Reading the Dead Sea Scrolls as Cult Ethnography

This fall I have the great joy of auditing James Nati‘s excellent course on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in Qumran in the late 1940s and led to a huge quest to procure the corpus, which dispersed into a variety of hands in the following decades. One of the most successful quests to obtain the archaeological artifacts and bring them back, the scrolls have now been digitized, and we read the primary text and some commentary on it in class. To challenge myself, I try to read it out of the original papyrus, imagining myself touching and smelling the manuscripts.

It’s been particularly intriguing to read this stuff as someone who knows next to nothing about the cults at the time, but knows quite a bit about movements, sects, etc., in the 1960s and 1970s. When I studied Israelite/Jewish history in middle and high school, it was common to lump the Dead Sea folks together and refer to them as the Essenes (a term that comes from Josephus and Philo) and assume that they were a bunch of hippies in white robes who liked to bathe a lot. I’m finding out that newer historians and theologians now believe that the scrolls are not necessarily the work of one isolated sect, but rather of people who might have had considerable ties to the outside; the Community Rule includes some references to behavioral norms when outside of the compound. Also, the Yahad people, to whom the Community Rule refers, and the composers of the Damascus Document might have been two different groups.

Stuff like this makes me wish I could time-travel and see how that scene differed from what I saw when I looked at the cults and new movements of the 1960s with all their eccentricities and splintering. The idea that these folks would have to at least trade with the outside world makes a lot of sense to me, because they lived in the desert and would have had to procure food somehow, at the very least. Also, the idea that their splintering might be about personal ego clashes as much as about theological differences resonates with what I know about the 1960s. The eschatological stuff reminds me a lot of the narratives of various cultish sects even today, who assume that at some point all the wrongdoers will perish while the righteous folks will remain or be taken to the heavens. Do we have, as a species, some sort of cult blueprint that repeats itself in various groups?

A couple of decades ago I came across Isaac Bonewits’ tool for evaluating cults. I wish we had a good enough picture of the Yahad people and/or the Damascus Document people to apply the tool and figure out what was really happening there. The eschatological stuff reminds me a lot of the narratives of various cultish sects even today, who assume that at some point all the wrongdoers will perish while the righteous folks will remain or be taken to the heavens. Moreover, it certainly seems that a big part of the righteousness is about strict norms and regulations (e.g., what to do on the Sabbath, ritual and meal planning, hierarchy, personal and spiritual cleanliness) that far exceed those that presumably were practiced in mainstream society. One has to wonder: do we have, as a species, some sort of cult blueprint that repeats itself in various groups? Is there anything new under the sun?

The Scouring of Samson: Incarceration and Corporal Punishment

One of the major assumptions of modern penologists is that prison, as an artifact of modernity, came to replace other forms of punishment: executions, maiming, etc. Overall, I think there are three main approaches that support this idea:

The legalistic approach

Some punishment scholars—primarily those who study incarceration from a formal, doctrinal perspective—rightly point out that the legal definition of prison differed greatly in antiquity and in modernity. The modern conceptualization of criminal punishment adheres to the Enlightenment-Era logics regarding the rule of law: laws forbidding undesirable behavior must be preemptively enacted, universal in their verbiage, fairly and impartially applied by an independent judicial entity, and prescribe the minimal amount of set punishment that satisfies retributive and/or utilitarian goals. Descriptions of incarceration in antiquity (and, in particular, in the bible) rarely, if ever, conform to this model: determination of guilt is not a necessary precursor to incarceration, and when it occurs, it does not necessarily reflect what modern doctrinalists would regard as a fair, impartial judicial trial. Sentences, if meted at all, are not necessarily determinate in length. The entry and exit points of ancient confinement facilities are not always well defined and, as we will see, often reflect erratic, casuistic decisionmaking by monarchs in the throes of whims and dreams.

If the argument dismissing incarceration in antiquity relies on legalistic comparisons, it is seriously undermined by the fact that the study of incarceration in modernity has long ago transcended such formal categories. For decades, scholars have been studying the function of legal institutions on the ground, unlimited by the rational or articulated goals of said institutions. The entire field of law and society is concerned with the gaps between “law in the books” and “law in action,” often identifying the ways in which the actual operations of institutions deviate from their legal definitions. More specifically, current scholarship about the modern carceral state applies to an entire body of institutions, facilities, and practices, of a dazzling variety of shapes and sizes, and encompassing multiple goals and functions. Adopting a limiting, legalistic project of studying incarceration would miss out on a wealth of scholarship about pretrial detention, immigration detention, bail, electronic monitoring, parole conditions, and postrelease supervision, as well as on illuminating comparisons between correctional facilities and other forms of extractive confinement, such as cattle towns and private sector surveillance.

In other words, save for when stating the obvious—that confinement systems looked different and served different purposes thousands of years ago—clinging to formalism is not particularly instructive when studying the incarceration experience.

The arc-of-enlightenment approach

By contrast to the legalistic approach, some sociological pioneers have examined penal changes over the longue durée, attributing the emergence of incarceration as the most salient form of punishment to large-scale social transformation. In his classic text The Division of Labor in Society, Emile Durkheim analyzes the shift from simple societies, in which collectivity is a function of sameness and conformity, to complex ones, based on diversification and socio-economic exchange. This shift manifests in numerous ways, one of which is the emblematic penal regime. In a later essay, titled The Two Laws of Penal Evolution, Durkheim observed that punishment would change as societies became more complex: laws designed to address transgressions through repression would shift toward restitution, and corporal punishment would shift toward incarceration. Durkheim, then, tied incarceration to social complexity, which he identified with modernity.

Setting aside the many critiques of Durkheim’s identification of “simple” and “complex” societies, which exceed the framework of this book, it is notable that prison symbolized, for him, a progressive step. Other sociologists were even more explicit in identifying prison with progress. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias advances the idea of a gradual reduction in interpersonal violence as a political and cultural shift. Post-medieval times, Elias argues, saw a top-down trickling of new standards regarding violence, sexual behavior, bodily functions, table manners, etc., from courtier society to lower societal strata, reflecting sublimation and self-restraint.  The formation of this more rarified etiquette paralleled the emergence of the modern state. As monarchs amassed and consolidated power, Elias argues, they assumed a monopoly over legitimate physical violence, centralizing the infliction of punishment and eliminating violent forms of dispute resolution between individuals.

Elias’ observations are echoed in the work of other people who documented long-term trends in crime and punishment. V.A.C. Gattrell notes a decline in bloodthirstiness and delight at spectacles of public savagery in Early Modern England. Robert Nye documents the increasing regulations and limitations on, and eventually decline in and disappearance of, dueling as the modern state assumed a monopoly on punishment. And Pieter Spierenburg notes the gradual disappearance of more savage forms of punishment and the turn toward confinement. In The Spectacle of Suffering, Spierenburg painstakingly documents the gradual disappearance of public executions and the emergence of penal restraint. Importantly, these scholars, especially Spierenburg, shy away from praising these trends as an unqualified good, describing them in neutral language.

The neutrality seems appropriate, given a considerable flaw in Durkheim’s take on the evolution of punishment: the transition from repression to restitution is a premise that careful historical observation does not bear out, and even if plausible, it would not necessarily dovetail with a transition from corporal punishment to incarceration. As Leon Sheleff has observed, social complexity often generates repressive forms of punishment, and as Martin Killias’ careful study of dozens of historical and modern societies shows, a rise in incarceration often occurs alongside repressive efforts.

Moreover, the extent to which these works, which focus on the emergence of the Early Modern European state, can offer useful insights about punishment in antiquity, is very limited. Durkheim and Elias were inspired by dramatic social transformations that occurred in their time and place—the long industrialization process—and likely did not give much thought to their application to a completely different setting. If the emergence of centralized state power represses savagery and interpersonal violence, one might wonder what these big-picture sociologists and historians would make of ancient empires, including those reflecting great levels of sophistication and social complexity, such as ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome. It is hard to responsibly draw comparisons between these empires and the emergence of the European modern state, and even harder to speak of penological parallels, but there are indications that Fourth century Athenians, for example, believed that institutionally channeling anger through formal punishment was beneficial.

The body-to-soul approach

A more sinister take on the emergence of the prison in modernity is Michel Foucault’s influential Discipline and Punish. Foucault observes the emergence of “great confinements” in hospitals, military barracks, schools, and prisons, as a new form of governmentality. At the outset of the book, Foucault contrasts a scene of royally prescribed torture for a regicide, culminating in drawing and quartering the condemned, with a monotonous daily schedule for inmates at a juvenile facility. The shift from the former to the latter, Foucault argues, reflects a turn from centralized, dramatic displays of governing power focused on the body of the condemned to something much more pervasive: a vague but widespread web of institutions designed to produce changes in the soul through surveillance and supervision. As his central metaphor for the carceral, Foucault relies on Jeremy Bentham’s famous prison design: the panopticon. Housed in cells organized in a circle, facing a central tower, inmates have no way of knowing whether they are being watched, and thus begin to control and modify their own behavior to comply with the institutional standards, internalizing them.

Plenty of works about the emergence of the modern prison have adopted Foucault’s observations, finding evidence that control and fear increasingly shape behavior in societies with mass incarceration, identifying carceral features in many settings and areas of life beyond physical prisons, and focusing on the growing classification of people according to risk. There is also evidence that certain punishments, such as the death penalty, are increasingly regulated, medicalized, and removed from the public eye. But importantly, just like Durkheim and Elias, Foucault focuses on the transition from a European court society to the modern state, and the applicability of his framework for understanding antiquity is limited. 

When Foucault identifies incarceration with modernity, he is describing a very particular form of incarceration: one that is highly regulated and operates on a massive scale, according to the government and administration principles of Weberian formal rationality. The basic premise of Foucault’s analysis does not discount the possibility that ancient societies might have had a very different sort of prison, one that exhibits some common features with the “gloomy festival of punishment” era.

Another challenge to Foucault’s observations, as well as those of the other two approaches, has to do with the classification of incarceration as categorically distinguishable from other forms of punishment, often referred to as corporal punishment. And I have to say, the more I think about the history of punishment over the longue durée, the more I realize that the boundary between incarceration and corporal punishment is false. Not only, as I’ve said many times before, is prison itself corporal punishment, but it often comes hand in hand with corporal mortifications of various kinds. People on death row, for example, are incarcerated. People put to hard labor are incarcerated. People awaiting deportation are incarcerated. People awaiting public humiliation are incarcerated.

In other words, incarceration and other forms of punishment do not have the sort of see-saw correlation that simplistic accounts of penology would have us believe. One does not necessarily rise when the other one falls. What throws us off is that the scale of incarceration in modernity is so immense that it dwarfs the other accompanying things. But that doesn’t mean that incarceration wasn’t always there.

Samson Captured by the Philistines

Today’s example of this is Samson, whom, as I’ve just realized, I haven’t yet discussed in the context of the book. The story of Samson’s capture, incarceration, and suicide, is told in Judges 16. If the Joseph/Daniel/Esther trio can be classified as exilic fantasy/folktale and Jeremiah as political thriller, Samson is definitely in the action/adventure category, and while we have plenty of evidence for the existence of the Philistines (though their ethnicity is debated, see here, here, and here), the Samson stories are superhero fiction. By contrast to other judges, characterized by their wisdom, righteousness, and/or military strategic acumen, Samson is, first and foremost, a man of astounding physical force. David Grossman’s terrific reimagining of the Samson story casts him as a man of contradictions: his blessing is his curse, he is a terrifying antagonist of the Philistines but is fatally attracted to Philistine women, and his desire for vulnerability and openness is his undoing.

What leads to Samson’s incarceration is his disclosure to Delilah that his physical prowess stems from his long hair. Once he falls asleep, she cuts his tresses, and begins to torture him. Interpreters differ in how they understand this torture: some believe she called someone else to cut Samson’s hair, and some believe that she started taunting him physically to test whether, indeed, his power has dissipated. Then she calls out that the Philistines are upon him, and they charge, and immediately inflict horrific torture: they gauge out Samson’s eyes. They then take him to Gaza, place him in “beit ha-asurim” (literally: the house of prisoners), where he is put to work at the grinding mill. Rabbi Steinzaltz explains that the grinder works in a circle, so Samson did not need his eyesight to engage in this labor: it was well fitted for his new disability. Radak posits that prisoners had to earn their keep and therefore ground the mill.

But Radak offers an additional, and more sinister, take on Samson’s forced labor: he sees “grinding” as a euphemism for sexual slavery. According to Radak, Samson, not to put too fine a point on it, was put to stud, to impregnate Philistine women (one wonders why: did they still believe that he possessed some special supernatural powers and was therefore a valuable progenitor?) Generally, this reading dovetails with what I saw in some medieval readings of Esther: really unsavory sexual undertones and a fleshing out of the power differential stuff, which suggests that these commentators might have read the Biblical material through the lens of medieval punitive savagery. Which is not to say, of course, that sexual slavery was not within the realm of the imaginable in antiquity (we have plenty of examples). What is interesting about the Samson story is the emasculation of Samson but the preservation of his manliness for the utility of his captors (I’ve read a couple of queer readings of the Samson story that make a lot out of this stuff.)

In any case, the Philistines hold a big party at their temple, and they bring in Samson to mock him in his weakness. Unbeknownst to them (and this is a truly genius literary device from the author of this tale, I think) Samson’s hair has begun to grow back while at the prison, and when he is brought to the temple, he asks the youth who minds him to place him between the columns of the temple. He begs for God to restore his power so that he can avenge one of his eyes, and calling out “Let me die with the Philistines!” he demolishes the temple, slaughtering more Philistines than he had killed in his life. This, by the way, is often a spectacular moment in operatic productions of Samson and Delilah.

Samson and Delilah production at the Metropolitan Opera

The Samson story is instructive in several important ways. First, it offers an example of incarceration that goes hand in hand with torture, humiliation, and forced labor. Second, it offers some notions of what would have been imaginable to those reading and interpreting what was surely a work of complete fiction in terms of the scope of carceral torture. And third, this story–not unlike the Jeremiah incarceration story–does a terrific job capturing the deep rage and desire for revenge by someone treated so cruelly by his captors.

Two Federal Rulings on Campus Protests

This week saw two federal district court decisions against Harvard and UCLA, respectively, regarding their failure to protect their Jewish and Israeli students from antisemitic discrimination, which you can read in their entirety here and here. Both complaints have a run-through of the upsetting facts we saw at play in many college campuses last year. I’ve already seen some coverage of the decisions and, as expected, it is understandably politically inflamed (as is some of the language in the briefs and the decisions.) What I hope to contribute to the discussion is a concise run-through of the legal arguments made by the plaintiffs and the defendants, which may illuminate the issues that are likely to come up in future litigation on this topic in the fall.

The Harvard case is a ruling on a motion by Harvard University to strike a complaint, based on the Civil Rights Act, by Students Against Antisemitism (SAA), against the university for its failure to rein in antisemitic behaviors and actions that targeted Jewish and Israeli students. The court dismissed in part and granted in part. The Title VI case based on a deliberate indifference claim will go through, whereas the case based on direct discrimination will not.

Harvard raised two preliminary hurdles to the SAA lawsuit, the first of which involved SAA’s standing to bring it forth. There are three conditions for granting standing to an association: at least one member of the association must have standing to sue individually (members of SAA were affected and targeted by the litany of antisemitic events described in the lawsuit), the interests involved in the lawsuit are germane to the org’s purpose (in this case, fighting antisemitism), and the claims and types of relief sought do not require the participation of individual plaintiffs (which SAA can represent).

The second issue was that the lawsuit was unripe: Harvard argued that it was still in the process of formulating its response to antisemitism on campus. The court, however, rejected this argument, asserting its authority to rule on incidents that already happened. The lawsuit would examine whether actions Harvard had taken before the lawsuit was filed had been adequate and whether they will be adequate going forward.

On the merits, the court acknowledged that SAA brings a valid Title VI case on the basis of deliberate indifference. It has provided a prima facie showing that (1) SAA members suffered harm that (2) hindered their educational opportunities, (3) that the school knew of these deprivations, (4) that the deprivations were related to school programs and activities, and (5) that the school exhibited deliberate indifference toward the denial of these opportunities. Harvard argued that some steps to remedy the situation had been taken, but the court disagreed, characterizing the university response as “indecisive, vacillating, and at times internally contradictory.”

By contrast, the court did not find that SAA’s direct discrimination claim was valid. When arguing that discrimination has taken place, plaintiffs have to offer the right comparators: X is discriminated against while Y is not. The examples offered by SAA were diffuse and insufficient to show discrimination: they argued that Harvard canceled speakers who were trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) but not antisemitic speakers. In the broader context of the culture wars, if one is hell-bent on viewing all political questions as lying on a right-to-left axis, this argument might make sense: it shows a progressive bias in speaker invitations. But I think the court was right in discouraging this way of thinking about things, because it is crucially important to disaggregate how people think about various questions of social, political, and economic interest. Take a look, for example, at this interesting story in the Stanford Review. Overall, yes, there’s a proliferation of leftiness on campus, but when one digs into the nuances of student opinions, one finds rich diversity on questions of foreign policy, domestic civil rights, and fiscal policy. Students and faculty who are deprived of a say in the invitation of speakers on Israel/Gaza/Hamas/Palestine might not be deprived of a say in gender policies. I also think that the association of “rightthink” on gender matters and “rightthink” on the Middle East is misguided at best and poisonous at worst, for reasons that should be obvious to any thinking person on either side of both issues. I like that the court decided not to conflate this stuff.

The UCLA case that resulted in a preliminary injunction revolved around the university’s failure to dismantle an encampment at the Royce Quad, which barred students for entering for failing to dismantle an encampment. The injunction prohibits UCLA from offering any educational programming to which Jewish students do not have access, and from colluding in preventing Jewish students from attending programs on campus in the future where other students can do so.

The plaintiffs in this case, by contrast to the Harvard case, were three Jewish students, who argued that they were prevented from accessing the Royce Quad, including the library, because of an encampment whose members would confront them about their opinions about Israel. Despite the fact that the plaintiffs were directly affected, UCLA argued lack of standing, making the point that there was no proof that such hindrances would be in place in the future. The court, clearly incensed about the antisemitic incidents at UCLA, rejected this logic, expressing concerns about how the fall semester would unfold given the university’s paltry response to the spring encampment.

Another argument brought about by UCLA was lack of causation, which I think is best understood as a “wrong defendant” argument. The protestors, it is claimed, were private students and entities, and the university itself did not contribute to what happened with the encampments. The court swiftly did away with this arguments as well, finding that UCLA continues to offer educational opportunities knowing that the Jewish students cannot avail themselves of these opportunities (including physical access to campus areas and buildings).

There are three conditions for obtaining a preliminary injunction: (1) likelihood of success, (2) irreparable harm to the plaintiffs should the injunction not be granted, and (3) a balance of equities. It looks like the federal judge thought that this lawsuit would eventually succeed, that the students’ education would be hampered were the injunction not to be granted, and that the discomfort, such as it is, to UCLA in having to grant equal access to its programming to all students did not outweigh the injury to the plaintiffs.

A few general observations are in order. First, while not all the facts in these cases were germane for the disposition of these preliminary matters (the actual lawsuits could drag on for years), they do paint a distressing picture of the daily life on campus. The images from Columbia are, of course, in the news today due to their president’s resignation, but the stuff quoted in these lawsuits is profoundly upsetting and dovetails with things I’ve heard from clients and colleagues about other campuses. I’m left wondering whether the emotional effect of the real-time unfolding of these events will wear out as the lawsuits go on. That the judges in both cases were deeply disturbed is evident in both decisions, though the Massachusetts judge uses more measured tones.

The second observation has to do with the proverbial “incident of the dog in the nighttime”–an issue that some might have expected to be brought up, but does not come up in either case, which surprised me because of its centrality to the Brandeis lawsuit against Berkeley Law–namely, whether Zionism is germane to Judaism to the point that hostile action against people for adhering to Zionist worldviews counts as religious discrimination. It simply did not come up at all in either case. The UCLA decision identifies the plaintiffs as “three Jewish students who assert they have a religious obligation to support the Jewish state of Israel,” taking their nexus between religion and political opinion at face value. The Harvard decision summarily acknowledges the proper basis for discrimination: religion (against Jews) and national origin (against Israelis.) It looks like both judges were not interested in the minutiae of how this debate unfolds in the intellectual communities which they examined, such as: can you disaggregate Zionism from Israeliness, can you disaggregate it from Jewishness, can you disaggregate it from support of, or objection to, the Israeli government, and other hairsplitting typologies and dichotomies in which academics are profoundly interested but judges and lawyers are not. It might be that the judges simply concluded what many of us also have: if it walks and quacks like a duck, that’s what it is, regardless of the verbal pretzeling around who might be a Jew and nevertheless pass muster with the protestors. It’s also a valuable lesson for potential plaintiffs and defendants in these cases of what to focus on. I’ve recently observed that what seems of high importance to academic (e.g., the particulars of why this or that expression is an antisemitic dogwhistle given the history and semantics of bigotry) is of little importance to people more worried about concrete examples of physical violence, vandalism, blocking entrance, etc. What I take away from this is the following: plaintiffs can and should grow thicker skins and focus on clear, discrete examples of discrimination and administrative inaction, while defendants should not prepare to expound on why they were violent and vicious toward someone because of quality A but not quality B. Looks like, when things come to court, no one cares.

Joseph in the Joint: Fatalism, Transformation, and the Bible’s Most Illustrious Prisoner

In the last few weeks I’ve been sharing snippets from my new book in progress, Behind Ancient Bars. Chapter 2 of the book will be devoted to the Hebrew Bible’s most illustrious prisoner, Joseph. You can find the full story in Genesis 39-41. Briefly, Joseph is thrown in prison following a false rape accusation by the wife of Potiphar, to whom Joseph had been sold as a servant. The biblical story offers us a rather rich account of Joseph’s carceral experience, including his responsible role in prison management while a prisoner himself and his interaction with two fellow inmates (the chief cupbearer and the chief baker). We also learn of his unsuccessful efforts to have the chief cupbearer curry favor for him with Pharaoh and of his eventual release, and auspicious rise, when his dream interpretation skills are needed.

Medieval midrashists found Joseph a fascinating subject, but tended to focus on his dreams, the salacious story with Potiphar’s wife, and Joseph’s later reconciliation with the brothers who sold him to the Ishmaelites. But one also finds quite a bit about his prison journey there, and the expanded stories tend to adhere to two important messages. The first is a concerted effort to frame the entire incarceration journey—in terms of time as in terms of content—as orchestrated by God for specific purposes, suggesting God’s interest not only in the people of Israel but also in geopolitical matters. I see examples of this in other biblical incarceration stories, but it is especially pronounced here. Second, and relatedly, there is an idea I’ve already discussed in the context of Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah: the notion that Joseph undergoes a penological transformation within confinement that prepares him for his prophetic leadership after reentering Egyptian society.

I’ve recently come across Nicholas Reid’s excellent book Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia. In his analysis of primary sources, Reid urges us to use a wide lens when discussing prisons in antiquity, similar to what we now do in modern incarceration studies. He says this, with which I’m wholeheartedly in agreement:

When thinking of a history of prisons and imprisonment, one must look beyond the stated goals and stated functions of the prison to the actual practice. . . since prisons are multifunctional, the historical investigation into imprisonment should not revolve solely around the question of punishment. . . the adaptability of limiting corporal movement through imprisonment to meet numerous social goals and handle numerous social ‘problems’ has deep roots in history, even though direct connections and linear developments do not exist.

Even though Joseph was not sentenced to a prescribed period behind bars, and even though biblical punishment is usually retributive in nature, there is enough in the biblical descriptions and the midrashim to point to a message eerily similar to the one parroted in rehabilitation programs and parole hearings today: that incarceration is a “rock bottom” point in a prisoner’s journey that is an essential part of his or her coherent life story, that one goes down in order to go up, and that one develops important prosocial and other skills in confinement that set him or her up for a pivotal historical role postincarceration. In light of this, I decided to rewrite the Joseph story as a parole hearing transcript, relying heavily on the medieval midrashim. Here’s a short snippet:

PHARAOH: Okay, since we’ve moved to the inmate’s C-file, let’s see how he did in prison. From what I see from the record, you haven’t had many visitors in the twelve years you’ve been inside.

JOSEPH: No, Your Majesty. I believe only in the early days, when Zulycah still visited me.

AMHOST: I’m not sure I understand: The woman whom you claim falsely accused you of rape visited you in prison?

POTIPHAR: Your Priestly Eminence, since I oversee the prison, she can come and go as she pleases, and she even helps me with the logistics.

PHARAOH: And when she visited you, what did you talk about?

JOSEPH: She was trying to persuade me to give in to her. You know, “How ‎long wilt thou remain in this house? do but listen unto my voice, and I will release thee from ‎thy prison.” Like that. I had to keep saying: It is better for me to remain in this house, ‎than to listen unto thy words, and transgress against God.[1]

AMHOST: I guess we keep things nice and cushy for you in Thebes. Some people would easily mistake you for a prison administrator, rather than an actual prisoner, and think Potiphar just moved you to another job to put some distance between you and his wife.[2]

MERITAMUM: It’s not like that, Your Grace. The write-up about the visit documents that the inmate was repeatedly threatened by his accuser‎. She was overheard saying, “if thou wilt not do my wishes, I will put out thine eyes, and I will put ‎additional chains upon thy feet, and I will surrender thee into the hands of such as thou hast ‎not known, neither yesterday nor day before yesterday.”

HAT: Looks like it was even worse. I have the 128 write-up that she put in his file, and it says that, while they were setting the table at chow hall, cleaning the drinking glasses and all that, she would say to him: ‘In this matter, I mistreated [ashaktikha] you. As you live, I will mistreat you regarding other matters.’

MERITARIUM: Oh, but he gave as good as he got. Basically played her at her own game. Like she said “ashaktikha,” so he would say to her: ‘[God] “Performs justice for the oppressed [laashukim].”’ (Psalms 146:7) [She would say:] ‘I will reduce your sustenance.’ He would say to her: ‘[God] “Provides food for the hungry.”’ (Psalms 146:7) [She would say:] ‘I will shackle you.’ He would say to her: ‘“The Lord frees the imprisoned.”’ (Psalms 146:7) [She would say:] ‘I will cause you to be bent over.’ He would say to her: ‘“The Lord straightens the bent.”’ (Psalms 146:8) [She would say:] ‘I will blind your eyes.’ He would say to her: ‘“The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.”’ (Psalms 146:8)[3]

PHARAOH: Dear Maat. How far did all of this go?

MERITARIUM: We’re not entirely sure, because there’s a lot of hearsay in prison intelligence. Rav Huna said in the name of Rabbi Aḥa, you know, that sort of thing. But rumor was that she placed an iron bar beneath his neck until he would direct his glance toward her and look at her. Nevertheless, he would not look at her. That is what is written: “They tortured his legs with chains; his body was placed in iron.” (Psalms 105:18)[4]

PHARAOH: Nice facility you run there, Potiphar.

POTIPHAR: I can’t possibly screen my own wife from the list of visitors, Your Majesty.

PHARAOH: Why would you let her do it? Did you think he was guilty?

POTIPHAR: Oh, no, I knew he was innocent. Even my kids knew.

PHARAOH: What?

POTIPHAR: We all knew. My kid kept saying, “stop beating on him, my mom is lying.”[5] Even on the way in, when I was booking him, I said to him, “Joseph, I know you didn’t do this, but I’m locking you up so I will not attach stigma to my children.”[6]

MERITAMUM: And even so, Your Majesty, when she visited him in prison, it didn’t seem to faze the Inmate. He was overheard replying, hold on, it’s hard to read the hieroglyphs, “‎Behold the God of all the earth, he is able to deliver me from all that thou wouldst do unto me. ‎For he giveth sight to the blind and he freeth the captives and he preserveth the strangers ‎that are in the land they never knew.” Eventually she gave up and stopped coming.  

PHARAOH: Do we have any laudatory chronos in the file?

MERITAMUM: Yes, Your Majesty. The inmate was charged, de facto, with the functioning of the entire administration.

PHARAOH: You entrusted. The entire prison administration. To a prisoner.

POTIPHAR: The whole thing. Eating, drinking, binding people, releasing them, torturing them, giving them a rest. He would call the whole thing and whatever he said, went.[7]

HAT: It says in this chrono, “the minister did not have to see anything he put in the inmate’s hand.” I’m not sure what this means.

POTIPHAR: It means I didn’t have to supervise him, because God helped him succeed in prison as well as on the outside. It’s a kal vahomer.

HAT: A what?

POTIPHAR: A kal vahomer. Argument a fortiori. They have to say he was successful in prison, because success on the outside would be self-evident.[8]

HAT: See, I read it differently. I read it that you didn’t see anything fishy or poorly performed.[9]

POTIPHAR: You know these prison write-ups. You can read them seventy different ways.

HAT: Mr. Jacobson, do you feel that you were treated fairly in prison?

JOSEPH: To be honest, I did end up feeling relieved. Back home, whenever we ate, my father would give me the choice portions, and I always had to look over my shoulder lest my brothers take revenge. And I confess that here in prison I could breathe a bit easier. But God likes to give me a challenge, so I figure he’ll sic a bear on me anytime soon.[10]

HAT: Not sure I understand what the bear’s got to do with any of this.

JOSEPH: It’s got to do with the grain.

AMHOST: What grain?

JOSEPH: You’ll see.


[1] Sefer HaYashar (midrash), Book of Genesis, Vayeshev 19

[2] McKay (2009).

[3] Bereshit Rabbah 87: 10.

[4] Bereshit Rabbah 87: 10.

[5] Sefer HaYashar (midrash), Book of Genesis, Vayeshev 18-19

[6] Bereshit Rabbah 87: 9.

[7] Midrash Sekhel Tov, Bereshit 39:22:2

[8] Bereshit Rabbah 87:10; Midrash Sekhel Tov, Genesis 39:23:3.

[9] Midrash Sekhel Tov, Bereshit 39:23:2

[10] Midrash Sekhel Tov, Bereshit 39:23:4

Dark Esther

My new project Behind Ancient Bars looks at several prominent incarceration stories in the Hebrew Bible. One that is often missed is Esther’s stint at Ahasuerus’s harem. Because most of the story is a bedroom farce, and some of it a bloodthirsty schadenfreude fest, many commentators skip over Esther’s confinement before she is taken to the king, which you can find in Chapter 2. But this short vignette illuminates not only commentary about empire in general (and probably Persian empire in particular), but also about the multiple forms of vulnerability of women and the ways in which governmental systems are crafted to exploit these vulnerabilities. This paints the festive Esther story a much darker, more sinister hue.

Seeing the Esther story as an incarceration story to begin with requires doing what modern penologists do on the regular: expanding our definition of incarceration. I find it interesting that people who happily read Foucault and Goffman, seeing obvious parallels and symmetries among total institutions and across the carceral archipelago, suddenly adopt a hyper-legalistic approach to punishment in antiquity, forcefully arguing that there is no incarceration in the bible because it is not listed as a sanction for a criminal conviction in Deuteronomy or in Hammurabi’s law. If incarceration scholarship in modernity can look at pretrial detention, immigration detention, and even cattle towns–because those are carceral experiences–then incarceration scholarship in antiquity can and should encompass political detention and shady government programs for locking up and reeducating children. And indeed, some commentary on the Book of Esther moves away from the entertaining popular presentations of beauty pageants to identifying incarceration elements.

How much of this represents true carceral practices, or is a realistic portrayal of royal harems, is hotly debated. Summarizing the literature for and against a reading of Esther as fiction, Adele Berlin opines that the story, like the Daniel story, dates to the Hellenistic period, and reflects stereotypical Athenian perceptions of Persia: “luxury, hierarchy, bureaucracy, wine drinking, the postal system, imperial law, bowing down, eunuchs, impalement, a royal garden, and a sexually virtuous queen.” But at least some of this fed commentators who used it to glean more about imperial Persian governmentality.

The background to the Esther story is well known: during a royal feast with his courtiers, an inebriated king orders his queen, Vashti, to appear before the courtiers. She refuses, angering the king, and is either banished or executed, which results in a vacancy. The king’s servants propose that all good looking virgins in the kingdom be gathered at the “women’s house” in Shushan, the capital, under the supervision of Hege, the king’s eunuch, so that the king may pick whichever one pleases him to be his queen in lieu of Vashti.

Julia Schwartzmann points out that the details of Esther’s arrival in the harem can be disturbing to modern readers, because of Mordechai and Esther’s “ambiguous uncle/niece relationship, the way Mordechai hands over Esther to the king’s harem, and his manipulative handling of his silent and passive niece.” Not only modern readers: Two important medieval commentators, Abraham Ibn Ezra and Immanuel of Rome, propose that Mordechai planned, as a foster parent, to marry his beautiful charge, a-la Dickens character John Jarndyce (his charge in the book, you’ll remember, is also called Esther!) One can only imagine many young women and girls in similarly precarious situations who would end up swept into the harem–a rather hopeless prospect, as only one girl would be officially crowned queen, and as no girl, per Ibn Ezra, would be available for marriage or any life outside the harem after having bedded the king–with girls like Esther, without parents and with guardians who have agendas beyond their charges’ best interests, more vulnerable to apprehension and lockdown.

The pageant story will have us believe that the girls gathered at the capital out of their own free will, but some commentators see this more as a coercive executive action. Shelom Esther draws the readers’ attention to the large number of officers and bureaucrats involved in the concubine-gathering operation, which had to visit each house to prevent parents from hiding their daughters. Joseph Ibin Yahya adds that Mordechai hid Esther, and that she was taken against his will and against hers.

The administration of the harem, as we saw in the Daniel court stories, is given to eunuchs. The word “saris” (eunuch) might be used differently in different biblical contexts, and could be a reference to a high government official rather than to the sexuality of these personages, but what we know of various empires–especially the Persian empire–suggests that, at least in some contexts, the meanings converge. Last week, at our archaeology course, Brett Kaufman told us that it was common to entrust military commands in imperial armies to eunuchs because they would have no dynastic aspirations and thus would not attempt to usurp the throne. But it makes sense that confinement operations, where sexual exploitation is a serious risk, would be entrusted to sexually inactive supervisors, as 19th century commentator Malbim very explicitly explains.

Even if sexual abuse was not a risk, there were other ways to render the eunuchs’ charges pliable and docile. Much is made in chapter 2 of the issue of cosmetics (“tamrukim”). Some commentators, like Ibn Yahya, interpret these in a straightforward way as beauty-enhancing products, while others, like Immanuel of Rome, thought these could be medications, including first-aid supplies. What is interesting is that the sole purveyors of these items were the eunuchs, which Malbim shrewdly interprets as part and parcel of the king’s power play which, in turn, reflects the lessons learned from the Vashti episode:

He feared that [the girl he would choose] would not want to marry him, and [his advisors] said that after they examined those who came willingly and did not find an appropriate wife for him, then he will appoint officers and they will round up all the girls with a strong arm, (and they even shrewdly said that he should appoint new officers, so that it would be someone who has not been bribed to ignore the rich people’s girls), and against the fear based on his memory, and the concern that [the prospective bride] would do as Vashti did, they advised to gather the girls around Hege, and that they must not bring their own cosmetics from home, but rather only receive them from the eunuchs, and from this side will always be submissive toward the Eunuch and not uppity as Vashti was.

Malbim on Esther 2: 3: 2

When Julia Schwarzmann marvels at how captivating the Esther story is given its telenovela-like synopsis, I want to add: the power of the story is that both ancient and modern readers would recognize the patriarchal fear of subversive and disobedience, the injured pride, the opportunities for exploitation and exertion of power. But it also points to a source of power and ingenuity on the part of the incarcerated person. We’ve already seen how Daniel, when failing to negotiate his diet with chief Eunuch Ashpenaz, makes a deal with “the waiter” on the sly to receive his special vegan rations. Here, we see Esther realizing that the key to surviving in the harem is to charm Hege, who proceeds to favor her with food and luxury items.

Another aspect of the story that exudes verisimilitude is Mordechai’s concern for Esther’s welfare–whether because of the general situation or because, at his request, she hid her identity from harem management. He is told to come to the harem yard every day to inquire after her, and perhaps one advantage of charming the pants off Hege was the availability of daily reports of her wellbeing.

By contrast to the later story of her tenure as queen, Esther of chapter 2 is described passively: she is beautiful, parentless, young, vulnerable, and puppeteered by her uncle/guardian as well as by the various government officials. But between the lines, one finds glimmers of transformation. Placed in a complicated logistical and social scenario, Esther figures out that personal charm and charisma are useful tools, and that performing modesty and restraint pays off. Both Ibn Ezra and Immanuel of Rome emphasize that her restraint, which earned her the favor of Hege, reflect her intelligence. Ibn Yahya opines that she had the good fortune to be taken to the king in the winter, when one enjoys intimacy and closeness more than in summer, thus improving the odds of being the king’s favorite, but what if Hege, who was in her corner, was the one in charge of the schedule and deliberately scheduled her sexual audition for an auspicious date? The emerging picture is one of strategic thinking, charming the key people responsible for her welfare, and performing royal virtue even prior to her selection (perhaps impressing Hege as “queen material”) which the story does not demonize or regard as duplicitous but rather as an understandable, even commendable, survival strategy.

This is interesting for two reasons. The first is that, regardless of the official goal of incarceration in biblical stories, there is evidence of personal transformation occurring behind bars. Martin Pritkin, who approaches biblical punishment from a more doctrinal perspective, finds evidence of rehabilitative motives amidst the retributive rationales, but I think these stories make a somewhat different point: there’s a difference between the espoused nature of a confinement program and the sociological and psychological features of the experience of going though said program. Second, and relatedly, personal transformations in incarceration stories are a means to an end. Notably, incarceration serves as a cauldron, a crucible, a vehicle, for developing leadership characteristics that predict the protagonist’s success at his or her post-incarceration life. Joseph, for example, is incarcerated as punishment for a wrongful accusation or to allow Potiphar and his household to save face; behind bars, however, he develops not only the administrative and logistics acumen that will later serve him well in Egyptian administration, but also a prosocial approach to dream interpretation and the skills of getting along with different kinds of people (skills he lacked as a youth). Daniel learns some wheeling and dealing and perhaps impresses Ashpenaz and “the waiter” with his initiative. Jeremiah, admittedly a “finished character” by the time of his incarceration, has an opportunity to flex against Zedekiah and to leverage his existing friendship with Ebed Melekh to obtain relief, as well as to forge an important alliance with Nebuchadnezzar that grants him relative freedom in exile. And Esther’s reputation for virtuousness and humility and capacity to marshal personal charm and good looks to make important friendships goes a long way toward earning the favor of the king, both at her audition and later, when her skills are needed at a time of national crisis. The dire straits of incarceration are an essential part of the formulaic, fatalistic narrative. Theologically, they support the idea that the divine jails these people to foster the development of the personal characteristics that will come in handy later. I don’t see this as being much different than the sort of logic I see and here at many a rehabilitation program in prisons–namely, the way people are encouraged to construct and tell a coherent personal narrative, in which the prison journey, the crucible of change, is an essential ingredient on the way up, and support for an “everything happens for a reason” notion of meaning-making.

There are two ways of looking at this–benign and cynical. The benign approach relies on Victor Frankl’s logotherapy to argue that people survive and thrive after suffering–even extreme suffering–by imbuing their experiences with meanings. Shadd Maruna’s Making Good offers many examples for the role that a personal narrative of hardship and redemption plays in desistance from reoffending. The more cynical approach, akin to the one I developed in Yesterday’s Monsters, is that rehabilitative programming becomes sort of a mediocre community play that has to follow a script that prison authorities and parole commissioners recognize and validate: follower-to-leader, toxic-thinking-to-empathy, anger-to-understanding, opacity-to-insight. These scripts have a quasi-theological flavor (in some cases, the programs that encourage them, such as Twelve Steps groups, actually have a religion component.) Whether or not the fatalism and meaning-making project is genuine or artificial, it is a well-recognized story, and so, these incarceration stories feel familiar and similar to each other because they evoke a recognizable, universally familiar trope.

Political Incarceration Under Siege: Jeremiah in the Pit of Mire

An important question in the sociology of punishment is whether the social reaction to deviance/challenge becomes more ferocious during times of social and political turmoil. This question is often attributed to Emile Durkheim and his concept of anomie. As Bruce DiCristina explains, Durkheim used the term “anomie” in various different ways in his scholarship: insufficient regulation of interactions, insufficient regulation of desires, excessive imprecision and weakening of the collective consciousness, and a decline in morality. Most crime and punishment theorists I am familiar with are interested in whether social control rises when the consensus is challenged: For example, Kai Erikson shows that, in Puritan colonies, repression and swift punishment were at their height during times in which religious authorities felt most challenged and imperiled. Similarly, there is a wonderful article by Martin Killias that compares 47 countries (as of 1972) in terms of their political structure and incarceration rates. Killias finds that countries plagued by dictatorships, high power concentration, unemployment, and unequal income distribution tend to be more punitive. Killias ties these punishment-enhancing factors into the concept of a “legitimation crisis,” which occurs “when rulers cannot meet the standards emanating from their own self-justification and when the power gap between rulers and subordinates grow and power is concentrated among a few.”

This makes a lot of sense: it doesn’t take a lot of heavy theorizing to figure out that a society at risk, in which the leadership faces challenges, lashes out at people and displays punitive power in a last-ditch effort to instill fear, if not earn legitimacy. A classic example of this can be found in Jeremiah, where the biblical authors outdid themselves painting a vivid picture of a city under siege, a king in decline, conflicts, intrigue, and secrets, and the resulting incarceration of a prophet suspected of being an enemy shill.

Harold Wilmington offers a thorough biographical sketch of Jeremiah, from which one learns that his fortunes swung high and low in the last few days of the kingdom of Judah. During the discovery (or the “discovery”) of the Torah under King Josiah’s reign, he served in an official capacity, helping implement religious reforms, but after Josiah was felled in the battle against Pharaoh Necho, Jeremiah fell out of favor with his descendants. The biblical text (as well as Wilmington’s biography) paints a picture of someone well known throughout the Judean kingdom as nobody’s patsy, and certainly someone who provokes strong reactions: steadfast friends and bitter enemies abound.

The text suggests that Jeremiah’s incarceration during the Babylonian siege was not his first time at the rodeo. In Jeremiah 36:5-6, the prophet dictates his prophecy to his scribe, Baruch ben Neriah, instructing the scribe to read the prophecy in public because “I am detained; I cannot go to the house of God.” It’s possible that short-term political detention of a tiresome dissident was a usual government approach during Josiah’s descendants’ reigns; the text, which describes a failed manhunt for Jeremiah and for Baruch, certainly suggests that Jeremiah was acting in the shadow of the law and had to evade capture. But things really come to a head under Zedekiah, the last king of Judea, a puppet monarch instilled by Nebuchadnezzar. Kevin Tolley contextualizes Jeremiah’s imprisonment:

Zedekiah came to the throne at a time of great spiritual, economic, and political turmoil. The previous kings had made “disastrous choices.” The city was caught between two external political powers since both Egypt and Babylon vied for power. Over the past decades, loyalties had shifted and allegiances had waned as Jerusalem was continually controlled by one side or another. Egypt had heavily taxed the people (2 Kings 23:33), and Babylon had pillaged the temple and national coffers and had exiled a portion of the inhabitants, leaving the state in financial ruin (2 Kings 24:13). Zedekiah had witnessed the murder of his father, Josiah, and the exile of his brother Jehoahaz. He had seen his brother Jehoiakim mismanage Jerusalem, which had caused the might of Babylon to come down on the city for a three-month siege, resulting in the death of Jehoiakim and the exile of his son Jehoiachin. Thousands of people were deported, and both the city’s economy and defenses were in shambles. Civil unrest prevailed, and various political groups competed for power. . .

For the next few years, Zedekiah maintained a quiet reign. The Babylonians had successfully cowed him. Few would have dared to question the might of Babylon after their armies had just sacked the city. Over his eleven-year reign, Zedekiah realized he needed to rebuild without provoking the ire of either Babylon or Egypt. Zedekiah was a well-intentioned leader (Jeremiah 38:14–16), but he was weak, vacillating, and fearful of public opinion (Jeremiah 38:5, 19).

Throughout Zedekiah’s reign, various political groups pressured Zedekiah to break his oath of allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar. Rumors began to arise that Egypt would assist in a rebellion against Babylon. News of civil unrest in Babylon reached Jerusalem; Zedekiah gave in to the pressures and joined an alliance with Egypt to rebel against Babylon (2 Kings 24:20). And so the countdown to Jerusalem’s destruction began.

In January 588 BC Nebuchadnezzar caught wind of the rebellion and moved quickly against Jerusalem, laying siege to the city. The blockade ultimately lasted over eighteen months. In the spring or summer of 588 BC, Judah became hopeful when the Egyptians began to march toward Jerusalem (Jeremiah 37:5–7). Nebuchadnezzar briefly left the siege of Jerusalem to smash this Egyptian resistance, and then he quickly returned Jerusalem. Zedekiah was in a desperate situation.

Kevin Tolley, “The Imprisonment of Jeremiah in Its Historical Context,” Religious Educator 20(3) 2019, https://rsc.byu.edu/religious-educator/vol-20-no-3-2019

What happens next, vividly described in Jeremiah 37-38, is a veritable political thriller. As the Babylonians lay siege to the city, Jeremiah prophesied the destruction of the city and the temple (presenting Nebuchadnezzar as an instrument of God) and outlined the three options: leave the city by escaping the siege, remain in the city and be ravaged by the Babylonians, or surrender and hope for the best. Jeremiah’s advice to surrender to the Babylonians did not sit well with a group of government officials, who managed to catch Jeremiah when he was dealing with some property matters at the Benjamin Gate. One of them, Irijah, accused Jeremiah of defecting to the Babylonians. Jeremiah said, “lie! I’m not defecting!,” but the denials fell on deaf ears and he was brought to the officials, who beat him up and put him in a place described as “beit ha’asur.”

Religious commentators fault the government officials for this grievous miscarriage of justice, and the classical midrashim, invested in Jeremiah’s image as righteous, all use remarkable linguistic gymnastics to explain how bad of a king Zedekiah was (by “bad” they don’t mean “politically weak, manipulated by the bureaucracy, and speaks out of both sides of his mouth,” but rather, “disloyal to God.”) Agaddat Bereshit 35:2 and Esther Rabbah, Petichta 6 both rely on the fact that Zedeikah is not described as a “king” (a word associated with the righteous), but rather through the verb “to reign” (suggesting that he is unworthy of the descriptive noun). But if one reads this story as a political thriller, rather than a theological morality tale, I think there is enough in the text to suggest that Jeremiah could be reasonably believed to be a Babylonian shill. Not only was he advocating surrender during a stressful time, which could erode everyone’s morale given the siege and resulting hunger, but he is later said to have been released and treated well in Babylonia (perhaps as an expression of Nebuchadnezzar’s gratitude?).

Rembrandt Van Rijn, The Prophet Jeremiah Mourning over the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1630

What sort of prison was “beit ha’asur”? Notably, the text does not speak in plural (‘beit ha’asurim”), and this perhaps strengthens the description of this facility: it is the house of Jonathan the scribe, converted into a makeshift jail, perhaps specifically to hold Jeremiah (was Jonathan in cahoots with Jeremiah’s jailers?) The architecture of this improvised prison is somewhat unclear, and different commentators have different takes on it. Jeremiah was put in “beit habor” and in the “hanuyot”, where he is said to sit for “many days.” The “bor,” translated as a pit, is said by 18th century commentator David Altschuler (“Metzudat David”) to be the worst place in prison (think “down in the hole”). But what are the “hanuyot”? Rashi translates this as “cells,” but Altschuler opts for the literal translation as “stores,” and Medieval commentator Radak explains that these stores were also converted into prison cells, akin to the conversion of Jonathan’s house. What I find interesting about this “hanuyot” business is that it is supported by some of today’s controversies about evidence of incarceration. Last week, as part of my rabbinical program, I attended our summer intensive, during which we took a phenomenal archaeology course with the one and only Brett Kaufman, who told me that some places where locked rooms were found were initially thought to be storage places, only to later be found to evince evidence that people were housed there (I need to dig, pun intended, deeper into this issue of material culture support for confinement structure.)

At this point, we’re thrown into a web of political intrigue to rival Game of Thrones. Zedekiah, who we already know is viewed very unfavorably in this text, gets Jeremiah out and into his own house in secret, asking him for the prophesy. Jeremiah repeats his dire predictions about Babylon, also complaining, “how have I sinned against you, your servants, and this people, that you put me in jail?” Jeremiah points to the fact that, so far, his predictive ability exceeds that of other prophets, who mistakenly (or perhaps buoyed by his brief sojourn in Egypt) prophesied that the King of Babylon would not move against Jerusalem. Jeremiah begs Zedekiah: “Don’t send me back to sit in the house of Jonathan the scribe, so I will not die there.” Zedekiah relents and moves Jeremiah to a place called “hatzar ha’matarah.”

Commentators differ widely on how they perceive this new space, which is obviously better than the “bor” and “hanuyot” area. Malbim says that Jeremiah sat there of his own free will, meaning that it was not a confinement space. Chomat Anakh says that this was a “spacious place, and even though it was still a prison, Jeremiah was not sorry” about the change in his circumstances. Metzudat David says that “incarceration wasn’t so hard there” and adds an important detail: that Jeremiah received bread from the bakeries every day until the bread supply was depleted, from which we learn that hunger and deprivation was beginning to affect everyone on the outside, too. Steinsaltz refers to this place as a “detention camp of sorts,” identifying it with a prior mention of the same place in Jeremiah 32:2. If these two places are not telling of the same incident, this implies that hatzar ha’matarah might have been a permanent detention camp, whereas the “bor” and the “hanuyot” were ad-hoc places with worse conditions, perhaps fashioned specifically for Jeremiah.

The story doesn’t end there, because apparently Jeremiah continues to advocate surrendering to the Babylonians even from his confinement in hatzar ha’matarah. Ministers who hear him speak to the people (unclear whether in person or through a scribe) turn to Zedekiah, asking for Jeremiah to be executed “for he disheartens the solders who remain in this town and the people when he speaks thus to them, because this man does not speak for the benefit/welfare of these people, but for evil.” If one removes the religious, pro-Jeremiah filter from this incident, the ministers’ concern seems valid, especially when mitigated by the lens of a siege and the prospect of destruction. Anyway, Zedekiah gives in, with a heavy implication that these ministers are more powerful than him and he simply does not have the clout to oppose them.

The descriptions of what happens next are horrifyingly vivid. The ministers use ropes to lower Jeremiah into a pit within hatzar ha’matarah, which is said to belong to one of Zedekiah’s sons. The cistern does not have water; it has mire, and Jeremiah sinks into it. But not all his friends have abandoned him. Ebed-melech the Cushite (or the Ethiopian, depending on translation), who was a eunuch in the king’s service, hears of this, and complains to the king that Jeremiah is to unjustly die of hunger. Zedekiah changes course again, ordering Ebed-Melech to take thirty men and pull Jeremiah out of the cistern.

The text offers a detailed description of the mechanics of this liberation effort. Ebed-Melech proceeds to take rags from the treasury and lower them carefully into the cistern using ropes (commentators explain that he does this so as not to drench them in mire.) He then calls out to Jeremiah to wrap these rags under his armpits, between his skin and the ropes. Once Jeremiah pads his armpits, the men pull the ropes, getting him out of the cistern, and returning him to his less constrictive confinement at hatzar ha’matarah.

It’s hard to tell who Zedekiah is more afraid of: Jeremiah, who perhaps he believes is telling him the truth, or the ministers, who can bring him down. Perhaps his concern for Jeremiah’s welfare is part and parcel of his fear of the Babylonians and he, like his ministers, suspects that Jeremiah is in cahoots with them. In any case, he tries to eat the cake and leave it whole. He again brings Jeremiah in, in private, through the third entrance of the House of God, and asks him to tell him the truth. Jeremiah understandably hesitates: “If I tell you, you will kill me for sure, and if I offer advice, you won’t follow it.” After Zedekiah swears he will spare Jeremiah’s life and protect him from his enemies, and Jeremiah repeats his dire predictions about the Babylonian destruction of the city and his advice to surrender so as to save it. Perhaps inspired by his own recent predicament, Jeremiah uses the pit of mire as a metaphor for Zedekiah’s fate. Leslie Allen comments that the “two crises are linked as cause and effect. The rejection of the prophetic message that resulted in Jeremiah’s dire predicament, despite the partial amelioration granted by the king, was to land Zedekiah himself in a comparable predicament. . . Zedekiah rescued Jeremiah from mud, but the king’s friends had abandoned him to it.”

Zedekiah keeps his word: he does not return Jeremiah to Jonathan’s house, but rather to hatzar ha’matarah. He even instructs Jeremiah to lie to the ministers and obfuscate about the true nature of his conversation with the king. Jeremiah manages to effectively deceive the ministers about his royal interview, and as a consequence remains in hatzar ha’matarah until the city falls. Notably, Zedekiah does not actually follow Jeremiah’s advice, and as a consequence sees his sons executed before he is blinded by the conqueror. Jeremiah fares better under the new empire–Nebuchadnezzar orders his captains and eunuchs to set him free, which they do, and he continues to prophesy to the freshly defeated people.

There are several remarkable features to this story. The first is the detailed, quasi-documentary description of the various confinement facilities: a pit, or pits; cells, or makeshift cells from converted storage rooms; a home converted into a makeshift facility as the worst location; an easier detention center. We are provided the minutia of lowering someone to the pit and elevating them from it, including the humane (?) measure of padding their armpits so they are not cut by the ropes. We are also told, akin to what we saw in Daniel’s story, details about food rationing, which are especially important during the miseries of a siege. And, we are offered a window into the use of incarceration as a tool in political conflict and intrigue, in which even the incarcerated person holds some modicum of negotiation power and how that plays into the reversals of fortune in the story.

This story is also a microcosm, a window into Zedekiah’s court. One thing I notice about all these exilic incarceration stories is the way the biblical authors use them: as a good index of quality of governance, akin to the well-known Tolstoy maxim. Lovers of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish will remember his foundational distinction between punishment in antiquity (dramatic, violent, centralized) and punishment in modernity (decentralized, vague, aimed at the soul, normalizing, self-monitored). Foucault saw the prison as the epitome of a modern way of punishment, identifying earlier historical periods with corporal punishment. I think that descriptions of prison in antiquity both strengthen and challenge his framework. On one hand, incarceration stories tend to portray the regimes that run the prisons (Egypt, Persia, Babylon) and jails as capricious, risky, easily swayed by things like dreams or conspiracies, and spiteful. The power of incarceration is centralized and brutal. On the other hand, these are, undoubtedly, prisons. The sources do not make the distinction that modern penologists (including Foucault) make between prisons and corporal punishment. In other words, they support what I’ve come to see as true since we wrote Fester: incarceration IS corporal punishment. It can come in different flavors: it could be a drab, gray, vague experience at a modern juvenile facility that destroys the soul and makes people obedient and docile, or it can be the drama of throwing a particular person into a pit of mire and getting him out. But both are incarceration. We can, and should, revisit Discipline and Punish by decoupling prisons from modernity, and by seeing incarceration modes not as a historical rift, but along a historical continuum.

Letter to My Dad on the One-Year Memorial of His Death (in Hebrew)

אבא היקר והאהוב,

לפני כמה חודשים, שאל אותי ריו הקטן אם אי פעם מפסיקים להתגעגע. אני יכולה להגיד לך שאחרי שנה מתגעגעים יותר ויותר. כל מי שאיבד אדם אהוב מספר לי שהשנה הראשונה מלאה רגעים של ״הראשון בלי״. יום ההולדת הראשון בלי, החג הראשון בלי. אבל בלי אבא כזה, אבא חד פעמי, האבא הכי טוב, כל כך קשה, קשה מנשוא.

ריו נמצא כעת בגיל שבו נמתח גבול נוקשה בין האמת לדמיון. אני אומרת לו, ״כשקשה לי, אני מקשיבה לקולו של סבא מייעץ לי מה לעשות,״ וריו עונה, ״אבל סבא לא יכול לייעץ, סבא מת.״ אני מסבירה: ״נכון, סבא איננו. אבל אני מכירה את סבא כל כך טוב שאני יכולה לנחש מה הוא היה מייעץ.״ מייעץ איך לעזור למשפחה ולחברים. מייעץ להמשיך לסחוב גם כשבעבודה לא פיקניק, לשמוח בדברים טובים, לא להתרגש מדברים רעים, וודאי לא לעשות שום צעד נמהר בלי לחשב עלות ותועלת. מייעץ למחול, להתפשר, מייעץ לחבק את המשפחה חזק חזק, מייעץ להתרכז במה שחשוב ולהניח למה שלא.

הניחוש הזה, הדמיון הזה, זו הנחמה החילונית. פעם ריו שאל אותי ואותך כשהיינו יחד באוטו: ״מי זה אלוהים?״ ענינו לו: ״יש הרבה אנשים שמאמינים שיש להם חבר דמיוני. בשמים, או בלב. זה חבר שאי אפשר לראות, אבל מרגישים אותו, והם מרגישים שכשהם מדברים אתו, הוא עוזר.״ ופעם אחרת אמרת לי, ״אני לא דתי, אבל אני אדם מאמין.״ ובאיזה שהוא מקום, בתודעה החילונית מנסרת המחשבה: האל שאיני מאמינה בו לקח את אבי הצדיק השמיימה, כמו את חנוך איש האלוהים, כמו את אליהו הנביא, כדי שלא יראה באסוננו.

אבא, איזו שנה איומה. השבר הנורא שניבאת לפני שנים התרחש, התהליכים שעליהם התרעת בעשורים האחרונים מתגלגלים ומתפתחים, האסון האישי והלאומי התמזגו ואי אפשר להפרידם בלב. לא נותר אלא לנחש איך היינו עוברים את החודשים המסוייטים, הנוראים הללו, לו היית אתה אתנו. אילו ניסים היית מחולל, אילו לבבות היית מקרב. אני רואה אותך קורא עיתון, מסיט הצידה את כל המפרשים והמלהגים וחושב, כמו הגנרל פאנפילוב ב״אנשי פאנפילוב״, כמו דון חואן ב״מסע לאיכטלאן״, כמו המח״ט ב״תיאום כוונות״, כמו האנשים הכי חכמים בספרים שהכי אהבת. אני כמעט יכולה לשמוע את דבריך המקוריים והמחכימים. אני עוצמת את עיניי ורואה אותך מנחם אבלים, תומך במשפחות החטופים, עוזר לסטודנטים במילואים שלימודיהם הופרעו. מגן על כבודם ובטחונם של הסטודנטים הערבים ומקשיב להם, עוזר לכולם להתחשב בזולת, יוצא מגדרך כמו תמיד לרומם ולהקל על אחרים. במיוחד אחרים סובלים ופוחדים. עושה סידורים במרכז טבעון ומברך את כולם במאור פנים. מלמד שעורים פרטיים לילדים מפונים. מחבק הורים וסבים שדואגים לילדיהם ולנכדיהם. וגם אותנו, והכי הכי את אמא, משמח ומרגיע.

ואם אני משחררת עוד יותר, עוצמת את העיניים קצת יותר חזק, אני יכולה לדמיין אפילו אבא מלאך. כמו ״אבא פיל״, בספר היפה ״גן גורים״ של רפאל ספורטה, רק מלאך. אבא שאינו סובל יותר, אבא שפוגש את סבא יוסף ואת סבתא שרה ואת אחיו דוד בין העננים. אבא שלקראתו רץ הכלב דון ונובח בשמחה. אבא שבחיקו מתכרבל ומגרגר החתול לולו.

ואני אפילו יכולה לדמיין עוד משהו. איך אחרי כמה חודשים נפתחים שערי שמיים ומגיעים המון מלאכים. מלאכים סבים וסבתות. מלאכים אבות ואמהות. מלאכים נערים ונערות. מלאכים ילדים וילדות. והם מבוהלים, והם מבולבלים, ואבא שלי היקר והאהוב, אבא מלאך, פורש את כנפי המלאך שלו לרווחה ומחבק את כולם. ברוכים הבאים, ברוכים הבאים, הוא אומר, וחותך לכולם אבטיח, ומפרק רימונים ומכין לכולם קערות עם גרגרים ויוגורט. אבא מלאך מפיל מצחוק את כל המלאכים החדשים. שואל מלאכים ילדים חידות בחשבון, ואם הם עונים נכון, הוא צוהל. אבא מלאך מסדר את כל העננים בעיגול ויושב עם המלאכים המבוגרים ומסביר להם בסבלנות סוגיות בתחבורה ובתלמוד. מייעץ למלאכים הנערים מה ללמוד בגן עדן ומחליף תמונות של הנכדים עם המלאכים הסבים. אני כבר לא ילדה, ואני יודעת שאין לנו הוכחות, והנחמות שיש למאמינים אין למי שלא מאמינים. אבל היה לי האבא הכי טוב, אבא שמספר סיפורים, אבא שלימד אותי את כוחו של סיפור טוב להעשיר, לעודד ולרומם את הנפש, אבא שלימד אותי שהנפש בוחרת איזה סיפור לספר, אבא שבכל צומת בחייו בחר בסיפור החיובי והשמח על פני הסיפור מרפה הידיים והעצוב. אבא שבחר בסיפור של צמיחה על פני סיפור של עוני, בסיפור של השכלה על פני סיפור של קוצר זמן, בסיפור של מסוגלות על פני סיפור של נכות, בסיפור של נדיבות על פני סיפור של מחסור, בסיפור של חריצות על פני סיפור של בטלה, בסיפור של איחוד על פני סיפור של פילוג, בסיפור של תקווה על פני סיפור של ייאוש. אבא שלימד אותי לראות בעיניים פקוחות וגם בעיניים עצומות. ובסיפור שאני מספרת בעיניים עצומות, האל שאיני מאמינה בו לקח אותך כדי שתהיה אבא לא רק שלי, לא רק שלנו, אלא של כל המלאכים החדשים.

אבא יקר, איש שלא היה ולא יהיה כמוהו, אבא צדיק, החכם, הטוב, והאציל בעולם, אני אתך כשהרוח נושבת וכשהגשם יורד וכשהשמש זורחת. אני אתך כשמצחיק וכשעצוב, כשקל וכשקשה, כשסביבי שאון מחריש אוזניים וכשנופלת דומיה, כשאנחנו יחד וכשאני לבד. ובסוף הזמן והמרחב שוב נהיה כולנו יחד. אני אוהבת אותך, אבא, תמיד.

Behind Ancient Bars: Daniel’s Diet

This month I started working on what will eventually become my next book, tentatively titled Behind Ancient Bars. In this book I hope to illuminate the Biblical and Talmudic incarceration experience, and hopefully put to bed some misconceptions held by modern penologists and some held by historians of antiquity. Every penology textbook I’m familiar with speeds through punishment in antiquity, retrenching the common assumption that prison is a product of modernity and contrasting it to its predecessor, corporal punishment.

In an environment saturated with incarceration, it’s hard to see it as anything but modern, but once you start looking for it, you can’t unsee it: the Hebrew bible and the Talmud are filled with references to prisons and jails, and while nothing in antiquity would have come close to resembling our modern correctional apparatus, confinement was very much present in the sociopolitical arena. Moreover, what we’ve been educated to see as a rift is more of a continuum: not only does the variation in carceral experiences today echo the variation in antiquity, but the boundary between prison and corporal punishment is very, very blurry, if it even exists (working on FESTER was the starkest confirmation for me that prison IS corporal punishment.)

There’s not a shred of archaeological evidence of prisons and jails from empires thousands of years ago, and the texts we have are not trustworthy descriptions of confinement. Rather, they tell us something about what would have been within the realm of the imaginable for their authors, and in the process, have something to say about politics, personal transformation, and fatalism.

The story of Daniel and his three friends, Hananyah, Mishael, and Azaryah, is a case in point, and you can find it in Daniel ch. 1. The book opens with Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar’s victorious siege on Jerusalem, during which the Babylonians captured the implements of the temple into the land of Shinar, where they were deposited into the divine treasury. The king then ordered his high minister, Ashpenaz, to bring forth young Judahites of noble descent, teach them Babylonian literature and language, and feed them at the king’s expense, intending to incorporate them into the Babylonian administration. One of these children, Daniel, resolved not to defile himself (“lo itga’el”) with the Pat Bag and the wine, and after Ashpenaz expressed concern that his own life would be at risk if the children appeared poorly, appealed to the server/bursar to feed him and the other Judahites legumes and water. After a ten-day trial period, Daniel & Co. looked haler and healthier than the kids who fed on the path bag. The bursar continued to “carry” (remove? Keep for himself?) the king-allotted rations for the four and to serve them seeds instead. The kids are told to have done very well at the training, and when they came to the king, they were found to excel far beyond members of his senior administration.

Much of the exegetic chatter about this curious story focuses on Daniel’s refusal of the “path bag,” trying to establish precisely what was wrong with it. This is of deep interest to me, because I’ve been long interested in the awfulness of prison food, and Chad and I devoted much of the second chapter of FESTER to the horrific FUBAR of prison kitchens during COVID-19 (some of this story, complete with original emails, is here.) Of course, most religious commentators are not quite interested in that: rather, they spend their exegetical energy on explaining that Daniel et al. were trying to adhere to kashruth laws, the provenance of which is the ritual slaughter instruction in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, but which were far from developed in the early exilic period. Other commentators hypothesize that the four young Judahites were concerned about the possible use of the king’s meat and wine as libations to foreign gods. The dietary discussion among commentators then becomes a halakhic “hook” for backdating cleanliness and kashruth to the biblical text, thus creating linkages between the Torah prohibitions and the meticulous kashruth industrial complex of later periods. There’s a broader context to all this: revulsion at another nation’s food is often a proxy for differentiation, separation, setting oneself apart. As Daphne Barak-Erez explains in Outlawed Pigs, disgust of pig flesh has deep roots in Jewish tradition, and its implications persist to this day, and it could explain why this diet thing might have resonated as much as it has (it’s also worth considering, as I’m reminded by Rabbi Adam Chalom, that the Book of Daniel was likely composed during the Hellenistic period, when swine sacrifices and diet-based persecutions would explain the central role of diet in this story). As a secular humanistic Jew interested in penology, though, I find these particulars ancillary to the much more fundamental question about this curious story: what sort of facility, regime, or program, was this, exactly, and how does it relate to the overall Babylonian colonial project?

The exposition to the story places it in the context of the conquering of Jerusalem and seems to suggest an administrative response straight out of the playbook of colonial governance: identify potential leaders among the nobility of conquered population, remove them from potential leadership positions among their populace, bring them to the metropole, and coopt them into the colonial scheme through middle-management positions within the metropolitan government apparatus. Where this program lies along the continuum between benign and sinister, empowering and coercive, is fairly unclear. What we do know is this: Daniel, Hananya, Mishael, and Azarya are still children when the story takes place, and alongside them there are many other children subject to the same regime, most of which are not Judahites. The quartet (perhaps like all children in the program) is given Babylonian names (Belshatzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed Nego), a practice reminiscent of the “entry rituals” that Erving Goffman describes in Total Institutions. They are entrusted to the care of a high official (perhaps a minister, perhaps a eunuch), and their period of confinement, as explained above, includes an educational/vocational component: they are to learn Babylonian and the art of Babylonian governance, and when their three years of training conclude, they are expected to take a role in the Babylonian administration. They receive state-provided rations (“Path Bag HaMelech”) that are uniform for all residents of the facility. There is a special functionary who is responsible for the provision of foods, and he is identified as the “meltzar” (a word that will come to mean “waiter” or “server” in modern Hebrew.) It is also made clear that this is a high-stakes program: Ashpenaz himself—marked as a high administrator in Nebuchadnezzar’s court and clearly the chief administrator of this course or facility—is personally responsible for the welfare of his wards, to the point that his own head might roll should the king see that the children are upset, and that he feels comfortable enough with his wards to confide in them regarding this concern—a high official fostering amity with captive children who feel empowered enough to complain about their diets (and even to propose what might be the first Biblical experiment that has a valid control group!), presumably trying to get on their good side and eliciting their sympathy against the king. That the children’s welfare (not just their health, but their satisfaction) rates so highly with the king seems to speak well of his colonial enterprise, though the later stories in Daniel will do much to blemish his character. In any case, the fact that an entire story is devoted to the diet incident reminds me so much of what I know about the culinary aspect of CDCR administration, that I can only imagine the paper trail of the whole thing looking more or less like this:

***

From: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: Saga-Saltiyas@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Pat-Bag Supplies

Hey Saga how’s your night going.

Well as for here, it’s not going too good. I got four kids here starting to act out over the food and I don’t blame them. We’re now giving everyone the King’s Path-Bag and wine and four kids are asking for special vegetarian ratios. Right now we don’t have special meals for anyone. They say eating our food defiles them. Hope there is something we can do. I think it’s going to get really bad really fast around here if other kids start asking for vegetarian food. Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

***

From: Saga-Saltiyas@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

CC: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Re: Pat-Bag Supplies

Hey Pahas, that’s the correct meal. Everyone gets the same meal, no special problems because of “defilement.”

Sir Ashpenaz, anything we can do to improve upon this meal? The fellas aren’t enjoying it much and I worry.

Thank you

***

From: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: Beltis@MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Veg Meals

Beltis, can you find out if we can order legumes cost-effective for four inmates for a few days? The king’ll have my head if he sees they’re unhappy. –Ashpenaz

***

From: Beltis@MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Veg Meals

Minister Ashpenaz, my cousin Babasu works for Balasi Beans. They have a ten-day special for a bean and seed combo I can order per person. Pls confirm.

***

From: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: Beltis@MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Veg Meals

Conf’d. Pls liaise directly with Pahas-Bel on next steps.

***

From: Balasi@BalasiBeans.com

To: Beltis@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

CC: Babasu@BalasiBeans.com

Subject: Order Confirmation

Order no. 1:14

Balasi Beans – Quality Legumes for a Great Price

Order Confirmation

Hi Beltis,

Thank you for your purchase!

We will send you another email once your order ships.

Many Thanks,

Balasi Beans

Bean and Seed Combo: Ten-day special  x 4

***

From: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

To: HealthServices@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

CC: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Beans

Dear Dr. Shala,

  1. Inmate no. 49596 Muhibu is suffering from uncleanliness and inflammation. He is due for his alcohol, honey, and myrrh preparation. Can you grind it here for him?
  2. Kids no. 30303, 23041, 30453, and 30340, Shadrach, Mischach, Abed-Nego, and Belshatzar, have been approved a diet of bean and seed combo. If effective in maintaining participants’ health, Minister of Eunuchs says we might reorder for the whole prison. Can you check how they are doing after ten days?

***

From: HealthServices@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

To: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

CC: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Beans

Just did initial assessment on the four kids you specified and a few kids receiving the usual rations. Will report back in ten days. –Dr. Shala

***

From: HealthServices@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

To: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

CC: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Beans Follow-Up

Pahas-Bel: I just stopped by the prison to take vitals and metrics from the four seed-eating kids and the control group. The seed-eating children seem to be doing better than the control group. If the king is so inclined, I would recommend ordering from Balasi Beans for the entire facility, but I won’t push it. In any case, there is no medical reason to prevent the children from eating seeds and beans.

***

From: CorrectionalCounseling@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Participants no. 30303, 23041, 30453, and 30340

Dear Sir Ashpenaz,

In anticipation for the appearance of Participants no. 30303, 23041, 30453, and 30340 (Shadrach, Meschach, Abed-Nego, and Belshatzar) before His Majesty the King, we have conducted exit interviews. The children wish to thank you for accommodating their dietary requests and to especially commend Pahas-Bel for his cooperation.

***

From: MinisterOfEunuchs@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

To: Pahas-Bel@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl

CC: HealthServices@BabelPrisonsBureau.gov.bbl; CorrectionalCounseling@BabelPrisonBureau.gov.bbl

Subject: Path-Bag Discrepancy

Hi Pahas,

I’m looking at the books in preparation for the exit interview of the Judahite kids with His Royal Majesty and have to account for the Path-Bag rations they did not consume. I see three years’ worth of legume orders from Babasu, but I don’t see that the overall amount of path bag was reduced accordingly. What did you do with the meat and wine? Pls advise.

***

As some of you may know, the diet story is only the first of six court stories that found their way into the first half of the Book of Daniel. One of the more famous ones involves Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed Nego thrown into a furnace and emerging hale and healthy, which inspired this awesome gospel song:

Shadrach, Meschach, and Abed Nego, sung by the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet

Another famous one involves Daniel, whose fortunes rise and fall quite dramatically in the first half of the book, being thrown into a lion’s den, inspiring works like this:

Daniel in the Lions’ Den, by Rubens

That the diet story was important enough to be a precursor to these dramatic tales tells me two things. First, that the confinement regime in Chapter 1 is being seen as part and parcel of the overall political/administrative arsenal at Nebuchadnezzar’s disposal: classic corporal punishments, like the furnace and the lions, do not exist to the exclusion of confinement, but rather alongside it. One wonders whether the spectacularly corporal punishments of Daniel & Co. are unique to them, in the sense of singling them out of the other young people, while the confinement regime was everyone’s baseline in the program, or was everyone in the program at risk of ending up “down in the hole” with the lions if they fell out of favor.

Relatedly, that all these royal reactions are being deployed is designed to paint a story of fractured, erratic, capricious governmentality. Not unlike the Pharaoh we meet in Joseph’s incarceration story (which will also be extensively told in the new book), Nebuchadnezzar runs the sort of administration where the fates of his underlings–especially his foreign subjects–widely swing up and down. This either reflects the erratic nature of these monarchies, or adds to the fairy tale aspect of the story by exaggerating the mobility and changing fortunes of the protagonists. It’s also notable that, like in the Joseph story, there’s very little in the way of institutional memory: if the confinement form ch1 incurred stigma, it hasn’t impacted Daniel’s fate later. This wild reversal of fortune continues throughout the stories: after a meteoric rise in the Babylonian administration, Daniel’s prospects seem to have changed for the worse in chapter 4, only to dramatically rise again when he interprets the king’s dream (this and other aspects of the story are why some commentators think that the Daniel and Joseph stories are versions of the same tale, and thus date Joseph’s prison story to the exilic period as well). There’s also a lot of elasticity in the use and misuse of power. We see exalted people afraid their heads will roll if some foreign kid complains to the king. And on the other hand, it looks like Daniel & Co., who are kids–and foreign kids, at that–feel comfortable not only complaining about a diet that does not work for them (quite rudely, too! Imagine telling an Emperor that his royal banquet fare defiles you!), but also proposing an experiment to gauge the health benefits of the diet they demand. They also seem to possess real savvy about who to deal with, and how, in a total institution: when negotiations with the higher-up authority hit a hurdle, they make a deal with the bursar on the sly. Not only that, but they are taken seriously enough that, even when the experiment succeeds, they are served legumes and water until their time is up.

Rainbow Brenner

Two friends, young, poor, bright, and full of promise, sit together in a shabby room in Warsaw. They are joyous, for not only do they have food and oil to light the furnace—a rare occurrence—but also a fresh-from-the-presses literary journal issue, containing a new poem by a famous poet they both admire. They recite the poem to each other, squealing, frolicking, then leap into each other’s embrace, as the fire burns in the furnace and a candle flickers on the table.

The two young men were Yosef Haim Brenner, among the most celebrated and appreciated Hebrew revival novelists and essayists, and Uri-Nissan Gnessin, a master of the short story in Hebrew and Yiddish. Intimate friends since their yeshiva days under the tutelage of Gnessin’s father in Pochep, Ukraine, the two ended up at the frontlines of literary innovation in Hebrew. They traveled across Europe fighting poverty and shirking military service. Brenner ended up living in a shabby room in East London, working long hours as a typesetter to fund his passion: his literary journal Ha’Meorer (“The Awakener”), a serial publication of Hebrew fiction, essays, and poetry. Gnessin edited Nisyonot (“attempts,”) a periodic collection of short stories. In 1907, after much deliberation, Gnessin joined Brenner in London, but the friends’ attempt at a shared life went sour within a few weeks and the two broke all contact. Brenner immigrated to Eretz Israel (then part of the Ottoman empire) in 1909 and, after a short and unsuccessful attempt at agricultural labor, moved to Jaffa and resumed his intellectual and creative career, venerated by members of the Yishuv for his originality and creative genius despite frequent controversies stemming from his controversial, strident writing. Gnessin returned to Pochep and in 1912 moved to Warsaw, already gravely ill with a congenital heart condition, a fact unknown to Brenner and to most, or all, of their circle of friends. On his deathbed he cried out Brenner’s name. The year was 1913, Gnessin was 33 old at his death, and when Brenner heard of Gnessin’s death, he was devastated. His moving eulogy to his intimate friend, “Uri-Nissan: A Few Words,” is at the heart of this paper.

Brenner married and fathered a child, whom he named Uri-Nissan and doted on, but divorced while his son was an infant. He then rented a room at a ranch in the outskirts of Jaffa, where he mentored an unknown young author, Yosef Luidor, and invited Luidor to live with him. In 1921, during a horrific pogrom in Jaffa, Brenner and several other authors, including Luidor, were horrifically brutalized and murdered at their lodging. The crime scene was so heinous, and reflected such atrocious slaughter and torture, that details were kept confidential even as the murder filled newspaper headlines, and many of the facts remain unknown to this day.

While Brenner’s books and essays are still regarded as the pinnacle of artistic merit in the Hebrew language, and his many novels, including his final masterpiece Skhol VeKishalon (“Bereavement and Failure”), are cited as inspiration by many Israeli literary giants, his works are no longer widely read beyond a small circle of literature connoisseurs. But in recent years, there has been a surge of interest in, and controversy around, Brenner—not for his literature and ideology, but for his personal, romantic, and sexual life.

The two works that sparked these controversies were literary critic Menahem Perry’s nonfiction work Sit on Me and Warm Up: The Homoerotic Dialogue of Brenner and Gnessin (Tel Aviv: The New Library, 2020), and novelist Alon Hilu’s speculative novel Murder at the Red House (Tel Aviv: Yediot, 2018). Perry’s book painstakingly recreates Brenner and Gnessin’s London misadventure, whereas Hilu’s book offers a shocking, lurid narrative that casts the murders of Brenner and Luidor as stemming from a doomed homoerotic triangle. The turmoil and heat generated by both books is the subject of this paper.

My interest is not in the was-he-or-wasn’t-he question; there is plenty in Brenner’s tortured personal life to suggest that he was a complicated man, and as to his suspected and confirmed romantic entanglements, we know that some were tragic (Gnessin), some tender (Luidor), and some, as we will see, unsavory, especially to a 21st century reader. We also know that Brenner was plagued by debilitating mental illness—perhaps depression, perhaps bipolar disorder—and it is not a stretch to hypothesize that his emotional suffering was related at least in part to his unconventional sexuality, as well as to the fact that such sexual feelings and desires, though certainly present and not uncommon, were deeply stigmatized and unspoken among the halutzim and absent from public discourse in Israel until the 1960s. What I do wonder about is the sudden cultural appetite for the sexual and romantic entanglements of a man murdered more than a century ago: What, beyond prurience, can explain this recent interest in Brenner’s sexuality? Does the speculation, investigation, and debate regarding Brenner’s queerness contribute to our understanding of his work or his death, and if so, how?

Perry’s Sit On Me and Be Warm: Investigating and Reading Between the Gaps

    Most serious Brenner biographers unflinchingly accept that Gnessin was his first and biggest love interest, and that the relationship, as well as Gnessin’s premature death, deeply impacted Brenner’s life and work. You can see some of these comments in Yair Kedar’s terrific documentary HaMeorer (2016), a beautiful film I recommend you watch in its entirety:

    Shai Zarhi comments:

    Gnessin was truly the love of his life; I really do think he was the love of his life. They emerged together and they started writing together. You know, they went through formative experiences together, that create a friendship… a very big love. And with difficulty, because both of them were very complicated people.

    The most harmonious and idealized expression of this relationship is an episode described in Brenner’s eulogy for Gnessin (1913), which centers around a poem by Haim Nahman Bialik titled “On a Sunny, Warm Day.” The poem proceeds in three parts, corresponding to three seasons. In the first, the narrator joyously a friend (“pleasant brother,” “blessed of God”) to his garden during the hot summer months. The second part, which is especially relevant to Perry’s inquiry, reads:

    When the black cold of a winter’s night
    bruises you with its icy pinch
    and frost sticks knives in your shivering flesh,
    then come to me, blessed of God.

    My dwelling is modest, lacking splendor,
    but warm and bright and open to strangers.
    A fire’s in the grate, on the table a candle –
    my lost brother, sit with me and get warm.

    When we hear a cry in the howling storm
    we will think of the destitute starving outside.
    We will weep for them – honest pitiful tears.
    Good friend, my brother, let us embrace.

    וּבְלֵיל חֹרֶף, לֵיל קֹר, עֵת מַחֲשַׁכִּים וּשְׁחוֹר
    יְשׁוּפוּךָ בַּחוּץ, הוֹלֵךְ סוֹבֵב הַקֹּר,
    וּבִבְשָׂרְךָ כִּי-יִתְקַע מַאַכְלוֹתָיו הַכְּפוֹר –
    בֹּא אֵלַי, בֹּא אֵלַי, בְּרוּךְ אֲדֹנָי!
     
    בֵּיתִי קָטָן וָדַל, בְּלִי מַכְלוּלִים וּפְאֵר,
    אַךְ הוּא חָם, מָלֵא אוֹר וּפָתוּחַ לַגֵּר,
    עַל-הָאָח בֹּעֵר אֵשׁ, עַל-הַשֻּׁלְחָן הַנֵּר –
    אֶצְלִי שֵׁב וְהִתְחַמֵּם, אָח אֹבֵד!
     
    וּבְהִשָּׁמַע מִילֵל סוּפַת לֵיל קוֹל כָּאוֹב,
    זָכֹר נִזְכֹּר עֱנוּת רָשׁ גֹּוֵע בָּרְחוֹב,
    וּלְחַצְתִּיךָ אֶל-לֵב, רֵעִי, אָחִי הַטּוֹב –
    וּרְסִיס נֶאֱמָן אוֹרִידָה עָלֶיךָ

    In the third part of the poem, however, describing the fall season, the narrator wishes for solitude, begging his “merciful brother” to leave him alone, away from others’ prying eyes.

    In his eulogy for Gnessin, Brenner reminisces about an evening in Warsaw, in which Gnessin returned from the printer with a fresh copy of the literary journal Luah Ahiasaf, containing the poem’s first-ever appearance in print, on an auspicious evening “when we had bread, tea, oil for the lamp, a warm fireplace.” By this time, Brenner and Gnessin were 19 and 21 years old, respectively, both out of the yeshiva and living secular lives. Brenner describes what happened next:

    We sat, both of us, during dinner, and began: “On a warm, sunny day, when high noon makes the sky a fiery furnace and the heart seeks a quiet corner for dreams”, etc., etc., – a song by H. N. Bialik!- and after a little while, when we finished our meal, we already stood facing each other, knowing the poem by heart.

    “A shady carob tree grows in my garden” – he emphasized every word with a sensuous, physical pleasure…

    “And when the black cold of a winter’s night” – I extended a howl toward him…

    “My dwelling is modest, lacking splendor” – he squealed, frolicking, and in his frolic “sat on me and got warm” while reciting “sit on me and get warm,” intoned “a cry in the howling storm,” imitated, with extended limbs, a “destitude starving outside,” jumped, shook, and then “pressed me to his heart,” his “brother, good friend” –

    And suddenly –

    The tear that had been sent in the letter from Pochep to Bialistok sparkled in his eye, and then another dropped –

    “honest, pitiful tears,

    Friend of my youth!”

    Our bones shook, and in the furnace a fire burned, and on the table the candle…

    Brenner’s description of the evening suggests harmony and mutuality, and his heartbreak over the rift with Gnessin is evident. Gnessin, however, never shared his own perspective on his relationship with Brenner, and though his biographer Anita Shapira observes that he sometimes expressed disgust with his friend, she still believes that they were “two opposites attracted to each other: Gnessin, tall, handsome, the Rabbi’s son, and Brenner, the plebeian, short, somewhat fat.” Shai Zarhi describes Gnessin as “completely different from Brenner. He was fastidious, delicate, a prince. But Gnessin’s special sensitivities, which created this deep connection—they were both people who were very sensitive to the soul.”

    Perry’s resulting literary investigation led him to posit a much darker, unsavory picture of the relationship, which Perry links to a cynical interpretation of Bialik’s poem. In a nutshell, Perry sees “On a Sunny, Warm Day” as a prime example of a typical Bialik semiotic device, which Perry refers to as a “reversing poem.” In such a poem, readers are led to interpret the song in a certain way, only to find themselves confronted, later in the poem, with new, contrasting information that sheds a new light on the earlier part. Perry believes that, in “On a Sunny, Warm Day,” this mechanism plays out to reverse our opinion of the protagonist’s desire to commune with his friend, suggested by the first two sections: the summer and the winter. When we discover that, in the fall, the protagonist wishes for solitude and distance, it casts doubt and undermines the credibility of his previously expressed enthusiasm for companionship and intimacy.

    Perry believes that Bialik’s reversing song is the key that unlocks Brenner and Gnessin’s relationship and also explains the rift that tore them apart during Gnessin’s stay in London, which is evident from Brenner’s words of despair in his friend’s memory:

    Neither him nor I expected anything from his arrival in London, and nevertheless we were both as if cheated… as if we both had hoped that our meeting would be different, that our relationship would be different, that our lives together would be different.

    And sometimes I thought: Everyone speaks of suffering. The word suffering is carried on every tongue. About us, as well—we are sufferers. Hebrew authors, exiles in East London, sickly, poor, etc. etc. But what could people know about the measure of suffering of this relation, that is between me and Uri-Nissan, my Uri-Nissan…

    In the few good moments, of which there certainly were some then, hearts were joined and purified from the impurities of resentment. Then we both understood, that I am not at fault, that he is not at fault, that we are not at fault, only disaster lies upon us.

    What was the “disaster”? To reconstruct those few fateful weeks, Perry engages in a maximalist reading of all documentary evidence of the London weeks, looking for details neglected or ignored by prior biographers, and “raising the concentration level” of the information about the relationship amidst the less important clues. He doggedly pursues clues in Gnessin’s letters to Brenner and others, painstakingly reconstructs the friends’ respective lodgings and employment situations in Whitechapel, and even travels to London to walk their paths and verify the feasibility of their intentional and accidental meetings. The resulting portrayal is one of a relationship that those of us inclined toward couples’ therapy (though not Perry) would easily armchair-diagnose as “anxious-avoidant.״ Gnessin, Perry believes, was always conflicted about his relationship with Brenner, fearful of him, and repelled by his exaggerated mannerisms and aggressive pursuit. His known romantic entanglements were with women, whom he treated shallowly and callously, and he teased Brenner with the same ambivalence that he teased some of his female lovers, including Yiddish poet Celia Drapkin, who attempted suicide after Gnessin rejected her. Perry documents Brenner’s repeated pestering and supplications that Gnessin, who was traveling throughout Europe, join him in London. After several evasions, Gnessin finally arrived in London in 1907, and during his stay there, for a few weeks shared close quarters with Brenner. Perry’s detective work suggests that the two shared not only a room, but a bed, and he hypothesizes that they also shared sexual intimacy. The experience was far from mutual and short-lived. Gnessin fled Brenner, quickly found a female lover and moved in with her, and never spoke to Brenner again. Perry carefully analyzes one of Brenner’s letters, in which he recalls walking to a public park and bitterly weeping there, and literally follows in Brenner’s footsteps in London, concluding that Brenner walked across the entire city to see Gnessin, who at this time lodged as far away from him as possible.

    Casting Gnessin as the solitude-seeking narrator of the “autumn” section of Bialik’s poem, Perry shows that, at the time of his London visit, Gnessin was already aware of his congenital heart disease and his impending death. It was due to this heavy emotional burden that Gnessin shied away from deep connections and commitment, and his disease was known to no one (Perry mines the autobiography of Asher Beilin, who lived near Gnessin and Brenner in London, and finds Beilin’s assertions that he knew of Gnessin’s disease unreliable.) Brenner’s deep grief at Gnessin’s passing, Perry surmises, stems from the fact that he finally understood the source of his beloved’s avoidance and hostility, and agonized over having judged him and snapped at him. In particular, Perry is attentive to an anecdote Brenner describes in the eulogy: Gnessin, who worked as a typesetter for Brenner’s journal Ha’Meorer, made a typographic error, and in Brenner’s apology for the late publication, set the editor’s note to read, instead of “please accept it [the issue] with my apologies,” “please accept me with my apologies.” Brenner’s recollection of how he fumed at Gnessin for the error is impregnated with guilt and anguish, and Perry believes that this might have been Gnessin’s subconscious effort to apologize to Brenner for his rejection, an effort that Brenner recognized only posthumously.

    Sit On Me and Be Warm became a lightning rod in the literary world. Perry is a venerated professor of Hebrew literature, the author of countless articles and essays, and the editor of several prestigious book series, and most of Israel’s literary circle consists of his former students. This hegemony has antagonized people who believe that their lack of fealty to Perry has harmed their careers, and that his work is unserious, as he is coasting on his earlier successes and established reputation. One of these critics, Ha’aretz literary critic Orin Morris, refers to Perry’s book as an “abject failure” (2017), and writes:

    This could have been an excellent book, had Professor Perry striven to do what is expected of a reasonable biographer. That is, to make do with existing materials. Instead, Perry decides to play the part of a detective, but he has to invent a mystery, because a mystery does not exist here at all, but Perry cannot let go of the glory of a land discoverer, even in a world in which all continents have been already found for quite some time. That’s why validating the mystery is so full of effort, puffing, and sweating.

    Morris rejects Perry’s “fanciful” interpretation of the Bialik poem as negating Gnessin’s attraction to Brenner. But more importantly, he expresses reservations about Perry’s project at all:

    [Brenner’s] ambiguous sexuality is among the most open secrets of Hebrew literary gossip. What was he? Celibate, monastic, shy, horny, a latent homosexual, a friend to children—what difference does it make. Like any person, he had an assortment of desires and abhorrences, and like any person, his sexuality was mostly his own business. Perhaps he tried to put order into his excitement over the touch of Gnessin, who was a known seductor. Perhaps, but that is not grounds for a book, and certainly for this kind of book. . . in addition, about a century after the acceptance of Freudian theory, we can easily leave the following question open: if any lengthy, strong male friendship, a youth friendship, carries the echo of homoerotic secrecy, what is the sensation here?

    A few days later, an irate Perry responds, also in a Ha’aretz article:

    Morris’ critique completely misses the quality of the story I’m telling, a story that I by no means claim to be true and final. The intellectual adventure in the book—which describes a multistage love story and not the story of acts, a story that centers a Bialik song and a famous typographical error. . . provides hypotheses justified by the fact that they accommodate an ocean of details that were either neglected or marginalized or unknown before, and allow them to coalesce. To undermine this narrative suggestion one has to propose a better counterstory, or to explain why this standard for deciding between stories—by examining them and comparing their capacity to make meaning of details that were left neglected in other readings—is farfetched.

    Yehuda Vizan’s ferocious critique of Perry’s work is of a different nature, and is titled “the fall of a giant”—referring, of course, not to Brenner, but to Perry himself:

    There’s an especially aggressive academic fad here, an additional layer to the “discourse,” not to say neoliberal propaganda masquerading as literary research, the fruit of French fornication that became further contaminated in the United States, and arrived here to us, unenlightened savages that we are, with fashionable tardiness—in which scholars compete, perhaps with homoerotic pleasure—whose is bigger, that is, who has identified a bigger author in whose work, or letters, or a note on the fridge of his former neighbor, there is a hint, vague as might be, that he considered flipping the table, or perhaps did not, but would have liked to. Or maybe did not consider, or wish to, but dissociated with all his might his homoerotic fleshly desires, which might explain his antipathy toward women in his adult life, and circularly then proves the homoerotic tone of his works, etc.

    Vizan is especially incensed by the fact that Perry himself, in an interview he gave to Vizan a decade earlier, decried the identitarian-ideological turn in literature and literature scholarship, complaining that ideology and gender theory “have nothing to do with literature” and are selectively deployed for the purpose of confirming theories of academics. He wonders about Perry’s megalomania and apparent change of heart about identitarianism, asking, “why, of all the topics in the world, would a liberal, Tel Avivi, enlightened author, in 2017, in the Eighth decade of his life, choose to write about “the homoerotic dialogue between Brenner and Gnessin? What is it good for? Whom, exactly, does it serve?”

    Vizan’s answer is that it serves mostly Perry himself:

    Perry’s new book, more than it is a story about “the homoerotic dialogue between Brenner and Gnessin, is the story of the fall of a giant who became, in his dotage, a hostage. His kidnapping finally confirms what has been known for a while: the changing of the guard in Hebrew academia, and the role flip between the former teachers (Perry) and their students (Gluzman), who now lead them, defeated and bludgeoned. . . mumbling others’ words with the heartwrenching, human, and understandable hope to remain relevant, to remain just a little bit loved, not necessarily homoerotically.

    Arik Glassner’s critique, far less vicious than Vizan’s, more constructively addresses the heart of the problem. Glassner admires Perry’s pedantic and dogged documentation, though he gently admonishes him for his “excessive appetite for piquancy,” and he highlights the complexity around the appropriateness of Perry’s inquiry:

    The question of “Brenner the fairy” is not mere gossip. Erotic distress is at the heart of the Brennerian creation, and therefore the question of the precise nature of the distress that preoccupied Brenner the person has deep meaning for the interpretation of his work as well. As opposed to Orin Morris’ critique in Ha’aretz, which sparked a heated debate on social media (including the brilliant argument that the conflicted relationship between Perry and Dan Miron as central to this book as the one between Brenner and Gnessin)—I think Perry represents a legitimate question here. Nevertheless, I do think that this position, the “Question of Brenner the Fairy,” which Perry sharpened and enhanced with the question of Gnessin’s reticence, does not quite hit the heart of the matter.

    Glassner leaves open the question of the literary relevance of Brenner’s sexuality, and we will return to it. But first, we turn to another recent treatment of Brenner’s biography that eclipses even Perry’s.

    Hilu’s Murder at the Red House: Sexuality, Mystery, Horror, and Thrill

      If Perry’s book provoked sharp critique, Hilu’s Murder at the Red House, a fictional, speculative novel, caused uproar. Hilu, no stranger to mining the biographies of historical figures, is known for playing fast and loose with the boundaries between fact and fiction. His previous book, The Dajani Estate (2008) is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which a Zionist agronomist, Haim Klorinsky (a real historical figure), starts an affair with a married Arab woman, Afifah, and takes over her estate after her husband suddenly dies. Afifa’s son, Salah, is convinced that Klorinsky murdered his father. The book made a splash,[1] and Hilu was praised for his virtuosic use of historical Hebrew and Arabic, but panned for his one-sided, villainizing perspective on Zionism. More importantly, Hilu was accused, by the Klorinsky estate, by author Aharon Meged and even by Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein, of deliberately misrepresenting the legacy of a man who was known for his friendly and cooperative approach to the Arab population and his firm commitment to peaceful coexistence. Hilu eventually admitted that his purported reliance on real personal diaries was fabricated, and that the diary pages he had supposedly reproduced in the book were forged; after a mediation process between him and the Klorinsky estate, Hilu changed the protagonist’s name in subsequent editions, and added a lengthy disclaimer at the beginning of the book.

      Either out of a sincere commitment to historical authenticity, or in a desire to avoid a second legal kerfuffle for maligning eminent cultural figures, Hilu equipped Murder at the Red House with two preemptive disclaimers. In a detailed afterword, he accurately and assiduously documented the known facts about the murder of Brenner and his companions. The trigger for the 1921 Pogrom was a violent clash between two May Day protests of rivaling Jewish political parties. The British police quelled the violence and pushed the communists to the Jewish neighborhood of Neve Shalom. The communists unleashed their furor against the police, the Jewish landlords, and their Arab neighbors, by continuing to provocatively wave red flags and sing the International in the vicinity of the Arab neighborhood of Manshiye. Fisticuffs broke, which escalated into a bloody armed conflict, in which hundreds on both sides were killed. The Hebrew authors’ murders occurred the next day and, save for the fame of the victims, would probably have been seen as one violence site among many. It is also known that, on the day before the murders, an Arab “lad” of an unknown age had disappeared, and his family had inquired after him at the Red House. Shortly before the murders, the neighboring Arab village held a funeral for a boy (it is unknown whether it was the same boy.) And it is unquestionably true that massive efforts were made to send a vehicle to Jaffa, to evacuate the house’s residents, and that they refused, sending some bee keepers who stayed with them, the Lerer family, in the vehicle in their stead. The Lerers attested that, the day before the murders, Luidor was sexually assaulted by a gang from Nablus and rescued by a Jewish man, and that he was deeply shaken by this experience. They also mentioned at the police inquest that there were hostilities between the residents of the Red House and an Arab gardner, Murad Alkarnawi, who cared for the nearby orchards.

      In the introduction, he flags the holes in the evidence, which he sets out to speculate about in the novel:

      What were the reasons that [Brenner and his author friends] gathered at the house on the day of the murder despite the turbulent political climate and despite the house’s dangerous location amidst Arab villages? What were the relationships between the residents? What was the reason for their incomprehensible (and ultimately fateful) choice not to get into the escape vehicle that arrived to pick them up the day before they were murdered? What were their connections with the Arab inhabitants of the nearby village, Abu Kabir? . . . Why were the bodies mutilated? What became of the body of Yosef Luidor? Was there a connection between the death of an Arab boy from the nearby village and the collective lynching?

      There could be numerous ways to bridge these narrative gaps, but Hilu chooses to augment and center the possibility that the murder plot was closely related to sexual conduct and misconduct by Brenner and Luidor. As we saw in Perry’s book, this possibility, while explored in deeply unsettling directions, is far from being out of character for Brenner. Even Brenner biographers and documenters far less prurient than Perry all accept as plausible that he was attracted to men. Haim Be’er documents his mentoring relationships with young men and suggests that future biographers might explore these through a homosexual lens. Moreover, there is at least one confirmed story of a close, intimate, physical friendship (hugging and kissing), between Brenner and his landlords’ twelve-year-old daughter, Rachel Katinkaץ In interviews decades later, Katinka remembered the friendship fondly, expressed unreserved affection and warmth for Brenner, and mentioned that they remained in loving connection throughout her young adulthood, marriage, and motherhood, until his murder. Nevertheless, the relationship seems deeply unsavory, even predatory, through the lens of 21st century sensibilities, and even at the time, Brenner himself must have felt ambivalent about its morality, and about his own sexual proclivities; as early as 1907, he commented in Yiddish to Hillel Zeitlin that “the difference between pure and impure hands regarding [sexual behavior] is unclear to me”, and he left the Katinka home in haste in 1909.

      Playing up the sexual possibilities to the max, Hilu’s Rashomon-style tale is narrated from three perspectives, starting with Luidor’s. Rescued by Brenner—the “Great Author”—from isolation and abject poverty, and invited to reside at the Red House, Luidor is initially grateful to Brenner and flattered by his attentions, until he learns that of Benner’s sexual interest in him. After initially rejecting Brenner’s unwanted advances, he succumbs, finding the experience traumatic and repellant. A lovesick Brenner promises to stop pestering Luidor if the latter refrains from having sex with another men. But unbeknownst to Brenner and others, Luidor meets and falls in love with an Arab “lad”, Abd’ul Wahab, and the two enjoy a beautiful, idealized romantic relationship in various hideouts around the neighboring Arab village, Abu Kabir. When Abd’ul Wahab disappears, Luidor frantically searches for him, coming upon what he believes to be a murder scene, and is immediately and brutally ambushed and sexually assaulted by a gang of Nablus men. Before he can compose himself, a group of beekeepers arrive at the house, alarming the inhabitants by telling them about a wave of pogroms against Jews in Jaffa and seeking shelter. The residents decide to leave the house immediately, and a rescue vehicle, procured with great effort, arrives to evacuate them. But Luidor has received a note from Abd’ul Wahab’s young sister, informing him that his lover is seriously ill and wishes to see him, and refuses to board the vehicle. Halfway to Tel Aviv, Brenner exits the vehicle and returns to the house, the others on his heels, and reunites with Luidor, explaining: “if I am unwilling to risk my life for my love, I do not deserve to be called a human, let alone a Hebrew author.” At night, news of Abd’ul Wahab’s death reach the house. It is too late to evacuate, but they decide to take shifts defending the house from a possible mob with the only rifle they have. A local cop, Ali Arafath, whom they consider an ally, offers to help, and they reveal to him their plan to flee through the back door during Abd’ul Wahab’s funeral.

      The second narrator is Murad Alkarnawi, an old gardener, reminiscing about the events forty years later. His special connection to the orchard trees is disrupted when the Red House’s owner, Mantura, leases the house to the Jewish ranchers, who frighten and repel him. He is especially unsettled by the Jewish authors—especially “the bearded one,” Brenner, and “the limping one,” Luidor—whom he catches lovemaking in the orchard and alarming the trees. After he complains about them to the rancher, the two steal a valuable ax from Murad’s shed, falsely accusing him of stealing it (the ax is a gift from German gardeners) and getting him in trouble with Officer Arafath.

      Murad is horrified to see “the limping one” grooming a young, dimwitted child (implied to be Abd’ul Wahab) and sexually assaulting him. The next day, the boy disappears, and his family frantically searches for him. The villagers are further alarmed by the May First labor parades and protests, in the ensuing violence, the dimwitted boy suddenly reappears, and is fatally shot in his stomach by a Jew. Murad, shoked and horrified, reports all he witnessed to Officer Arafath.

      During the boy’s funeral, the villagers carry improvised weapons, to defend themselves against Jewish attacks. Ali Arafath urges restraint, but the villagers are shocked to see “the limping man” peeping through the Red House’s second story window, threatening them with a rifle even as the funeral processes. The stress upsets  the donkey pulling the funeral cart, and when the boy’s corpse falls off the cart, “the limping man” deliberately shoots the innocent cart driver. The angry crowd storms the house, finding it empty, and then find the Jewish men—six of them, all armed—outside the house. The men shoot and kill many of the villagers.

      The third story, implied to be the true version, is narrated by Raneen, Abd’ul Wahab’s sister and the only fictional character in the book, in 1971 (on the fiftieth anniversary of the murder). In her recollection, Abd’ul Wahab is neither a child or dimwitted—he is a gentle, effeminate teenager. Raneen befriends the Jewish residents of the Red House, enchanted by the empowered women and the kind farmers, but mostly by a goodhearted man (Brenner), whom she calls “the bear.” Learning to sneak into the Red House, unobserved, Raneen notices that Bear is deeply in love with a man with manicured nails (Luidor), and then, with alarm, that Nails falls for her own brother—a love that becomes mutual. Ali Arafath finds out from Murad—known by the children to be frightening and mentally ill—about the affair, and shares his suspicions with Abd’ul Wahab and Raneen’s parents. After an ensuing conflict, Abd’ul Wahab leaves the home, asking Raneen to bring food for him to a hut where he intends to stay. When she delivers the food, she overhears Officer Arafath blackmailing her brother: if Abd`ul Wahab does not persuade the Jews to sell a cow and give Arafath five hundred francs, Arafath will reveal the illicit relationship to Abd`ul Wahab’s father. As the whole village searches for Abd’ul Wahab, Raneen arrives in the shed, finding her brother dying from a self-inflicted gunshot to the stomach. His last words are, “five hundred francs.”

      News of the death spread throughout the village. Amidst the collective horror and outcry, Ali Arafath orders Raneen to deliver a note to Nails (which we know is forged to appear from Raneen’s mother and claims Abd’ul Wahab is still alive). In this way, Arafath guarantees that Nails, and possibly the others, will choose not to evacuate, thus being present at the house when he orchestrates the raid during the funeral. Raneen, who does not know about the ploy, cooperates, and things unfold as Arafath had hoped: the officer exploits the funeral to incite the mourners against the Jews, falsely claiming that  Abd’ul Wahab was murdered by a Jewish officer, and pretending to help the Jews escape while directing the villagers to the back door. Arafath then orchestrates the Jews’ brutal massacre and torture, including the burning of Luidor’s corpse. At the criminal murder trial, Abd’ul Wahab’s father and Arafath are acquitted; the father flees the country, and Arafath is ambushed and murdered by the Haganah.

      Horrified and repelled by male violence, Raneen refuses to marry. Her eyesight, marred by the horrors she witnessed, deteriorates to almost complete blindness. Fifty years after the murder, she hears of a memorial for the murdered authors and attends it. She meets a Jewish woman of her own age, Rina, who is Yitzkar’s granddaughter. Raneen recalls meeting Rina at the Red House in their infancy, shares the full story of the murders wih her and, finally, finds peace.

      As the recipient of the Sapir prize for his previous novel, Hilu provoked a splash with Murder at the Red House, which was especially praised by queer critics. Filmmaker Gal Ohovsky’s laudatory review read:

      Despite the fact that it centers a love story between two men, this book cannot be described as a homosexual affair. As in [his previous books], Hilu uses homosexuality as a background for uncovering the subterranean currents between different cultures, opposing worldviews, and the documentation of human diversity. This is not a simple, beautiful, rewarding homosexual novel like “call me by your name.” What we do have here is a love-hate relationship between Luidor and Brenner who constantly desires him, and there is the complicated relationship between the Jewish intellectual and the Arab boy who, according to one of the versions, is a bit dimwitted. Homosexuality serves here as a way to examine prejudices and social taboos. With great delicacy, Hilu manages to tell a painful historical tale, and also to describe interpersonal sensitivity in an insensitive place. Whoever looks for an amiable telenovela featuring two men, in love and kissing, might be disappointed.

      Other reviews were far less sanguine. An editorial in Yisrael Hayom praised Hilu’s style of writing and his gift for intriguing the readers, but raised serious qualms about the ethics of Hilu’s creation:

      Is it appropriate to do so? Can a man produce a book that relates the fictional, or half-fictional, biographies of flesh-and-blood people and write in it whatever he fancies, tie to their characters any qualities, choices, deeds, and words that he wishes? Or should such freedom be limited to whoever writes on well-known people, who cannot hide in the shadow of their anonymity and their very celebrity kosherizes writing about them?

      An even more negative perspective was articulated by critic Maya Sela for Ha’aretz:

      The novel’s motto is “The early ones are not remembered” (Ecclesiastes 1: 11), as if the book intends to serve as a memorial. When I read it, a different biblical passage echoed in my ears as an alternative motto: “What have you done? Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground” (Genesis 4: 10). It was hard not to think of Hilu’s actions here as a sexual assault on history—a rather homophobic sexual assault, including completely stripping his characters of any humanity, thought or idea in favor of them being homosexuals and nothing else.

      But Sela’s main concern with Hilu’s work is with literature. She pans the way he crassly crafts the facts, admitting that many of the horrifying, gratuitously lurid details he revels in describing did not, by his own admission in the epilogue, actually happen. She then expresses grave concerns about the value of the literary exercise:

      The things the author wrote in the introduction and epilogue raise some substantial questions about literature and its role as intellectual amusement without any obligations—not to shaping, not to language, not to style, not to history, not to ethics, not to good taste, and not to the ancient, forgotten art of the storyteller. In that, the novel also exemplifies what can go wrong when authors do not write literature, but rather engage in sociology, gender, psychology, politics, and law. Maybe because this book was borne out of intellectual amusement, there is not a single moment where the reader can be sucked into the loose tale and find in it any logic, grace, or taste.

      Hilu tried to examine things that remained mysterious to him, but the truth is that there isn’t much of a mystery here. The six Jews were murdered because they were Jews who settled at a place where there were already people, as has happened since then to this day—Jews and Arabs fighting and killing each other in a war over the land.

      I fancied that I heard Brenner’s blood crying out to us from the Earth and begging that we stop sexually assaulting him, but it’s possible that he was crying the cry of literature. Perhaps he does not care about historical truth, perhaps he already understands postmodernism, he certainly understands melancholy and emptiness, but what will be of literature, he wonders, perhaps, still demanding the right to cry out.

      Is Brenner’s Work Queer Work, the Work of a Queer Author, Both, or Neither?

        Perry and Hilu critics seem to object to the use of Brenner’s sexuality as crass exploitation, wondering whether the two works are crafted to pander to the readers’ basest instincts, and wondering about the value of the exercise given what we already know, without such graphic elaboration on Brenner’s corporeality, about his conflicted sexuality. According to this critique, the blow-by-blow elaborations, fictional, speculative, or otherwise, contribute nothing to our lives beyond the satisfaction of prurient interests. But Arik Glassner, whose critique of Perry’s book I presented above, is willing to consider the questions of Brenner’s biography relevant to our understanding of his work. Elsewhere in his review he writes that the notion that the rift between Brenner and Gnessin stemmed from the latter’s “gay panic” and avoidance is “not preposterous, but it’s worth saying a few things about it”:

        First, it’s worth distinguishing between the question whether Brenner was attracted to Gnessin and the question whether Brenner was attracted to men at all. Regarding Gnessin specifically—perhaps. Regarding men in general, I’m doubtful. Shofman, a friend of Brenner’s and not at all a naïve man, wrote about Brenner that “his painful point” was the thought that women do not fancy him. In a critical essay about Poznansky, Brenner himself observes that Poznansky differs from others, and apparently from Brenner himself, “in that the erotic is not a touch of leprosy in the life [of Poznansky’s novel protagonists], but rather a welcome source of emotional glow, of magical ruminations, of lyrical sesntiments. ‘The worm of envy’ does not eat at the heart [of his protagonists]. Au contraire, may the senior student realists fraternize with the junior female students of the gymnasium—and all the power to them!” The implication is that the erotic is “a touch of leprosy” for those who envy others’ sexual successes. 

        I tend to think that the inner erotic world of Brenner’s protagonists is much closer to that of the protagonists of Ya’acov Shabtai and Hanokh Levine. In fact, Brenner, to me, is the one who made these protagonists possible in our culture. These are straight heroes who are haunted by sexual inferiority sentiments and envy of exploding virility, and the heartrendering esthetic treatment by the male triangle Brenner-Levine-Shabtai of these painful topics has made this theme central to Hebrew literature.

        Glassner’s point is well taken, but I submit that he does not take it far enough. While definitions of queer theory vary considerably, some suggest a broad understanding of the “queer gaze” (Burnston & Richardson 1995). According to these broader perspectives, one’s experience of being an outsider-looking-in, perennially feeling out of place in visible and invisible ways, code-switching, and sometimes furtively hiding in plain sight, in a heteronormative society where openness could sometimes result in serious life-threatening consequences, has the power of opening one’s eyes to many other displays of inequality, injustice, and exclusive assumptions—beyond those directly related to sexual identity or expression. The loneliness that can result from a closeted life could generate deep empathy for lonely people everywhere. Understanding how experiencing one’s own unconventional sexual attractions in a society where these things are unspoken (and would remain unspoken until the 1960s) can illuminate more general, and possibly coded, references to deep helplessness, a sense of “being stuck,” and experiences of shattered, fragmented identity.

        An instructive way to consider whether this perspective can add to our understanding and enjoyment of Brenner’s work is to see how he was read by critics and scholars of prior decades, for whom the personal/sexual biography aspect was inaccessible either because they had no idea of it or because it was taboo. In his 1977 book Brenner’s Art of Story, Yaacov Even, whose analysis never veers anywhere near Brenner’s interiority (sexual or otherwise), sees the central theme of Brenner’s work as the struggle of a complicated hero—usually a former yeshiva student turned secular, almost devoid of friendship and intimacy, and unmoored from his cultural context even as he strips off the suffocating confinement of the religious world—to survive in an ugly, unjust, alienated world that in need of urgent moral and spiritual repair. This general truth manifests in different ways in Brenner’s novels. In Winter (1904) the hero, departing the shtetl for a big Russian city and joining a circle of intellectuals, discovers that his new milieu is nothing more than a modern manifestation of the ghetto he left behind. In From Here and There (1911), the hero is similarly disillusioned with the New York City underworld (set in the Lower East Side and resembling Brenner’s Whitechapel’s experience). Several of Brenner’s novels—notably, Beyond the Border (1907)—paint the world’s oppressiveness and cruelty at its most extreme through descriptions of compulsory military service and various carceral settings for military defectors. And lest these appear to suggest that the answer to these conflicts is Eretz Israel, Brenner’s greatest work, Bereavement and Failure (1914), reveals the same oppression, indifference, and cruelty among Zionist immigrants of the first Aliyah.

        Bereavement and Failure is especially remarkable because, for many halutzim, who yearned to shed stifling religious environments and home lives, Zionist immigration held the promise of freedom: newfound connection to the land, new ways to literally embody their ideals through agricultural work, and an empowering rejection of the stereotypical exilic, effeminate weakling. Brenner was an enthusiastic believer in the Zionist dream and devoted his life to the revival of the Hebrew Language, and he was deeply committed to the success of the exercise, to the point that he was willing to walk away from his meteoric literary career and become a farm laborer. That someone in Brenner’s position, having been expelled from his only viable career path at the yeshiva, spent a coerced and frightening stint in the army, and lived in various European cities in abject poverty, would fully buy into the Zionist dream and yet, upon attaining that dream, bravely and perceptively indict his new environment for being as stifling and constrictive as all the other environments he previously occupied, is nothing short of genius, integrity, and true courage, and could be the product of two factors or both. First, as a deeply closeted man who experienced deep, unrequited love that truly could not say its name, with a traumatic ending, whose devastating psychological effects he could hardly keep from wearing on his sleeve but could openly discuss with no one, Brenner would carry his anguish and emotional suffocation with him wherever he went, for the rest of his life. It would be so central to his human experience that a geographic change, even dramatic and supported by exuberant ideological hope, would not enable him to shed it. Second, Brenner could be one of those rare people blessed with boundless sensitivity for the universal human condition, whose ability to identify invisible threads of human distress and suffering could transcend his personal experience. Given the artistry with which Brenner shaped his unhappy, stuck heroes, with both ridicule and empathy, I find both possibilities plausible, and perhaps more valuable than those offered by Perry, Hilu, and their critics.

        Personalizing Grief, Queering Mourning

          Another possible explanation for the recency of interest in Brenner’s sexuality could be the changing landscape of grief, mourning, and bereavement in Israel. Some of these shifts echo universal trends: the exhortation to avoid speaking ill of the dead has been deeply undermined by the gradual empowerment of victims of sexual assault and bullying to speak up, years before the #metoo movement but more extensively in its wake. Exposés of sexual misconduct—unethical or criminal—have provoked countless cultural debates about the need to reassess the public image and cultural contributions of people whose reputations are tarnished by accusations and, sometimes, by proven facts. At the same time, changing mores regarding the acceptability of unconventional identities have allowed fuller appreciation and mourning of people whose suffering in life and in death from a stigmatized disease was silenced or minimized, such as Rock Hudson and Ofra Haza.

          There are, however, aspects to the changing forms of bereavement that are uniquely Israeli. For a reader in 2024, the murders at the Red House strongly and keenly reverberate the October 7 massacre, provoking a well of horror and grief. But for people who read Brenner’s books in the 1950s and 1960s, the horrors of pre-World-War-II pogroms and killings paled in comparison to the all-encompassing horrors of the Holocaust. Shocked locals, meeting Holocaust survivors for the first time in the late 1940s and unable to make sense of the horror, reacted with guilt, shame, and mistrust: “How come you survived and so many died?” “Why did you go like sheep to the slaughter and did not try to fight?” In the early years of Israel’s existence, therefore, the collective memory of the Holocaust was characterized by the schism between the Holocaust martyrs and heroes, emphasizing the bravery and revolt of the few while neglecting the physical suffering of the victims. Gradually, as Holocaust survivors found their voices and their testimonies were deemed valuable, Holocaust memory became collectivized, to the point that it is now widely experienced and felt as a national trauma, regardless of family connection to the Holocaust, ossified through the rituals of Holocaust Day, and marshalled to convey the message of commitment to ensure the future of the Jewish people, closely entwined with the project of realizing Jewish life in the State of Israel.

          Similarly, the collective commemoration of military deaths in Israel was initially crafted in two ways that Liat Granek (2014) refers to as “mourning sicknesses”: the urge for parents to display bravery and resign and refrain from showing emotion, and the political manipulation of grief as justification for war, aggression, and violence. As with Holocaust remembrance, the emphasis on bravery and the worth of sacrifice normalized the distinctions made between whose lives were deemed grievable and whose lives are considered worthless and unmournable.

          Since the 1980s, this hegemonic pattern of mourning has been gradually eroded and undermined. The eroding political consensus led to the eschewing of collective, official narratives of death, in favor of an expansion of individualized, personal remembrances. Udi Lebel (2011) exemplifies this process through an analysis of the bereavement models of parents of fallen soldiers. Before the Yom Kippur war, the activities of bereaved parents were channeled by the state to public sites and commemoration practices, and bereavement was, in effect, nationalized. However, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War fiasco, complete with widespread political protest and the Agranat Inquiry Board, and following the Lebanese incursion of 1982, a political bereavement model became dominant. Parents blamed the government for the death of their children and engaged in media and political protest activities. This trend intensified in the 1990s when, against the backdrop of human rights legislation and the prospect of a peace agreement with the Palestinians, bereaved parents whose sons had been killed in training accidents and military failures adopted a model of civilian criticism of the army. This alienation from hegemonic rituals, which increasingly clashed with the standard commemorative practices, was especially striking for families whose political views did not align with government policies, and for families whose sociocultural and economic circumstances disconnected them from the national ethos, such as new immigrants from Russia and Ethiopia.

          The model of individualizing death and mourning, as well as mourners’ protest against governmental ineptitude or violence, continues to characterize bereavement in Israel. Among the most outspoken critics of the 2024 war in Gaza are family members of soldiers and civilians slaughtered in the October 7 massacre, who see Netanyahu as the chief culprit in the country’s unpreparedness for the massacre and the war as a self-centered distraction from the desperate need to redeem the hostages through diplomatic means. The families of the hostages use social media to publish their loved ones’ images, telling stories about them and their lives, and introducing the Israeli public to their family members, pets, hobbies, and contributions to their local communities.

          This individualized model of bereavement has bled over to less recent losses. Holocaust education in Israel is now far more individualized than it was decades ago. Israeli textbooks no longer deal in abstract numbers (“the six million”), opting instead to tell individual stories about children in the Holocaust. Military mourning has also changed, not just for recently bereaved parents, but also to those who lost loved ones in wars decades ago.

          More than a century has passed since Brenner’s murder. Perhaps the surge of interest in his personal life suggests that the horror of his murder, silenced by the media in the 1920s and unspoken for years, subsumed into the horrors of the holocaust, is finally ready for processing, through the current bereavement model: a celebration of Brenner as a private person, rather than merely as a national hero, and an openhearted look into the lights and shadows of his psyche.

          ***

          It’s important to keep thingsi n perspective, though. Despite the open secret of Brenner’s complicated sexuality—many of the facts about his personal life are either known or surmised—it has taken more than a century for two books to center these issues and marinade in them, and even that encountered fierce resistance. The fact that this issue still generates considerable heat in literary circles shows that, despite the rise in identitarian approaches to literary criticism and in wresting control of tragedy away from hegemonic patterns—or maybe because of them—some aspects of Brenner’s life are still controversial, though perhaps not to the extent they were in his lifetime.

          Whether one sees merit in the exercise of revisiting the personal and embodied lives of cultural giants, every human being is more than a sum of their group identities. Brenner might have wrestled with silenced and unrequited desires, and he was far from a perfect, “put together” person. At the same time, he was blessed with a rare, sparkling intellect, and with a heart open to identifying and protesting injustice and cruelty. Those unique gifts are what made him a literary luminary, and will hopefully continue to be guide our path when we lionize literary heroes, in all their remarkable flaws and beautiful imperfections.

          #FacultyVigil Tomorrow Night at My Office

          My colleague and new friend Ron Hassner, who teachers political science at Berkeley, has been sleeping in his office for more than a week. Ron is protesting against the university’s failure to protect Jewish students from violent antisemitic behaviors, like the horrifying attack of last week. His list of demands is fairly modest: he wants Sather Gate opened, protection for speakers assaulted by students with opposing views, and campus-wide education on antisemitism and Islamophobia. Julia Steinberg reports for The Free Press:

          “This is a campus known for its protest,” Hassner says. “Put up propaganda! Hang it everywhere! But don’t physically block students from walking. Don’t harass them. Please don’t strangle them. I think it’s possible to advocate for the Palestinian cause without strangling people.” 

          I agree, which is why I will join Ron and several of my colleagues at the UC system to stage a #FacultyVigil tomorrow night. We all want to work and study safely. The boundaries of free speech in the US are wide enough to include lots of ways to disagree and express conflicting opinions without resorting to violence and terrorizing. If anyone wants to visit on Tue, I’ll likely be at the office (333 Golden Gate #320) from 7pm until my 9am class the next morning. If anyone shows up, maybe we can do a movie night (I propose Footnote) or we can just have a nice chat.