Two great literary forces, poets both yet both greater in what they said than in how they said it, expressed their most intimate beliefs on life and destiny under the guise of a Jewish personation. Nathan the Wise, the hero of Lessing’s drama, was Lessing, just as Rabbi Ben Ezra, the supposititious soliloquist of Browning’s poem, was Browning. Lessing, it is certain, had a living model in Moses Mendelssohn. Nathan was drawn from his friend. Had Browning any such model? Yes and no. Many a writer since Furnivall has identified the hero of Browning’s poem with Abraham Ibn Ezra. It is probable that the poet had him vaguely in mind. When, however, it is sought—as several have done—to work out the identity in detail, the effort fails. The poet clearly meant to prevent any such error. For in Holy-Cross Day, he introduces a Rabbi Ben Ezra as singing a “Song of Death” quite different in tone from the poem in which Rabbi Ben Ezra unfolds his scheme of life. Browning obviously meant us to infer that Ben Ezra was no one in particular.
Browning’s Hebrew knowledge was probably good; like his wife he was apparently able to read the Bible in the original. He also had dipped into curious, out of the way books on Jewish lore. The Rev. Michael Adler cleverly detected that he owed some of the astonishing Hebrew words in his Jocoseria to a little read edition of the Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela. Very bad Hebrew it is, but its author was not Browning but Baratier (see Jewish Chronicle, April 25, 1890). On the other hand, Dr. Joseph Jacobs records in the Jewish Quarterly Review for April, 1890, an incident which shows that the poet was “shaky” in his use of Hebrew names. One of Browning’s most important “Jewish” poems was his Johanan Hakkadosh, Johanan the Holy. Dr. Jacobs tells us that the author was about to call this worthy “Hakkadosh Johanan.” But “through a common friend I pointed out the error to the poet, and the adjective was put in its proper position.” Another misconception of epithets will be noted below.
Similarly with the poem entitled Ben Karshook’s Wisdom. Who was “Ben Karshook”? I doubt whether the writer could have told. In the Tauchnitz copy of 1872, as well as in the English edition of 1889, as Mrs. Sutherland Orr points out, the name is spelt “Karshish.” Ben Karshook, seems a mere jumble of Ben Hyrkanos. But either way, there was no Rabbi of the name. Elsewhere, Browning employs the name Karshish to designate an Arabian physician. It was one of Browning’s foibles, to quote Dr. Jacobs again, to give an impression of recondite learning. Ben Karshook would seem to have been the poet’s first attempt at a Jewish, as distinct from a biblical subject. Holy-Cross Day was the first to be published; it appeared in 1855. Rabbi Ben Ezra came in 1864, Filippo Baldinucci in 1876, Johanan Hakkadosh (with other Jewish poems) in 1883. This list is not a complete summary, but (if one adds Abt Vogler) it includes the most important. Ben Karshook’s Wisdom was not published until a year later than Holy-Cross Day, for it was printed in the Keepsake for 1856. But it was written on April 27, 1854 (according to the statement of Berdoe). Browning himself omitted the poem, apparently by accident, from one of his own volumes, where it is included in the table of contents but not in the book. He never reprinted it. The result has been that it has often been reproduced by others for that very reason; and now, though it has been given a place in the Oxford Browning, let it be printed again!
I.
“Would a man ’scape the rod?”
Rabbi Ben Karshook saith,
“See that he turn to God
The Day before his death.”
“Ay, could a man inquire
When it shall come?” I say
The Rabbi’s eye shoots fire—
“Then let him turn to-day.”
II.
Quoth a young Sadducee:
“Reader of many rolls,
Is it so certain we
Have, as they tell us, souls?”
“Son, there is no reply!”
The Rabbi bit his beard:
“Certain, a soul have I—
We may have none,” he sneered.
Thus Karshook, the Hiram’s-Hammer,
The Right-hand Temple-column,
Taught babes in grace their grammar,
And struck the simple, solemn.
The first part is an apt version of the saying of Rabbi Eliezer, son of Hyrkanos: “Repent one day before thy death” (Pirke Abot 2. 15). Whereon the Talmud (Shabbat 153a) records that Eliezer’s disciples asked Browning’s very question, and received precisely the same answer. The second group of stanzas introduces us to a young Sadducee who has doubts as to the existence of the soul. The poet obviously got his information from Mark, but was a trifle confused as to what he read there. The Sadducees (Mark 12. 18) denied the resurrection, and some have supposed their denial to have extended to the belief in immortality. (See Dr. Kohler’s remarks in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. x, p. 631, top of second column.) To Browning this may have seemed equivalent to questioning the existence of the soul. Assuredly, granted that there be a soul at all, it must be immortal.
What is the point of calling Karshook “Hiram’s Hammer?” Browning is probably drawing on Josephus. Hiram, who helped in building the temple, also interchanged difficult problems with Solomon. (Antiquities, viii, 5. 3). Hence, Browning uses the name in relation to these puzzles, so wisely answered in the poem. It was also Hiram—not identical with the king of Tyre—who constructed the two temple columns Jachin and Boaz. Or, as Dr. Halper has cleverly suggested, the poet may have had in his mind a confused reminiscence of the Rabbinic praise of Johanan ben Zaccai, who (in Berakot 28 b.) is described as Right-hand Temple-column, Strong Hammer. Browning possibly mixed up the Hebrew hazak (strong) with hiram, and so transformed the epithet into “Hiram’s Hammer.” If these and similar reminiscences were passing through Browning’s mind, they might well result in the verse which terminates with the brilliant phrase “struck the simple, solemn.” It needs rare wisdom to make a fool think—or even better, make him silent.
Dr. Jacobs well summed up our indebtedness to Browning when he said that “it is not in the minutiae of Hebrew scholarship that we are to look for Browning’s sympathy with the Jewish spirit,” so markedly shown in his writings. Mr. Stopford Brooke (The Poetry of Robert Browning, 1902, pp. 33-4) puts the case strongly but truly when he declares that “no English poet, save perhaps Shakespeare, whose exquisite sympathy could not leave even Shylock unpitied, had spoken of the Jew with compassion, knowledge and admiration, till Browning wrote of him. The Jew lay deep in Browning.” The writer of those sentences no doubt would not call Richard Cumberland a poet; his plays were friendly enough to the Jew. But Browning’s understanding was more profound than Cumberland’s. It is a mistake to say, as a recent critic has said, that “Browning would have us see that the purest religion is of any creed or none.” That was perhaps Lessing’s view. Browning seems to go further. He saw in Judaism certain elements of absolute truth; therefore he presented those elements through Jewish characters.