Chapter Nine

Gershom Scholem’s
Reading of
Tristram Shandy

Elizabeth Kraft

Any student, friend, colleague, or intellectual legatee of Melvyn New will recognize in my title an allusion to his intermittent engagement in the general topic “Sterne and Modernism.” In his 1988 essay “Proust’s Influence on Sterne: Remembrance of Things to Come,” New deliberately—and with characteristic slyness—upends our notion of authorial relations, rejecting traditional “influence study” in favor of a fluid, creative, and evocative enterprise that speaks more fully to the “complexity of the concept of literary tradition.” What difference does it make if Proust pored over the works of Sterne, particularly A Sentimental Journey, at some point before he sat down to write À la Recherche du Temps Perdu? Very little, to New’s mind, for he “find[s] almost everything about their techniques quite dissimilar and . . . [does] not believe for a moment that Proust learned anything about literary form or style from Sterne.” What does interest New and what provokes his bringing the two authors together in conversation with each other is that the correspondence of their sensibilities on “the very fundamental human problem of male-female relations resulted in some uncanny similarities of images and concepts.”1 Whether or not the eighteenth century influenced twentieth (and now twenty-first) century writers, we who study earlier periods of literature come to those periods first having read the works of our contemporaries or near contemporaries. We (and perhaps more important, our students) see connections that may not exist intentionally, but that are nonetheless valid in terms of the preoccupations of Western culture. Thus is literary tradition written and rewritten by every new generation of readers and scholars who perceive influences where they do not exist in echoes that, in fact, do resonate down the long corridors of time. It is because of our perceptions as readers and scholars that we can validly say that Proust influenced Sterne.2

My essay adds a twist to this New-like project in bringing together Gershom Scholem and Laurence Sterne. Scholem (1897–1982) was a near contemporary of Proust (1871–1922), but his academic preoccupations were the history, texts, and traditions of Jewish mysticism, or kabbalah. Robert Alter, in fact, finds that the term “modernist” needs special pleading when applied to Scholem as “there is little indication that . . . [he] took much time off from poring over kabbalistic texts to steep himself in the literature of modernism.” Yet, as Alter persuasively argues, there is a reason that Scholem’s seemingly narrow (or “esoteric”) studies have had such an impact on “international intellectual life over the past several decades,” for everywhere in his work one is aware of “the imposing imagination of the deep and dangerous business of life in history.”3 Scholem, like the modernists—and indeed like Sterne, who is, in this trait, like the modernists as well—looks into the abyss of a world that has become radically destabilized and finds there not fear, not annihilation, not emptiness, but a source of strength and knowledge.4

Scholem and Sterne seem strangely similar in their willingness to meet the challenges of modernity or the Enlightenment (as the case may be) head-on, but that in and of itself would not be reason to bring the two of them together had Scholem himself not extended an invitation to do so, as it were. In his 1977 autobiographical memoir From Berlin to Jerusalem, the scholar of kabbalah invokes Tristram Shandy, not as an influence, but as a fond memory associated with his intellectual transition from childhood to maturity:

Around that time, in September of 1910, I sold all my children’s books to a secondhand book dealer on Wallstrasse in a fit of defiance which I greatly regretted later, because I had decided to set up a “real” library. I was greatly interested in history, even before my mathematical inclinations also asserted themselves. The awakening of the latter was due to the influence of my marvelous longtime mathematics teacher, Franz Goldscheider, whose brother was a famous physician. He was the only teacher in my school who meant anything to me. (To him I owe my early acquaintance with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.)5

Given this cryptic but pointed reference, we might legitimately wonder why the book is so important to Scholem that he remembers and reveres the teacher who first recommended it.

We may never know definitively what attracted Scholem to Tristram Shandy, or why he continued through the course of his long life to find it a meaningful and significant work. That he did so consider it, however, is attested to by the above quotation and substantiated by the fact that he shared his enthusiasm with his friend Walter Benjamin. In 1926, Benjamin writes to Scholem:

Your letter from Safed reached me today via Berlin. I was pleased to receive it for—at least—three reasons. First, you are seeing Safed for yourself—with your own eyes. Second, you are not strictly and without exception adhering to the principle of writing only in response to a letter received. This is the principle we have hitherto observed in our correspondence. Third, at the very moment I was about to start a letter to you, yours arrived. Should this digression and its mathematical character appear to be and strike you as something new in my correspondence, you can attribute it to my immersion in the third book of Tristram Shandi. At the same time you will have observed that sooner or later I do follow up on your suggestions of what to read[.]6

By 1933, Tristram had become a byword between the friends, as we see in Benjamin’s letter of June 15: “I allowed K.M.’s greetings to take effect on me. The story of her first letter to me seems to be unfolding in the purest Tristram Shandy style. With this observation we also best do justice to the utter uncertainty as to whether the letter will ever come into being.”7 Poignantly, the reference to Tristram and the whimsical vagaries of social life follows Benjamin’s reflections on the direr uncertainties of the times. He reveals that his brother is “in a concentration camp” suffering “God only knows what,” though “the rumors about his wounds were exaggerated in at least one respect. He did not lose an eye.”8

Scholem’s response to Benjamin does not include overt discussion of Tristram Shandy, yet, clearly, the novel had an impact on both men, who were struggling in the late twenties and early thirties to pursue their own “literary studies”—Scholem’s kabbalistic study and Benjamin’s “conspicuously European” work.9 Scholem’s path was easier, as he acknowledged, because he found Palestine (later Israel) the perfect location for his own literary and intellectual pursuits. He urged Benjamin to join him, away from the dangers of European life under the various fascist regimes that were sweeping the Continent, but he recognized that Benjamin might have difficulty participating in the Zionist cause and that difficulty, in turn, would “rapidly bring about a morally unbearable state of estrangement” in which work would be impossible and “in which life cannot be sustained.”10 As Scholem expresses himself to his friend, it is clear that he is preoccupied with the difficulties of creation and the dangers of extinction on a number of levels, all of which concern Tristram Shandy as well.

What follows is necessarily speculative as I will be treating episodes of Tristram Shandy as they may have resonated with a kabblistic scholar of German-Jewish descent living through one of the worst periods of anti-Semitism in a world whose history is replete with such episodes. How did Tristram Shandy, an eighteenth-century work authored by a Protestant clergyman, remain dear to one who had every reason to distrust the intellectual and creative heritage of Europe? My speculation is that Scholem had long recognized in Tristram a sympathetic imagination committed to life in the world but intrigued and inspired by the world beyond. Further, read with alertness to mention of Jewish culture, religion, and texts, Tristram Shandy evidences awareness of and sympathy for the pains of oppression suffered by European Jews as well as surprisingly detailed knowledge of the cultural and religious heritage of the Jewish people.

Tristram Shandy’s “Mysticism”

Bernard McGinn, a scholar of Christian mysticism, has noted a broad appeal in Scholem’s presentation of kabbalah. While “Scholem himself made no universal claims for Jewish mysticism” nor did he claim “that Kabbalah was the archetype or inner core of other forms of Western mysticism,” nevertheless, “all students of mysticism should read Scholem” in order to “deepen their insights of the dynamics of other mysticisms,” dynamics that McGinn explains, drawing on Scholem’s “Religious Authority and Mysticism”: “‘All mysticism has two contradictory or complementary aspects: the one conservative, the other revolutionary’” (or one digressive, the other progressive, we might say). “What Scholem meant by this,” McGinn elaborates, “is that the new direct contact between God and human that marks the mystical phase of religion is . . . ineffable.” Mystics in all three monotheistic faiths experience both contact with God and a “desire to communicate this to others” in such a way that invariably points to a “‘rediscover[ing] of traditional authority.’” In that sense, mysticism is fundamentally conservative. But, “due to the wild card of ineffability . . . mystical preservation of tradition is never mere repetition, but also allows for creative transformations of the inherited amalgam.” McGinn concludes, “While Scholem never denied a creative aspect to the more abstract elements of religion, like law and philosophy, it is obvious that he was drawn to the study of mysticism precisely because he saw in it the deepest resource for dynamic change and development within religion.”11

It would be wrong to say that Sterne was a student of mysticism in the way that Scholem was, but the eighteenth-century writer and clergyman was certainly aware of the Christian mystical tradition, especially, as New has pointed out, as articulated in the writings of the Neoplationist John Norris.12 While Norris’s sermons and other writings cannot be said to partake of kabbalistic learning, their focus is on heaven, the other world—a focus that, for all his immersion in the senses of this world, Sterne ultimately shares and endorses in Tristram Shandy. Moreover, while certainly not a spokesman for the historical Sterne, Walter Shandy exhibits a thorough acquaintance with the literature of alchemy, learning he could hardly have without Sterne’s awareness. Sterne’s obvious willingness to delve into bodies of forbidden or discredited knowledge for creative inspiration probably appealed to the similarly minded Scholem. Further, the focus of such knowledge on the moment and means of human creation resonates with what we have noted to be one of Scholem’s concerns. Tristram introduces us to himself as a homunculus who was to have been named “Trismegistus” in Walter Shandy’s homage to the hermetic tradition. Although clearly Walter’s “natural philosophy” is the object of satire in the early pages of Tristram Shandy, the highlighting of the word “HOMUNCULUS,”13 the reference to alchemy, machinery, animal spirits, animation, clockwork, and the like may have, for Scholem, invoked the legend of the golem, a legend that directly addresses the moment of mystical contact between man and God.

While we are accustomed to thinking of the homunculus as that “little man” in the spermatazoon who makes his microscopic appearance in seventeenth-century preformationist theories of reproduction, Clara Pinto-Correia has pointed out that the “leading spermists” of the seventeenth century never used the term and would not have used the term because it “was consistently related to occult sciences and magical formulas”: “It would therefore have been impolitic for the spermists to have chosen such a dangerous term when they sought to defend their theories.”14 The homunculus was always a made-man (and the OED supports Pinto-Correia, citing Henry More on the “artificial way of making an Homunculus,” John Edwards on the “artificial Homunculus,” and Tristram Shandy, too). Based on her understanding of the terminology involved, Correia thinks that Sterne is presenting Tristram as a being that has not been conceived and born in the usual way. We know from the beginning, she says, that “something is not normal about Tristram Shandy.” Then we find out just what that is:

Chapter six starts with the subtly threatening warning that “in the beginning of the last chapter I informed you exactly when I was born; but I did not inform you how.” From here, although the secret is going to be withheld in hallucinogenic convolutions of the narrative, we can see it coming—especially since we have already been informed that his father was somewhat estranged from his mother around the time of his presumed conception. And also because chapter two suddenly interrupts the flow of the story to dwell on the condition of the homunculus in this world—by all accounts, in the author’s description, a sad and tormented life.15

I doubt any conscientious literary scholar would go so far as Pinto-Correia to suggest even the possibility of Tristram’s being made in a metal tub of some sort according to Paracelsus’s famous formula;16 however, most readers would agree that Walter’s intentions in the act of making love, as later on in writing his Tristrapoedia, are to “make a man,” if not an alchemical creation, at least a man that Walter believes he can shape and form by detailed attention to the words and circumstances of the child’s early life. Homunculus or golem, Tristram is to be (if Walter has his way) his father’s creation, body and soul.

In his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Scholem uses the word homunculus as a synonym for golem, a fact that seems to suggest the connection in his own mind between the figure of Jewish lore and Tristram’s early state-of-being:

It is to Hasidism that we owe the development of the legend of the Golem, or magical homunculus . . . and the theoretical foundations of this magical doctrine. In the writings of Eleazar of Worms . . . discourses on the essence of Hasiduth are to be found side by side with tracts on magic and the effectiveness of God’s secret names. . . . There one also finds the oldest extant recipes for creating the Golem—a mixture of letter magic and practices obviously aimed at producing ecstatic states of consciousness. It would appear as though in the original conception the Golem came to life only while the ecstasy of his creator lasted. The creation of the Golem was, as it were, a particularly sublime experience felt by the mystic who became absorbed in the mysteries of the alphabetic combinations described in the “Book of Creation.”17

Scholem wrote and read in at least three languages—German, Hebrew, and English. I do not know whether he read Tristram Shandy in English or in the German translation by Johann Elert Bode as Benjamin did.18 It makes no difference, really, for homunculus was retained in the Bode translation, and, indeed, the word was associated with Sterne from the beginning in Germany, Ueber den Homunculus being part of the German title of Yorick’s Meditations published in Frankfurt in 1769.19

Of course, Sterne does not hold a copyright on the word homunculus. Scholem would have known of the homunculus created by Goethe’s Faust, as well as, perhaps, a 1916 German film entitled Homunculus, which tells a story very similar to the typical golem tale in which the made-man grows too powerful and must be destroyed. Scholem had very likely encountered the word often in the esoteric reading involved in his study of the history of kabbalah. Yet, given his early love of Tristram Shandy and the prominent use of the word in that work, it seems reasonable to conclude that Scholem thought of Tristram when he heard, read, or wrote the word homunculus—and given his association of that word with golem, it seems fair enough to speculate that Scholem may have seen similarities between Tristram and the golemim of kabbalah.

Scholem may have even suspected that Sterne knew the Jewish legend of the golem in addition to the medieval Christian story of the homunculus. While there is no clear evidence one way or the other, it is possible that Sterne was aware of the myth. 20 Knowledge of kabbalah and other forms of Jewish mysticism had flourished in secret societies in Stuart England, as Marsha Keith Schuchard’s exhaustive study of Freemasonry during this time has established definitively.21 That Scotland and northern England remained repositories of such knowledge during the more staid Hanoverian reigns is hinted at by the popular association (which surfaces occasionally—and not necessarily by way of praise) between Scotland and “the Jews.”22 There were also readily available sources in print, such as Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s 1700 Entdecktes Judentum, literally, “Judaism Revealed,” but translated into English in 1732 as Rabbinical Literature; or, The Traditions of the Jews contained in their Talmud and Other Mystical Writings. A new edition had been printed in London in 1748, and had Sterne been interested in doing so, he certainly could have acquired the book and read the following account of the golem:

The same Treatise (Yalkut Chadash) in the Part entitled Neshamoth, teaches, that Souls before they come into the World, are cloathed, and appear before Almighty God in the Bodies in which they are to appear in the World. “All the Souls (’tis there said) before they come into the World, cloathe themselves in the same Bodies, and put on the same Likeness, in which they are to appear in the World. Every Soul above, before she cometh into the World, cloatheth herself with a Body; and in that Image, or Figure (i.e. so habited) she standeth before the Holy and Blessed God. Then doth the Holy and Blessed God adjure that Soul and Body not to sin. And these Things are signified by the Words, Thine Eyes did see my GOLEM: That is, my Golem, which is the Body, thine Eyes did see when I stood before thee.”23

Eisenmenger’s project was to subvert Jewish authority. He had studied with rabbis under the guise of pursuing conversion to Judaism and had repaid their efforts by writing this “treasure trove of . . . anti-Jewish arguments,” which “served as ammunition for antisemitic agitation” well into the twentieth century.24 Yet, though Eisenmenger’s interpretations are invariably perverse and dismissive, his renditions of the texts themselves are not always distorted. If Sterne did read here of the golem, he would have been correctly informed that the figure is invoked both in the Talmud and in Jewish mysticism in order to explore, elaborate, or experience aspects of creation, particularly the moment before bodies and souls are fused.25 Sterne was perfectly capable of distinguishing the narrow-minded from the exuberant when encountered in the same source, as his relationship with William Warburton suggests. Melvyn New explains that Warburton, as bishop, “preached caution and prudence” to Sterne, but as author of The Divine Legation of Moses, he demonstrated “encyclopedic, energetic abundance[,] precisely the fertility and variety Sterne most desired.”26

Whether or not he knew the golem legend, Sterne teaches in Tristram Shandy many of the same lessons to be derived from a close study of the figure. In On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Scholem cites several Midrashic and Talmudic sources that attribute a golem phase to the creation of Adam.27 There are several variants of this myth, but most emphasize a delay in the time between God’s creating of Adam and his endowing Adam with a soul. In one version of the story, to the golem Adam, God reveals “all future generations to the end of time” (Scholem, 161); in another, God creates Adam before he creates anything else, but hesitates to breathe a soul into him: “If I set him down now,” God says, “it will be said that he was my companion in the work of Creation; so I will leave him as a golem, until I have created everything else” (Scholem, 162). In all versions, the golem is both more privileged than man and less powerful—all due to the will of his creator. According to Scholem, these various Adamic myths attest to the mystical union of body and soul—of course, a preoccupation of Sterne’s as well. In one sense, the golem is mere matter, not a being with rights as Tristram insists he, in his homuncular state, is. In another sense, the golem is simply matter waiting for a soul, rather than never to have a soul; and while the word “golem” means clod, even the Adamic golem is presented as more than a mere lump of inanimate clay. Though he lies prone, he also sees (Scholem, 162). One Midrash, in fact, portrays this “seeing” in particularly animated terms: “While the first man lay prone as a golem, the Holy One showed him each and every righteous man that was to issue from him—some hung on Adam’s head, some hung on his hair, some on his forehead, some on his eyes, some on his nose, some on his mouth, some on his ears, some on his teeth.”28

Around the twelfth century, Scholem explains, the golem is transformed in Jewish learning into an “object of a mystical ritual of initiation which seems actually to have been performed, designed to confirm the adept in his mastery over secret knowledge” (Scholem, 174). Here the focus shifts from God as creator of bodies informed by souls to man as creator of matter capable of movement. One wonders if Scholem might have seen Tristram as an adept performing ritualistic mysteries in order to create his golemim, Walter and Toby, mechanical men animated by hobbyhorses rather than souls. Certainly, Tristram’s descriptions of his creative processes emphasize his physical possession by forces that act upon him and send him in directions he may or may not plan to go. He writes with frenzied nerves, in hurry and precipitation, with things crowding in upon him, in rash jerks and squirts. Occasionally, he mentions being “relaxed,” but usually he is in motion—“so much of motion, is so much of life” (7.13.593)—and the reader is continually reminded that writing for Tristram is a matter of inspiration: “I begin with writing the first sentence—and [trust] to Almighty God for the second” (8.2.656).

One further kabbalistic view of the golem also seems pertinent to Sterne’s purpose in Tristram Shandy. This is the view of the golem as a moralistic warning against pride. In a thirteenth-century text about the prophet Jeremiah’s creation of a golem, this point is clearly made. Jeremiah and his son combine letters according to kabbalistic formulae and create a man on whose forehead stand the words “Elohim Emet” or “God is truth.” But this golem takes a knife and scrapes off the aleph from emet leaving the word met or death, and so the words then signify “God is dead.” Jeremiah rends his garments in agony due to the blasphemy of what he now reads and asks the golem why he did such a thing. The golem replies with a parable:

An architect built many houses, cities, and squares, but no one could copy his art and compete with him in knowledge and skill until two men persuaded him. Then he taught them the secret of his art, and they knew how to do everything in the right way. When they had learned his secret and his abilities, they began to anger him with words. Finally, they broke with him and became architects like him, except that what he charged a thaler for, they did for six groats. When people noticed this, they ceased to honor the artist and came to them and honored them and gave them commissions when they required to have something built. So God has made you in His image and in His shape and form. But now that you have created a man like Him, people will say: There is no God in the world beside these two! Then Jeremiah said: What solution is there? He said: Write the alphabets backward on the earth you have strewn with intense concentration. Only do not meditate in the sense of building up, but the other way around. So they did, and the man became dust and ashes before their eyes. Then Jeremiah said: Truly, one should study these things only in order to know the power and omnipotence of the Creator of this world, but not in order really to practice them.29,

To know and not practice the art of creation is to learn the lesson of the golem, even as the mystic seeks God in order to know God, not to become God—or, we might add, even as the writer masters the principles of novel-writing in order not to write a conventional novel. We have creative powers that link us to the divine, but when we invoke them and put them into play, we face the abyss of history and write onto it letters that may prove beneficial, but that may prove destructive as well.30 The most famous story of the golem is one that Sterne probably did not know—the golem of Prague, created by Rabbi Loew, the Maharal, to protect the Jews during a time of persecution.31 This golem was a savior for a while, but he turned destructive because he became too empowered, too little subject to the control of his maker. He stands as a lesson in pride and its destructive tendencies. In more than one sense, Tristram Shandy teaches the same thing.

Sterne and the Jews

For Scholem, the destructive power of human creativity was everywhere evident in the 1930s as the Nazi state redesigned a world in which there would be no Jews. Sterne’s sympathetic treatment of Jewish history and culture in Tristram Shandy must have been a powerful source of encouragement during those dark times. In fact, there are moments in the book that Sterne reveals surprisingly intimate knowledge of Jewish life and learning—so intimate that one might suspect him to have had direct acquaintance with Jewish texts and, perhaps, with Jews themselves.32 In two instances, Tristram Shandy offers evidence of Jewish knowledge hard to explain without personal interaction with Jews or Jewish texts. The first is centered on the sympathetic portrayal of Trim’s brother Tom.33 Tom marries the widow of a Portuguese Jew and is taken before the Inquisition and imprisoned in a dungeon. Readers more than likely have varying opinions as to why Tom meets this fate, but close attention to the text reveals that Trim is quite clear about it. It is not because Tom is an Englishman; nor is it because he has married a Jew’s widow. It is because of the sausages that he and his wife make and sell: “[M]y brother Tom went over a servant to Lisbon,—and then married a Jew’s widow, who kept a small shop, and sold sausages, which, some how or other, was the cause of his being taken in the middle of the night out of his bed, where he was lying with his wife and two small children, and carried directly to the Inquisition, where, God help him, . . . the poor honest lad lies confined at this hour” (2.17.144). “Some how or other” can be explained. As Trim suggests later on, Tom and his wife do not put pork in their sausages. Why not? Because, one has to assume, they cater to the Crypto-Jewish shoppers, the Marranos, who had undergone mandatory conversion rather than leave Portugal but who still practice their religion in private. Why do Tom and his wife cater to them? My guess is that they are also Jewish—or at least she is, and that means their children are, and for all practical purposes, Tom is Jewish as well. Trim indicates that if “after their marriage . . . they had but put pork into their sausages, the honest soul had never been taken out of his warm bed, and dragg’d to the inquisition” (9.4.742). The option was there, but Tom chose not to take it.

These sausages referred to by Trim (and Sterne) are called Aiheiras and are “heavily seasoned sausages (the word derives from alho, garlic), still very popular in Portugal. Originally made with chicken, turkey, and partridge, it is said that they were created by conversos to give the impression that they ate pork, the main ingredient of Portuguese sausages.”34 Perhaps the sausages were popular enough on their own to account for the “rousing trade” to which Tom is drawn in the first place (9.5.745). But if the popularity was dependent on the absence of pork, the indictment of Portuguese intolerance is profound, as it indicates a rather large population of Judaizing Portuguese who remain loyal to a religion they have been forced to abandon. And if the popularity was not dependent on the absence of pork, why not add it after the marriage and avoid imprisonment? There are surely matters of conscience at stake here. This kind of knowledge and sensitivity, it seems to me, must have come to Sterne through the Sephardic Jewish population of England.35 The sausage ruse is not the kind of thing an outsider would know; the sympathy for Tom’s commitment to the Jewish life he has embraced as a husband or, perhaps, a convert, is not the kind of thing one expects from an Anglican clergyman with no Jewish acquaintances.

Significantly enough, Tom’s courtship of the Jew’s widow is prefaced by his encounter with a Negro servant, the report of which prompts the discussion between Toby and Trim as to whether or not “a Negro has a soul?” Trim is not sure, but Toby reduces the question to its fundamental essence: “I suppose, God would not leave him without one, any more than thee or me.” Trim’s response is definitive: “It would be putting one sadly over the head of another” (9.6.747). His implication is that God would not do such a thing. We might, were we to create golemim. But God would not because he creates men and women.

The second instance that seems to reveal Sterne’s uncanny knowledge of Judaism occurs in the reference to “Ambition” in chapter 8 of book 9 of Tristram Shandy. Toby invokes the word in response to Trim’s suggestion that he loves glory more than pleasure: “I hope, Trim, answered my uncle Toby, I love mankind more than either; and as the knowledge of arms tends so apparently to the good and quiet of the world—and particularly that branch of it which we have practised together in our bowling-green, has no object but to shorten the strides of AMBITION, and intrench the lives and fortunes of the few, from the plunderings of the many—whenever that drum beats in our ears, I trust, Corporal, we shall neither of us want so much humanity and fellow-feeling as to face about and march” (9.8.753). In their notes to the Florida edition of Tristram Shandy, Melvyn New, Richard A. Davies, and W. G. Day draw our attention to Sterne’s sermon on Herod, which advances the opinion that the Judaean king was driven by ambition and led into unjust wars on that account. In other words, Toby’s assertion that wars are waged from motives of “humanity and fellow-feeling” is not to be taken as Sterne’s own conviction.

The sermon itself fuses a scriptural passage about the matriarch Rachel with a historical meditation on the character of Herod as presented by Josephus. The sermon was preached on Innocents’ Day, which commemorates Herod’s slaughter of the male children of Bethlehem reported in Matthew 2:1–18 (and nowhere else in the Gospels or in independent accounts such as Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities). Sterne’s text is from the end of the chapter, Matthew 2:17–18: “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying,—in Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachael weeping for her children, and would not be comforted because they are not.” He moves immediately from the fact of Rachel’s weeping to the place of her burial, asserting that “to enter into the full sense and beauty of this description, it is to be remembered that the tomb of Rachael, Jacob’s beloved wife . . . was situated near Rama, and betwixt that place and Bethlehem.”36 New points out that here “Sterne simplifies a standing confusion concerning the location of Rachel’s tomb, whether near Ephrathah, identified with Bethlehem (and where Rachel died giving birth to Benjamin . . .) or north of Jerusalem, near Ramah.”37 Christian biblical commentator Matthew Poole, indeed, insists that Rachel’s tomb is near Bethlehem and glosses the scripture’s reference to Ramah as one that need not “be taken appellatively, as it signifieth a High place, from whence a noise is most loudly, and dolefully heard.”38 Sterne, however, does not call on Christian commentary; instead he moves, unexpectedly, to “Jewish interpreters” who “say upon this, that the patriarch Jacob buried Rachael in this very place, foreseeing by the spirit of prophecy, that his posterity should that way be led captive, that she might as they passed her, intercede for them.”39 While Sterne rejects this “fanciful superstructure” as an example of the “doctrine of intercessions” that strikes him as all too similar to traditions embraced by “Romish dreamers,” he is absolutely accurate in his understanding of the oral tradition regarding Rachel’s tomb.40 The “Jewish doctor” who “dreamed” this interpretation was Nachmanides in his commentary on Genesis 48:7 where Jacob says, “And as for me, when I came from Padan, Rachel died unto me in the land of Canaan in the way, when there was still some way to come unto Ephrath; and I buried her there in the way to Ephrath—the same is Bethlehem.” Nachmanides focuses on the repetition of “in the way” as “implying in the way her children were destined to pass did she die and there she was buried in their interests, since she had not actually died ‘in the way’ but at ‘Ramah’ which is a town in the land of Benjamin and there she was buried, but what the text meant to suggest was that she was buried at a spot where her descendants were destined to pass, when they were on the way going into exile. The text does not, however, explicitly refer to future events, but merely alludes to them.”41 Nehama Leibowitz remarks that in this passage “Rachel . . .
is pictured as the symbol of the Matriarch of Israel standing by to protect her descendants on their way into exile and interceding on their behalf.”
42 Sterne’s gloss, and I believe it can be called such legitimately, is slightly different: “the lamentation of Rachael . . . has no immediate reference to Rachael, Jacob’s wife, but . . . it simply alludes to the sorrows of her descendents, the distressed mothers of the tribes of Benjamin and Ephraim who might accompany their children, led into captivity as far as Rama, in their way to Babylon, who wept and wailed upon this sad occasion.”43 The mothers he commemorates on Innocents’ Day are “mothers of the same tribe” as Rachel. They suffer at the hands of Herod, whose “ambition” leads him to “trample upon the affections of nature” with violence, cruelty, and heartlessness and, though “bred a Jew,” to care more about “ingratiat[ing] himself with Augustus and the great men of Rome from whom he held his power” than about the Sanhedrin or his own sons (all of whom he executed).44

Sterne’s portrait of Herod, as New points out and as Sterne himself tells us, is “derived . . . from Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities”; however, “the lack of specific verbal echoes” has led Lansing Van der Heyden Hammond to speculate that “some convenient ‘intermediary’ saved Yorick the trouble of perusing the pages of the Jewish historian for himself.”45 Who or what might this intermediary have been? And could it be the same intermediary that provided access to Nachmanides, gossip about sausages in Portugal, and lore about the golem? Perhaps the esoteric reading that Sterne may have indulged in John Hall-Stevenson’s library can explain some of this knowledge, though, as Cash has pointed out with regard to all the “odd lore that went into Tristram Shandy,” definitive documentation is simply lacking.46 It seems just as likely to me that Sterne’s knowledge of Jewish matters came from acquaintance with a Jew.

We tend to think of the times as totally segregated in terms of race and religion, but, after all, it is in the mid-1750s that, on the Continent, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn become friends over a love of chess and a joint interest in the works of Alexander Pope, among other things. Their coauthored Pope, A Metaphysician (Pope ein Metaphysiker), although published anonymously in Danzig in 1755, was very quickly identified and celebrated as the product of intellectual and aesthetic partnership between Jew and Gentile. During this period, as well, Freemason lodges in London were open to Jewish members as the constitution of the brotherhood required a simple deistic faith, “that religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves.” Though certainly there was some discrimination in practice, there were also occasions on which the stated principle was honored: a Jew applied for membership to a London lodge in 1732 and was accepted.47

In other words, while the atmosphere in the eighteenth-century Jewish-Christian world was not completely open, there were occasions for non-Jews to meet Jews. Indeed, as Todd Endelman points out, such occasions for “social contact” were “increasingly common” in the Georgian period.48 Sterne may have simply been in the presence of Jews from time to time. There is also the possibility, however, that he sought acquaintance in the midfifties, for the heated rhetoric surrounding the passage and then the repeal of the “Jew Bill” in 1753 and the devastation caused by the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 could not have left a sensitive spirit such as Sterne’s unmoved.49 Some of the Jews in eighteenth-century England (indeed the oldest communities) hailed from Portugal and Spain, driven out of those countries by an intolerance that had also, at one time, driven them out of England. Sterne lived in York, after all, site of one of the most tragic incidents of the thirteenth century’s wave of anti-Semitism.

All things considered, I think it quite possible that Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy (as the Maharal is said to have created his golem) at least partly to combat what he might legitimately fear to be a new instantiation of an age-old antagonism.50 It is probably too much to attribute to Tristram Shandy the atmosphere of openness and exchange between Jews and non-Jews that would characterize nineteenth-century England and Europe, but certainly the novel did its part to open minds and hearts to look for points of connection rather than matters of contention.51 Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in Tristram Shandy’s one direct reference to the Talmud. In paying tribute to Trim for his gloss on the commandment to honor father and mother, Yorick says, “I honour thee more for it . . . than if thou hadst had a hand in the Talmud itself” (5.32.471). How has Trim glossed the commandment? By dedicating part of his daily pay to the sustenance and care of his parents—or, in other words, by deed, not creed. Ultimately, here and throughout both Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey, Sterne endorses what Enlightenment Judaism (haskalah) and Enlightenment Protestantism (Anglicanism in particular) will embrace with vigor in the century to come: the important thing is how we behave, not what we believe. Reading, as we must, from the point of view of our own times, we might pause, as we imagine Scholem did, for a sigh of regret that we have so poorly learned this lesson as we proceed thoughtlessly and violently, like golemim gone bad, down paths of global destruction upon which our various masters have set us.

Notes

1. “Proust’s Influence on Sterne: Remembrance of Things to Come,” MLN 103 (1988): 1053.

2. For other of New’s meditations on Sterne and modernist writers, see “Three Sentimental Journeys: Sterne, Shklovsky, and Svevo,” Shandean 11 (1999–2000): 126–34, and “Sterne and the Modernist Moment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 160-73.

3. Robert Alter, “Scholem and Modernism,” Poetics Today 15 (1994): 430, 431.

4. The “abyss” as a source of meaning is, according to Alter, one of the key correspondences between Scholem and the modernists. See “Scholem and Modernism,” 432–37. I think anyone reading this essay will concede that the concept is important to Sterne as well. After all, we stare into a black page that commemorates Yorick’s death in volume 1 of Tristram Shandy, and we confront meaningful gaps, hiatuses, blanks, and silences from that point on. The abyss in Sterne is never a nihilistic fantasy. It is always, as in Scholem, an occasion to seek meaning on a higher—or lower—plane.

5. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1980), 33. I would like to thank Alan Levenson for introducing me to Scholem in this context.

6. The Correpondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Gerhard Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 304.

7. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 60. K.M. refers to Kitty Marx with whom Benjamin would have a flirtatious, Yorick-like, friendship, but at this point, the relationship is fraught with uncertainty.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 66.

10. Ibid.

11. McGinn, “Foreword” to Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), vii, xi–xii.

12. New, “The Odd Couple: Laurence Sterne and John Norris of Bemerton,” PQ 75 (1996): 361 and 373. For Norris’s Neoplatonism and its indebtedness to philosopher Nicolas Malebranche’s “complex interweaving of Platonic idealism, Cartesian dualism, and Augustinian theocentricism” into his own “Occasionalism,” see E. Derek Taylor and Melvyn New’s introduction to their edition of Mary Astell and John Norris: Letters Concerning the Love of God (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 7–22, 14–15.

13. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: The Text, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, vols. 1 and 2 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1978), 1.1.2. All references to this text cite Sterne’s original volume and book numbers followed by the Florida edition page number and will appear parenthetically in the text.

14. Clara Pinto-Correia, “Homunculus: Historiographic Misunderstandings of Performatist Terminology,” Topic 4.1 in Developmental Biology Online, ed. Scott F. Gilbert, 9th ed. (http://9e.devbio.com).

15. Ibid.

16. “Let the semen of a man putrefy by itself in a sealed cucurbite with the highest putrefaction of venter equinus for forty days, or until it begins at last to live, move, and be agitated, which can easily be seen. At this time it will be in some degree like a human being, but, nevertheless, transparent and without a body. If now, after this, it be every day nourished and fed cautiously with the arcanum of human blood, and kept for forty weeks in the perpetual and equal heat of venter equinus, it becomes thencefold a true living infant, having all the members of a child that is born from a woman, but much smaller. This we call a homunculus; and it should be afterwards educated with the greatest care and zeal, until it grows up and starts to display intelligence.” Quoted by Pinto-Correia, ibid.

17. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 99.

18. Scholem and Adorno note that Benjamin’s “spelling is a mixture of Shandy and the spelling used by Bode in his German translation, Schandi.” The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 307n2.

19. I am grateful to John Oberholt of the Houghton Library of Harvard University for checking the Bode translation for me and to Howard Gaskill of Edinburgh University for the information regarding Yorick’s Meditations. E-mail correspondence with both, via C18-L listserv (to which I am also indebted), 5 March 2010.

20. Emily Bilski notes that Christian authors began publishing accounts of the creation of a golem (specifically Rabbi Eliahu of Chelm’s golem) in the mid-seventeenth century, which became the source material for Jakob Grimm’s version of the tale that he published in Zeitung für Eisiedler (Journal for Hermits) in 1808. “The Golem: An Historical Overview,” in Golem! Danger, Deliverance, and Art, ed. Emily D. Bilski (New York: Jewish Museum, 1988), 13–14.

21. Marsha Keith Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Boston: Brill, 2002). See also Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 538, 645–50. David S. Katz has also demonstrated that seventeenth-century English “projectors” of universal language were well versed in Jewish mysticism, particularly kabbalah; see his Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 71–88.

22. See, for example, Oppression: A Poem (London, 1765), which compares the Northern Britons to “the Jews” whose “greatest crime is too partial love” (30) and the North Briton, 19 June 1762, in which Scots are compared to “the Jews” in that they “are spread over the face of every country.” John Wilkes et al. North Briton, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Dublin, 1763), 1:19. See also Michael Ragussis, “Jews and Other ‘Outlandish Englishmen’: Ethnic Performance and the Invention of British Identity Under the Georges,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 773–97, especially 775.

23. Eisenmenger, Rabbinical Literature; or, The Traditions of the Jews contained in the Talmud and Other Mystical Writings (London, 1748), 1:269–70.

24. H. L. Strack and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, ed. and trans. Markus Bockmuehl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 224.

25. Indeed, as Frank E. Manuel has demonstrated, the late Renaissance had witnessed a “revival of interest in virtually all aspects of Hebraic thought” in the Christian world—kabbalah, as well as ritual law—that continued throughout the eighteenth century. “Christendom’s Rediscovery of Judaism,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 40, no. 7 (1987): 17.

26. “Sterne, Warburton, and the Burden of Exuberant Wit,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, no. 15 (1982): 263. I would disagree with New’s conclusion that the one overt reference in Tristram Shandy to the Divine Legation is a thorough repudiation of Warburton’s “ponderous treatise” (273), as opposed to Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, the other text with which he compares his own. Indeed, I believe Sterne to be quite serious in seeing all three books as efforts to deflect religious controversy and defuse religious passion.

27. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 161–62; hereafter cited parenthetically.

28. Exod. R. 40:3.

29. Scholem, Major Trends, 180–81.

30. With “abyss,” I echo Alter on Scholem (discussed above). It was also Alter, interestingly enough, who first read Tristram Shandy as “a continuous demonstration and celebration of the imagination” that coexists with articulation of “the possibility that the imagination is a cheat, a purveyor of substanceless flimflam.” Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 38.

31. It is really difficult to say what people of the past knew and did not know about oral history. We cannot confirm Sterne’s awareness of the legend of the golem of Prague because it was not written down until well after his death, around 1835. Moishe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 252.

32. Arthur H. Cash speculates that Sterne was “introduced to Hebrew grammar and logic” at Hipperholme (Laurence Sterne: Early and Middle Years [New York: Routledge, 1975], 34). Sterne’s acquaintance with rabbinic texts appears to Norman Simms, who has thoroughly considered “Jewishness in Tristram Shandy,” to be secondhand, through Josephus, John Spencer, and William Warburton primarily (“The Missing Jews and Jewishness in Tristram Shandy,” Shandean 4 [1992]: 139). As will become clear, I am not so sure.

33. While Simms sees this episode as encoding “an almost imperceptible anti-Jewish fantasy,” I (and I think most readers) see the portrayal of Tom and the widow as completely sympathetic (“Missing Jews,” 139).

34. Eduardo Mayone Dias, “Crypto-Jews in Portugal: A Clandestine Existence,” Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, http://www.cryptojews.com/cryptoJewsinPortugal.htm.

35. On the Sephardim in England at this time, see Simms, “Missing Jews,” 137–38; for a full history of eighteenth-century English Jewry, see Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979). He discusses the Jewish immigrants from Portugal on 167–68.

36. “Sermon 9: The Character of Herod,” in The Sermons of Laurence Sterne: The Text, ed. Melvyn New, vol. 4 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 81–82.

37. New, The Sermons of Laurence Sterne: The Notes, vol. 5 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 133–34.

38. Cited by New, ibid., 134. Poole’s two-volume Annotations upon the Holy Bible appeared in 1683.

39. Sterne, “The Character of Herod,” Sermons: The Text, 82.

40. Ibid.

41. Gen. R. 82:10. Nachmanides or Ramban (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman) was a thirteenth-century commentator, a Spaniard, and, like Maimonides earlier, a physician as well as a rabbi. His biblical commentaries were the first to incorporate the mystical tradition. See Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. “Nachmanides.” See also the brief biography at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Nachmanides.html.

42. Nehama Leibowitz, New Studies in Bereshit (Genesis), trans. Aryeh Newman (Israel: Eilner Library, n.d.), 541.

43. Sterne, “The Character of Herod,” Sermons: The Text, 82–83.

44. Ibid., 83, 86–87.

45. Hammond, Laurence Sterne’s “Sermons of Mr. Yorick” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 59; cited by New, Sermons: The Notes, 133, 137.

46. Cash, Laurence Sterne: Early and Middle Years, 194.

47. Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. “freemason.” Indeed, wealthy Jewish merchants and patrons of the arts Moses and Solomon Mendez were Freemasons, as was their friend James Thomson. Solomon Mendez provided shelter for Richard Savage during some of his low moments in London. Sterne was not a Freemason, but two Freemasons erected his memorial stone around 1780, inscribed to one whose “keenest Knowledge of Mankind / Unseal’d to him the Springs that move the Mind.” Wilbur Cross meets objections to the inappropriateness of the tribute and those who paid it by calling it “a sincere encomium” (The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne, 3rd ed. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929], 494–95). For Solomon Mendez and Richard Savage, see Richard Holmes, Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 3, 175, 215. For Thomson and the Mendez brothers, see James Sambrook, James Thomson, 1700–1748: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 168.

48. Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, 249–50.

49. I follow Simms here in highlighting these two events as significant for Sterne, both as independent events and as they stood in relation to each other.

50. My argument does not really contradict Simms’s perception of an underlying, unconscious reflection of certain aspects of an anti-Jewish myth. We agree that “Sterne . . . would not knowingly articulate the racial and social fears encoded” in this myth (Simms, 145). And we also agree that Tristram Shandy is directly engaging with various aspects of the “Jewish question.” My emphasis on the cultural, intellectual, and mystical aspects of Judaism and Sterne’s seeming awareness of them as opposed to Simms’s emphasis on the ritual and covenantal aspects (circumcision, in particular) result in different readings of Sterne’s overall purpose and effect. While Simms sees in Sterne’s Jewish themes evidence of “creative misunderstanding,” I see (and I believe Scholem saw) intuitive sympathy. See Endelman, Jews of England, 44, 50–85, on the role of Anglican clergy in relation to the Jew Bill (bishops in the House of Lords did not oppose it) and on the general philo-Semitism among liberal Anglo-Christians of this time.

51. For the literary effect of such openness—and for the participation of novelists in the consequent rewriting of English national identity in the nineteenth century, see Michael Ragussis’s excellent Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).