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PARTISAN REVIEW
Nevin] by being treated as [mere] woma.n, sickly, and finally as Jew. In
Nevin's presentation Weil apparently was merely trying to 'pass' as a
Christian...[Indeed] she had, he suggests, 'an
anima naturaliter
judaica' .
.
.'a natural Jewish soul' [!] ...To be a Jew [for Nevin] .. .is to
belong to 'a club one does not quit' .... "
Rachel Brenner, in turn, in
Writing as Resistance: Four Women
Against the Holocaust,
pits Weil against another famous "Jewish-Chris–
tian," Edith Stein, whose recent canonization by the Catholic Church
has been the source of much controversy. Stein, who grew up in an
orthodox Jewish family, converted in her twenties, became a Carmelite
nun, and ended up being gassed at Auschwitz. "In contrast to Stein's
specific mention of Jewishness," Brenner writes, "Weil entitled the auto–
biographical letter she wrote to Father Perrin as a
'Spiritual
Autobiog–
raphy'....Was [this] emphasis on the spiritual an indication of her
intention to eliminate the fact of her Jewish birth?" Indeed, if Brenner
is to be believed. Weil, as Brenner would have it, "denied her Jewish
identity," "desired to obliterate her Jewishness," due to her "inability to
accept herself as a Jew" and to her search for "deliverance from the bur–
den of Jewishness"!
(It
is a mystery how anyone could speak of Weil's
desire to be "relieved of burdens.")
With Brenner's comments we come to the heart of the matter. Weil
was concerned exclusively with the
spiritual.
This is what led her to fall
in love with Plato and the Christian Gospels, but it is also what alien–
ated her from what she saw as the temporal, this-worldly, "collective"
or racial, element in Judaism. (It also inspired her to unloose not a few
poisoned arrows in the direction of the Catholic Church, which she
never did join.) The hair-raising stories of the fearfully powerful God of
Moses and the Passover, the God of Joshua, horrified Weil, and led her
to deny that the God who inspired (or gave) the Sermon on the Mount
could be consanguine with a God who could perform or condone such
acts on behalf of his "chosen people." For instance, in
Deuteronomy
20:
16-17:
"Of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you as an
inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive, but you
shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite and the Amorite and the Canaan–
ite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord your
God has commanded you." Weil's reaction to such passages, in which
the Lord appears to order his "chosen people" to slaughter their ene–
mies, is outrage: "The Hebrews took as their idol, not something made
of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their
religion is essentially inseparable from.. .idolatry, because of the notion
of the 'chosen people.'"
