Jonathan Miller's view of life

I said I might follow up on Jonathan Miller, having posted a couple of weeks ago a segment of an old TV interview in which he talked about his Jewishness. There he was basically saying that he asserts it only in the face of anti-Semitism, and also that he was not religiously Jewish. (Apparently, he gave up on the religious side of things as he was preparing for his bar mitzvah, which in the end never took place).

When he was interviewed by Ben Silverstone in 2006, Miller was saying the same things about his Jewishness as he had been a quarter of a century earlier. But it's clear that he had become more embittered over the intervening years, convinced that he had not been given his due (as a director, say) as well as exhibiting more regrets about giving up the practice of medicine.

A number of things struck me, most notably his commitment to the ideas (mainly his views on religion and social issues, I suspect) of Bertrand Russell. Miller's father (who later became a noted psychiatrist) had studied philosophy at Cambridge before World War I and Jonathan inherited his father's library which included works by Russell.

Miller -- I think unfortunately -- made a bigger deal than Russell did of rejecting religion. For Russell this was primarily a personal decision whereas Miller sees religion as an evil social force which must be actively resisted.

I am also out of sympathy with Miller's left-wing social and political views. His children were sent to the local comprehensive, described by his son as a "war zone".

Russell had some decidedly dodgy ideas on education, and made (or lent his name to) some extreme political statements, particularly in his old age as a leading member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and associated groups. But generally I think his social and political views were more nuanced than Miller's.

I won't talk about Miller's activism on behalf of the Palestinians and against Israel. I have never lived in the region and I prefer to steer clear of these sorts of discussions. Both sides have done bad things.

In three main respects I am on the same page as Miller: I share his respect for scientific knowledge and achievement, his rejection of metaphysics, and his fascination with ordinary human behaviour.

Miller says: "On the whole, the best works of literature simply address the tiny, quotidian questions - what happens when you get up? What stops you not going to bed earlier? In neurology, you’re also looking at the peculiar, anomalous ways in which patients do what they do: deficits, failures to say what they wished to say. In both neurology and theatre, subtle observation of what appear to be negligible details turns out to be the name of the game: that’s where the payload is."

I agree. Certainly there is no way we can get answers to those old, traditional metaphysical questions about purpose and meaning. The best we can do is muddle through, understanding the little we can and cherishing, if possible, the uncertainty and fragility of human life.

At the time of the interview, Miller was directing a production (in Michael Frayne's strange but wonderful translation) of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

Chekhov, he points out, was a doctor also. Miller also mentions Flaubert in this regard (but not Somerset Maugham who -- though he too was trained as a physician and was an acute observer of mundane human behaviour -- was probably not ideologically sound from Miller's point of view, being rather conservative). Frankly, I think medical training is much less relevant to observational capacities than Miller is making out.

According to Miller, great literature is simply about "what it's like to get from one end of a life to another". This sounds about right. Seriousness and triviality are inevitably intertwined.

The Cherry Orchard, Miller explains, "ends with a short scene depicting the aged footman, Firs, locked into a freezing house, left alone, apparently to die, after the departure of the entire Gayev household for the winter."

In Michael Frayn’s translation, Firs’s final words read...

“My life’s gone by, and it’s just as if I’d never lived at all. I’ll lie down for a bit, then… No strength, have you? Nothing left. Nothing… Oh you… sillybilly…”

On the concept of the Jewish people

Daniel Kaufman wrote a piece last month on his new blog Apophenia about religion without spirituality. He talks specifically about his particular liberal take on Jewish religion and culture and relates the notion of Jewish identity not so much to the religious side of Judaism in the sense of beliefs but rather to its rituals and conventions and to Jewish nationhood.

In the comment thread I raised a couple of questions, one about his notion of the Jewish people.

"I can see," I wrote, "that one can identify with the experience of more recent generations but doesn't it get a bit problematic when one imagines that one's "nationhood" traces back thousands of years in more than a mythical way?

"And then there is the problem of deciding who exactly is a member of the Jewish people and who is not. I, like many with British and European ancestry, have Jewish ancestors. There seems to be an arbitrariness about the Jew/non-Jew distinction if it is seen as clear-cut [unless of course one is using the word in a purely religious sense to designate individuals who identify with particular congregations or forms of Judaism]; and an unsatisfactoriness about seeing people as being more or less Jewish (especially in genetic terms)...

"... There are some perceptions of Jewish identity which appear to me on the one hand to give too much credence to the Biblical accounts as history and on the other to incorporate unrealistically strong claims to genetic continuity over the entire span of the tradition. (Or traditions? I tend to see Jewish culture as extremely variegated, more as a kind of patchwork, interacting with and contributing to various other traditions and cultures.)"

Daniel Kaufman's approach draws more on cultural and psychological rather than on strictly historical factors. But, as I suggested in the discussion, the (degree of) historical grounding of the Biblical narratives upon which Jewish culture and religion are built matters; it makes a difference.

He replied first by conceding that the concept of the Jewish people is not amenable to a clear, analytical definition, referring to it as a Wittgensteinian "family-resemblance" type of concept. Would this not, however, render the concept insufficiently determinate, insufficiently robust to do the work he wants it to do?

In a final comment, he more directly addresses my historical concerns, acknowledging that tracing the Jewish people back beyond the Roman era is rather problematic because of the lack of independent sources. He identifies with the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism which, deriving from the Pharisaic tradition, developed in the diaspora after the Roman era.


There are a couple of issues which I would like to pick up on, so here are a few further thoughts...

Firstly, as I suggested above, I see Judaism and Jewish culture more generally as being far from homogeneous. It changed over time (as all cultures do) and at any given time has been more or less variegated. At the time of Jesus, for example, Judaism was clearly comprised of a variety of (competing) schools of thought and practice. In various ways, the Gospels, Acts, the Book of Revelation and Paul's letters provide compelling evidence for these but there is (even stronger) evidence also from many other sources, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls (which were the product of an extremist or radical community which rejected the religious and political status quo and lived a monastic type of life while awaiting an imagined war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness in which they would fight on the side of the angels of light). The figures of John the Baptist and Jesus may be seen to inhabit a similar radical space, though they rejected communal living.

Of course, the Pharisees figure prominently in the New Testament narrative as do the Sadducees (who apparently believed in the traditional Jewish concept of Sheol, rejecting the notion of the resurrection of the dead and indeed any notion of judgement after death). And Paul (or Saul of Tarsus) seems to have been a practitioner of a heterodox and mystical form of Judaism.

Another relevant issue is that, unlike today's versions, Judaism was a proselytizing religion during Roman times. In fact it was the energetic and successful missionary activities of the Jews which apparently precipitated an expulsion in 139 BC and another in AD 19. References to the Jewish expulsion from Rome in the Acts of the Apostles, Suetonius, Cassius Dio and (much later) Paulus Orosius all apparently refer to an edict of the Emperor Claudius (who ruled from 41-54) however.

Given, then, that many Roman Jews were converts and, given that the post-Roman diaspora communities were probably also associated with conversion activity (and widespread intermarriage with local people), it is no surprise that there is much confusion and controversy surrounding the question of Jewish ethnicity, much of it currently focussed on DNA studies and their interpretation.* No doubt a scientific consensus will form over time as more studies are done, but it is already clear that Jewish ethnicity is not and never will be amenable to a straightforward genetic test.


The central focus of Daniel Kaufman's post (which I did not directly address in my comments) relates to the broader question of whether one can have a (viable) religion without spirituality. This issue came up the other day in another exchange between him and me in the comment thread of a subsequent post, and I may have more to say about it in the future.

For now, let me just make two points.

The first relates to semantics. There is a question about whether the attenuated form of Judaism he describes remains a religion in any meaningful sense. Certainly he is employing a broader view of the religious and the sacred than the conventional one. And this is fine, but for the fact that we normally like to retain some kind of distinction between 'actual' religions and forms of life (like nationalism) which may well involve expressions of the same sorts of instincts as those traditionally associated with religion but which are not religions.

The second point relates to the question of whether or not such attenuated forms of religion are capable of sustaining themselves beyond a couple of generations. (My guess is that they are not.)

______________________


* I have touched on these issues before. For example, this post discusses (and links to) research which examines Ashkenazi lineages via mitochondrial DNA analysis. The findings were that the female lines derive predominantly from European rather than Levantine populations. (The four major and most of the minor Ashkenazi maternal lineages form clusters within descent lines that were established in Europe between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.)

Y DNA studies, on the other hand, have apparently shown that Ashkenazi Jews (here I am citing Wikipedia) "share more common paternal lineages with other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than with non-Jewish populations in areas where Jews lived in Eastern Europe, Germany and the French Rhine Valley."

Mitochondrial and Y DNA are good for discovering deep ancestry but don't indicate the actual degree of relatedness between individuals: for this autosomal DNA or whole-genome analysis is required. Studies of the latter kind paint a very complex picture of regional variation with varying levels of commonality with host populations leading to increased scope for competing claims and interpretations. One surprising early result was that there appear to be very strong genetic links between Sephardi and Ashkenazi populations and non-Jewish Southern Europeans, especially modern Italians.

This is how the authors of the cited mtDNA study sum up the research into Ashkenazi origins and place their own work in relation to it:

"We are [...] faced with several competing models for Ashkenazi origins: a Levantine ancestry; a Mediterranean/west European ancestry; a North Caucasian ancestry; or, of course, a blend of these. This seems an ideal problem to tackle with genetic analysis, but after decades of intensive study a definitive answer remains elusive. Although we might imagine that such an apparently straightforward admixture question might be readily addressed using genome-wide autosomal markers, recent studies have proposed contradictory conclusions. Several suggest a primarily Levantine ancestry with south/west European admixture, but another concludes that the ancestry is largely Caucasian, implying a major source from converts in the Khazar kingdom. An important reason for disagreement is that the Ashkenazim have undergone severe founder effects during their history, drastically altering the frequencies of genetic markers and distorting the relationship with their ancestral populations.

"This problem can be resolved by reconstructing the relationships genealogically, rather than relying on allele frequencies, using the non-recombining marker systems: the paternally inherited male-specific part of the Y chromosome (MSY) and the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). This kind of analysis can be very powerful, because nesting of particular lineages within clusters from a particular geographical region allows us to pinpoint the source for those lineages, by applying the parsimony principle. This has indeed been attempted, with the MSY results interpreted plausibly to suggest an overwhelming majority of Near Eastern ancestry on the Ashkenazi male line of descent, albeit with much higher levels (more than 50%) of European (potentially east European) lineages in Ashkenazi Levites, suggesting a possible Khazar source in that particular case.

"The maternal line has also been studied, and indeed Ashkenazi mtDNAs are highly distinctive, but they have proved difficult to assign to a source population. Some progress has been made by targeting whole-mtDNA genomes or mitogenomes, which provide much higher genealogical (and therefore geographical) and chronological resolution than the control-region sequences used previously—although the far larger control-region database remains an invaluable guide to their geographic distribution. Using this approach, Behar identified four major founder clusters, three within haplogroup K—amounting to 32% of sampled Ashkenazi lineages—and one within haplogroup N1b, amounting to another 9%. These lineages are extremely infrequent across the Near East and Europe, making the identification of potential source populations very challenging. Nevertheless, they concluded that all four most likely arose in the Near East and were markers of a migration to Europe of people ancestral to the Ashkenazim only ~2,000 years ago. The remaining ~60% of mtDNA lineages in the Ashkenazim remained unassigned to any source, with the exception of the minor haplogroup U5 and V lineages (~6% in total), which implied European ancestry.

"Here we focus on both major and minor founders, with a much larger database from potential source populations..."

Their conclusion: "... Overall, we estimate that most (more than 80%) Ashkenazi mtDNAs were assimilated within Europe. Few derive from a Near Eastern source, and despite the recent revival of the ‘Khazar hypothesis’, virtually none are likely to have ancestry in the North Caucasus. Therefore, whereas on the male side there may have been a significant Near Eastern (and possibly east European/Caucasian) component in Ashkenazi ancestry, the maternal lineages mainly trace back to prehistoric Western Europe. These results emphasize the importance of recruitment of local women and conversion in the formation of Ashkenazi communities, and represent a significant step in the detailed reconstruction of Ashkenazi genealogical history."

A boy, a bomb and a bus: more on Jews and politics

Following on from an earlier post, here are a few more (fairly inchoate) thoughts on Jewish intellectuals and left-wing politics.

First of all, it might be said that intellectuals (Jewish or otherwise) generally tend to the left. And the fact that so many intellectuals happen to have a Jewish background might give the false impression that the leftishness derives from the Jewishness rather than from the intellectuality.

But I am inclined to tie the particular ideals of left-wing thought, as well as its uncompromising moral vision, to the Jewish (and Christian) scriptures. And I have made the point that people with a Jewish background who no longer believe religious doctrines are more likely to continue to identify with their cultural and religious traditions than are non-believing ex-Christians.

This issue is complicated by the fact that Jewishness is such a vague concept. It simultaneously relates to genetic, cultural and specifically religious factors. So, identifying particular individuals as Jewish or not Jewish is problematic.

For example, Ludwig Wittgenstein was staggered to learn that the Nazis considered his family Jewish. And not only the Nazis. He is (despite having been baptized a Roman Catholic and even buried as one) widely seen as Jewish. And, indeed, many of his forebears were Jewish.

Similarly, Kurt Gödel, was, though a Lutheran, considered by many of his contemporaries to be Jewish. But he insisted that he was not.

It all becomes quite arbitrary – and tedious. Who is going to be interested in determining how many of (and how long ago) a given person's forebears practised Judaism?

The 'racial' side is also problematic because of the large numbers (for example, in Southern Europe during Roman times) who converted to Judaism. Genome analysis studies have reached no clear conclusions, but they do seem to show genetic similarities between the general population in Italy, for example, and Jewish groups in other parts of Europe.

To an extent, Jewishness has been defined by anti-Semitism and so it is hardly surprising that the whole notion is shot through with myth on various levels. The key driver of anti-Semitism is the belief that 'the Jews' rejected the true Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, and were responsible for his death. During the Middle Ages, Christian anti-Semitism spawned a whole range of myths and legends which imputed sinister powers to Jews and reinforced various stereotypes. Interestingly, the Islamic 'reform' movements of the late-19th and early-20th centuries beefed up traditional Islamic anti-Semitism with elements derived from the rather more vivid and intense Christian tradition.

So any talk about radical Jewish intellectuals is a bit sensitive because it can easily appear to play into this anti-Semitic, scapegoating tradition.

Think of the early Hitchcock film, Sabotage, about a secret agent (played by Oskar Homolka) seeking to cause havoc in London. It involves a bomb, a bus and a child, the trusting little brother of the Homolka character's trusting English wife. Enough said.

Another kind of subversion was evident in the real world in the course of the Manhattan Project. And during the 1950s, of course. Jewish intellectuals and writers in particular were often under scrutiny.

The fact that there were real traitors who happened to be Jewish and who passed secret information to the Soviet Union served to give renewed life to some anti-Semitic stereotypes.

But my point – about the tendency of secular Jews to have left-leaning views – is, I think, generally true or at least defensible; as is the idea that this tendency derives from an essentially Biblical understanding of justice and morality.

I was going to say something about some of the names mentioned in the comment thread of the previous post, but, given the huge number of significant Jewish intellectuals who flourished during the last 150 years or so, not much would be gained by cursory comments on an arbitrarily-selected few.

It's pretty clear that Jewish thinkers spanned the ideological spectrum, even if the distribution is skewed in the direction of socialism and related philosophies.