Norman Lebrecht

Hi Michael, how are you?

I've, I've lived lived several lives. Um, I've tried to cram them into this one container. There's a lot of them. Yeah, I know I know I went to rabbinical college. And um not in order to become a rabbi, but in order to immerse myself into Talmudic learning. It's been a a strand of my life. It's not ever something that I thought I would use in any way professionally, until about um five years ago, I started writing my latest book, which is Genius and Anxiety. Um and I, you know, you mentioned that I'd I'd done a lot of journalism. Basically, when I turned 60, Michael, I decided I'm done with journalism, you know. I've done this for 40 years, and it's been fun and it's great, and it's now no longer fun, and it's not even well remunerated. So just think about ways of communicating, which is is broadcasting and um Slipped Disc, and the books that I want to write, and and the last one that I wrote was was this one, which is called Genius and Anxiety. Um and which was there to answer um a question that had preoccupied me all my life, which was this: Between the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries, the most productive period in human history, about three dozen individuals changed our perception of the universe, changed the way that we live our lives. I mean, transportation uh became if you said I was transported in 1840, you meant probably you were on a horse and cart. Uh by 1940, you were in a car, you were in a plane, you were in a train, you were, you know. So, uh this is the most productive period in in in human history. About three dozen individuals are responsible for most of the changes, and half of those are Jews. How's that possible? During that period, the Jews amounted to about 0.002% of world population. How is it possible that such a tiny minority could make such a phenomenal um transformational contribution to human society in that time? And so that became um the theme of this latest book, Genius and Anxiety. And through it, um I also reverted to certain ideas within Talmudic study, to certain aspects of Talmudic methodology, because it it occurred to me that if Jews were making these these quantum leaps into the unseen and the unknown, there might be something connective about it. Not necessarily directly that they were using Talmudic method, but that there is a collective cultural unconscious that simmers somewhere beneath their thinking that can help us to understand why they played played such a disproportionate role. So, so very, very long answer to your question as to why I went to college when I was 16. But these things all come together somehow in life, don't you find?

Um, to a degree. Um, Firstly, I, I'm with you. I, I, it's it's nothing to do with DNA. It's nothing to do with Jewish exceptionalism. It's nothing to do with with with a whole load of other factors that might be particular or peculiar to Jews. Yes, it has something to do with an idea of learning, but the idea of learning was not necessarily the same as the practice of learning. There was an enormous amount of illiteracy in the Pale of Settlement where most Jews lived in in in Eastern Europe. Um, the whole Hasidic movement, which was a revolutionary anti-intellectual movement, arose in order to appeal to the vast unlettered masses of Jews who had no access to God because they couldn't read the texts. So, one one can't make a generalization about Jews and literacy and Jews and love of books and so forth, but there is an aspiration there. There is always an aspiration in Jewish culture, in Jewish civilization to know more, to learn more, to um um to raise your children to be intellectually superior to yourself. But that's that's not uniquely um that's not uniquely a Jewish thing. I think it was your second president, John Adams, who said uh I was a soldier in order that my son could be a farmer, in order that his son could be a professor, in order that his son could be a poet.

Um, the most important part of the process was choosing the tense. I write it in the present continuous. I struggled with it until I changed the tense from past to present continuous. And present continuous, of course, is the is the tense of biblical literature. There there is no past, present, or future in the Bible. It is all written in present continuous, and the whole exegesis is founded upon the idea that humanity's role is to be a partner in God's continuing creation. So that's the first most important uh the first key decision in in doing it. Secondly, choosing the dates. Um the obvious dates would have been 1848 to 1948. Everybody goes with 1848, the Year of Revolutions, and then 1948, the foundation of the State of Israel. I rejected both of those. Firstly, because nothing came out of the 1848 revolutions apart from Wagner. And you know, nobody nobody nobody made a career out of 1848. Um 1847, now that's interesting because that's the death of Felix Mendelssohn, who is the first Jew to make an appreciable impact on Western European civilization, certainly on music. Uh it is the year that Heinrich Heine, the first uh the second Jew to make an impact on Western European civilization, transforming the German language. The year that Heine became a permanent invalid until his death. It's the year that Karl Marx writes the, who is Heine's second cousin, writes the Communist Manifesto, and it's the year that Benjamin Disraeli becomes effectively head of the opposition party in the House of Commons. So that seems to me a breakthrough year for Jews within Western society. And then 1947, I didn't want to deal with the actual birth of the State of Israel because it's an enormous amount of historiography arguing, well, this is the end of history, this is some, this is where this is where the Jewish diaspora ended and something new began, and it's it's not it's not a new chapter, it's a new book. And I I I didn't want to get into that. But 1847 is fascinating. 1947 is fascinating. It gave me an opportunity to deal with the moment when New York became the center of the universe culturally. It came about by accident. And it's not just Bernstein, Copland, Feldman, and the others, but it's it's, you know, the whole artistic ferment. Those guys were all so Jewish. The whole balletic ferment. New York suddenly replaced Berlin, Paris, London for a period. It was only it was only a brief period. And I wanted to look at that period and the interaction of those individuals and the sense in which their Jewishness um uh integrated within this cultural ferment and explosion. Um and then I wanted to do something about this idea of history going both forwards and backwards at the same time, because on the very day that the League of Nations voted to create a Jewish state in Palestine, voted to end 2000 years of diaspora. That selfsame day, a man in Jerusalem got a call and said, if you can get yourself down to Bethlehem, you are actually going to find a different window into the history of the Jews.

And for it to be for it to be that day, that Saturday, and for it to be the most dangerous journey that ever is take ever taken, because there is total insurrection of the Arabs in Palestine and the Jews in Palestine. They're shooting up buses and nobody's safe, and he goes down to Bethlehem and he buys the first three of the Dead Sea scrolls which show us that many of the things that we've taken for granted, the text of of of scriptures, are fixed, actually have to be questioned, because there were plural texts, there were alternative texts, there were ways in which texts were edited. And so, as history goes forward towards a the formation of a Jewish state and a new Jewish independence, it also goes backwards to re-examine the origins and the question of whether we are who we actually thought we are, who they told we are, or maybe we're not. So, that's yeah, I I like to leave it on that question.

Whoa. Um, these are so many questions. Let me just let me just pose the Mendelssohn question first, or address the Mendelssohn question first. Because Mendelssohn is a man in denial. Mendelssohn at no time admits he's a Jew. There is only one known comment, one known published comment of Mendelssohn in which he refers to himself to himself as being of Jewish origin.

And but you hear in the music, there are certain phrases in the music um that we know are Jewish. We know in the Resurrection Symphony, which which which you mentioned. Suddenly you come into da da da da da da da da da which, you know, that's what they play on El Al flights as they land in Israel.

That's right. They ain't playing Mendelssohn, that's for sure. Mendelssohn is so ferociously divided against himself, so intent on on covering up his Jewishness, on not so much denying it, but burying it. And then I came across this unpublished letter of his, which he writes to his mother, comes to London in 1831, I think it is. They ask him where he wants to go. The first place he wants to go is to the House of Commons because they are debating what is known as the Jew Bill. The Jew Bill is about the emancipation of Jews and the granting of votes to the Jews. And he goes there as an act of solidarity, he says to his mother in a letter, but um to uh in some way or other, to lend his silent vote to those who are about to give Jews freedom in England that they'd never had in Germany. And the letter he writes to his mother is riddled with Yiddish phrases, Yiddish phrases, and Hebrew words from Mendelssohn, and you know he was ever Jewish. There's an extraordinary tension in Mendelssohn. When you know that, you can then open him up and see, "Whoa. Who is this person?" He's much more complex than he knows. He's much more complex than we know. And the music really demands an awful lot more examination to see what's going on behind it, him and his sister, Fanny also. Incredibly fascinating. But I mean that's that's that that's that's another conversation, Michael, because they are they are they're really, really immense figures.

You know, my my my own choices, I went to Israel when I was 16. I stayed there for seven years. I fluented in Hebrew, speak Yiddish, I have a little bit of Arabic. Um, uh I uh and I came back to England um at the time I I wasn't sure where I was going to settle, but coming back to and I and I lived in the States for a while as well, and I've traveled a lot. But I I've, you know, I fluented in French and German and haven't just. Um, so I feel at home in many places, but England always seemed to me a tolerant society, um one where you could be yourself without having to look over your shoulders or without having to to declare yourself as being this thing or another. Um, and then over the past five years, while I was writing this book, that changed. And suddenly I became aware of an anti-Semitism that I'd never felt in my lifetime. I knew that my father, who was born in London in 1903, I knew that my father experienced anti-Semitism, but I didn't know anyone in my generation who'd felt prejudiced by it. And suddenly there it was on the screen in front of me, on the street in front of me. And I was having to look at myself not just as an English person, but as a Jewish person, and as an English Jew. And to address all of those things in terms of my identity, my family, where I want to spend the rest of my life. And these these have been quite agonizing years. Happily, over the past six months, the tide has turned. We feel a little more secure. We feel a little little less embattled. Um, but on New Year's Eve, um, there were daubings on one of the synagogues that I go to. And that felt like, you know, it felt like a a physical assault. And uh these these are things I'm having to grapple with, um and to which there is no immediate and obvious answer.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And so the universities do.

It's it that's it's a really important question, Michael. Um I I wouldn't pin it solely on the Sabras or on Leonard Bernstein. You find it in Heine. And Heine is at one moment a completely free and out and proud Jew who writes this immense ode to the glory of the Jewish Sabbath. You couldn't be more proud than that. And in in the next poem, he's attacking the Jews as being this, that and the other. Um so, the ambivalence is there, but the pride the pride is always there. Um, Lenny was always out and proud in everything that he did, and he never tried to prettify himself or his Jewishness. Take me as I am. It it was it it was in many ways admirable, in some ways intolerable. Um, the um, the things that we are, the things that we became, when I'm was trying to explain why it is the Jews made such a contribution in this so important period, it occurred to me that the anxiety is the internal combustion engine. Genius is there. It's visible on the outside. It has these marvelous fins, and it's shiny, and you can see, and it's Einstein. My God, it is Einstein. But the anxiety is the thing that makes Einstein write those write those four papers in three months in the spring of 1905, like like a rocket.

Because somewhere within his consciousness is the thought, this may not last long. There may be the next wave of anti-Semitism, there may be the next physical attacks, there may be the next pogroms, there may be the next expulsions, there may be the next Holocaust. Everyone, every single one of the people that I write about has in their personal unconscious the idea of Jewish vulnerability. That is the anxiety. And it is disastrous for some of them, because Freud in so many of his conclusions was so terribly wrong. He actually killed a patient in one of his crackpot experiments early on. And he was so wrong because he had to write and think so fast. If he'd had the leisure, if he'd had the professorship that would have been his if he'd been a Gentile. If he'd had the the the comfort and the status to think slowly, reasonably, rationally, um and and walk as confident Gentile gentleman of Vienna through the Prater and come out with his conclusions in his own good time, then more of Freud would survive today than actually does. The vast part of it vast bulk of it has been discredited, except for the fact that Freud taught us two simple principles that that that most human misery arises from sexual difficulties, sexual confusion, and that we have within ourselves the ability to heal ourselves through this talking cure that he created, through self-analysis. And the auto-analysis that Freud brings that auto-analysis is is quite a has its origins in Jewish thought going back a really long way. So, think of the think of the anxiety as the rocket propeller.

Thank you. Thanks so much, Michael. It's been a great pleasure.