The Ritual of New Creation (55 page)

39. Ibid., 44.

40. Ibid., 45. Steiner's view of Judaism as the source of Western culture's superego is implicitly refuted in one of the funniest scenes in Philip Roth's
The Counterlife
. For the violent but crudely eloquent Israeli agent who foils Jimmy Ben-Joseph's attempt to hijack the El Al flight, anti-Semitism is to be understood in exactly the opposite terms as Steiner's analysis. As he declares to the hapless Nathan Zuckerman: "You think it's the Jewish superego they hate?
They hate the Jewish id
!" And just as Steiner revises T. S. Eliot's
Notes towards the Definition of Culture
in
In Bluebeard's Castle,
Roth revises Eliot's poetry. In the agent's diatribe, the anti-Semitic portrait of Bleistein in Eliot's poem ironically becomes a heroic symbol, "A powerful Jew with a Jewish id, smoking his big fat cigar!
Real Jewish might
! See Philip Roth,
The Counterlife
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), 178, 181.

41. Ibid., 46.

42. Rabinbach, "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse," 86.

43. Rosenfeld,
Imagining Hitler,
99. See also S. Lillian Kremer,
Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 349355.

44. Robert Boyers,
Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 158. Boyers makes his point in a refutation of Hyam Maccoby's attack on
The Portage,
but what he

Page 156

says applies at least to some extent to nearly everyone who has written about the work, including Rosenfeld, with whose reading Boyers mostly sympathizes. See Hyam Maccoby, "George Steiner's Hitler,"
Encounter
(May 1982): 2734.

45. Steiner,
The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.,
166167.

46. Boyers,
Atrocity and Amnesia,
170.

47. Terry Eagleton,
Marxism and Literary Criticism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 18.

48. Steiner,
The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.,
169.

49. Friedlander,
Reflections of Nazism,
2.

50. Ibid., 6970.

51. Joseph Lowin, "Steiner's Helicopters,"
Jewish Book Annual
41 (19831984): 56.

52. I am indebted to Joseph Lowin for this information.

Chapter 7. Walter Benjamin, Messianism, and Marxism: A Midrash

1. Adin Steinsaltz,
The Thirteen Petalled Rose,
trans. Yehuda Hanegbi (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 54.

2. Benjamin,
Reflections,
192.

3. Rolf Tiedemann, "Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses 'On the Concept of History',"
Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History,
ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 191192.

4. Richard Wolin,
Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 205.

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