Kipling was happy when he heard there was a full translation of the Mahabharata into English. Since he didn't know Sanskrit, he would quickly gain access to a vast treasure trove- or so he thought till he skimmed the first volume. It was impossibly Brahminical and presupposed a knowledge of Veda, Samkhya and God alone knows what else. A great story was buried in a pointless and obscurantist type of pedantry. Of course, Kipling was wrong. You aren't meant to read the Mahabharata the way you read Homer. Why? It was actually very funny, very self-reflexively ironic, and 'Borgesian'- i.e. as in Borges's stories, the ordinary bloke gets to sneer at bookish Professors while digesting a brief and compact tale of wonder whose infinite echoes in the heart's deep cave are just as extraordinary, 'apoorva' or unprecedented, as every moment of our own emotional life.
However, it wasn't till I read the Mahabharata for myself- in the light of Noether's theorem & evolutionary game theory- that I saw that Borges was a Hindu writer precisely because, like Kipling, the Mahabharata was denied to him. Had either been Sanskritists they would have been boring, virtue signalling, elitist, casteist, cunts. Instead, both, in very different ways, could 'show more than they know' by reason of being poets of work or just hardworking poets whose aim was use not fame.
There is a cogent article titled 'Borges the Jew' by a Professor at Amherst in the Jewish Review of Books. Since there is no Hindu Review of Books, for the excellent reason that Books quickly review Hindus and tell them to fuck the fuck off, I will use it to write a parallel essay 'Borges the Hindu'.
Borges, the Jew
By Ilan Stavans
In 1934 an Argentinian fascist magazine accused Jorge Luis Borges of being a Jew.
in which case his Mother would have had to have had a Jewish mother. Sadly Borges was what Hitlerites called an Aryan- like Tagore or Bose. Strangely, Hitler had no problem with Grand Mufti Husseini (the Philistines were of Greek origin) and Black and Brown peeps were welcome to join his Waffen SS so as to kill blonde, blue eyed, Jews.
Janusz Korczak broke the Law when he got the children in his 'Kinderplanet' to put on Tagore's 'Post Office'. Why? Tagore was Aryan. Korczak- whose real name was Henryk Goldszmit- was a Jew. As were the kids. They were loaded onto cattle trucks. But their ultimate destination was the polar opposite of that of the Nazis.
That's not a comforting thought. It is a fucking nightmare- as Kipling showed in 'Jews in Shushan'.
I quote
Shushan is a big city in the North of India, counting its dwellers by the ten thousand; and these eight of the Chosen People were shut up in its midst, waiting till time or chance sent them their full congregation.Miriam the wife of Ephraim, two little children, an orphan boy of their people, Ephraim’s uncle Jackrael Israel, a white-haired old man, his wife Hester, a Jew from Cutch, one Hyem Benjamin, and Ephraim, Priest and Butcher, made up the list of the Jews in Shushan.
A holocaust is a religious animal sacrifice that is completely consumed by fire, also known as a burnt offering. The word derives from the ancient Greek holokaustos, the form of sacrifice in which the victim was reduced to ash, as distinguished from an animal sacrifice that resulted in a communal meal.
But 'burnt offerings' went straight up to God. This is why the Aryans sacrificed their beloved cows.
Borges knew all that. What he didn't know, what he couldn't know, was that Stupidity would halve the global population of Jews of Ashkenazi, but not Karaite, heritage. But that Stupidity soon got Stomped.
Borges, 35 at the time, responded in a brave and witty little essay he titled “I, a Jew.”
He didn't make the obvious move which was to accuse the Argentine Fascists of being Italian scum who couldn't pronounce Spanish properly. This was smart. He'd have received a knife in the guts.
I suppose, it was around this time that Borges wrote 'Approach to Al-Mutasim'. Perhaps, his research into the past to find an ancestor who would unite him with the Jews gave Borges the idea of a search in space- in Kipling's India which is 'vaster than the world'- for a sequence of individuals of increasing spiritual perfection who, as in the Vimalakirti, have influenced those lower down. (I may mention, the Swastika and Aryanism was associated with the Buddha. Emerson asks 'Was it Boscovich (a Jesuit who had access to Jesuit translations of Chinese Buddhist texts) who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists).
In Borges's story, at the limit of an ascending series or enlightened beings is 'Al-Mutasim'. But, the relevant hadith- which also motivates Attar's notion of a 'Simurgh' or great bird which turns out to be constituted by the very birds who remained steadfast in their quest for it- is that once there is 'perfect agreement' amongst believers, then God will be seen clearly as we see the full moon in the cloudless night sky. Borges had met Tagore and was aware of Mahatma Gandhi's claim that India should not seek independence till Hindus and Muslims had come to just such a 'perfect agreement'. Only then would the Kiplingesque 'British Umpire' become otiose. Borges would certainly have recognized the line Kipling puts into the mouth of District Commissioner Petit (this could be a Parsi name) 'it is expedient that one man die for the sake of the people'. These are the words of Caiaphas.
'Who has not, at one point or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the prehistory of his flesh and blood?
Only people with family money. The rest of us know our ancestors were indistinguishable from the vast mass of people toiling in the countryside. Borges, the Yeatsian Hindu, could play around with the notion that he had been Homer, he had been Shakespeare, but he had also been a Hindu in a previous life for whom no literature is as sublime as the cow's moo- which is but Om spelt backwards.
I have done so many times, and many times it has not displeased me, to think of myself as Jewish.
Sephardic Jewish. Back then, the Ashkenazis were considered an inferior tribe.
It is an idle hypothesis, a frugal and sedentary adventure that harms no one, not even the name of Israel, as my Judaism is wordless, like the songs of Mendelssohn.
who was baptized at the age of 7.
The magazine Crisol [“Crucible”], in its issue of January 30, has decided to gratify this retrospective hope; it speaks of my “Jewish ancestry, maliciously hidden” (the participle and the adverb amaze and delight me).
Chesterton had complained that Jews in London were not wearing kaftans. They suggested that G.K might be more comfortable in a mumu. That boy was as fat as fuck.
Unfortunately, he goes on to say, it turns out that the ancestor most likely to have been Jewish, Don Pedro de Azevedo, whose surname suggests “Judeo-Portuguese stock,” was “irreparably Spanish.”
But Azevedo is a Portuguese name. Still, that ancestor was Catalan. Perhaps his ancestors migrated when Portugal was under Spanish rule.
Nonetheless, Borges wrote, “I am grateful for the stimulus provided by Crisol, though hope is dimming that I will ever be able to discover my link to the Table of the Breads and the Sea of Bronze; to Heine, Gleizer,
Borges's publisher
and the ten Sephiroth; to Ecclesiastes and Chaplin.” A few years later, during World War II, when Borges offended both the local Germanophiles and Argentina’s dictator Juan Domingo Perón by siding with the Allies against Hitler, he was subjected to a campaign of intimidation that culminated in his demotion from librarian to inspector of poultry and rabbits in a municipal market.
A Hindu would have been delighted. A market inspector can rake in lots of bribe money. Fuck can a librarian do?
But the idiosyncrasy of Borges’ short, seemingly extemporaneous list of Jewish touchstones, shows that his philo-semitism—if that is a strong enough word—was not merely, or even primarily, a matter of anti-fascist politics or a romantic embrace of the cultural outsider.
Indeed. I think it also suggests an interest in Freemasonry which had contributed to the Argentine war of independence. That, together with Borges's metaphysical interests, linked him to 'Krausism'- Krause had tried to teach his pal Schopenhauer a bit of Sanskrit- which was associated with the great Liberal politician, Hipolito Yrigoyen whom Borges had supported.
He associated Judaism not only with his friend Manuel Gleizer (an avant-garde publisher and bookseller) Heinrich Heine, and Charlie Chaplin (who was, in fact, no more Jewish than Borges), but with biblical wisdom, the mysteries of the Temple, and the doctrines of Kabbalah, by which Borges remained fascinated all of his life. Nor is this all.
It is natural to associate Judaism with 'biblical wisdom'. Similarly Islam is associated with the Quran. We must remember the author teaches at Amherst. His students may not be aware of such things.
One of Borges’ early literary mentors was Alberto Gerchunoff, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who, inspired by Don Quixote, switched from Yiddish to Spanish and wrote The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas,
upon which I based my stage character- Gaucho Marx. My mistake was to perform in the nude.
a series of vignettes about Argentinian Jewish cowboys that owed something to Sholem Aleichem.
rather than Mae West. Shame.
By the time Borges met Gerchunoff he had been obsessively reading books by and about Jews
the Bible?
since childhood. He first discovered Kabbalah in an appendix to Longfellow’s translation of the Divine Comedy, which discusses the mystical values of the Hebrew alphabet.
I think Borges, who was bilingual, would have been struck by Longfellow's translation of the great medieval poet Jorge Manrique. Were there 'mystical values' or other occult attributes which rendered a language untranslatable? If so, is Christianity- in its essence- discontinuous with Judaism? One reason to think so, St. Augustine's, is that the Septuagint (translation of the Bible into Greek) was Divinely inspired, in which case, Hebrew had, so to speak, been superseded.
As an aspiring young writer, Borges read Spinoza, Gustav Meyrink’s fantasy Der Golem, Buber’s Hasidic tales, a translation of the Zohar, and almost anything else of Jewish interest he could get his hands on. (He discovered Isaac Babel before Trilling and was scandalized by Toynbee’s pseudo-historical discussion of Judaism.)
Indeed. This was a period when the philistine Anglo-Saxons suspected that the Jews were at the forefront of everything but that everything was no longer humanly comprehensible. In 1929, Punch magazine published the following-
What with Gertrude, Ep and Ein,When I hear the name of Stein,
I go creepy down the spine.
Ein has caught the ether bending,
Gert has sentences unending,
Ep is really most art-rending.
Ein’s made straight lines parabolic,
Eppie’s “Night” is alcoholic,
Gertie’s grammar has the colic.
Perhaps most significantly, the stories of Kafka were among his deepest literary influences. He wrote a perceptive essay on Kafka’s precursors and even translated “Before the Law,” the famous parable from The Trial.
Did Borges know the passage in the Kuzari which, I believe, inspired Kafka's parable of the Messengers? It seems Kafka had learned good enough Hebrew to read Halevy in the original by the time he died. Perhaps, Borges being on what Prebisch called 'the periphery' identified with those European Jews who, though at the center of things, were yet in exile. The Great Depression had caused Yrigoyen's downfall and arrest. Krausist Universalism was as dead as the dodo while Europe was preparing to tear itself apart yet again.
Borges’ life-long passion for lo Judío, Jewish themes, has been noted, but it has yet to be fully reckoned with in the ever-expanding world of Borges commentary.
Thankfully, this is one field where Hindus know themselves too stupid and ignorant to contribute. Still, we may gas on about Tagore and Ocampo and hint that Borges should have grown a beard and taken up Pranayama.
It is almost invisible, for instance, in Borges: A Life, the standard English biography by Oxford scholar Edwin Williamson.
which David Forster Wallace excoriated.
A few years ago, Penguin, Borges’ American publisher, released five small thematic collections of his writings.
I suppose his widow has no objection to getting richer.
One was about the art of writing, another gathered many of Borges’ sonnets, a third comprised poems about darkness and blindness. (Borges became progressively blind until, in his later years, he was only able to see vaguely two or three colors and no silhouettes.) A fourth was on mysticism, and the fifth was On Argentina. This was, to some extent, a publisher’s gimmick. Borges’ genius is, perhaps, better served by eclectic juxtaposition than thematic unity. Nonetheless, it might have been interesting had the publisher decided to collect Borges’ Jewish writing, which would have included some of his very best stories, written in his literary prime.
Why not his 'Indian' writing? I suppose one could say the cretin, VS Naipaul, had been beforehand in shitting on Borges. There is nothing wrong with 'unanimous night'. Night is the absence of a particular star- the Sun. Unanimous night is one from which every celestial body has absented itself. I suppose Borges forgot this was the case. The other curious thing about Naipaul, who was a Hindu from a rural Trinidad where the Ramlila was faithfully celebrated over many nights, is that he fails to see 'the man on the threshold' is characteristically Hindu- it is a play within a play, a story within a story (the Arabian nights were inspired by Indian literature)- even though it features only Muslims and Sikhs and Jains and 'dark-skinned Jews'. The underlying notion here is of the Divine 'lila' or play of an Occasionalist God. Even the Incarnation of the Godhead can be a victim of this 'maya' or mummery. But this is because 'maya' is the madness of believing 'we are as Gods' and can judge accordingly.
'Man on the threshold' was published after India had become independent. Borges knew that the Brits had departed peacefully. It was the Indians who slaughtered each other. The British had been irrelevant. To judge otherwise would be madness. Yet only the mad would judge. Why? The notion that there is a Past is bogus. There is merely a story told to arrest you on a threshold which it would be folly to cross. In the end, it was Naipaul, not Borges, who retreated into a hermetic world unconnected to the past or future. Still, if he were alive, perhaps he would recognize the wisdom in what Modi's mother told him at their last meeting- 'kam karo buddhi se/ jeevan jiyo shuddhi se'- do your work in an intelligent manner. Live your life in a pure and pious manner. It is not the case that intelligence can untangle some plan or purpose to all there is. Eusebia- which is the word the Indo-Greeks used to translate 'dharma'- is 'pietas', that is piety. It is content to be humble and restricted in scope. Borges's, life, seen from that perspective, was just such as his own elderly mother might have wished. He had filial piety- so did Naipaul, though only towards his father and not his mother. In a sense, Borges was more Indian than Naipaul- though Naipaul did marry a Pakistani who kept him safe from being claimed by the rabid Islamophobes- and with 'man on the threshold' and 'Al-Mutasim', Borges made his own modest contribution to Indian ecumenical religion. I suppose, to round things off, I need to mention the defective 'Blue Tigers' where Islamic monism is the antidote to Hindu polytheism. However, the disks which mysteriously multiply themselves or wink in and out of existence are merely the incarnation of the Banach Tarski paradox which arises out of the Axiom of Choice or its constructive equivalent in Martin Lof. It really isn't a scandal. It is merely useful. I suppose Borges needed to close out his Indian ledger. In the Thirties he had been too Gandhian or Tagorean. He had to accept that there had been a partition. Perhaps Lahore would always be at war with the henotheism of the Gangetic plain. As for Mathematical logic, it would soon exceed his own games with infinity- provided it was useful to do so. He himself had tried to do his job as smartly as possible and had tried to lead a pure life. Thus, he has continued to remain useful to my atrocious generation.
Such a volume might begin with “The Aleph.”
This might be the second entry in 'the Hindu Borges'. Tagore's hereditary cult believed there was a 'Saakshi' or Universal witness. The gift of 'divine eyes'- as happens to Arjuna in the Gita- enables a person to see everything, everywhere, simultaneously. Kipling's Kim briefly attains this 'darshan' as Borges acknowledged. Apparently, he initially believed Kipling was 'half caste'.
The story is indebted to Dante, but, as I have noted, Borges connected kabbalistic letter-mysticism with the Divine Comedy.
He is likely to have connected it to the Holy Quran.
The plot, which is partly autobiographical, follows the narrator’s love affair with a woman named Beatriz. But it is also inspired by H.G. Wells’ story “The Crystal Egg,” in which the item of the title turns out to provide a window onto Mars. In Borges’ more metaphysical vision, the Aleph is “one of the points in space that contain all points,” turns out to be in a cellar, and it enables whoever possesses it to see the world from a God’s-eye point of view. It is, says the excited poet who discovered it, “the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the world, seen from every angle, coexists.”
It is a false Aleph. Borges was as much a pragmatist as Frank Ramsey would have been- if he had lived. Ramsey theory says that because of 'partition regularity' it is likely that infinite randomness will contain some very highly, perhaps infinitely, structured items. The same point is made by the Library in Babylon of which any actual library is but a sample. I believe the Razbarov Rudich result re. 'natural proofs' came out at about the time Borges died. This altered our reception of him. It is mathematics which creates its own precursors. Why? Math is useful. God is a pragmatist.
Why did Borges choose that letter?
In the Kabbalah, it is the primordial contraction. However, what this gives rise to in Islam is 'barzakh' or what the Hindus call 'antarabhava' and the Tibetans term 'bardo'. It seems 'a' only exists so 'b' can point to it as a 'limit' which unites what it otherwise divides.
He never gave a definitive answer, but in his writing, Hebrew plays an important role. It is used in different places to announce, perhaps playfully, that God communicates with humans in that language, and not in Latin or any other. It is the ur-language, the natural language of the universe.
For Marquez, it was Sanskrit. King James the First thought that kids brought up in isolation would speak Hebrew.
“Emma Zunz,” which was first collected alongside “The Aleph,” is a memorable story of revenge set entirely among Jews. Although the story is perhaps the least bookish that Borges ever conceived (the plot was given to him by a female friend), the protagonist’s last name might be a literary allusion—a tribute by Argentina’s great librarian-writer to the 19th-century scholar, and preeminent bibliographer, Leopold Zunz, who helped found the 19th-century movement for the academic study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums). When Emma avenges the death of her father, at great cost to herself, the narrative ends with a characteristic Borgesian flourish: “The story was unbelievable, yes—and yet it convinced everyone, because in substance it was true . . . all that was false were the circumstances, the time, and or two proper names.”
The Jews are not killers. Emma Zunz has turned herself into a macho Argentine thug- or, at least, she has approached that ideal as far as her sex would permit. I suppose, the 'woke' would accuse Netanyahu of being an Emma Zunz.
I may mention Tagore too wrote of crazy killers who claimed India had been raped. But they had dicks and weren't saying it was their own anal cherries which had been lost to White pricks. Sad.
Emma Zunz may or may not have been based on a real person. But she is almost unique among Borges’ creations in not being interested in literature.
She read the papers. There was some literature there. Indeed, Borges had supplied some himself to a rival to 'La Presna'. Does Zunz belong in the 'universal history of infamy'? This is like the question Hardy poses- is Tess virtuous?
Jaromir Hladik, the protagonist of “The Secret Miracle” is more typical. Hladik is a Czech writer in Prague, whom the Nazis imprison in 1939 for the crime of being a Jew. He is a writer of a metaphysical bent, who has written on “Boehme, Ibn Ezra, and Fludd,” and translated the mysterious kabbalistic text Sefer Yetzirah, which purports to show how the world was created from permutations of the Hebrew alphabet. Hladik, Borges writes, “like every other writer, measured other men’s virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he someday planned to do.” None of his works strike him as enduring—with the exception of an unfinished play, The Enemies. In desperation, Hladik asks God for a miracle.
It is one familiar to the Yogis though no miracle at all to the Buddhists. There is only ever the single moment. Temporal succession is an illusion. Thanks to various Steins- not just Ein- the Judaeo-Christian world had been overtaken. As Oppenheimer would say, a dark-skinned Hindu God had become Death, destroyer of Worlds.
“If,” he prayed, “I do somehow exist, if I am not one of Thy repetitions or errata,
Borges believed, with Ibn Arabi, that there can be no repetition in theophany. But this is only true of the true Godhead. What we may be stuck with is a demented Demiurge and Nietzschean eternal recurrence.
then I exist as the author of The Enemies. In order to complete that play, which can justify me, and justify Thee as well, I need one more year. Grant me the days, Thou who art the centuries and time itself.”
It was the Prophet who insisted that it was 'wrong to vilify the Aeon'. Islam left a strong impress on Sephardic thought.
Borges’ story is remarkable in that the miracle does take place, though secretly: “the German bullet would kill him at the determined hour, in Hladik’s mind a year would pass between the order to fire and the discharge of the rifles.” The external clock stops ticking but internally he has an entire year to finish writing the play.
This is cinematic. Perhaps, Borges could have earned money from the movie rights.
The plot, which turns on notions of time, infinity, and a kind of message (the bullet that destroys European Jewry in something like slow motion) is a tribute to Kafka.
Though nobody does not know that alongside Hladik's poem, the review which would tear it to shreds, was also being composed.
In fact, Hladik’s residence on Zeltregasse is a direct homage, since it’s where Kafka himself lived. The mysteries of the divine, a theme in Kafka’s oeuvre, are also Borges’ concern here.
An Amherst professor may have to say things like that. The Bible has importance for religious people. Religion is about what happens after you die. Trigger warning- Kafka had a penis. He was white. White penises are very very evil. Ban them immediately.
Another story that would have to be in any collection of Borges’ Jewish stories is “Death and the Compass.” It is a mystery that begins with a murder at the “Third Talmudic Congress ” and whose solution lies in the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God. Spinoza also makes an appearance. The protagonist is detective Erik Lönnrot, a Gentile with a Borgesian interest in Jewish texts.
The goy thinks he is smart. His enemy knows his Achilles heel.
His task is to solve a series of deaths committed in a mysteriously geometrical order: at the points of an equilateral triangle (North, East, and West) and numerically on the same day of consecutive months (December 3, January 3, February 3).
His enemy deceives him by sending him a cryptic message. The Jewish day begins at nightfall.
The first victim is Dr. Marcelo Yarmolinsky, a scholar at the conference whose interests would seem to overlap with those of the condemned Prague writer Jaromir Hladik. He is the author of “A Vindication of the Kabbalah; A Study of the Philosophy of Robert Fludd; a literal translation of the Sefer Yetzirah; . . . A History the Hasidim; a monograph in German on the Tetragrammaton.”
That was a case of a burglary gone wrong. The detective is mislead by his own fascination with esoteric mysteries and thus becomes not the unraveller but the victim of a mystery which was actually just a coincidence. Umberto Eco turned this conceit into a very long book- Foucault's Pendulum -and perhaps some other shite he published later which I didn't bother to read. Being a Hindu means never having to apologize for being lazy or stupid. Moo is Om spelt backwards. Mind it.
In a typewriter in the hotel room where his body is found is a note: “The first letter of the Name has been written.” Likewise, a note is found near the body of the next victim, another Jew named Daniel Simon Azevado:
a variant of the name of Borges's own Catalan ancestor. This suggests that Jewishness does not matter. Borges has an anti-Semitic newspaper complain of the miserliness of this putative pogrom.
“The second letter of the Name has been written.”
Is it significant that this Jewish victim has virtually the same surname as that of Borges’ possibly-putative-would-be-Jewish forebears?
Yes. Borges's point is that Jews qua Jews, for any political purpose, don't fucking exist. Neither do the Druze though they might play a trick on a credulous Argentine journalist of limited intellect.
No doubt, as it showcases his empathy with Jews, and his desire to see himself as part of the persecuted. The story was collected in Ficciones in 1944, at the height of the Nazi annihilation of European Jews.
Even that pogrom was miserly. Why bother with cattle-trucks and gas chambers? Let the peasants simply smash in the skulls of smart people using only such crude agricultural implements as are ready to hand. Gandhian India showed the Germans how to do ethnic cleansing. Don't get guys in uniform involved. Leave everything to local yokels.
The pattern continues with an apparent third victim. Realizing that only the fourth letter of the divine name is missing, Lönnrot deduces where a fourth and last murder is likely to take place. He goes there only to find out he himself is the fourth and final victim.
He truly is as stupid as shit. He should have taken along a posse of armed plain-clothes detectives. Still, the fellow is probably a Swede or a turnip of some type.
Borges’ is a famously cerebral writer and there is certainly something cold in “Death and the Compass,” including the literary games he plays with Jewish motifs and characters.
In Hitler's Germany the cold calculation was made that if there are extermination camps, then some Nazis could pretend to be serving the Master Race without endangering their own lives by fighting the Red Army. Nothing about the Jews mattered save the fact that you could make a bit of money and stay safe by pretending they were preparing a 'stab in the back' or some such nonsense.
But this is true of all of his work. His Jewish characters are a bit bloodless,
because he wasn't James Joyce prosing on about Leopold fucking Bloom. But, in 'Zunz' there is a 'mystery of the heart'. Elsewhere there is the notion that Cain is actually Abel, or perhaps it was the other way round. To God's eye there is a Leibnizian identity of indiscernibles. But this was also De Maistre's theory of sacrifice. Everything is Statistical but Statistics are merely a type of damned lie.
not so much because of his failure to get beyond stereotypes,
To be fair, his Jews aren't constantly doing Jewish things related to matzoh balls or latkes. To my mind this is a great deficiency. At the very least, they should sing Hava Nagila and waltz around the place.
but because he was a writer of metaphysical fiction
so was Bertrand Russell
and philosophical and theological poems.
like TS Eliot. Being from the periphery, he did not want to grant his characters too much autonomy. The more they spoke for themselves- as they do, interminably, in 'Six Problems'- the more unreadable the text becomes. But, for me that is the big take-away from Borges. We are like the most boring and bombastic of the characters in the book he co-wrote with Bioy Casares. Thankfully, Borges grown rich and famous, was too well bred to point this out. My generation waged a 'dirty war' on the Environment and Equity and Fraternity. Do not name us and shame us. Let oblivion overtake us so there can be no repetition of our stupidity.
Borges visited Israel twice near the end of his life in 1969
after the Six Day War even Franco started boasting of his Jewish heritage. Strangely, he did this boasting to a Pakistani Ambassador who wasn't greatly thrilled.
and 1971,
He was Seventy two. He still had more than a dozen years of life.
the second time to collect the Jerusalem Prize. On both of his visits, he made sure to meet the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, a real-life counterpart of Borgesian Jewish scholar-heroes like Hladik and Yarmolinsky. (Scholem had already appeared, in rhyming tribute, in Borges’ gorgeous poem “El Golem” in 1958.)
I think Borges took the notion of 'ibbur' from Scholem. I may be wrong. I recall being struck by the story of a Hungarian Rabbi who wished to be re-born as a cow so as to give milk in the morning to the Yeshiva students. Like I said, us Hindus think 'moo' is better than all literature. Even Om is just moo spelt backward.
While in Israel, he wrote three poems. They are not his best work,
such 'bread and butter' effusions seldom are
but they do impart a vivid sense of his loyalty—it is not too strong a word—to the people of Israel and some of his characteristic Jewish themes.
Then the silly man spoiled it all by quoting Henry IV's speech from Shakespeare. He didn't get that Christians have persecuted Jews the most. The Crusades were a disaster for them.
In “Israel,” he apostrophizes:
a man who in spite of humankind
is Spinoza and the Baal Shem and the kabbalists,
Did Isaac Luria forbid the practice of Kabbalah? Was Spinoza deservedly persecuted by the Orthodox? Borges was aware of these controversies. But, being a good Pragmatist, he rightly considered both Spinoza and the Baal Shem Tov as 'justified'.
a man that is a Book,
a mouth praising heaven’s justice
from the abyss,
an attorney or a dentist
who talked with God in a mountain,
a man condemned to ridicule and abomination, a Jew,
an ancient man, burnt and drowned in lethal chambers,
an obstinate man who is immortal
and now has returned to battle,
to the violent light of victory,
beautiful like a lion at noon.
This is dreadful. What is beautiful about lions at noon, is that they are asleep. They are terribly lazy creatures. That's why the Human Race was not exterminated in its East African cradle.
A few years earlier, Borges had spoken, perhaps more subtly, on the Israeli Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon
whom Sholem called 'the Jew's Jew'.
at the Instituto Cultural Argentino-Israelí in Buenos Aires. Near the beginning of that talk, he posed a “simple yet complex question”:
Which Agnon's life had answered. He had moved from Israel to Germany only to return in time for the Palestinians to burn down his library.
What is a nation?
The Jews are a Nation. The Goyim belong to many nations. The word Goy means 'Nation'.
My first reaction is to offer a geographical answer, but it would be insufficient.
Borders wax and wane. Nations may be expelled from their original homelands. There have been great folk-wanderings but also episodes of return and an in-gathering of Diasporas.
Instead, let us envision a nation as the series of memories stored at the heart of a people . .
like the Guarani?
. To me there isn’t a clearer example of a nation than Israel, whose origins are almost confused with the world entire . . . Memory is often approached … as [either] a barren collection of dates [or] a catalog of curiosities. But there’s another approach, neither endorsed by historians, nor by students of folklore: memory as experience incarnated in a people. This, precisely, is what I find in Agnon.
Agnon had merely an Ashkenazi memory of the shtetl. But Israel was equally home to the Sephardic and the Mizrahi. It has manufactured plenty of its own history. Perhaps too much so. Places which export that commodity tend to come to a sticky end.
Borges envied Agnon, Scholem, Spinoza, Kafka, and Gerchunoff for having what he didn’t: an insider’s understanding of Judaism.
Agnon, yes. Kafka had to effortfully study Hebrew. Gerchunoff, bizarrely, is said to have collaborated with Reich to create an 'orgone box' to preserve Judaism's collective memory. Buenos Aires's denizens were stranger than any character in Borges.
Maybe it wasn’t envy per se but sheer adulation. In any case, a sentence of his essay “I, the Jew” resonates loudly: “I have done so many times, and many times it has not displeased me, to think of myself as Jewish.”
I think of myself as Jewish when I eat bacon. It somehow improves the taste. When I drink wine, however, I am a pious Muslim. Incidentally, I have to ask, why is Jewish wine so terrible?
He spent his whole life wishing, or at least imagining through his fiction, that he was Jewish, or was privy to the gnostic wisdom of the Kabbalah, although, in the end, he understood quite well that he lacked that “experience incarnated in a people.”
but, by 'ibbur', it was available to him. If an ancient Persian poet could take possession of a Victorian hack like Fitzgerald, why should not Borges be taken possession of by Isaac Luria the lion? Why stop there? Are we not all, like the two sons of Aaron, fulminated by the Lord only to, by ibbur, enter into the soul of the man who killed Schlemiel? No. We are Schlemiel- if not the Schlimazel upon whom even Schlemiel spills soup.
As for the Hindu Borges, the question of nationality does not arise because 'India is larger than the world'. I leave it to some Israeli Indologist- or just some stoner in Kulu who is celebrating the end of his military service- to explain what this means. Does it have something to do with Modi as 'Vishvaguru'? No. Don't be silly. Obviously, the reference is to Rahul's next Yatra which will commence in Kamchatka before achieving the escape velocity of Jupiter. Mind it kindly.
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