakespeare. Stern reads Hamlet as a Eucharistic allegory: “In a crucial historical translation—’at the heart of the ghost story called Christianity’—Shakespeare analyzes the aura and reproducibility of the king’s portrait as a political theology of a survivor-ghost” (137). If you read Hamlet for reminiscences of Torah, on the other hand, you might overhear Polonius rewriting the Book of Proverbs, Hamlet wallowing in Ecclesiastes, the Ghost delivering his commandment on Mosaic tablets, and Claudius and his stepson jockeying for possession of Davidic kingship. Hamlet’s Bible broadens the tropes of survival well beyond the resurrection celebrated in the Mass, to include the feint of madness, the agony of repentance, and the competing forms of discourse and study associated with Torah (Moses) and wisdom (Solomon). Even Hamlet’s liberatory “interim” in Act Four, which allows him to affirm his role as minister and scourge but also as forgiver and forgiven, has a messianic tenor. 

What whispers in Hamlet howls in Lear, the Shakespearean tragedy that displaced Hamlet after the Holocaust. Lear has long been compared to Job and the prophets, and artists in the eighteenth century, responding to the increasing prestige of Shakespeare as a secular scripture, depicted Lear in the style of Michelangelo’s Sistine portraits. In many illustrations, Lear raging on the heath evokes the outstretched arms of Michelangelo’s storm-and-creator-God. The Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, fresh from his Italienreise, used Michelangelo’s nested schemata to design a whole Shakespeare gallery, a secular Sistina. It was William Blake, however, who most closely channeled the forced inventiveness of exile that Hermann Cohen later intuited in Michelangelo’s Ancestors. Blake’s image of Cordelia and Lear in prison captures the lassitude and abandonment of Michelangelo’s refugees and honors their remodeling of leftover intervals for acts of imagination, companionship, and care.

Figure 2: William Blake, Lear and Cordelia in Prison, c. 1779. Tate Britain. Photo: Tate. https://www.tate-images.com/preview.asp?image=N05189 

Like my father-in-law Frank Reinhard’s generation of assimilated German Jews, Arendt was thrust into her Jewishness by the events of the 1930s, which she survived by becoming a refugee while aiding others in their exodus from Europe to Palestine and the United States. She could not save Benjamin from death, but she did carry his writings out of Europe and see them into print: survival of another kind. In the “Introduction” to Illuminations, Arendt compares Benjamin’s citations to pearl fishing, alluding to The Tempest. Shakespeare in turn assembled his underwater wonderland from the prophet’s psalm of thanksgiving in the Book of Jonah. Arendt’s pearls—luminous, portable, secreted around trash and trauma, and belonging to sea change—proffer a different, more magnanimous, Shakespearean trope of survival than the ghosts, hosts, and dead dictators that Stern finds in Hamlet and Julius Caesar. 

Stern’s genealogical approach unmasks survival’s darker purposes by “provincializing the presumed universality of regnant codes” and “analyzing the text of dominant discourses” (10). Although I came of age on deconstruction, genealogy often leaves me feeling bereft of valuable tools and fellow travelers. There are moments, however, when Stern pauses from the necessary work of critique in order to seek a way forward. In the stunning Epilogue, Stern provides an affirmative genealogy of the Palestinian virtue of ṣumūd—“agency, ability, and capacity in dire circumstances” (184), the forms of endurance that shine in Michelangelo’s lunettes. Stern couples ṣumūd with the rabbinic identification of the sarid or remnant with the talmid hakkam, “a student listening to the call of Torah (even at night),” that is, under conditions of persecution and dearth (186). Such devoted and courageous study, Stern suggests, is a form of Jewish survival less contaminated by Christian-colonial thinking than the post-war “Holocaust survivor” has become. And Stern’s own work is surely itself such an act of nocturnal study, insofar as he is keeping alive the tradition of Jewish thought that flourished before, between, and after the first two world wars, within a new “dark time” (in Arendt’s phrase) marked by the moral compromises of Israel, the march of climate change, and, as we write, the prospect of WWIII. 

Figure 4: Hannah Lupton Reinhard, Song of the Sea, 2021. Oil and Swarovski crystals. Private collection. https://seasons.la/exhibitions/16-hannah-lupton-reinhard-beshert-beholden/overview/ 

Whither Jewish (post-secular) art today? This final image, Song of the Sea, was the centerpiece of an exhibition entitled “Beshert / Beholden,” the 2022 solo debut of painter Hannah Reinhard Lupton (named twenty-six years ago after Hannah Arendt and, yes, my daughter). In this large oil painting bedazzled with Swarovski crystals, the exodus from Egypt becomes an afterparty where Instagram girlfriends trample a Chagallesque dejeuner sur l’herbe. If the headless dancers at the back of the painting mimic the maidens of Botticelli, the women in the foreground, one braiding the hair of another, resemble Michelangelo’s snapshots of Jewish solicitude in exile. Beshert is Yiddish for soulmate. Hannah’s nymphs are dear to each other because they are braiding stories greater than themselves in a world they did not make (“O cursed spite that these were born to set it right”). This granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor from Weimar is finding her way through the ruins of art history and the leavings of Judaism in full knowledge that for her generation, survival of any kind is a burning question. Reading Torah deep into the night, Adam Stern has given us a refreshed and chastened archive with which to think about these predicaments.