Enter Senor Summers

I have always enjoyed reading. I lovingly received the gift from my mother. Over the years I have read much, and have narrowed my personal perspective down to three favorite authors, who have managed often to give me great comfort and incite, in moments of memory and solitude. Ben Hecht I met on my journey back to being a Jew. He has been a great friend, and he has confided much to me over the years. My second favorite is also someone I met on my journey back – Nikos Kazantzakis. He might have been born a Christian but in his heart and in his writing he is a proud Hovat Zion. And third, although politically very different, Elie Wiesel writes as I have often felt, …A Beggar in Jerusalem.

For Hecht there is truly nothing new under the sun, and certainly his Guide for the Bedeviled [Jew] is as relevant today as it was when he first put type to paper. He writes of a person of history. “I met him in a history book. He is tall, a handsome man with an imperious eye…He is a Portuguese Jew of distinction, and lives in elegance in the city of Bordeaux, France; time 1763. The Senor owns a few sailing vessels, trades with the people of the Indies, has a carriage with four horses, pomades his hair, takes snuff, carries an ivory-handled cane, and reads Voltaire… but Voltaire, nonetheless, has disturbed Senor Pinto…The merchant of Bordeaux calls in some friends. They arrive in velvet carriages drawn by happy horses. They discuss the matter of this Jewish calumny of Monsieur Voltaire over tall bottles of rich red wine. The Jews must strike back…and who is better fitted than Senor Pinto. Thus, by acclamation, Senor Pinto is declared champion of the Jews. He seizes his quill, produces in five weeks a fine volume of rebuttal, and takes this volume to Paris to hurl at Voltaire. The rebuttal says that Voltaire is a fool in assailing Jews as if they were all alike. Senor Pinto points our indignantly that the Portuguese Jews, who “are all practically aristocrats,” despise German and Russian Jews as deeply as do any of their other despisers. All Voltaire has to say against the Israelites, cries the Senor from Bordeaux, might well be true of these same uncouth German and Russian varieties, but it is in no way applicable to the fine, high- class Semites only recently driven out of Portugal.

“I shake hands with Pinto. He soothes me. He reveals that neither Voltaire nor any anti-Semites have a corner on intolerance…I applaud Senor Pinto… He looks around with imperious eye, takes a pinch of snuff, and smiles with the arrogance of a Cardinal. But Senor Pinto’s distaste for all Jews but his own brocaded variety has an unhappy [end]… Attracted by this dandy’s boasts, Christendom looks on the towns of Bordeaux and Avignon, and is shocked to see Jews living in such high estate. Jews with ivory-handled canes and velvet capes, and large sailing vessels full of spices and gold plate. Unlike the Epicurean Pinto, the Gentiles are unable to savor the distinction between Portuguese and German Semites…The Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux are stripped again of their dignity and treasures, and sent packing into ghettos.

Another reason I admire Pinto is that he permits me to say, here is one Jew who was victim only of his own stupidity. I imagine there are many such, but Pinto stands in a spotlight…There is also a historic lesson in Pinto, for he reveals that when the Jew plays villain, there are always better villains around to steal the part from him. Senor Pinto also helps me to understand many Jews of today who have come to high estate in various lands. These elegant ones are ever ready to repudiate all Jews without ivory-handled canes, collections of fine paintings, or the ear of an archbishop. No more than poor Pinto will these Jewish Fortunates know that, in the eyes of anti-Semites, Jews are as inseparable and identical as Siamese twins. No more than poor Pinto will they learn that even espousing so un-Jewish a cause as anti-Semitism, never makes a Jew less a Jew.

But Senor Pinto is not entirely a villain, nor yet a fool. He is more the victim of a certain logic that the world refuses to share with him… there comes a morning when Jews always wake up. History stands outside their windows and, in a voice that seems truly that of an idiot, bids them attend a massacre being held for Jews only. At such a time the Pintos and the near Pintos…catch a look at the true meaning of the Jew. He is part of a game the world plays…This Jewishness is not essential to the Jew… it is to his enemy, who refuses to out grow a panacea so soothing, so enriching, so ego inflating as anti-Semitism.”

And so it was on September 17, 2002, that a more up to date Senor Pinto again takes the stage, his place in the spotlight is what might be called, an historical curtain call. Although this Pinto has changed his name, we know it is him by his personality, and ultimately by his sensitivities and realizations. History steps out from behind the curtain to applaud Senor Lawrence Summers, (nee Samuelson) as he takes his place in a Jewish history he only recently became aware of. Senor Summers is no longer part of his comfortable academic or political in-crowd. He says as much, although a bit shocked. Having leaped up the status ladder leaving his roots, and his bubbie and zayde far behind, he finds that having reached a height he thought he could never achieve, and would leave his own history behind – he has found to his sudden dismay that perhaps the ladder wasn’t quite tall enough, and that some of his quaint colleagues had cut a few of the rungs just to put him back in his place. For Senor Summer’s it has been a humbling realization. In his pain he feels an urge for public confession and so with head bowed, he begins his most solemn defense of his realization in Memorial Church, on the esteemed campus of the sometimes highly regarded Harvard University, no less. No longer in cape, and without the benefit of his ivory cane, in a Dreyfus-esque moment he begins.

“I speak with you today not as a president of the University but as a concerned member of our community about something that I never though I would become seriously worried about – the issue of anti-Semitism. I am Jewish, identified but hardly devout. In my lifetime, anti-Semitism has been remote from my experience. My family all left Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. The Holocaust is for me a matter of history, not personal memory. (Here come those Polish and Russian Jews again.) To be sure, there were country clubs where I grew up that had few if any Jewish members, but not ones that included people I knew. My experience in college and graduate school, as a faculty member, as a government official, all involved little notice of my religion. Indeed, I was struck during my years in the Clinton administration that the existence of an economic leadership team with people like Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Charlene Barshefsky and many others that was very heavily Jewish, passed without comment or notice. It was something that would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago, as indeed it would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago that Harvard could have a Jewish President. Without thinking about it much, I attributed it to progress – to an ascendancy of enlightenment and tolerance. (So too the German Jews of 1938.). A view, that while the politics of the Middle East was enormously complex (for a part time Jew), and contentious, the question of the right of a Jewish state to exist had been settled in the affirmative by the world community (and if a vote were taken today at the U.N).