Norman Raeben, Prof Sean Wilentz in America, and the Post-Blood on the Tracks Influence on Bob Dylans Work:

a Yiddiotic Critical Oversight at the End of the Dylan Worlds Nose? Dedicated to John A Bryant, professor emeritus of molecular and cell biology at Exeter university, UK, and the worlds greatest Dylanologist. Max Dimont in Jews, God and History:
The Jews will create their Goethe and Keats, their Beethoven and Brahms, their Renoir and Van Gogh when their own men of genius take up themes which capture the four-thousand year drama of their survival and then distil that drama, that survival, into a universal mythology of man.

In his recent book Bob Dylan in America, Sean Wilentz calls Sholem Aleichem (pen-name of Rabinovitz), father of Norman Raeben, Bob Dylans influential art teacher in the run-up to Blood on the Tracks, the Jewish Mark Twain - but without citing any source: the pertinence of which would have been to contextualize firmly the influence on Dylan that Wilentz makes so much of in brush-stroke terms in a manner that only Pales into insignificance in the light of his not having bothered to explore the full, true, ramifications of Raebens significance beyond the Pale. I wrote the above last year as an initial draft, and now I see Scott Warmuth write of Wilentz, in his Goon Talk blog:
A stock line that Sean Wilentz, the author of Bob Dylan in America, uses in interviews is, "Being a historian means you get to read a lot of dead peoples letters." Dylan using a dead person's letter to discuss the birth of America would have been a wonderful topic for Wilentz, one seemingly tailored for his expertise. It is a shame that he didn't recognize this Easter egg of required reading. It is just one of a number of Wilentz's glaring missed opportunities for a richer discussion.

My thoughts entirely albeit in a different context, though Im not sure who is plagiarizing from whom but I do love litigation, Scott. See you in court. No, seriously, in the best Pale tradition: I am imitating Scott here palely. Max Dimont in Jews, God and History p 350 says:
Sholem Aleichem was both an artist and an entertainer, the Jewish Mark Twain, who, because he loved the Jews, was allowed to spoof them, the ghetto, and their rituals. He held before them a comic image of the Chosen People and made them laugh at themselves. In one sentence spoken by his favourite character, Tevye, the dairyman, Sholem Aleichem summed up the plight of the Jew in the Pale. I was, with Gods help, born poor, says Tevye. Sholem Aleichem wrote about the helpless masses and defended the sanctity of the insulted and injured. With Tevye, the Jewish people could agree on the plight of being a Jew in the Pale, If He wants it that way, thats the way it ought to beand yet, what would have been wrong to have it different? But even as they laughed, the Jewish people paused and reflected.

As did Larry Yudelson at the Tangled Up in Jews website:

Dylan's Yiddish writers Bob Dylan was profoundly influenced by the sons of Shalom Aleichem and Sholem Asch. Here's how: Shalom Aleichem Shalom Aleichem was the pen name for Shalom Rabinovitz, the author and humorist known as the "Mark Twain" of Yiddish literature. Born in 1859 in Pereyaslav, Ukraine, he died in New York City in 1916. Shalom Aleichem's son, Norman Raeben Norman Raeben was Dylan's art teacher in 1974. The techniques for seeing Dylan learned with him were the inspiration for "Tangled Up in Blue." And Norman's frequent use of the word "idiot!" led to "Idiot Wind."

But this still fails to make the connection: the pertinent Dylanesque twist which biographer Clinton Heylin also misses (p 244, Take Two, I think).
As an ex-student of Raeben mentioned, during a WBAI special on Dylan in 1986: Norman Raeben used to call everybody an idiot because they couldnt see the nose on their face. They couldnt understand that it was a shadow and a light put together He called Dylan an idiot all the time, and Dylan stayed for about six months and took off and never said a word to any of us and just left. But he took a lot from Norman.

Ken Brooks does make it in the syntactically challenging Bob Dylan: The Man in Him (1999) p 145:
Yiddiot Wind are the words Bob sings, however on the outtake with just Tony Brown on bass he sings idiot precisely, it may be a yiddish play on words. This is clever because some of the lyric takes the female stance

But not even Brooks sees the pertinence of this in conjunction with Raeben to JOKERMAN, whereby, in Infidels, Dylan becomes, as a result of his time with Raeben some eight years earlier, heir to this spoofing tradition: known as the Haskala, the Jewish enlightenment. Note that I access the preceding and following Max Dimont material from hard disk, onto which I wrote it in 1998. So I am not copying Wilentz or Yudelsons ideas: not even the latter, which I had not seen. Having said this, I had not realized Raebens own ancestry until later seeing the above mention on the Tangled Up in Jews website, which nevertheless entirely fails, with characteristic Dylanesque dramatic Haskala irony, to extrapolate the true Dylanological significance: in fulfilment of the Raeben influence. And way beyond Blood on the Tracks. Note also that although I did know of Raeben I had already decided, via Dimont, that Dylan was heir to Sholem Aleichem, most supremely in JOKERMAN, before I knew of Raebens ancestry: as his son. And this hit me in much the same way as a cold frozen fact hit Scott Warmuth in Chronicles.

Max Dimont in Indestructible Jews p 232:

It was not until after the Reformation, after the Jew has been stuck in the ghetto, after he has lost his image as a universal man, that we see him evolve into a symbol of evil. Not until after the Jew lost his meaning as a religious symbol for the West, after he became a competitive integer in the marketplace of gold, do we see a changed attitude toward the Jew in Western art corresponding to the changed attitudes toward him in Western life. When the Jew emerges in the seventeenth century as a maligned stereotype, it is not a result of ecclesiastic evil but of secular propaganda. The corruscating effect of three centuries of ghetto life on the Jew was that he emerged looking like a caricature of himself. The stultification of the Talmud by narrow-minded pilpulists, the absurdities of the maharils, the farce of Sabbateanism, the vulgarity of Frankism, the deification of ignorance by the Hasids, all contributed to shaping and begetting the queer-looking, black-hatted, caftaned, earlocked Jew that reduced the Jewish manifest destiny to a joke of history. How could one seriously view this grotesque, archaic fossil as one of Gods Chosen People, as the man entrusted by God with the message of salvation?

As Dylan said to Scott Cohen in 1985 for Spin magazine, The Jews aint gonna know. Dimont continues:
There is an assumption by too many Jews and Christians that the ghetto Jew represents the true Jew, and that the well-dressed, worldly-minded Jew is a deviation. Nothing could be further from the truth ...The ghetto Jew in his ridiculous clothes, with his bigoted, narrow views, is the ill-begotten product of his three-century imprisonment, a travesty of the Jew and of Judaism. Yet the ghetto Jew, though he represents but a brief segment of Jewish history, even now is made to exemplify the Jew throughout the ages. But such a Jew would be unrecognizable by Moses, David, Solomon, or Isaiah, who never wore phylacteries or the garb of Hasids.

Resent him to the bone? Jews, God and History p 234:

New generations of Christians who did not know of the proud, learned Jew of other days, saw only a queerly dressed ghetto Jew, wearing a black caftan, a yellow patch of ignominy, a ridiculous peaked hatan object of derision and scorn.

Continued after the photo.

Is this Jew not the subject of the song PROPERTY OF JESUS? Richard Wurmbrand wrote, in Marx: Prophet of Darkness p 35:
Strangely, Marx also wrote to the contrary, in The Capital, Vol.1, under the heading The Capitalist Character of Manufacture: In the front of the chosen people it was written that they are the property of Jehovah.

Dimont, Jews, God and History p 342:

The Jewish medieval period began with the Jew as the ambivalent man in Western society. When his medieval period ended, he was the symbol of the abhorrent man in Western eyes. In Eastern Europe, unemancipated Jews created a culture, known as the Haskala, identified with Jewish values. But the Haskala produced no scientists, no musicians, no painters. It did produce a humanistic literature, written not in Russian or Polish but in Hebrew and Yiddish, one the classical, the other the folk language of the Jews.

Cassells Encyclopedia of World Literature (Vol one):

To reach the masses of the Jews, many Haskala writers turned to Yiddish. Because Yiddish was a folk language, fluid and without discipline, it had certain literary limitations and also certain advantages. It did not lend itself to heroic epics or subtle psychological moods, but it was perfect for lyric expression and satire. It could not be made to express ambiguity, but it could be made to exude empathy. As Dante shaped the Italian language, as Chaucer shaped the English language, as Luther shaped the German language, so the Haskala writers shaped the Yiddish language.

It is just as well that Dylan did not use Yiddish to write JOKERMAN; otherwise the song would have been unable to express the multilayered ambiguity it so exudes. Indeed, the genius art distilled by the Haskala writers transcended the particularity of the immediate environment.
The genius of the Haskala writers forged a literature that did not die with the Yiddishspeaking Jews in the German concentration camps. Though born in that strip of land known as the Pale, located in an outpost of history, and written for three million Jews who were thought of as anachronisms of history by the gentile world, this Yiddish literature created characters that still live, long after the already vanished shtetl Jews. In these heroes of the insulted and injured, the Jewish Haskala writers created universal figures. By pure chance, the first three of these writers were also its three greatest-- Mendele Mocher Sforim (Mendele the bookseller), Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz.

Would the genius universal figures created by these Haskala intellectuals have anything to do with Dimonts prophesied universal mythology of man to be distilled by Jewish men of genius?

Although continuing the traditions of earlier Yiddish writing, individually each linked it with contemporary trends in European literaturerealism, social criticism, liberalismPeretz, particularly, being associated with a kind of messianic universalism which embodies both national and social liberation.
Cassells Encyclopedia of World Literature (Vol one) Gen. Editor J Buchanan-Brown, Cassell & Company Ltd, 53, 73, 35 Red Lion Square, WC1R 4SG

Which contemporary trends did Dylan confine himself to in JOKERMANs poetic eschatology?
Mendele Mocher Forim inveighed against the narrow-mindedness and dogmatism of the Jews in the Pale, but behind his vitriol the Jews could sense his love for his people.

The close of JOKERMAN (1983):

Oh, Jokerman, you know what he wants, Oh, Jokerman, you don't show any response

Again, Dimont in Jews, God and History p 350:

Sholem Aleichem was both an artist and an entertainer, the Jewish Mark Twain, who, because he loved the Jews, was allowed to spoof them, the ghetto, and their rituals. He held before them a comic image of the Chosen People and made them laugh at themselves. In one sentence spoken by his favourite character, Tevye, the dairyman, Sholem Aleichem summed up the plight of the Jew in the Pale. I was, with Gods help, born poor, says Tevye. Sholem Aleichem wrote about the helpless masses and defended the sanctity of the insulted and injured. With Tevye, the Jewish people could agree on the plight of being a Jew in the Pale, If He wants it that way, thats the way it ought to beand yet, what would have been wrong to have it different?

Say that hes a chump; PROPERTY OF JESUS, the forerunner of JOKERMAN. Rabbi Manis Friedman, a close associate of Bob Dylan as many know, in Belief in Moshiach: Possibility or Certainty? (1991):
And Moshiach's coming is dependent on our doing God's will. We did his will; I did my best today; what else does He want?

Unspeakable Super-Mitzvah. Dimont:

But even as they laughed, the Jewish people paused and reflected.

As did Larry Yudelson at Tangled Up in Jews:

Who is the Jokerman? We claim Jesus is not the answer.

Indeed.
Analytical Commentary:

Who is the Jokerman? This commentary proposes that the Jokerman is Dylan the Jew: An individual blessed with charisma and cursed with turbulence, aware of God's commands but unsure of their reality and of his ability to respond. Is this Dylan the Jew before Jesus or after Lubavitch? I believe the latter.

Yudelson also asks: Chapter 5: Lubavitcher or Jokerman? Norman Raeben (Heylin, or his source, tells us):
used to call everybody an idiot because they couldnt see the nose on their face. They couldnt understand that it was a shadow and a light put together He called Dylan an idiot all the time, and Dylan stayed for about six months and took off and never said a word to any of us and just left. But he took a lot from Norman.

And, although I had decided, via Dimont, that Dylan was heir to the Haskala in JOKERMAN, I had not realized Raebens ancestry own ancestry before seeing Tangled Up in Jews. Nor had I made the final clinching Yiddiot connection until I read Ken Brooks. My brother recently asked me, Do you think there is anything in his pronunciation of Idiot Wind that could be a play on Yiddish? I told him that until seeing Brooks I hadnt thought of it. He replied, I find that, with your penchant for puns, spoofing, irony and all, quite astounding. And I find it quite astounding that the Dylan world can pay so much superficial lip service to the Raeben and idiot influence without seeing what is at the end of its nose: the artistic implications way beyond Blood on the Tracks, whereby Dylan in JOKERMAN becomes heir to the Haskala and Sholem Aleichem, its last survivor but one, via his son Norman Raeben. Yiddiot-jumbi is the thing we didn't do, indeed. (Kendel Hippolyte) We are Yiddiots, babe.
The Jews will create their Goethe and Keats, their Beethoven and Brahms, their Renoir and Van Gogh when their own men of genius take up themes which capture the four-thousand year drama of their survival and then distil that drama, that survival, into a universal mythology of man.

As for Raeben and Wilentz, neer the Yiddiotic Twain shall meet. As Dylan says in Chronicles p 288:
Its strange the way circles hook up with themselves.

Copyright 2011 Paul Kirkman, Dylanologist of Messianic motifs