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Jews & the Japanese. Ben-Ami Shillony
Читать онлайн.Название Jews & the Japanese
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isbn 9781462903962
Автор произведения Ben-Ami Shillony
Издательство Ingram
In Japan, the imperial family and the Shinto shrines have been the main repository of ancient arts and reverence for antiquity. The emperors patronized literature and art and were often themselves accomplished poets and artists. The most important poetry collections were compiled and published by the imperial court. By becoming gods the emperors deified these cultural pursuits. Japanese on pilgrimages to the temples and shrines of their land could relive the mythology, history, and art of their nation. At the Grand Shrine of Ise they could worship the progenitress of the imperial family, and at the shrines of Hachiman they could worship the legendary Emperor Ojin, said to have reigned in the third century. Important imperial officials like Sugawara no Michizane in the ninth century, who was deified as the god of literature, and Kusunoki Masashige in the fourteenth century, who was deified as an exponent of loyalty, had their respective shrines, as do Tokugawa Ieyasu and the twentieth-century general, Nogi Maresuke, who committed suicide after the death of Emperor Meiji. Through this deification of their famous persons in special shrines, the Japanese have integrated their past with their present.
Both the imperial family of Japan and the Jewish Halakha enhanced national consolidation. To be a Japanese meant not only to be a native of one country, Japan, but also to be a subject of the emperor. To be a Jew meant not only to be born to a Jewish mother, but also to be subject to the laws of the Torah and the Talmud. Unlike the emperors of China, the Japanese emperor was not considered to be a universal ruler; he was the fatherly monarch of one particular people, a role that served to enhance their sense of community and self-esteem. By performing ceremonies that only he and his biological kin were allowed to do and by mediating between man and god, the Japanese emperor was more similar to the ancient Jewish High Priest than to Western or Chinese monarchs. Halakha did not bind gentiles, and its agricultural rules did not apply outside the Land of Israel. Foreigners could settle in Japan and become Japanese, but no foreigner or ordinary Japanese could ever become an emperor. Similarly, gentiles could become Jews by conversion, but holy duties in the Temple or synagogue had to be performed by those born as priests.
The political irrelevance of the Japanese emperors and the inapplicability of much Jewish religious law eventually also served as progressive forces. Their detachment from actual affairs enabled them later to sanction change. The imperial institution of Japan was often used to legitimize political authority, but it could also serve to delegitimize, making that authority appear as a usurper of imperial prerogatives, as indeed happened when the Tokugawa shogunate was overthrown in 1868. Among Jews, observance of the rich body of law pertaining to life in their ancient homeland served not only as preparation for the coming of the Messiah, but in modern times, could be interpreted as an injunction to terminate the Diaspora, to settle in the Land of Israel and to rebuild the Jewish homeland.
5
Two Peoples of the Book
THE JEWS have long been known as the People of the Book. The book referred to is, of course, the Bible, which for many centuries was the book of Western civilization. As the people who gave the Bible to the world and who played the central role in both the Old and the New Testaments, the Jews held a special position in the Christian world: Although derided as infidels loyal to a mistaken creed, they were allowed to exist and bear witness, through their harsh trials, to the prophesies of that Book. Another reason for the appellation is that writing, compiling, reading, studying, and disseminating books have always been central activities of the Jews. Indeed, Judaism is a religion of books: The Five Books of the Torah, the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible, the six orders of the Mishnah, the two huge compilations of the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, the innumerable commentaries, the many compendia and codes, the learned responsa, the collections of stories, the anthologies of hymns and liturgy, the books of prose and poetry, the various manuals, textbooks, and reference books— all these held the content of Judaism throughout the ages.
Judaism considers the most meritorious activity of its members to be neither prayer nor performance of rituals, but rather the intensive study of scriptures, especially the Talmud. Pious Jews spend most of their time in front of religious texts, reading, chanting, reciting, analyzing, discussing, and memorizing the texts and their commentaries. The study of these writings for their own sake is considered more important than the study for any practical purpose, such as becoming a rabbi. Not only the act of learning but also the books themselves have acquired a sanctity. A book written or printed with Hebrew letters should not be thrown away or destroyed because it may contain within it the name of God. When worn by age or use, it must be stored away or buried. Moreover, in the kabbalah, a system of Jewish mysticism, the Hebrew letters themselves assumed occult powers and their secret combinations were often used for magical purposes.
Each synagogue maintained a study hall (bet midrash, or in Yiddish, shul) where men could join in the collective learning of the religious books; here one could find the books, the study companions, and the teachers needed. In time, the words bet midrash or shul became synonymous with synagogue, bet knesset. The great importance attached to reading and learning the sacred texts made it a religious duty to teach them to the young, and education has been a central institution in each Jewish community. Young boys attended a bet sefer (house of the book), later called heder (room), and older boys as well as young adults attended an institute of higher learning, or a yeshivah (literally, a sitting). The one who excelled in learning, the talmidhaham (scholar), enjoyed the greatest prestige within his community. Indeed, the ideal Jew throughout the ages has been the talmudic scholar.
The texts taught at all these schools were difficult; they were written in either Hebrew or Aramaic, ancient languages not spoken in daily life, and their content was often abstract, enigmatic, and argumentative. Yet Jewish men learned and memorized these texts from early childhood and trained themselves in the arduous argumentations relating to them. The bet midrash, the heder, and the yeshivah were noisy places. Learning took place through chanting, recitation, movements of the body, and lively disputations. But this obsession with intensive analysis and abstract argumentation also helped Jews to excel in abstract thinking and nonconformist theory when they later turned their attention to secular subjects.
The Japanese too have been a people of the book. Although literacy came quite late to Japan, about the middle of the first millennium C.E., and the oldest extant books written in Japan, the Kojiki and Nihongi, date from the eighth century, once the Japanese acquired reading and writing skills, they practiced them avidly. Chinese culture entered Japan in the form of books written in a difficult foreign language and a complex script. But the Japanese exhibited an enormous interest in reading, understanding, and mastering these difficult texts and within a few centuries learned and adopted the Chinese script, absorbed a large number of Chinese words into the Japanese language, and incorporated the great religious and philosophical systems of Buddhism and Confucianism into their own thoughts and beliefs.
Since the eighth century, the Japanese upper classes have been acquiring, studying, reading, writing, and compiling books of enormous variety: histories, novels, poetry anthologies, diaries, political records, geographical observations, administrative reports, holy sutras, illustrated stories, local gazetteers, manuals, almanacs, books on medicine and divination, and various commentaries. The development in Japan of the two kana syllabic scripts in the ninth and tenth centuries enabled the transcription of Japanese words in combination with or entirely without Chinese ideographs. Woodblock printing, a craft imported from China and first used to produce the Buddhist sutras that were in great demand, became from the seventeenth century the means of mass-producing books for a steadily growing reading public.
Japan also adopted the technology of papermaking from China, and improved upon it. Shortly thereafter, Japanese paper reached a comparatively high degree of quality and came to be used for a wide variety of purposes, from sliding doors to folding fans. In Shinto, paper acquired a religious significance: A sacred wand with strips of white paper (gohei) is used in various Shinto ceremonies, especially purification rituals, and slips of paper with auspicious oracles (mikuji) are hung on tree branches around Shinto shrines.