The ancient rabbis understood the Roman empire as the successor to the ancient kingdom of Edom, and the rivalry between the biblical Jacob and his brother Esau—the ancestor of Edom—as a prefiguration of that conflict. Later on, Edom came to signify European Christendom in the rabbinic imagination. In his recent book Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History between Nation and Empire, Malachi Hacohen, a self-identified “post-Orthodox Jew,” combines a history of this typology with a general argument about the Jews of Europe and prognostications about the Jewish future. In his review, Allan Arkush writes:
Jacob & Esau is a sprawling, often scintillating book, a work of great range and depth. Hacohen’s analyses of the political outlooks of modern rabbis of very different stripes, ranging from Moses Sofer to Samson Raphael Hirsch to Adolf Jellinek, are innovative and eye-opening. His ten-page intellectual biography of the literary critic Erich Auerbach does a marvelous job of explaining that man’s complex and regrettable attitude toward his Jewish heritage.
Nonetheless, his book contains a disconcerting number of errors, small and large. . . . Of course, mistakes in a book of Jacob & Esau’s scope and ambition are inevitable. Still they ought to give the reader some pause, for the rhetoric of Hacohen’s book turns less on persuasive historical argument than on an apparent sovereign command of more than 2,000 years of Jewish history and literature, which underwrites his vision of the whole. “Going beyond the polemics on Zionism,” Hacohen tells us, his book “makes it possible for pre-Holocaust and pre-Israel historiography, grounded in the longue durée, to speak to the Jewish future.”
He writes, then, if not for the ages than for the next age, when the explosion or implosion that he quietly predicts in Israel will already have occurred, the dust will have settled, and the surviving Jews will be able to begin their work of reconstruction. No longer blinded by what he at one point calls “the miraculous Jewish state,” they “will need to fashion new paradigms to explain the Holocaust and the Jewish state’s place in Jewish history”—with Hacohen’s presumably posthumous assistance. If, God forbid, that day should ever come, and a new post-post-Orthodox Yavneh is convened, I greatly doubt that Hacohen’s scholarly tome will be of much help to its sages.
Jacob & Esau is a brilliant, bewildering medley of myth, history, literary criticism, and prophecy. Readers should mine it (carefully) for what is valuable and disregard what Hacohen thinks about what lies ahead and how we ought to deal with it.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/5407/jacob-gazed-into-the-distant-futures