The problem with the common use of "The Mortara Case" is that people want to have it every which way except any honest way. They want Egardo Mortara to be a Jew when he's a child too young to have his own thoughts but when he's an adult with no signs of mental illness and clear signs of intellectual acuity, he's a brain-washed Jew who can't be trusted to speak for himself about the one thing that he is the supreme authority of, his own life. His own evaluation of his own life is to count as nothing as compared to people like a dishonest professional scribbler on the make and a playwright who wants to write a polemical play using the novel said scribbler wrote to do it.
I'm prepared to see if Kushner has done an honest job of it but I think the facts of the case make a dramatic or a fictional piece about it the worst possible ways to deal with it. It doesn't work as either. For the Atlantic to ask the novelist to review the published translation of the memoir was grotesque for the reasons I stated. A novel would make more dishonest use of the people involved than the transgressions of the translator are alleged to have. I have become ever more an opponent of using real history and real people as the stuff of novels and plays and scripts. Real history has a hard enough time being honest about them. I like Kushner's work the best when it can't, possibly be mistaken as history, he has proven you can use real people honestly when you make it unrealistic but it's when it's presented as ersatz reality that it quickly goes bad.
My own take on it doesn't work neatly as narration or as a satisfying dramatic arch. What Pius IX and his henchmen did was wrong - certainly a wrong that doesn't compare to what is honestly called "antisemitism" because the boy was well treated and given a first rate education and was taken in as a valued member of the then current structure of the Catholic church. I of course think his parents were wronged, having their child taken from them with no good reason and for a very bad reason. I hold all of those within my thinking about the case while, at the same time, holding that the person most in question, Egardo Mortara, when he left his thoughts on it, doesn't hold he was wronged. He doesn't even seem to think his parents were wronged, though that's a good example of how even he doesn't get to speak for them in disagreement over himself. Parents and children often have opposing views of their shared experiences.
It's too complicated to work as fiction, admitted or not admitted. If that fiction is presented as history, it's a lie. Mixing in polemical use of it makes it a huge lie.
As I pointed out if, in early life, he fell under the influence of atheists who alienated him from the religion of his parents, you'd hold his brain-washers up as heroes of free thought - though if he were converted to materialism, he almost certainly could not believe that free thought was possible and that everything that had happened to him, everything his abductors and "brain-washers" had done would have not been their free choice but would have been merely the results of their position on a line of material causation. In which case assigning them guilt is irrational.
What's funny is that there have been no greater enemies of the Jewish religious tradition than atheists, many of the most vicious attacks on Judaism have come from "secular Jews" who get on the atheism hobby horse. The Mortara Case has been something such atheists have used to the max against their other great enemy, Catholicism. And in that, they make the same kind of use of the real people involved. What their beef is with someone alienating a Jewish kid from their religion has nothing to do with the beliefs of his parents and everything to do with the fact that the one who did it was probably the most mentally unstable Pope of the modern era, the symbol of a religion they hate even more than Judaism. As I've pointed out the irony of that is that the majority of people in the world, today, who take the Jewish religious tradition the most seriously are, by an enormous percent, Christians, Catholics being the largest subset of that set. In the post-Vatican II era, I think the Jewish tradition has been taken more seriously than it would have been since the period in which at least two of the earliest Popes would almost certainly have considered themselves Jews, St. Peter and St. Evaristus who died around 107. I'd be curious to know who the earliest Pope to call himself a "Christian" was, which was the first to call himself a "Catholic". I would imagine that most of the earliest ones held that in Christ there was no gentile or Jew, as Paul taught.
It's a different world after Vatican II, after the post-war examination of conscience that happened in many Christian churches, though not one that reactionaries on any side are happy with. They all want to go backwards.
I remember at your ol' stuping grounds, Eschaton, during one session of the resident atheists partaking of the 00's atheist fashion of slamming circumcision - clearly a thinly veiled attack on Jewish religion - I as a gay man pointed out that there were health benefits to the practice, citing the WHO papers that said it helped protect people against the spread of HIV and other STDs. I also mentioned that as the practice was an intrinsic part of the Jewish religion, banning the practice could very well be seen as a ban on the Jewish religion. I believe I may have mentioned Islam in that regard, as well, though I understand that it's just a widespread custom and not a definitive practice for Muslims. I remember having to tell one of the atheist-gals there who went on what a terrible, horrible thing it was - how she was supposed to know, I don't think I did more but wonder - that I'd been circumcised and it never impinged on my enjoyment of life. Never discussed with my mother why she'd have made that choice, we didn't discuss such stuff in my family. We are Irish. And it would have been her decision, she being the health professional in the family. I doubt she'd have had the discussion with my father, he would never have wanted to talk about it. He was half-English.
Naw, atheism is inherently dishonest and irrational. That's what comes of things inhereing to people by human choice instead of God's. I'd never have thought so before the "new-atheism" was a fad starting almost two decades ago. which forced me to really look into its claims and practices and intellectual product closely. I started the new millenium figuring it was just an aggressive form of agnosticism that we on the left had to accommodate. But it's really a lot worse than that and as I end this second decade of it, I think it's something the left has got to dump or it will never, ever succeed. It, as an almost uniformly materialist, scientistic ideology, is inherently in opposition to the traditional, American egalitarian-democratic, economic-justice left and it always will be. We dump it or it drags us ever downward.
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