Every so often a scholarly book appears that is worthy of discussion and analysis by the non-academic Jewish reading public. Weitzman’s Surviving Sacrilege is one such book. He asks the age-old question about the reasons for Jewish survival, especially in the ancient world. He calls it cultural persistence, and adopts a Darwinian approach to explain Jewish cultural survival amid hostile realities. Based on models drawn from other scholars and other disciplines, he suggests that appeasement, symbiosis, mimicry, storytelling, the art of the pivot, optical elusions, scoptophilia (the urge to see forbidden objects), conjuring power, and playing dead are some of the tactics used knowingly by ancient Jewish leadership in the struggle to survive.
Weitzman marshals contemporary scholarship for the theories and backs it up with primary sources to make his case. He analyzes early Jewish history from the Babylonian era, the Maccabean period and through the destruction of the Temple. The arguments and proofs for the strategies employed by the Jews are compelling. Even those who disagree with the main thesis will find this book most readable. The survival instincts and adaptability of the Jews seems forced at times. The author reads a good deal into Josephus and other early sources, but his is nonetheless an intriguing approach.
A major lack is that although Professor Weitzman is the director of Indiana University’s excavation project in Israel, he does not utilize archaeology at all in this book. Archaeology may primarily show the persistence of particular institutions as opposed to the struggles and strategies for cultural survival. Yet, this data is important and can make contributions to a study on cultural survival.
Any study dealing with the whys and hows of Jewish survival should be taken seriously, especially one that shows how Jewish imagination expanded reality to overcome boundaries of space, time, and even death. The art of cultural persistence is this ability to maneuver between the real and the imaginary. This art works within reality but is also able to transcend it. A novel and well thought out concept.
