Books: Many branches

Historian Steven Fine explores the history of one of the world’s oldest religious symbols.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
Hanukkiot projected on the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City during Hanukka last year (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Hanukkiot projected on the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City during Hanukka last year
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
In his 1937 novella The Buried Candelabrum, Stefan Zweig drew on the legend of Procopius, the Byzantine historian, to tell the story of a menorah, part of the spoils taken from the Temple of Jerusalem, and shipped to Rome, where it was depicted on the south panel of the Arch of Titus – and its relevance to the exile of the Jews.
In a final twist, Zweig imagined that a Jewish goldsmith fooled the Emperor Justinian and replaced the menorah with a reproduction, so that Jews could return the real object to the Land of Israel, where it was buried on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem. There it “rests in darkness,” the story concludes, “lost to its people who know no peace in their wanderings through the lands of the Gentiles,” until a time “when the Jews come once more into their own” and the menorah is recovered.
“Only then will the Seven-Branched Lampstand diffuse its gentle light in the Temple of Peace.”
In The Menorah, Steven Fine, a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University, draws on archeology, art history and an analysis of ancient and modern texts in a fascinating, myth-busting, and at times personal and polemical history of one of the world’s oldest continuously used religious symbols. Used at one time by Samaritans, Muslims, Christians and Freemasons as well as Jews, the menorah, Fine points out, was “rediscovered” in the 1880s, and the ancient relic was then put to use as symbol “of Jewish emancipation (literally ‘enlightenment’), liberalizing Judaism, and Jewish nationalism.” And, Fine adds, Zionists brought the menorah “from a symbol of a forlorn people to the emblem of a modern-nation state – with all the complexities that have come with the assertion of messianic imagery into inert, secular time.”
Zionists, Fine demonstrates, were especially adept at enlisting the symbol to advance their cause. At the urging of Vladimir Jabotinsky (future founder of the Zionist Revisionist movement), he indicates, members of the Jewish Legion (and somewhat later, youth in Betar) wore cap badges bearing the image of the arch menorah.
Archeology became an obsession of cultural Zionists, who searched for menorahs in the remains of synagogues and tombs unearthed in Palestine, and purchased free-standing menorahs – sevenbranched and eight-branched Hanukka lamps – for their homes. For a Hanukka fund-raising drive in 1938, Tel Aviv artist Nahum Gutman designed a poster of young Palestinian Jews carrying lighted menorahs, each of the flames representing a Zionist virtue.
Not surprisingly, then, when the State of Israel was proclaimed in 1948, the menorah, which “spoke” to Jewish nationalists in Europe and the United States as well as the Middle East, was ubiquitous and iconic. The menorah was lit in Reform, Conservative and Orthodox temples, kindled in Zionist ceremonies and those of Jewish fraternal societies, displayed above the water towers of kibbutzim, villages and towns, and, of course, still “worn” on caps.
Most important, the Arch of Titus menorah, flanked by two olive branches, appeared in the center of the seal of the Jewish state. In a magazine published in time for the celebration of Independence Day 1949, poet Shlomo Sakolsky proclaimed: “For behold, O Menorah, you have been redeemed/ From Rome you have been taken./ And they restored to you the light of the homeland/ and a great holiday we established.”
Fine also assesses other efforts to bring the menorah “home.” No credible evidence exists, he maintains, to support the claims, deeply ingrained among many hassidic Jews, that the original menorah resides somewhere in the Vatican.
Grounded in a conspiracy-laden distrust of the Catholic Church, a Jewish version of The Da Vinci Code, the claims are “an urban legend, believed by people of goodwill who really want the menorah to exist.”
And Fine is sharply critical of the “ingenious” efforts of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the leader of the Lubavitch hassidic dynasty, to substitute a Chabad menorah for the Arch of Titus menorah.
Using a close reading of rabbinic sources, Schneerson sought to undermine Zionist iconography by demonstrating that the arch menorah, with its rounded branches, was a pagan lampstand, a secular and not a religious symbol that had nothing to do with Jews. Fine labels the effort “a branding decision of amazing chutzpah that fit the general program of a leader who would be messiah.”
As Fine concludes his story of “memory created and re-created,” of continuities and discontinuities, he leaves no ambiguity about where he stands.
“No longer a metaphor to be ‘returned,’” he writes, “the arch memorial is now a cipher for the messianic community and its practical steps toward settlement of the land, rebuilding the Temple” and undermining a secular state seen as undermining the process of redemption – steps that are “supported financially by Israel’s rightest government.”
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin professor of American Studies at Cornell University.