Introducing The Posen Library
By James E. Young
Editor-in-Chief
The Posen Library of Culture and Civilization
In November 2012, the first of ten 1,000-page volumes of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization is due to be published by Yale University Press. Thence will follow nine more volumes of roughly 1,000 pages each—until 2015, when the project will be complete.
The anthology represents an unprecedented attempt to gather, in a single, usable collection, what the current generation of scholars agrees best represents Jewish culture and civilization in its historical and global entirety. Nearly eight years ago, I was invited by Felix Posen to serve as Editor-in-Chief of this massive anthology. He had approached me on behalf of a sterling editorial board, including some of our generation’s leading scholars and thinkers in Jewish culture (Robert Alter, Yehuda Bauer, Menachem Brinker, Rachel Elior, Paula Hyman, Jonathan Sarna, Anita Shapira, A.B. Yehoshua, Yosef Kaplan, and Steven Zipperstein, among others). After consulting several of these board members, I accepted, somewhat humbled and embarrassed by the audacity of the project.
I proceeded to write the project’s précis and appoint a list of Volume Editors. From the outset, however, we recognized that our foundational question here, “What is Jewish culture?” needed to be followed (in good Jewish fashion) with several other questions: Toward what ends are we defining Jewish culture? Do we want to know what is essential to Jewish culture? Or what distinguishes it from other cultures? Do we want to know in order to celebrate all the cultural creations of the Jews as essentially “Jewish”? Or to be able to weed out the supposed non-Jewish elements from it?
Moreover, are there essentially Jewish qualities to Jewish culture or is Jewish culture itself essentially a dialectic between “adaptation and resistance to surrounding non-Jewish cultures,” as David Biale has suggested in his Cultures of the Jews? Or should Jewish culture be regarded as something that is produced mostly in relationship to itself, its own traditions and texts, as David Roskies argued in his review of Biale’s volume of essays?
Rather than pretending to answer these questions definitively, we allowed them to remain embedded in the multitude of entries selected by individual Volume Editors and their expert Advisory Boards. That is, we encouraged the editors to recognize the heterogeneity of Jewish culture and civilization. This fulfilled a crucial aspect of our central mission: to establish an inclusive and pluralistic definition of Jewish culture and civilization, in all of its rich diversity.
Historically, there have been any number of distinctive and parallel Jewish civilizations, some sharing common cultural traits and traditions, some with little in common beyond core religious laws and beliefs.
We all agreed that a major part of Jewish culture and civilization—visual culture—needed to be included throughout these volumes, in all of its forms. Still, questions of what constitutes pre-20th century Jewish literature, philosophy, liturgy, music, folk art and other forms of material culture remained. Often, these questions were easier to navigate than the questions that arise later, such as: What is Jewish art, or photography, or architecture? What makes Barnett Newman, or Philip Guston, or Mark Rothko Jewish artists? Do Newman’s meditations on martyrdom constitute “Jewishness” in his work? Do Guston’s reflections on identity and catastrophe make him a “Jewish artist”?
Is Rothko’s iconoclastic insistence on the abstract color field after the Holocaust a gesture toward the second commandment prohibition of images, and if so, does that give him a Jewish sensibility? And what about other art forms? Is William Klein a Jewish photographer? Or Weegee (née Arthur Feelig), or Robert Capa (née Andreas Friedmann), or Brassai (née Gyula Halasz)? Aside from its cheekiness, what are we to make of William Klein’s mischievous remark that “. . . there are two kinds of photography—Jewish photography and goyish photography”?
And architecture. Is there such a thing as “Jewish” architecture? The current generation of Jewish architects is certainly legend (think of Frank Gehry, nee Frank Owen Goldberg, Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Santiago Calatrava, James Ingo Freed, Moshe Safdie, and A.M. Stern, to name but a few of the most prominent). But what are we to make of Gehry’s suggestion that the undulating steel forms for which he is so famous are inspired by the live carp his grandmother kept in a bathtub before turning it into gefilte fish?
But rather than prescriptively suggesting some kind of hard and impermeable canon to be excavated by our volume editors, we decided, again, to leave these questions up to them: their jobs would simply (or not so simply) be to research all that has been regarded as representative of Jewish culture over time, and to bring it all together in generically, thematically, chronologically, and geographically organized volumes.
What, one could easily ask, is the purpose of attempting to collect in a ten-volume anthology all that this generation deems to constitute Jewish culture and civilization? I believe there are several large purposes, each with several parts.
First, we hope that The Posen Library will open the world’s eyes to the extraordinary contributions Jewish thinkers, writers, and artists have made as Jews to dozens of other national cultures around the globe. As a corollary, we also hope that as a process, The Posen Library demonstrates that like Jewish culture, all national cultures are comprised of multiple, often competing constituent cultures. Like Jewish culture, national cultures everywhere are formed in the constant give and take, the frisson between and within themselves.
Second, we hope to show that Jewish culture necessarily includes the living, breathing, ever-evolving expressions of Jewish experience in all of its shapes and forms, inside and outside Halacha, and that it is animated in its constant interrogation, debate, and disputation. As such, The Posen Library might serve not only as an outreach to the non-Jewish world, but also as a kind of Shaliach to otherwise disaffected and disengaged Jews whose religious identities have lapsed, but whose cultural identification as Jews might now be renewed.
Finally, we wanted to suggest The Posen Library as a model for defining a “national culture”—a culture shaped by its differences and reciprocal exchanges with other cultures—rather than a “nationalist culture.” For we know all too well what happens when nations and cultures attempt to purge themselves of all supposedly foreign elements: They become small and hollow shells, devoid of inspiration and imagination.
By attempting these, and by drawing attention to works that have traditionally been neglected and marginalized from prevailing canons, we wanted to provide a working anthological legacy by which new generations will come to recover, know and organize past, present and future Jewish cultures and civilizations.
James E. Young is Editor-in-Chief of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization (Yale University Press, forthcoming). He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Judaic & Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of At Memory's Edge (Yale U. Press, 2000); The Texture of Memory (Yale U. Press, 1993); and Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Indiana U. Press, 1988), among other books and collected volumes.
Introducing The Posen Library is adapted from a paper of the same name, originally presented by the author at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem in August 2009. It was adapted with permission of the author.
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