Shylock, Uncle David and Me

The topic is an exposition of my diffuse yet distinct identity as a non-practicing Jew, as the son of non-practicing Jews, and as the great-nephew of the once-famous Rabbi David Philipson, one of the first Reform rabbis to be educated and ordained in America. Where does Shylock fit in? You know who he is; everyone knows who he is. If he figures in your mental landscape, whether you’re familiar with the Shakespeare play or not, imagine how he looms for the Jew?

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Transcript

Shylock, Uncle David, and Me

Due to the vagaries of pagination and the fact that my great uncle David was on the American Board of Consulting Editors, the tenth volume of The Jewish Encyclopedia is emblazoned with our family name: Philipson—Samoscz. The date of that volume is 1905, and by then my great uncle David was a famous man in the circles of Reform Judaism. Among the first graduating class of four from the newly-established Hebrew Union College, the original “rabbinical seminary” for the training of Reform rabbis in America, Uncle David had become a scholar and historian of American Judaism. Originating in Germany and finding its most radical expression in America, Reform Judaism was, to describe it unkindly, the closest way to live like a Protestant and still claim oneself a practicing Jew. My family never had much to do with it in spite of my great-uncle’s fame. I was shocked to learn in a conversation with my father that nobody in his family had celebrated a bar mitzvah. I knew I hadn’t but had simply assumed this to be a result of my father’s indifference and my mother’s active antipathy toward organized religion. Then I found out it was a family tradition.

* * *

My ninth-grade English teacher was a young man of Armenian descent named Mr. Gertmenian. Of round features and exceptionally thick black hair, Mr. Gertmenian granted me the enormous service of recognizing my few gifts in a period of agonized, self-sabotaging adolescence. No time of my life was bleaker than the years between thirteen and sixteen. I felt like a loser, and most other kids were only too eager to demonstrate that my feelings of inadequacy were, in fact, fully justified. Mr. Gertmenian recognized the ham actor in me and chose me to perform Shylock in our class reading of The Merchant of Venice. My mother had oriented our house toward books—she loved to read herself—and reading aloud was one thing I could do very well. But I also believed, knew, that I had been chosen for the part because I was Jewish. Having been born Jewish, I simply assumed everybody else regarded me as such. After all, my father wore thick glasses (bad eyesight we all inherited); my mother lamented her Jewish looks; as a family we were loud, boisterously humorous, food-oriented; I had learned at my mother’s knee the catalog of goyische shortcomings exemplified by our suburban neighbors. That was the extent of our Jewishness. We celebrated the same secularized versions of Christmas and Easter as our neighbors. My parents had no trouble feeling American that I knew about, even if they were liberals in Pasadena. I hadn’t grown up with any Jewish solidarity and wasn’t even aware of much antisemitism that was personally directed. Other kids disliked me on the strength of my character alone. (In the fifth grade an I-Hate-Bobby-Philipson club was started with the sole purpose of refusing me membership.) Yet I thrilled at the opportunity to act the part of Shylock and read with the zest of a Henry Irving quarrying out of an antisemitic text the tragic hero more sinned against than sinning.

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Shylock’s righteous anger redounded to me, justified somehow my own sense of being disliked, friendless, outcasted. I was a Jew; it was my mission to suffer, “For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe.”

* * *

“Go to any synagogue in this country and mention that you’re related to Rabbi Phliipson,” my mother said proudly, “and you’ll be welcomed as a VIP.” Why should we have had any reason to go to a synagogue? We never celebrated any Jewish rituals or holidays. But my great-uncle David was famous! And there were his books to prove it: The Reform Movement in Judaism; The Jew in English Fiction; Max Lilienthal, American Rabbi; and My Life as an American Jew. I tried his autobiography once but couldn’t get past the first fifty pages. In its sober, posthumous assessment of Uncle David’s bid for rank of World Historical Importance, the Encyclopedia Judaica pronounced: “Not a profound thinker, Philipson was productive in the literary field.” Alas, based upon the sober chronicle of professional success that I had read before abandoning the narrative, I had to agree. There was nothing about the family outside of this first paragraph:

In March, 1875, a letter from Isaac M. Wise, the leading rabbi in the American Middle West . . . caused great commotion in an humble home in Columbus, Ohio. The recipient of that letter was a mail carrier, Joseph Philipson, who years before had been a Jewish teacher in the town of Sandusky, Ohio. While there he had met the great Cincinnati rabbi. Referring to that meeting, the writer of the letter informed the whilom teacher that the plans were almost completed to open a rabbinical seminary in the coming autumn. . . . Would he not like to enroll [his son] as a student in the new institution? The letter was like a bolt from the blue. The son in question was in his thirteenth year, the oldest of six children. As he was about to finish grammar school and to pass into the local high school, the question was quite acute as to his future. Before that Cincinnati letter was received there was no thought of the boy’s continuing his school career. No Jewish lad in Columbus up to that time had attended the high school. The grammar school was the limit of scholastic training. After that a position in some mercantile house was sought. But now a new thing was happening.

Definitely a new thing. Joseph Philipson, the whilom teacher and latter-day mail carrier, had emigrated from Germany well before the exodus of Eastern European Jews triggered by the vicious pogroms of the 1880s. Whatever the Philipson patriarch had been in the Old Country, his means of support in America could not sustain a life of scholarship for any of his children. David did wind up going to rabbinical school and three of his brothers, including my grandfather, Isidore, were left to grub it out in the mercantile world. They eventually collaborated in a Chicago garment enterprise, Cambridge Clothes. That had a nice Anglo-Saxon ring to it.

David pursued his academic studies not only at Hebrew Union College but at a public high school, where he was valedictorian, and the University of Cincinnati. Upon his graduation from the rabbinical seminary, David Philipson was one of the first four homegrown rabbis ordained in America. This event was fêted by an infamous trefa banquet held at the sumptuous Highland House restaurant. Rabbi Wise had been working toward a union of all non-Orthodox American congregations, encompassing both conservative and liberal religious practice, but, whether through negligence, sabotage, or arrogance, the French-inspired nine-course meal included Little Neck Clams, Soft Shell Crab a l’Amerique, and Salade of Shrimp. According to my great uncle, “Terrific excitement ensued when two rabbis rose from their seats and rushed from the room. . . . This incident furnished the opening to the movement that culminated in the establishment of a rabbinical seminary of a conservative bent.” (It seems oddly appropriate that the great doctrinal controversies between the different branches of Judaism stemmed from food preferences.)

Shortly after his ordination, Rabbi Philipson was called to minister at a prestigious congregation in Baltimore, where he also obtained a doctorate of divinity from Johns Hopkins University. The man was nothing if not learned. While in Baltimore, he met Ella Hollander, daughter of a well-to-do family of the Har Sinai temple. Ella had usually gotten what she wanted as a child and, as the Philipsons snidely put it, her parents bought her a rabbi. (“Sweet, unassuming, and modest, she spread about herself an aura of maidenly charm,” Uncle David wrote.) She didn’t like the in-laws, and the feeling was mutual. Uncle David had risen beyond his class, and his wife made sure that everyone knew their place. “Never has man had a truer mate,” he enthused. She certainly kept the mercantile Philipsons at a distance. The few times Uncle David came to dinner at his father Joseph’s house, the young Joseph, my future father, was admonished not to repeat any of the discourtesies about Aunt Ella that were common family fare. “Ugly as the mud post” was a familiar one.

* * *

Melissa Gardner read the part of Portia in Mr. Gertmenian’s English class, and that was perfectly appropriate because Melissa had been the first shiksa I wanted desperately to like me. She sported milky skin, a perfectly symmetrical face, and long straight brown hair. By ninth grade, however, I had given up on Melissa. Sensing my attraction to her, she had been among the cruelest and most unrelenting of my elementary school tormentors. As a loser, I couldn’t hope for her friendship. We never spoke of it, but Melissa must have enjoyed vanquishing me, yet again, in the person of Portia. Ninth-grade discussion of The Merchant of Venice hardly went beyond plot synopsis, so we could not broach one of the play’s mysteries: the motivation behind Portia’s masquerading as a lawyer. When her maid, Nerissa, asks, “Why, shall we turn to men?,” Portia replies, with the inevitable bawdy pun, that she’ll explain it all in the coach. There are finely tuned articles out there on all the turnings in Merchant that bring out the brilliant interrelationships of power, money, and value in the subplot of the rings, the caskets, the daughter and ducats, the pound of flesh, the rule of law, and women who become men to do what women could not possibly do. And Jews too could have their moments of nobility, lance their barbs of perception. The measure of humanity for Shakespeare was the multifariousness of human nature, and if he gave a man or woman in his imagination more than one dimension, he gave them seven. Was Shylock a clown, a villain, a usurer, a Jew? Certainly, but he was also, as my uncle whilomly wrote, “a heroic, intensely tragic figure, proud, deep at times, rising even to grandeur.” That was indeed the way I interpreted him in my dramatic debut. How could a Jew, even one so distantly islanded as myself from the People of Israel, read Shylock in any other manner? In this, though unbeknownst to me, my uncle and I were one.

* * *

My great uncle David passed away in 1949, the year before I was born. He and Ella had given birth to no children, and Ella had come to her journey’s end nine years before. In his autobiography, which seems devoid of emotion, he ends the narrative with an overwritten Victorian elegy to his companion of half a century—“no words could do justice to her exalted womanhood”—but this sad sentiment pops through unadorned: “The world is very empty for me.” 

The modest wealth that Rabbi Philipson had accumulated during his distinguished lifetime went to the Cincinnati synagogue where he had spent the better part of his life, with the exception of a thousand-dollar bequest to my older brother, David. That was it for the Philipsons. No money to any of the other relatives, just the firstborn of his favorite nephew, Joseph, the only nephew in terms of affectional relations. With Ella gone, Uncle David was again approachable, but it was only my father who made the effort. He asked his uncle to officiate at his Depression-style wedding to Amy Goldstein in the Goldstein apartment. When I asked why they didn’t get married in a synagogue, especially with the blessing of the famous Rabbi Philipson, my father replied, “We couldn’t afford it. Besides,” he continued, “nobody in either family belonged to one.” My father was the only college graduate of his generation, and when he won a fellowship for doctoral studies in chemistry at the University of Southern California, that sealed it for Uncle David. Here was a mensch. He sent the young couple fifty dollars a month, real money in 1943. Joseph was going to be a professional and a credit to the family name. What a relief after the mess David’s own generation had made of it: bad business investments, early bankruptcy (Cambridge Clothes went down the tubes before Black Thursday- a suicide among one of the mercantile brothers, an illegitimate child, estrangement, repudiation, class division. An American family attempting Jacob’s ladder.

* * *

The rabbi at the Pasadena Jewish Temple had been trained at Hebrew Union College. How he found out about us I do not know, but, excited by the prospect of molding the coming generation of Philipsons, he approached my mother and persuaded her to enroll Alice and David in Sunday school. Neither of my parents was interested in joining the temple or attending services, but my mother overcame her ambivalence sufficiently to allow her two oldest children to receive a Jewish education. This experiment in faith lasted only a few months. Alice came home with a note from her elementary school teacher asking why the little girl couldn’t join the class in singing Christmas carols. The rabbi, Alice replied, had said it would be wrong. That was the all the spark my mother’s anticlerical tinder needed. The children were yanked from Sunday school, and there were no further attempts at an institutional connection. The wife of a business colleague of my father who sent her children to Sunday school flipped when she saw the Christmas tree in our playroom. “I’ll tell the women at the temple,” she stormed, “and none of our boys will date your girls.” (“I have a daughter,” Shylock says of his fled and converted offspring. “Would any of the stock of Barrabas / Had been her husband rather than a Christian!”)

Had it been up to my parents, we would have ceased being Jews. “The only reason I’m Jewish is because that’s the way others see me,” my father declared. As a boy he was given twenty cents every weekend—ten cents for carfare, ten for the poor box—and sent to Sunday school. He soon figured out he could save a nickel if he walked home rather than taking the streetcar. He decided to walk to the temple as well but found that he arrived too late for class. Class was where the poor box sat, and so he pocketed the entire twenty cents, spelling the end of his religious education. When his parents discovered his truancy, they stopped sending him off. They themselves never went to services except for the High Holidays. When hard times followed the failure of Cambridge Clothes, their temple membership was the first thing to go. 

But traces of his Jewish childhood, secular as it was, remained. Both my parents had grown up in Hyde Park, an entirely Jewish neighborhood of Chicago at the time. My father’s storytelling imagination teemed with Jewish foods; he extolled Sid Caesar and the Marx Brothers; brought the records of Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May into the house; and would occasionally let loose with this cheer from Hyde Park High:

Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam

We are the boys who don’t eat ham,

We play football, we play soccer—

We keep matzos in our locker!

My mother’s attitude was more complex. She was afflicted with the famous Jewish self-hatred my father seemed devoid of, yet it was mixed with a bitter pride at the constancy and achievement of her people. My mother didn’t consort with gentiles until she went to the University of Chicago, and when she did, she became acutely aware of her Jewishness, her lower-middle-class background, her “Jewish” nose (which, following the assimilationist logic of Reform Judaism, she later had “fixed”). Gentiles were the golden people—beautiful, unthinking, smooth, and featureless in their easy belonging to the American mainstream. She simultaneously despised and envied them. As a Jew, she felt superior yet knew in her inmost soul that they looked down on her. When we lived in France, where antisemitism was embedded in the European psyche and had greater currency, I had occasion to see her conceal our Jewish ancestry.

As a couple, Joe and Amy’s sense of Jewishness reinforced their union in small, intimate ways. My mother’s affectionate name for Joe was Yossel. The Jewish deli foods that they had grown up with—lox, bagels, good smoked meats, gefilte fish—were a special treat, only to be obtained from the west side of Los Angeles. Though we celebrated Christmas like all assimilating Jews, our traditional breakfast after the pandemonium of gift opening was the pride of Canter’s Deli on Fairfax Avenue. I also believe that the Jewish component of my parents’ upbringing inoculated them from the conformist tendencies of the Eisenhower era. They had grown up during the resurgence of the KKK (“Koons Kikes and Katholics”) in the 1920s and the antisemitic fulminations of Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts in the ’30s—not to mention the rise of fascism and its culmination in the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem across the pond. How could they not have carried that with them as they forged the American Dream in Southern California—the swimming pool, the ranch-style house, the automobiles, and the bridge parties? From the outside they looked like their gentile neighbors, but Mother was acutely aware that we were the only Jewish family on our suburban mesa. Given her contempt for the failings of her neighbors—too much alcohol consumption, little intellectual curiosity, conservative ideology—she was glad for the difference. As they were driving to a party in the neighborhood, my mother querulously remarked, “I wonder why we’re invited. They don’t like our liberal politics and I’m sure they don’t like Jews.” “They have to,” my father replied, “or they’ll lose their federal funding.” 

Such was the legacy bequeathed to me. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was enough to mark me, to make me know that I was Jewish, to connect me to Israel, the Holocaust, and two thousand years of suffering.

And the pound of flesh. Ah, the pound of flesh! The barbarity of it! The ignominy of it! The pound of flesh was as much as part of my heritage as usury, clannishness, and the blood of Christian babies at Passover. How could Shylock have insisted upon such a revenge? “The quality of mercy is not strained,” Portia says to him in her famous speech, urging forgiveness. We cannot force mercy; it must come from the heart. Unfortunately, the principal auditor of her brief for compassion is addressed to one who knows the society in which he lives all too well. Where was Christian mercy as they robbed, expelled, and butchered the “Christ killers”? Where was their morality, their virtue, their religious admonition to “love thy neighbor”? How cunningly Shylock defends his right to the purchase of human flesh. It is, after all, business as usual in such a Christian society as Venice.

Duke. How shalt thou hope for mercy, rend’ring none

Shylock. What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?

You have among you many a purchased slave,

Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,

You use in abject and in slavish parts,

Because you bought them. Shall I say to you,

“Let them be free! Marry them to your heirs!

Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds

Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates

Be seasoned with such viands?” You will answer,

“The slaves are ours.” So do I answer you:

The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,

Is dearly bought, is mine, and I will have it.

* * *

In 1885, at the age of twenty-two, David Philipson was secretary of a conference famous in the annals of American Judaism for drawing up the Pittsburgh Platform, eight paragraphs elucidating the guiding principles of the Reform religion. These pronouncements soon fractured the tenuous coalition of the liberal and conservative wings of the non-Orthodox congregations, but at the time they represented a radical and complete triumph of modern thinking within a Jewish worldview. Zionism was explicitly rejected; Jews already belonged to America and had no need of a homeland. Traditional beliefs and practices were jettisoned in favor of moral laws promoting “bliss in righteousness”; shrimp and crab could now be eaten without condemnation. Most important the goal of Judaism was no longer eternally supplicating the love of Jehovah through ritual, prayer, and the unceasing application of the injunctions of the Torah in all times and places. “In full accordance with the spirit of Mosaic legislation which strives to regulate the relations between rich and poor, we deem it our duty to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve on the basis of justice and righteousness the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.”

No more pound of flesh! No more pound of flesh! No more usury, clannishness, weird dietary restrictions, and splitting hairs to decide if taking a daguerreotype ran afoul of the Torah’s injunction against “graven images.” The goal was social justice, tikkun olam.

Thank you, Uncle David! Thank you, Dr. Kohler! Thank you, Rabbi Wise!

* * *

A tether ball stood sentinel in the backyard of our house in Pasadena. When I was nine, playing with one of my neighbors, we used a children’s rhyme to see who would go first

Eenie, meenie, miney, moe

Catch a nigger by the toe

If he hollers, let him go

Eenie, meenie, miney, moe

While my friend was chanting this folk ditty, I lunged for his barefoot toe and shouted, “I got you. You’re the nigger now!” Greg was sandy haired – not a trace of Black ancestry to be seen. I was simply using the term to get his goat.

“I’m not a nigger, you snot-nosed crybaby!” he returned.

“Yes, you are,” I shouted gleefully. “You’re a nigger. Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!”

“Bobby!” My mother was standing in the kitchen doorway. “Come here for a minute.”

I followed her back to her bedroom. I was afraid and on the verge of tears. I knew I’d done something wrong but didn’t know what. My mother sat on the bed. Her serious blue eyes were almost on a level with mine.

“Bobby,” she began. “Do you remember the line from the Dr. Seuss book, Horton Hears a Who!?” It was a book that had been read to us many times in our childhood.

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“A person’s a person no matter how small.”

“That’s right. That word you were shouting out there earlier, do you know what it means?”

“Sure. It means Negro.”

“That’s right.”

“But I know Greg’s not a Negro. I was just saying that.”

“That’s not the point, Bobby. That word you used is in an insult. If any Black person were around, if Doris were around, they’d be hurt by hearing it. You can’t hurt people’s feelings because of who and what they are.”

“I’m sorry, Mommy. But all the kids use it at school.”

“Well, you shouldn’t. We have to be better than our friends and neighbors sometimes because . . .” Here she stopped, and I could see her searching for her words. “If somebody’s poor, if somebody’s Black, if somebody has a funny-shaped nose, that’s not something they can help, and it’s cruel to make fun of them for it. I never want to hear you using that word again. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mommy.”

“And if your friends use it . . .” Once again she felt her way through what she wanted to say. “If your friends use it, you should let them know that you won’t use words like that, even if they want you to.”

“All right, Mommy.”

She took my face in her hands. Her voice was both sad and tender. “Do you understand?”

How could I understand? She wasn’t ready to tell me. Did she hope that I would escape her own past of ambivalence and guilt? She wanted me to embrace the righteousness without taking on the inferiority complex, the stereotypes, the history of persecution. Why did I have to be better, more tolerant, of greater humanity than my peers? Where did this new Decalogue come from? These were questions that, at the age of nine, I could scarcely formulate, much less answer. Some of the answers lay within my family history, but that was uncovered only in response to an adult curiosity. As a child I accepted what was given to me, and what was given to me was coded in looks, silences, shrugs, sarcasms, ironies, and sidebar comments not meant for my ears. What my mother could not bring herself to tell me as a child began to reveal itself only years later as I declaimed to my classmates in a cracking soprano.

He hath disgraced me, and hind’red me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies—and what’s his reason? I am a Jew.