What Melville Saw

When we lived in Heidelberg, we often heard it said that the reason the town was largely spared during the Allied bombing raids that hastened the end of the Second World War was because General Eisenhower had already decided to set up the headquarters of the American Army in Europe in that town and wished it to be, at least more or less, in functioning order (i.e., with clean running water and an intact electrical grid) when the Germans finally surrendered. That much apparently is true—but the part of that same story I’m less sure about is the assertion that Eisenhower chose to spare Heidelberg specifically because he fondly remembered reading Mark Twain’s very funny account of his visit there in his 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad, and thought it would be a kind of after-the-fact homage to Twain to set up American headquarters in one of the few German cities with deep roots in American literary history. After all, it had to be somewhere!

A Tramp Abroad is mostly forgotten today, although it really is very amusing and interesting, as is its companion work, The Innocents Abroad, which wraps up with Twain’s extended account of his trip to Israel—then Turkish Palestine—in 1867. I read both books years ago—I went through a period during which I could hardly read enough of Mark Twain—and enjoyed them both, as I also did Twain’s other travel books, particularly Roughing It (which is about Twain’s travels in the Old West and Hawaii in the 1860’s) and Life on the Mississippi (about the years he spent as a riverboat captain on the St. Louis to New Orleans route). For readers who only know Mark Twain through his fiction, I recommend all these books for the glimpse they offer into the man himself when he wasn’t writing about Tom, Huck, and all the rest.

I was brought back to thinking about The Innocents Abroad this summer by an essay by Meir Soloveitchik in which the author compares Twain’s account of his visit with one that took place a cool seven centuries earlier, the one undertaken by one of the greatest of all medieval Jewish scholars and authors, Ramban (i.e., Rabbi Moshe ben Naḥman, also called Naḥmanides) in 1267. (To read Soloveitchik’s essay, published in Commentary just last month, click here.)

The thrust of the essay is to show how two authors, both clearly men of integrity and insight, were able to look out at the same landscape and see two entirely different things.

For Twain, what mattered most was the dreariness of the place. He has some caustic comments about the “big” tourist sites—he is particularly biting about his visit to the alleged grave of Adam within the confines of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem—but his most acidulous disdain he pours out on the land itself, which he found barren, lifeless, and—to say the very least—desolate. It is not at all a flattering portrait. Nor would or even could anyone reading it cold (i.e., without any previous sense of attachment to the land) come away possessed of any sort of interest in ever visiting it personally.

To this uninviting travelogue, Soloveitchik compares Ramban’s account of his visit. What brought him to Jerusalem is a sad story in its own right. Ramban apparently acquitted himself quite well in the famous 1263 public debate about the legitimacy and reasonableness of Jewish beliefs known to history as Disputation of Barcelona. (For interested readers, a remarkable graphic novel about the Barcelona Disputation by Nina Caputo and Liz Clarke called Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016 and is extremely readable and at least as interesting as it is upsetting.) By all accounts he was eloquent and convincing, for which effort he was rewarded by being charged with blasphemy and eventually exiled from Spain. And so, after several years of sojourning in various overseas locations, he arrived in Eretz Yisrael in 1267, precisely six centuries before Mark Twain. 

Ramban also found the place desolate and mostly forsaken. But instead of describing the land as bleak and abandoned, he saw in it a land in mourning for its former glories. Indeed, he suggested that, just as people tend only to find true solace in the wake of tragic loss in the company of caring family members, so does the Land itself exist in a state of misery as it awaits the return of its children. And so he set to work, playing a major role in galvanizing the Jews present in the land and, among other things, founding the famous Ramban Synagogue that has existed ever since in the Old City of Jerusalem other than during the dark days of the Jordanian occupation from 1948 through 1967. And he also invented Zionism, writing passionate, interesting letters back to Spain in an attempt to re-awaken a desire among his people to return to Zion and re-establish Jewish life in the Holy Land.

Soloveitchik’s essay, which I liked very much, set Twain and Ramban in opposition. But I would like to add a third voice, one almost always ignored even by Americans otherwise familiar with his work: I am thinking of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick and one of my personal literary heroes. Melville, the bicentenary of whose 1819 birth lovers of American books everywhere are celebrating this year, also made a trip to the Holy Land and wrote about it. But he did so in an entirely different way than Twain.

Melville left behind a complex legacy. Moby-Dick is acknowledged by all as an American classic, but others of his books, including some truly famous in their own day, are hardly remembered by anyone. But least recalled of all is surely Melville’s epic poem, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land.

Coming in at a cool 18,000 lines, Clarel is a big read. Avery big read. (My edition is 893 pages long.) Nor is it an easy one: the plot is extremely confusing, the cast of characters is immense, the language is obscure in many places, and the style is—to say the very least--challenging. This is not a book for the faint-hearted.

And yet it has a place in my heart. Twain was writing to be funny and he succeeded admirably, albeit at the expense of his subject. Melville was attempting to say something profound and inspiring about the place he felt the Land of Israel—and particularly Jerusalem—should play in the American sense of the world and the place of our nation in it. Basing himself on his own experiences traveling there in 1856, he presents himself (played in Clarel by the character Rolfe) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (played in Clarel by Vine) as close friends seeking spiritual fulfillment on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, then moves on from there to involve them in the lives of a dizzying amount of fellow travelers.  It’s an interesting premise and the book could have been a big seller, but that didn’t happen: the initial press run was a mere 350 books, of which the printer ended up burning the unsold copies (which constituted more than half the press run) when the author couldn’t afford to buy them at cost. In 1925, the literary critic Lewis Mumford famously found the pages still uncut in the copy owned by New York Public Library, unambiguous proof that the single copy the Library owned had remained unread for a full half-century. The reviewers, to the extent there were any, were unkind.

Melville, like Ramban and Mark Twain, found Israel to be, to say the least, uninviting. In his journal he wrote this: “Judea is one accumulation of stone: stony torrents & stony roads; stony walls & stony fields, stony houses & stony tombs; stony eyes & stony hearts. Before you and behind you are stones.” Nor does he harbor much hope for a Jewish future in that place, noting that it would be a true miracle if Jewish people were ever to find it in themselves to create a viable agrarian society in such a barren, desolate place.

Nonetheless, Melville found in Israel a place of natural haven for Jews of all sorts. In the endless pages of Clarel, he describes Jews from India, American converts to Judaism who have chosen to settle in the Holy Land, Jewish scientists hard at work deciphering the land’s geological legacy, religious and secular Jewish types, doubters and believers, socialists and capitalists, farmers (or rather, would-be farmers) and urban types. In other words, Clarel looks out at the landscape of mid-nineteenth century Turkish Palestine and sees something remarkably like the State of Israel today: a Jewish country filled with every conceivable kind of Jewish soul attempting to make the desert bloom, to create a viable economy, to find accommodations that make it possible for people of all kinds of beliefs to live in harmony with each other. Mostly, Melville writes endearingly about Judaism itself, seeing in the Jewish faith the platform on which the rest of Jewish life should and does stand. Had the word existed in his day, Melville would surely have been acclaimed as the most prominent non-Jewish Zionist the world had ever seen. (For an excellent introduction to Clarel published by P.J. Grisar in the Forward this summer, click here.)

For all sorts of reasons, American Jews are feeling insecure these days. The attacks on the synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway are always in the background. The sudden, unexpected shakiness of the traditional bedrock-solid support for Israel in the Congress is (or should be) a source of intense anxiety. (I personally think that the center will hold, but I share the sense of foreboding felt at least slightly, I suspect, by all.) The rise of anti-Semitic incidents both in centers of Jewish life and in places far from those centers is beyond troubling. And then—at least for me personally—there’s Melville waiting in the wings with his gigantic poem describing the deep interpenetration of the American and Jewish dreams, and promoting the idea of the Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel functioning for Americans as a symbol of what can be wrought by wholly dissimilar people when they embrace a single powerful idea.

Melville died in obscurity, his death barely noted and his name misspelled in the obituary that did appear in the New York Times. It took decades for Moby-Dick to take its rightful place among the great American books. And even today many of his works, including some of my favorites, are read by almost no one at all. But beyond all the rest stands one immense poem about America and Americans, about the Holy Land and Jews, about the specific way the future and the past meet in Jerusalem for all who journey there to seek out its peace.

On the two hundredth anniversary of Melville’s birth, I invite you all, at least a little, to sample Clarel and to marvel at what one man, toiling away on East 26^th Street, could see of the future.