Handel’s Messiah was first performed 275 years ago this week, the April 13, 1742 premiere taking place in Dublin’s New Music Hall before a distinguished and appreciative audience — though perhaps a crowded one, as the 700 ladies and gentlemen attending were asked, as a space-saving measure, to leave their hoop skirts and swords at home. For one rapt reviewer, the combination of Handel’s music with the biblical text compiled by Charles Jennens was a marriage made in heaven: “The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender adapted to the most elevated, majestic, and moving words conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.”

Sublimity was an issue, given that the Messiah premiered on Easter weekend. Originally scheduled for April 12th, the premiere had been delayed a day by “persons of Distinction.” Possibly those persons preferred April 13th because it was Good Friday; possibly they had to do a little more arm-twisting on Dean Jonathan Swift of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Asked to permit members of his choir to participate in the Messiah, Swift had initially refused on the grounds that the music hall, situated among the shops and pubs of central Dublin, was but “a club of fiddlers in Fishamble Street.”

In George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends, Ellen T. Harris notes that the composer’s unrivaled popularity in England, his home from 1712 until his death in 1759, was based on his ability to bridge the sacred and the secular:

In London, the sound of his music reached from court to theater, from cathedral to tavern, and was performed by the greatest virtuosi of the era as well as the lonely spinster sitting at her keyboard. It served not just at coronations but as a background to daily life . . . In 1732, the first public performance of Handel’s Esther occurred at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, and from 1739, his biblical oratorios in English, commencing with Saul and Israel in Egypt, began to represent, even in some ways to create, the national Protestant identity in Great Britain.

As elsewhere in the West, Britain’s religious identity is now more diverse than in Handel’s day. The religious scholar Diana Butler Bass is not among those who lament the diversity and what has evolved from it. Her recent Grounded: Finding God in the World — A Spiritual Revolution pursues the argument introduced in her earlier Christianity after Religion — the idea that a world “spiritual but not religious” is preferable to a religious world that is highly sectarian. Turning our attention away from the decline of organized religion in the West and the rise of fundamentalist belief elsewhere, Bass notes that a shift in religious consciousness has brought “a reenchantment of the world, a spiritual revolution”:

We no longer live isolated behind boundaries of ethnicity, race, or religion. We are connected in global community. We search the Internet for answers; we ask our Buddhist or Hindu neighbors; we read our own sacred texts and the texts of others; we listen to preachers from the world’s religions. Answers are no longer confined to the opinions of a local priest, mullah, rabbi, or guru. The answers depend on us figuring this out together.

In Grounded, Bass happily exchanges “top-down religions” for “a rebirthing of faith from the ground up.” In Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People, Nadia Bolz-Weber takes us along on her spiritual road trip — a bumpy, many-detoured, and funny ride in search of, or hoping to inspire, ground-up faith. Bolz-Weber says that it is a trip that she and her congregation at House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado take daily:

We see a need, we fill it. We fuck up, we say sorry. We ask for grace and prayers when we need them (a lot). Jesus shows up for us through each other. We eat, we pray, we sing, we fall, we get up, repeat. Not that complicated.

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Books by Jewish writers on Jewish topics usually carry a heavy personal subtext. Whether the author is writing about Yiddish folktales or medieval theology, he is also asking a question: what does it mean to be a Jew—for me to be a Jew? In premodern times, this would have appeared a meaningless inquiry. A Jew was a Jew because he prayed like a Jew, lived like a Jew, and lived in a community of Jews. But what if you are a rationalist, and so you don’t pray; culturally assimilated, so you don’t follow Jewish customs; and a devoted citizen of a non-Jewish country– like Germany in the 20^th century or the United States today? What does being born into Judaism mean for such a person? For many modern intellectuals, a good answer has been that Jewish identity involves thinking about Jewish identity. A Jew is someone who wonders what it means to be a Jew.

The genius of George Prochnik, in his new book Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem, is that he surfaces this subtext and makes it his explicit subject. The result is an immersive, passionate work that is really two books spliced together. The first is a quasi-biography of Gershom Scholem, the pioneering scholar of Jewish mysticism, whose life encompassed the greatest Jewish quandaries of the twentieth century. The second is a personal memoir, in which Prochnik describes his own experience of moving from America to Israel, where he lived and raised a family for more than a decade, and then moving back again.

Sections of these two tales alternate, creating a meaningful counterpoint, for they are really variations on the same story. Prochnik loves Scholem—and this is clearly a book written out of love, not mere interest or duty—because he offers a role model for a soul in quest of an authentic way to be Jewish. “Scholem’s work effectively substituted for the Bible … I was one of those for who Scholem loomed as a kind of prophet,” Prochnik writes.

Stranger in a Strange Land is not a full biography of Scholem. It covers only the first half of a long life (he lived from 1897 to 1982), draws only on English-language sources (Scholem’s languages were German and Hebrew), and concentrates on certain themes and relationships, especially his friendship with another major Jewish thinker, Walter Benjamin. At the same time, it explores some of the dense thickets of Scholem’s thought, which took the form of commentary on the ancient tradition of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah.

Getting to know Scholem involves a difficult feat of triangulation. To understand why he is important, you have to understand the essentials of Kabbalah, in order to make sense of his revolutionary interpretation of it. You have to be familiar with the social and political context of German Jews in the early twentieth century, where Scholem grew up in Berlin as a highly discontented member of an assimilated family. And you have to know about the history of Zionism, a movement Scholem joined as a teenager, leading him to move to Jerusalem in 1923. (A working knowledge of the writings of Walter Benjamin is also useful.)

These are all complex and controversial subjects, which helps to explain why Scholem is a figure of such fascination. Prochnik performs impressive feats of concise elucidation, taking the reader through Scholem’s life, times, and work in under 500 pages. He offers outlines of Scholem’s major books and close readings of some important essays, such as “Redemption by Sin,” in which Scholem analyzes the antinomian impulse in Jewish mysticism. Still, it is impossible to fully capture Scholem’s significance in a single book for a lay reader, and anyone who comes to Stranger in a Strange Land without some prior knowledge of Judaism and Jewish history is likely to find it challenging.

The title of Stranger in a Strange Land itself has multiple meanings. In the Bible, Moses names his son Gershom–which in Hebrew is related to the word ger, “foreigner” or “sojourner”–because “I was a stranger in a strange land.” That is, Moses was an exile from both Egypt, where he was born, and Israel, where he was destined to go. Scholem was born with the fine German name Gerhard, but when he arrived in Palestine at the age of 25, he exchanged it for Gershom. This was a standard Zionist gesture, trading in a foreign, Diasporic name for a native, Hebrew one; and the name Scholem chose suggested that his life in Germany had been a kind of exile. Yet in fact, it was Palestine that was the “strange land” for him, where he had to make a new life in a new language. What does it mean to leave home in order to go home?

This is the question at the heart of Zionism, and one of the central subjects of Prochnik’s book is what Zionism really means. Scholem was exactly the same age as the Zionist movement—the first Zionist Congress, under the leadership of Theodor Herzl, was held in Basel in 1897—and as he grew up he saw it split into several strands. There was the mainstream Zionism that wanted the gradual building of a Jewish population and institutions in Palestine; the more aggressive Revisionist Zionism that favored confrontation with the Arab population and a maximalist territorial claim; and a less worldly cultural Zionism, which saw settlement in Palestine as the key to a spiritual regeneration of the Jewish people.

Scholem was most drawn to this last definition of Zionism. As a young man, Prochnik shows, he was a kind of spiritual anarchist, against just about every organized society—a feeling heightened by the experience of living through the First World War. This meant that every concrete form of politics felt to Scholem like a letdown. What he wanted was a messianic transformation of the Jewish essence, compared to which building a Jewish state looked like a sordid compromise. In the 1930s, Scholem joined a small group of Jewish intellectuals who agitated for a binational state, in which Jews and Arabs would coexist. But as Prochnik acknowledges, Scholem’s highly theoretical Zionism bore little relation to political reality.

When Prochnik himself lived in Israel, in the 1990s, his hopes for such coexistence were first raised by the Oslo Accords, then dashed by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and Israel’s turn to the right. As he tells the story, personal, economic, and political motives combined to drive Prochnik’s family out of the country. Unlike Scholem, he ultimately found that the place where he was born felt more like home than the Jewish homeland–which is in part a testimony to the difference between Germany and the United States. Yet he retains a love for Jerusalem, and the book concludes with a vision of the city’s pulsating life, in which “the spell of hopelessness is broken.” This book is worthy of the rich, ambivalent, complex, and compelling stories it has to tell; more than a work of history, it is a document of the living spirit of Judaism.

 

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I’ll start with a confession: I’ve never really understood the Holy Ghost. Among the divine Trinity, God the Father and God the Son made plenty of sense to a Southern Baptist boy growing up in Tennessee in the ’70s and ’80s — I was a devout son, after all, and my father, a deacon in our congregation, ferried the offering plate from pew to pew each Sunday morning. Father and son: an affirmation of the patriarchal system known as “church.” But God the Spirit remained shadowy and elusive, a will-o’-the-wisp whose divine status we gladly acknowledged, an equal partner in the firm, but who was also associated with “baptism of the spirit,” or speaking in tongues, a practice we disavowed less on theological grounds and more because, well, hillbilly Pentecostals did that sort of thing, like handling cottonmouth snakes in worship service. Those people: Ewwww. 

My congregation’s rejection of charismata reflected class tensions — some stifled, others openly roiling — and its uniformly Caucasian complexion revealed a rancid, enduring racism. And yet the Holy Ghost has played a pivotal role in the growth of Protestantism since the Reformation, as illuminated by two very different yet complementary new histories, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World by British don Alec Ryrie, and The Evangelicals: the Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The baptism of the spirit, the sacrament of Communion, the strife between modernity and orthodoxy — these bones of contention have hammered together a broader Protestant identity even as it’s splintered into numerous denominations, in the wake of Martin Luther’s famous Ninety-five Theses, nailed onto a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. The Reformation allowed believers to shake off the strictures of Catholicism, opening the door to personal relationships with God.

An ordained Anglican minister as well as an academic, Ryrie celebrates this pluralism; as his subtitle suggests, his book emphasizes Protestantism as a catalyst for Enlightenment thought, scientific discovery, and the birth of representative democracy. Catholicism, in his view, was always defined by hierarchy and corruption, from the pope on down. The first page announces his critical insight: “Protestantism is a religion of fighters and lovers. Fighters because it was born in conflict, and its story can be told as one long argument . . . But it is also a religion of lovers. From the beginning, a love affair with God has been as its heart. Like all long love affairs, it has gone through many phases, from early passion through companionable marriage and sometimes strained coexistence, to rekindled ardor.”

Ardor clings like perfume to Ryrie’s vivid, graceful account; and one can almost forgive him for elevating the love affair over the bloody conflicts waged by Protestants over the centuries. He writes with passion and persuasion, drawing fine distinctions as the Reformation unfolded in myriad forms throughout Europe, and charting the complicated (at times contradictory) influences of Calvinism. He’s adept, too, at laying out the early religious history of Colonial America, how pluralism begot pluralism in the New World, the Puritans staking their ground but then ceding it to other groups, such as the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Anglicans in Virginia, and a mélange of Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists in the South.

Enter Frances FitzGerald and her magnum opus, The Evangelicals, which picks up from Ryrie the manifold conflicts within American Protestantism and teases out each strand with meticulous research and an impeccable eye for detail. Despite the range of class and education among European Protestants, theologians always prided themselves on rigorous scholarship, a carryover from the monastic tradition in Catholicism. But in America the story veered away from universities and cathedrals — largely because of the country’s vastness — and unfolded instead through the sectarian frictions that have plagued it from generation unto generation, older than the Declaration of Independence and younger than yesterday.

The most critical fault lines, as might be suspected, emerge from the deepest crack in America’s moral foundation, with Baptists and Presbyterians splitting apart over the issue of slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War. In the war’s aftermath, other discords emerged, with liberals advocating a Social Gospel characterized by communal uplift and conservatives increasingly drawn to an ideal that unified moral perfectibility with racial purity, a vision of America in which everyone thinks and acts according to a literal interpretation of the Bible. Politics became personal. Love and war: at the dawn of a new century war began to trump love. And with the atrocities of World War I, broadcast through photographs and newspaper and telegraph accounts, the fundamentalists embraced combat as an organizing principle. “Beginning in 1918, they went from more or less peaceful coexistence with the liberals in their denominations to organized efforts to drive modernism out of the churches and schools. The war had turned them into activists . . . They had lost the battle for prestige, but they did not lose their sizeable constituencies, and as before, fundamentalism flourished with new groups springing up, as one historian put it, like dandelions.”

FitzGerald’s style is starchy in places, but her narrative is as accomplished as the scholarship denounced by evangelical preachers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her pages teem with the titans of American evangelicalism, from the famous and infamous — Billy Sunday, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker — to the lesser known, such as Dwight Moody, Charles Finney, and Washington Gladden. Evangelism had a brief moment in the North, as rapid industrialization in cities such as New York and Pittsburgh evoked spiritual malaise in workers, and divinity schools such as Princeton’s pushed for conservative interpretations of Scripture; but eventually it waned as immigrants and educated urbanites faced down reactionary groups. Au contraire in the South: Jim Crow gave denominations the theological space to affirm their authoritarian order. FitzGerald leaves no stone unturned in her quest to tell this story in its complexity, from Pentecostals to Holiness congregations to the sprawling centerpiece, the Southern Baptist Convention, which grew to become the largest Protestant denomination by the mid-twentieth century, a title it still holds today.

Protestants and The Evangelicals, then, act as yin and yang in telling an encyclopedic tale of a Christianity in constant motion, with new American religions flowering in America (think Mormonism and Scientology) because of — not in spite of — the diversity of denominations. It’s precisely that diversity that offers such a variety of cubist-like perspectives on doctrine, which may explain why, as a child, I couldn’t quite grasp a mystery like the Holy Spirit. If both these books lack the sweep and beauty of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, each is nevertheless essential reading on the conjoined nature of religion and politics today (along with Leigh Eric Schmidt’s witty Village Atheists, the most perspicacious study to date of nonbelievers in our observant country). And although their approaches are different — Ryrie brings wonder and appreciation to his narrative, FitzGerald a methodical skepticism and brilliant research to hers — both illuminate the flaws and frailties of a dazzling spectrum of people, those who love the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost and yet are haunted by the many unseen ghosts who walk among them.

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