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S0l0mon Schechter examining manuscripts ''Cair0 inthe apartment"theCambridge at University Library

From toC6rdoba Gairo

by DAVID NIRENBERG
pril 28 is "Thke Our Daughtersto Work Day": not a maior holiday,but one that makes me anxious.What bothersme is not the principleor the task-I donthavea dauEhter-but the more generalquestionit poses an earnest to medievalhistorian like myself.What is my work? How can I makethat work visible,its interesttangiblel Sincethe earlynineteenth centurythe artist'sstudiohasbeena space of excitedvisitation-EuEBneDelacroix's Paris digsarean earlyexamp'ie. the solitarysitBut ter in thehistorian's srudyattracts voyeurs. no What thrill is to be foundin hoursof stillness, the occasional rusdeof paper,the all too interminent clickins of comouterkevs? SomeformsoFspelunking the pastare in soldasexciting.Archaeology, for Dauid Nirenberg on the Cmnmittee Social more easily b on cloakedin the romanticismof disThought theUniztersity Chicago at of HtrJudaism example, andChristianArt: Aesthetic Anxieties From the coverycanwield the whip oflndianaJones. Catacombs Colonialism(witbHerbert to Kessler) But the historian is a fisure of boredom is outfi'rn the Uniaerityof Pennsyh.tanin Press. and undmelin.rr, ,.-.-b.r. historv is the

liash Sacred
The Lostand Found, Worldof the Cairo Geniza. By AdinaHoffrnanandPeterCole. Schocken. pp. 526.95. 286 vocationof the only ghost on the faculryof Hogwarts, a prof so absent-minded fails he to noticethat he hasdied,droning specually on. If the making and the makersof history aresouninteresting, then what of the made? What claim does history especially that of the distantpast,haveon our attention? Few universiw professors write on such

28

The Nation.
\7

June 20.201 1

he relationship ground to du$in the terrible struggle between text and body questions,perhapsbecausethey have the holds in anothersense well. Just as for space, whilst otheis,asifovenaken as privilege of working in institutions that do by a generalcrush;dresqueezed the burial of corpsesservesboth to into not demandthe daily justification of their big unshapely lumpL... T\gse lrmps demonstratepiety for the deceased existence. Adina Hoffrnan and Peter Cole sometimesafford crripg;ly sugges.nve andto protectthe living from the dead, but they are are not university professors; combinations; for instance,when as, scholarsdeeply learned in the past; intel- so the burial of textsserveda dual purpose. you find a pieceof somerationaliqtic lecrual activistspassionately engagedwith Some texts enteredthe Geniza for a wellwork, in which thevery existence eiof to the present;and at the sametime writers earnedrest,worn out by long service the ther angels dwils is denied, or clinging therebecause who live by their pen. They are, to coin a pious.Otherswereimprisoned for its very life to an amuletin which which is also to they were fearedto be hereticalor corruptphrase, "public scholars," thesesamebeings(mosdy the latter) the saythat they are among the last specimens ing. Still others,perhaps vastmajority(at are bound over to be on their eood weretossed virtually extinguished a mod- leastat the BenEzraSpragogue), by of a species with Miss behaviour not interfere and theywere ern world. The book they have just given in by forceof habit,simplybecause The devel:us, Sacred Tiash,is equally rare: a precious penned, if not in the Holy Tongue, then Jair's love for somebody. opment of the romanceis obscured meditation on the ways in which the dis- in the Hebrew script with which the Jews by the fact that the last lines of the coveryoflong-hiddenhoards ofhistory can of Egypt wrote so much of their Arabic (a amuletaremountedon someI.O.U., transform our worlds, and a literary jewel mixtureknown in the tradeasJudeo-Arabic). or lease,and this in turn is squeezed whosepages turn like thoseof a well-paced But asin the cemeteryno force of habit can (or betweenthe shees of an old moralexorcise ambivalence doublevalence) the thrilleq but with all the chiseledelegance ist, who treatsall attentionto money task:"preserving good things and flashes linguistic surprisethat we as- of the Geniza's of affairs with scorn and indimation. from harm," as one scholarput it, "and bad sociatewith poetry. Again,all thesecontradi.toryhrn.r, Buriedtreasure what the book is about, things from harming." It is a placeof both is cleavetighdy to some sheetsfrom a This ambivalence nicely is albeit treasureof a peculiarkind. Hoftnan piety and danger. very old Bible. This, indeed, ought reflected in two venerablerumors (docuand Cole tell the story of a closegone that to be the last umpire betweenthem, was 18 feet deep, 8 feet long and 6Vz feet mentedasearlyas 1488)aboutthe Ben Ezra but it is hardly legible without peelwide. The existence this thousand-year- Geniza: that it containeda .magicalTorah of ing off from its surface fragments the old closet in the Ben Ezra Synagogue of scroll copied by none other tha-nEzra the of someprinted work which clings to andthat it wasprotectedfrom prying Cairo wasalways someway known by the Scribe, in old nobility with all the obstinacy and synagogue's congregants. it wasnt until eyesby a plethoraofscorpionsand a poison But obtrusiveness rheparuenu. of snake.Hoards require their dragons,even the late nineteenthcentury that Europeans is srumbled upon its contents-hundreds of when the treasure text. Endless scribbling,but nary a snake sight. in In the event,the rumois turned out to be thousandsof pieces of paper, parchment This doesnot meanthat there were no the and papynrswritten in Hebrew, Aramaic, exaggerated, secondfar more than the dragons be slain.One of the beauties to of first. The Geniza'sfirst known European Latin, Ladino, GreelqPersian, Judeo-Arabic, Sacred Tiashis the way it showsus how each Simon Yiddish, Syriac, fuabic, Cbptic and even visitor, Heinrich Heine'sgreat-uncle generationof Geniza scholarsdiscovered (Still more textual material was van Geldern, survivedhis visit in 1752,as its olvn monstersto tilt after in this trove. Chinese. makesclear: found buried in the communiry's courtyard his diary entry on that occasion Solomon Schechter'sdrason was biblical and and cemetery with competing European "I wasin the Elijah srr/nagogue searched criticism,andthough he did not find a Torah agentsacting like rival guilds of graverob- the Geniza."Van Geldem mentionsneither scrollcopiedbyEzra the Scribein his trea(nor,for that matter,much bers.)The discoverynecessitated remap- scrollsnor snakes a sure, in the very first Geniza fragment he ofanything elsebesides givingbaksheesh). A ping of history that continues this day. to held in his handshe descriedsomething Of course, burial doesnot treasure make. litde more than a centurylater,in 1859,the almostas marvelous: Hebrew text of a the TalmudistandtravelerJacob Safirwasableto But in the caseof our Cairo closeteventie biblical book hitherto known only from its etyrnologyof its Hebrew name points to seethe scrolloi Ezra(whichhe did not deem Greektranslation, Wisdomof Ben Sira, the but somethingrare and strange."Geniza" first genuine), he "did not find any fiery ser- ala Ecclesiasticus. and enters Hebrew under Persiandomination, pentsor scorpions, no harm cameto me, From Ben Sira,Hoftnan and Cole have who and is perhapsborrowed from the Persian thank God." As for SolomonSchechter, selected apt epigraphfor their volumean the In ganj (kanj):hoard,or hidden treasure. the "discovered" Genizain 1896andclaimed "Hidden wisdom and concealedtreasure, Universityand scholarship, biblical bools of Esther and Ezra, it means it for Cambridge what is the use of either?"-but Schechter we havehis own description what he saw of both the king's treasuries and his archives, extracted somethingeven more important and both senses passinto the Hebrew of when he climbedup a ladderto peer down from the ancienttext: an arg"ument against the Thlmud,whereit designates something into this textual charnel housefrom its only what he perceivedto be the anti-Judaism opening,high up in a wall of the s1'nagogue's stored up, or concealed away.But the Heof biblical scholarship his day.Schechter in women's gallery: brewroot is alsousedfor the burial of human wasespecially worried about a cutting-edge bodies,as when nignaz-"here lies hidden It is a battlefield of boola, and the school of German scholarship,known as this man"-is written on gravestones; its literaryproduction manycenruries of "source criticism" or "Higher Criticism," fuabic cognatejanazah means "funeral." had their sharein the batde,and their the that soughtto reconstruct historyof how Within the semanticfield of gqniza' texts disjecta mem.bra now strewn over are and when Scripturewasproduced,redacted and bodieslie in suchcloseproximitvasto its area.Someof the belliserens have and transmitted. It was not tle tools of -are be indistinzuishable. perishedoutright, and literally sourcecriticism that worried him-he often

30
used the sametools himself-but some of the usesto which they were put. According to Schechter,the "Higher Criticism" (whichhe sometimes calledthe "higher antian Semitism")became attackonJudaism. is for JuliusWellhausen, example, famous as the father of the "documentaryhypothesis" (identifring severalstrandsof authorship-the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist for andPriesdy-and periodsof composition which dominated scienthe the Pentateuch), tific studyof the Hebrew Bible until the late twentieth century.But one of the animating wasto prove goalsof his titanic scholarship that "there haveneverbeenmore audacious .. inventorsof history thanthe rabbins. . This evil propensity goesbackto a very earlytime, its root the dominating influence of the Law, being the root ofJudaismitself." From the this evil root (accordingto Wellhausen) more poisonous, so propensiry only became that after the destructionof the first temple in 587BC "the warmpulseof life" hadgone from Judaism."The soul was fled; the shell remained."There was no continuiry he wrote, betweenthe religion of the Old Testament and the deadlegalismof the Second Templeand is rabbinicdescendants. In the Wisdom of Ben Sira, Schechter thought he had found an antidote to Wellhausen's poison:a late Second Gmple text beloved by the early Thlmud's rabbis, yet spiritual in its moral engagements-far from the desiccatedlegalism with which Judaismwastaxedby its Higher Critics, and evenpoeticin its praiseof God: All wisdom comesfrom the Lord and is with Him forever. of Who cannumberthe sands the sea, and the dropsofrain, and the days of eternity?... Who can6nd out the height of heaven, and the breadthof the earth, and the deep,andwisdom? chechter's acquisition of the Cairo Genizafor Cambridge,and his organizationof its massacre manuscripts of into an archive,mademany other fupossible. of In ture branches research the the yearsbeforehe assumed presidency in of the JewishTheologicalSeminary New of York City and leadership the Conservative movement of American Judaism, he number of them. cultivatedan astonishing But his most oassionate ministrationswere ,i aimed, through the reconstructionof texts like the HebrewBenSira,at the revivification of aJewishscripturaltradition whose"brutal vivisection,"as he sawit, was being carried

Tlre Nation.

June ZU, ZUI I

out by the ChristianHigher Criticsof his day. the "Golden $.gp?.pf Hebrew'poetry than "What inspiredBen Sira," wrote Schechter, doe's any archivo3in'thg,magnifigent Islamic thinking perhapsalso of the inspirationfor city in which that poet4u;1yas borR,i. his own herculean effors in the Geniza,"was The authors'descrip{qpof the sE}olarly the presentandfuture of his people." projectgivesus a good_se_nse-^of im imporThe archiveSchechter brousht to Cam- tance,not only for thE'fribidft of F{ebrew bridgewould continueto proJu.. biblical poetry but for the living literarure'bf the q ) r as revelation, but the attention of the next present well: generation explorers-according,at least, of stretcha concatenation discoveries of to Hoftnan and Cole'saccountof that next ing into the twenw-first century has seneration-was orientedtoward a different the only enhanced auraofwonder suricriptural marvel discoveredin the Genirounding the poetry'sorigins.Agairlst zai poefty.Whole worlds of Hebrew verse and staggering odds, patient tenacious wouldbealmost lost entirely to uswereit not scholarshave reunited torn pagesor for the poemsburied in this one graveyard, leavesor. even just stray separated andthe scholars who exhumed them felt emfragments.... not linesof manuscript with the kissof life. "Eachphotostat powered only new poemsand new collections is a prayercongealed, eachpagea poemfroof poems,but new poets,new kinds zen in place,"wrote MenahemZulay. "The of poems and poets,and the often has from dustofthe generations to be shaken extraordinarylife stories of some of them;theyhaveto bewokenandrevived; and Hebrew literature's finestwriters have the workersare busy;and a day doesnt pass !'een introduced into the modern witlrout resurrecdon." Ztiay was writing literary mix. of his monumentalreconstructionof some write Hoftnan andCole,"in800 poems written by the sixth- or early Thesescholars, seventh-century pbet Yannai,whosehymns jected Andalusianpoetry into the bloodof studdedthe synagogue services ofPalestin- stream modernHebrewculturallife." Once in ianJewry for centuriesbeforethoseservices again,the pastasdiscovered the Genizais theJewish present. werereshaped the adoptionofBabylonian put to work animating by rites, and the poems deformed, forgotten The poets and their poems are indeed andfinally buriedin earlythirteenttr-century thrilling. The Moroccan-bornDunash ben Cairo. That reconstruction, publishedrn Labrat (circa 920-990) studied under the wherehe Gaon in Babylon, 1938, the first to display moderneyes greatsage was to Saadia a medievalrycle of Jewish liturgical poetry developed system a ofadapdngArabic poetmeterto the Hebrew in is full glory and the last Hebrew book to ry'srulesof quantitative ('rNothinglike it haseverbeenseen emergefrom a press Nazi Germany. in language. is Peter Cole is himself an inspiredwriter, in Israel,"his illustriousteacher reputedto ffanslatorand resuscitator verse.His ore- havesaid,without stipulatingwhether these of vious book, The Dreamof thePoem, opened wordSwere praiseor blame.)Dunash took with him when he migratedto the EnglishJanguage readers an entire world his system to of Hebrew poetry that emergedunder the Caliphateof C6rdoba,wherehis qrnthesisas tutelage of Arabic verse among the Jews forwhich hisownwordsmightserve motto: of Spain.So it should not surprisethat the "Let Scripturebe your Eden,and the Arabs' chapters he and Hoffrnan devote to tie books your paradisegrove"-immediately poetry of the Genizaare especially rich. But soawned school.But there were alsothose a neither liturgical poetry nor the poetry of who accused him of "destroying the holy Yannai,for all his gifts (his systematic of tongue...by castingit into foreign meters," use endrhyme,for example, the earliest He- and bringing "calamityupon his people."In is in we brewliterature,andprecocious the poetics the end,for reasons do not know,Dunash in and of from Al-Andalus, hispoems, all of both Near EastandWest),is the subject " wasexiled their finestpages. Those arereserved instead but for a few stravlines.werelost. for the poeric treasures translatedfor us in TheDreamof tbePoem, that were, ost.that is. until the Genizawasfound. treasures like the Judeo-fuabic in which so many of From the oatient rearticulationof its the Geniza'stexts were written, themselves severed fimbs there emergednot only the product ofJewishlife in Muslim lands:I poemsby Dunashbut deails of his life, mean,of course,the Hebrew poetry of what his poetic community, even his wife. the Muslims called Al-Andalus, the Jews At times Hoftnan and Cole work a litde for excitement this Sefarad we (somewhat and anachronistically) too hard to manufacture of.textualreconstnrction: ifin a "fu "medievalSpain."For althoughCairo is far Drocess from C6rdoba,is closets us more about made-for-TV National Geographic special," tell

they write of the dirfdiver! ihattwd fr agments of a poem fit together.Brti'thdliesult arexciting and the reconstioted prierii is beautifirl,a . miniatili fultl of thotpathosofpaning:

Will herIg[{Slinemler hisgracetul

,,oor. rqril r

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her bnlv ion'in her armsashe , partedi On her left hand he placeda ring from his right, on his wrist sheplacedher bracelet. fu a keepsake took his mande she from him, and he in turn took hers from her.

Beautiful, and also probably unique: the union of fragmentsrevealsthe poem to be not by Dunashbut by his wife on the occasion of his exile, mfing it the only known poem by a woman survivingfrom the 500year history of medievalHebrew verse. is The lastchaoter SacredTiwh dedicatof ed not to scholars oipoetry but to a historian: specifically,to Shlomo Dov Goitein, whom we might call the re-founder of Geniza studies.Goitein wasthe fust to re ahze,circat9 55, the significanceof the trash within the trash: not the sacredfragmentsof etemal Scripture or the lost poeticlinla of an immoral Iiterary tradition but the tatteredremnans of quotidian life. There wereIOUs, canceled contracs, letters about prices of linen and rumors of drought, amulits and shoppinglists: in shorg the tensof thousands documentscrammed of into two trunts for half a century and stowed in an attic only because early Iibrarian had an opposed principle the burning of anything, on no matterhow useless, suchantiquity.Out of ofthe contentsofthese trunks and other archives,Goitein v/rote what would eventually become the five volumes of his I Mediterranean Society, pluralistic history of media evalMuslim, Jewishand Christian socialand economic life that gavehistorians their first sense just how interconnected-we might of sayhow globalized-this medievalworld was, andhow fluid the relationsbetrreenmembers of its variousfaiths. Goitein'shistory hasproven resonangnot only because aught a new generation of it ' historians how to explore a vast world of documenation from the disant pastbut also because Goitein worked hard to make that past relevant to our present. FIis was not a lac\rmose medievalworld overflowing with ut political worries arenot the only(or persecution a "brimming hi storyof ffi," a but even the principle) ones tJrat surhce life Goitein characterized a "symbiosis"bein Hoffinan and Cole's exploration of as previousexplorations this past.AntweenArabsandJews.Goitein comparedthe of symbiosishe discoveredin the Geniza with other seems be what we might call to that of the world in which he found himself as the status arxiety of the historian: granted he wrote his masterwork-the United States that historians are "resurrectingt' the pasg

'8Os-and found them of the 1960s, "70sand similar. The Geniza world was a "religious tta sodemocrary,tt vigorous,free-enterprise ciety'' of "relative tolerance and liberalism." "We do not wear turbanshere [in t}le United hewrote;"bu! vlhilereadingmanya States]," Genizadocumentone feelsquite at home." Goitein gave us the history of a medieval Jewish community, one thriving in Muslim lands, and tied by coundessbonds of exchange----cultural social as well as and economic-to the vast world in which it found itself, a world stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Adantic, but cradled in the tolerant and cosmopolian waters of the Mediterranean.This vision is sharedto some extent by all the heroes of.Sared Tiash,from Schechterto Goitein, and it's a commonality at leastpardy because is alsosharedby the it authors, themselvesactive in Jerusalem as impresariosof literary integration. Hoftnan and Cole'spolyglot press, Editions,pubIbis lishes writers in Arabic, Hebrew and other languages the Levant. of The vision is certainly an appealingone, and all the more so today. Its resonanceis evident not only in boola both popular and scholarly but also in political projects like the "Union for the Mediterranean," whose joint declaration, signedin 2008,proclaims, "EuroDe and the Mediterraneancountries are bound by history geographyand culture. More imporandy, they are united by a common ambition: to build together a future of peace,democracy,prosperity and human, socialand culffal undersanding....in a renewed partrership for progress."This same ambition, I do not doubg helps motivate Hoftnan and Cole'streatrnentof the Dast. To harness history to the needsof the present: this has alwa1re been one of the duties of the historian, a duty Hoffrnan and Cole firlfill as admirablyand responsiblyasdid the scholars they are *iti"g about. @hich is not to say that the resulting histories are the only ones possible,or that citizensof the Genizawould feel at home were they to wake up in their pages. doubt that the elderlyMaimonidesI who wrote ofJudaismunder Islamas"dead" and "ailing," and sawin the communitiesof , Christian Europe "our only hope for help"would have describedhis world in Goitein's terms of liberal s.,'mbiosis.)

in what way do they participate in the immoftality they create?Of those who (like himself)restoredthe Hebrew poetry of the Geniza, Ezra Fleischer rather graphically wrote, "All theseactsare the achievementof host of scholars-early and lata dedicated er-great and lessgreat,who devotedtheir livesto the studyof the Genizaand wearied in their labor, sweatingblood in their efforts succeeding to sort its treasures, sometimes failing, their eyes weakening andsometimes their hairlinesreceding,and their bacla and limbs giving out asthey grew old and fraileachin his way and at his own pace." Hoftnan ind Cole's commentary places more emphasison question's etemity: of "Risking desiccationfor an ultimate viulity, name, andanonymityforthesake ofanother's redeemers. ..bringp the work of the Geniza's us back in uncanny fashion to the glory of 'the famous' whom...BenSirasingles for out the highest praise-'those who composed musical psalms,and set forth parablesin verse.'"But they aretoo honesttq leavetoilingscholars amongthefamous. Their effors, they continue, "also recall the fate of [those] later,'who haveno memorial... a few verses and perished though they had not been."' as What hope then, do historianshavefor eternity? Hoffinan and Cole cite Ben Sira once more, speakingof those who "maintain the fabric of the world, and the practiceof their craft is their prayer." Through toil in the Geniza, scholars"become links in the chain to of transmission...bacl the Wsdom of Ben And so, Sira,andfrom that spirit to is source. in their way,they too partakeofeternity." .I have arrived at my only perylexity with this delighdul book: I cant quite understandwhat the authorsmean by "eternity," "frmer" "vitality," "memoryt' or any of the other terms with which thev trv to evoke (rather than explain)what ii is'they think history shouldstrive towald. Worse for me, I can't shakethe feeling that, for Hoffinan and Cole, historical scholarship desiccatis ing unlessaimedat some"ultimate vitality," some higher end that infuses it with the vivit'ing forcenecessary achieve desired to a immortality. It seemsthat for them this end canin part be political.They often point, for politics of their example, the progressive to Geniza heroes on questionsof Palestine. But it alsoseems that at its highestand most sublime, this "ultimate vitality," this immortality,canonlybe poetic.Historyis demoted to a hand)'man whosecallingis to restorelost linls in the Hebrew literary canon.Clio, to is from a musewith shift metaphors, reduced her own rites to a priestess Euterpe. of Being a historian and not a poet, I

Ine.t\atlon,

JAne zu, aul I

may perceivea hierarchy even where it is not intended, as in the comparison with which the authorsdescribethe great historian Goitein's first encounterwith Geniza manuscripts: This litde handful of,nine-hundredyear-olddocuments that had traveled from the Nile basin the long distance to behindthe Iron Curtain would turn out to be for Goitein what the Archaic Torso of Apollo was for Rilke, an ipanimate'yet somehowliving presence insisting:Yoa mustchange W. yur

Ben Sira,exhortingus to a form ofpiety that has often gone by the name of history. He went on to sharpenthe ambivalence: There are somethat haveleft a name. so that men declaretheir praise. And there are somewho haveno name. . who haveperishedasthough they had not lived.

Hoffrnan and Cole haveraisedthe "fathers" of Geniza scholarshipfrom the dust heap, and brought them to life as never before. So it seemsslighdy paradoxicalthat even The simile is stunning, and I would not lose asthey do so they reinforce the notion that a word. But it doesreinforcemy melancholy historians, unlike poets, perish as though feeling that for the authorsit is poetry and they had not lived. Does the contradicnot history that animatesthe past. Or per- tion stem from their commitrnent to the hapsbetter put that it is easierfor them to continuity ofa poetic tradition, or from the fantasizethe immortality of the poet than implausibility of any professionalpretenthat of the historian. But why, I want to asb sions to eternity in our modernity? I do do we need to fantasize either to celebrate not know. What I can saywith certainty is rhat Sacred the wondersof Genizahistory? Tiashhasmadehistory beautiful "Let us now praisefamousmen/and our and exciting.And yet I will still feel anxious fathersin their generation,"wrote the poet every April 28.

Tradition AnUnlinished
byBARRY SGHWABSIff
ou mustlivelike a bourgeois and saveall your violence for your aft." Has anyone ever firlfilled more completelyGusave Flaubert'sdirective than his younger contemporaryEdouard Maneq?And hasany artist ever been, as a result, more of an saw him enigma?Manet's contemporaries as a realist, the heir of Gusave Courbet. If any of them had beensufficiendy realistic to retain Emile Zola as an investrnent adviser, they could have retired in style. "So sure am I that Manet will be one of the masters of tomorlow," the critic and novelistwrote in 1866,"that I shouldbelieveI had madea good bargain,had I the money,in buying all his canvases today.ln fifty yearsthey will sell for fifteen or twenty times more." fu the art historian GeorgeHeard Hamilton remarked, 7,ola'swager the pricesManetwouldfdtch on was accurate;amaztngly,this was five years before Manet had managedto sell, as far as we know, a single picture. (I-uckily there was familymonby to fall backon.) Although Zola graspedmany of the subtletiesof his friend's art, he still thought him to be a realist. He could yet imaginethat Manet "cameto undersand, quite naturally, one fine day, that it only remained to him to seeNature as it

ll

reallyis," and thus "madean effort to forget everything he had learned.in museums" in order to transcribewhat he sawwith unexampledfreshness. We don't seeManet like that an'rmore.Itt not that he neglected picturethe iife around to him, but he oftendid soin skewed, confounding andcontradictoryways. madehisstyle He modern by quoting the art of the past-not to lean on as a model in the approvedacademic manner but to poach in an alienated way,at times seemingto anticipatea practice that would later be dubbed"appropriation." Manet usesa painting by Veldzquez Raor phaelin much the sameoblique and riddling way that Jeff Wall, for instance,would use (1882)asa Manet's Bar at theFolie*Bergire I sourcefor his own Piaarefor Womm(1979). For Manet asfor Wall, tradition is unfinished andthereforeopento reinvention. Zola evenruallyrealizedttrat Manet was not a realistafter his own heart.In 1879he wrote about the artist again,this time regretting that "he is satisfi with unfinished ed work; he doesnot studynaturewith the passion of the truly creative."Just as the ordinary run of criticswere finally gettingusedto Manet, Zola wasstarting to sciundlike them. That Manet's paintings looked unfinished had

alwaysbeen their complaint. Manet seemed to violateia son ofartistic ethic, asifh could not be bothered i5 bring his work to a conclusion. Thesubjecs of his many portraits, at least,knew otherwise.They sat through in incessant sessions which Malret would attetnpt againand again,sparingneithertheir time nor his, to satisf' the artisgc scruples he could never quite put into words but that are so evidenton his canvases, a "lack But of finish" wasnot the only objectionManet faced."Ofinnpin canbe understood from no point of view,evenif you takeit for what it is, a puny model stretchedout on a sheet," insistedTh6ophile Gautier. Similarly, one Louis Etienneconfessed, search vain for in "I the meaning of this unbecomingrebus"meaningle Ddjeuner l'herbe. nr What wasmissing,in the eyesof Manet's contemporaries, a coherentstory holdwas ing togetherthe peopleand things depicted in the paintings.Its absence madehis work Decades later,modseem incomprehensible. ernist critics stationed themselvesat the oppositepole, sayingthat Manet'spaintings do cohere,dndwhat unifiesthem is not narrativebut form. Yet the youngManet'sviolation ofsexual proprieties,and his recurrent resort to politically provocative topics-Tbe Exem.tion Maximilian in the late 1860s, of in The bcape of Rochefort 1880-81-should undermine the notion that subiect matter wasinconsequential him. Insteadof seeing to Manet aseither an exponent realismor an of implicit abstractionisg might be betteroff we thinking of him asa precursorof Surrealism, whoseinspirationwas Lautr6amont's image of a boy "as beautifulasthe chance meeting on a dissectine-ableof a sewins-machine and an ombre'ila."It's not surpising that the writer who finally understoodManet best was not ZoIa the realist but St6phane Mallarm6, the Symbolistwho was later acknowledged bythe Surrealists one of their as great precursors. The deeperempathywas mutual,asyou canseeby comparing Manet's potraits of the t"vo. If Le Dejeuneris beautifirl, it's beautiful like that-in the spark it generates shonby circuiting meining. fu entwined asthe three foreground figures seemto be, they are also strangely disconnected from one another. Yes,the man on the righg the one with the fez-like headgear, could be gesturing toward the man on the left-but the latter seems to be in some other spaceentirely, phlnically and psychologically.So does the nude woman, who, looking out in the direction of the viewer, seemsquite unawareof the male companionswho lounge with her among trees that are too small in comparisonwith