Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (4 page)

Up to this point, the Gundolfian theory seems to us, from the perspective of the midtwentieth century, as not particularly radical. The conviction that historical interpretation is by definition a part of historiography and that Rankean objectivity is a "myth" has become part and parcel of contemporary historiographical theory,
23
and its attractiveness for Heinemann in his project to reach a sympathetic understanding of the rabbis is obvious. Not only will the masters of the aggada not seem naive on this view of historical understanding, but

those who attack them for being subjective and their midrash for being valueladen are only revealing the poverty of their own spirits and the degeneration of their own historical sense. The rabbis certainly saw in themselves, in the most important sense, the legitimate continuation of history and their writings are the very embodiment of a transhistorical, absolute, and universal system of values.

However, this version of the validation of subjective historiography will not further too much our reading of midrash aggada, for even those historians who acknowledge the importance of aesthetics and values in the choosing of relevant facts by the historian and their arrangement into cause and effect sequences and complete stories, will not countenance the
creation
of facts
ex nihilo
by the historian. And it is this which the masters of the aggada seem to do all the time, when they tell us stories about conversations and actions which are not written in the Torah, the historical document, at all. But Gundolf's views on a proper task for the historian are in fact much more peculiar than what I have presented so far and provide an exact source for Heinemann's understanding of aggada. I am referring to Gundolf's notion, based on his reading of Goethe, of history itself as only being important owing to the legends that it produces, to the poetry to which it gives rise. "Goethe", Gundolf explained, "saw the justification of history in the historical fables to which it gave rise, because the truths which these fables expressed—though often lacking empirical basis—stimulated through their wealth and grandiosity, the imagination of mankind."
24
The only test, then, of the adequacy of historical writing for this

school is in the importance of that writing for the life of the present. The method of the historian is to immerse himself in the documents of the past and achieve a oneness of spirit with their heroes, and out of that oneness fashion legends about those heroes which will be true because they are the product of deep spiritual connection between the great creative genius of the past and the great creative genius of the present. Whether or not the facts are right, this is true history because legends are the product of true apprehensions of the human qualities of the great figures which have given them rise. ''The sole criterion of the historian's objectivity was whether or not he apprehended the study of history as a series of intense and personal experiences. In short, to write history was, in a very real sense, to make history."
25

It should now be quite obvious why this historiosophy was so attractive to Heinemann, even though by the time of his writing it had long been replaced in Germany itself. This school not only provides a vindication for a subjective understanding of the writing of history—That much could have been gotten from Kant; it specifically promotes the value of the historical legend from a kind of primitive protohistory to the very Parnassus of the historical enterprise. As a philosophy of history, it does precisely the work that Heinemann wants it to, namely, to provide a theoretical model with which to understand aggada

positively as a writing of biblical history. The apotheosis of Romanticism in the Symbolist aesthetic and philosophy of history characteristic of the George school has provided the very foundation of all of Heinemann's work on the aggada. It provides the source for his crucial terminology, "creative historiography." We have here the romantic theory of literary production as the creation of the individual genius, carried over, via George and Gundolf, into the realm of biblical interpretation.

We should recognize how deeply immersed all of Heinemann's thought is in a specifically German cultural context.
26
Even his formulation that the goal of the highest kind of history writing is "'to make peace between life,' which requires satisfaction through spiritual contact with ancient heroes, 'and science,' which is indifferent to our longings" is an expression of the German ideology at its most typical. This opposition between "science" and "life" so characteristic of the George school is ultimately of Nietzschean origin.
27
It is certainly significant that the example which Heinemann cites for his theory is Dr. Faustus. ''There may be no doubt," he avers, ''that the play
Faust
is of more philosophical importance than the biography of the magician Johanan Faust who lived in the sixteenth century, his travels and his deceptions" (p. 5). The rabbis are the Goethes of Judaism, who with their gigantic creative abilities understand the "reality" of the salvation history and communicate this reality with their legends, the aggada. There is no small measure of irony, it seems to me, in the fact that Heinemann set out to create a theory of aggada in opposition to Maimonides' claim that aggada is poetry and ended defending a version of precisely that claim, relying on a school of thought for which everything—including any worthwhile historiography—was poetry. All of
Darkhe ha'aggadah
will proceed from this fundamentally German opposition between "secondrate, even trivial 'science,'"
28
and the vital, experienced, lived truth of legend. Even Heinemann's description of the didactic goals of the rabbis could not be more at home in the George school's theories of poetry, which imagines it as "emotional direction and liberation of a people through the artistic means of language,"
29
or as Heinemann puts it, "the aggada, and not only the aggada of the Jewish people, fills in the details [of the historical record] in an imaginative way, in order to find an answer to the questions of the listeners and to arrive at a depiction which will act on their feelings" [p. 21].

A significant example of Heinemann's Gundolfian approach to aggada can be found in his chapter, "The Bringing Near of the Distant," which begins with a strong restatement of his theoretical position:

The popular legend [aggada]—and the aggada of the sages included—often identifies, as we have seen, the different heroes of the story with each other or with their descendants.
30
Even more important is its way of identifying to a certain extent the lives of the heroes with the lives of the narrators. For here is the difference between the aggada and the scientific historiography.

The latter emphasizes the
changes
which have taken place in the course of the generations and interprets the events particularly in accordance with onetime conditions. The organic thinking from which the popular aggada has sprung obliterates as much as possible the barrier between the describer and the described. In this sense it "erases all secondariness," in the words of a great expert.
31
But also the art of the civilized peoples and indeed even science have not always preserved, as will be shown below, the difference between times. [p. 35]

Heinemann's analogies are indeed to Shakespeare with his Julian clock and to Lessing with his theaters in the twelfth century. Just as these great poets did not care about the facts of history but its true meaning, which they perceived through their creative imaginations, so did the rabbis in presenting the biblical history in aggada. A classic example of this program in Heinemann's text is his statement that "the Abraham of the aggada who baked matzot for Passover, while he is different from the one that the Bible testifies to with regard to the details of the description, is essentially closer to the Abraham of the Bible than the one who was described by the Apostle, that Abraham of whom only faith was considered as righteousness, as if there were no value in works" [p. 39].

While it cannot, of course, be, established that Abraham actually baked matzot, the fact is unimportant. This is merely the accident of the onetime, the unrepeatable, and therefore the insignificant. What is important is that the rabbis, in touch with the spiritual reality of Abraham, have understood his true essence, while Paul has missed this truth in his reading.

There may be little doubt, therefore, that the reliance on the George school as a grounding for
Darkhe ha'aggadah
has given Heinemann theoretical tools for a very strong reading of aggadic texts. However, since that grounding is so strongly predicated on the ideology and philosophy of that school, it is prey to the same weaknesses and distortions to which Gundolf's work itself is prey.
32
One of the signal consequences of Heinemann's powerful infusion of the Gundolfian model and sensibility into his study of midrash aggada is that it leads to near total disregard for social and historical forces and meanings in the production of the texts. If the rabbis are lonely geniuses in communion with the biblical heroes and reproducing their "real" essences in the aggada, then the aggada is above and beyond time itself, belonging to the supernal world of spirit and losing all of the specificity of historical and social circumstance. Indeed, this is explicit in Heinemann's thought as he repeatedly privileges the universal and eternal over the onetime occurrence. Once more, the German intellectual atmosphere of Heinemann's writing cannot be emphasized too much, for over and over again, we find in the literature characterizations of poetry as that which is not social, indeed that which is opposed to the social. Indeed Gundolf himself depended for his theory on what is to me a bizarre Germanic opposition between the poet and the writer, holding that while the

latter was subject to language and its social meanings and determinations, the former resided in a privileged ontological and epistemological space all alone and free of any contamination from his time and society. "Literature is part of society but poetry belongs to nature."
33
Aggada is, of course, poetry and not literature in this taxonomy. Considering how very heavily Heinemann's thought is imbued with the spirit of German romanticism and the George school, I find it, therefore, very understandable how he can have completely missed the social and historical factors in his theory of aggada. Any new theory will have to redress this imbalance, retaining what is valuable in Heinemann's thought and filling in its yawning gaps. I turn now to a programmatic outline of such a possibility for a new
Darkhe ha'aggadah
.

Repeating Heinemann's rhetoric, I would begin by saying that if the school which I have synecdochically represented by Joseph Heinemann places midrash aggada too firmly in its own historical circumstances and considers it a mere reflection of them, Isaak Heinemann removes aggada too extremely from any historical and social meanings. What is common to these theories is that they both assume the opposition between "objective" and "subjective," one privileging the objective and the other the subjective. The assumption of this distinction forces one view to assume that the rabbis did not intend to interpret at all and the other to suppose a romantic, near mystical understanding of historical interpretation. Thus, particularly in Isaak Heinemann, the binary opposition between science and aggada leads to acute structural tensions in his work. On the one hand he wishes to claim that the rabbinic midrash
is
interpretation of the biblical text, in direct opposition to what he takes to be the Maimonidean position. On the other hand his founding positivistic assumption that there is a true, objective, scientific meaning to the text which the rabbis depart from leads him again and again to compare aggada with fictional texts as such, which are not representations of the past at all, but "mouthpieces for the views of their authors'' [p. 42]. In short, by not deconstructing the opposition between objective and subjective in his theory, Isaak Heinemann is led back to the very position of the Rambam which he had set out to replace. Indeed, the very argument which Heinemann mounted against the Cassuto and Jacob approach, namely, that the rabbis distinguished between
peshat
and
drash
in their text, proves to be a Trojan horse, for it tends more strongly to support the Rambam's contention that they did not intend their midrash to be interpretation than to argue against the former view.
34
Thus Isaak Heinemann argues that ''the depictions of the sages are not 'interpretations' in the scientific sense, but even in the places where they supported their opinions with Scrip

ture, in truth they were following the ways of artistic creation" [p. 25]. I, for one, am hardpressed to find any distinction whatever between this claim and the theory of the Rambam's. It is clear from here how Heinemann's acceptance of the fundamental concept "scientific, objective truth," for all that he valued the intuitive, subjective "reality," nevertheless forced him into unthematized contradictions in his text.

In place of these approaches, I will follow much current thought in proposing that all interpretation and historiography is
representation
of the past by the present, that is, that there is no such thing as valuefree, true and objective rendering of documents. They are always filtered through the cultural, socioideological matrix of their readers. Continuing Isaak Heinemann's own metaphor which projects a dichotomy between the painter who subjectively represents the inner truth of reality and the photographer who objectively records only what is "really" there, I would suggest that today we hold that the photographer, no less than the painter, produces a representation in which the very image is generated by what the culture encourages and constrains her to see. This understanding is an outgrowth of several currents in contemporary theory. On the one hand Mikhail Bakhtin has revealed for us the social, interactional, dialogical nature of all language use (including the romantic lyric and the scientific description—the painting and the photograph). On the other hand, theoreticians of history such as Hayden White have been exploring the ways in which all historiography is constructed by a culture.
35
Finally, in a more specifically literary context, Frank Kermode has explored how culturally and ideologically determined are all notions of "the plain sense of things."
36
These theoreticians and others of their ilk will occupy in my description of midrash the place that Stefan George and Friedrich Gundolf occupied in
Darkhe ha'aggadah
.