Jews’ Harps

Letters

Vol. 4 No. 7 · 15 April 1982

From Charles Martindale

SIR: I have just read my colleague Gabriel Josipovici’s interesting review of The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (LRB, Vol. 4, No 2), in which he complains of ‘our [my italics] Rome-centred, Classics-centred view of the past’. Evidently he is living in a different world from myself: many of the literature students that I teach have not even heard of Horace or Ovid, let alone have any sense of their place in European letters, so that a complaint which might have had tactical validity a hundred years ago seems peculiarly untimely today (when, furthermore, Classics departments throughout the country are faced with contraction or closure). From a different angle, Dante or Shakespeare, little of whose energies, for better or worse, were devoted to the study of post-Biblical Hebrew literature, might have been surprised by his opinion. Nor does he give a single concrete instance of the supposed sovereign cultural importance of non-Biblical Hebrew verse. The true reason for reading these poems is surely likely to be their intrinsic merit, or even the challenge that they constitute to our customary sensibilities, rather than their important place in the literary history of Western Europe. Pace Mr Josipovici, Rome is, and, as long as we care for the truth (which may not now be long), will remain, central.

Charles Martindale
Classical and Medieval Studies, University of Sussex

Gabriel Josipovici writes: As a Classicist, Charles Martindale ought to be familiar with the uses of rhetoric. When I spoke of ‘our Rome-centred, Classics-centred view of the past’, I did not do so after taking an opinion poll. I was generalising from my own impressions of that vague and fluid thing, the ‘cultural Establishment’ as it exists in England even today, enshrined in universities, the ‘quality’ papers, literary journals, the British Council etc. I think it is easier for someone coming to this country from elsewhere to recognise how far English culture is still dominated by attitudes and assumptions that are a century old, even if only by the terms in which it chooses to react to them and deny them. I am sorry about Charles Martindale’s students (and presume he, too, is being rhetorical when he says he has Classics students who have not heard of Horace and Ovid), but the point I was making was not one about the reading of 18-year-olds but rather the kind of point that Edward Said made so eloquently in Orientalism. As to his last criticism, I did indeed stress that one of the pleasures of the anthology lay in its introducing us to many new and excellent poems. But I myself will not be able to read Medieval poetry, especially the songs of the Crusaders, in the same way after reading the moving poems in this anthology commemmorating the Jewish martyrs of Mainz or Blois. One knew of the pogroms unleashed by the Crusades, of course, but poems like those of Ephraim of Bonn or Barukh of Mainz bring home the pain and suffering involved as history books can never do. Our reading of Christian poetry, from ‘The Dream of the Rood’ to Herbert’s ‘The Sacrifice’, must be affected by a stanza like the following, from an anonymous poem about the massacres: ‘O everlasting God, we seek refuge in the shadow of your Wings. We have been abandoned, alone and suffering, because we refused to bow our heads before the crucified one … Let all who put their trust in him be put to shame!’

Vol. 4 No. 9 · 20 May 1982

From Charles Martindale

SIR: I must correct a damaging misapprehension in Gabriel Josipovici’s reply to my letter (LRB, Vol. 4, No 7) about his review. I did not say that my Classics students had not heard of Horace or Ovid (good rhetoric, even for a Classicist, should not lose all touch with reality!). I specifically referred to ‘literature students’ whom I teach, who read other subjects – for example, English – and my remark was not rhetorical but unadorned fact. This means that such students study, say, Marvell without a knowledge of Horace, or the Elizabethans knowing nothing of Ovid, and that does seem both damaging and not the characteristic of a Classics-centred culture. I quite agree with Gabriel Josipovici that we should all be aware of what was done to the Jews in the Middle Ages in Christ’s name, and what they felt and wrote about it, but that is a somewhat different issue from what is ‘central’ to the literary history of Western Europe.

Charles Martindale
University of Sussex