Ben Hur, the novel, pt. 1

So a while back I said non-Jews should not write about Jews because they always get things wrong. Even if you’ve lived in Crown Heights NY your entire life, when you haven’t lived inside a Jewish home and gone to Jewish schools, you’ll get something wrong. It takes months of fact-checking and then you would want somebody to read what you write and tell you what to fix and how. The kind of person who would know, spends his time improving his Jewish education, not reading Gentile works. And he wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings so he might say “interesting idea” or something like that.

You can’t blackmail him emotionally by saying, “wouldn’t you want it to be right?” He doesn’t care what Gentiles read. His life isn’t about telling Gentiles what to think. His life is about living Jewish and teaching Jews to live Jewish. Plus, all the fact-based literature about Jewish living is out there for free, in libraries, on the Internet. Pretty much all the classic Jewish literature is out there, some of it with translations. But since translations are never right either, any Gentile who really wants to know the truth about Jewish literature should learn Hebrew and Aramaic.

It's not up to him. It’s up to you. If you had spent that research time learning Hebrew, you could be reading the Jewish Bible now – most of it. You could be reading Mishnah – almost all of it. You could be reading Shulchan Arukh and its later versions. Your fictional writing prevented your doing that.

And that’s the tragedy of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur. He should have done a lot of research to write his book, but he still got it so, so wrong.

I won’t speculate on what Christian scripture might have meant by what it said. I’m going to deal with what Wallace says about Ben Hur and the Jews he lives among.

So, Wallace.

It starts early, Chapter III. The Greek Gaspar says “he would come again”. The only antecedent for “he” in the text is Gd. Well, excuse me, but Gd does not need to come “again”, He never left. I checked a PDF of the book and there is nothing in it that the text transcription left out. Wallace was asleep at the switch and so was his editor.

Then it goes into “he that was to come would be King of the Jews”. The initial identification of Moshiach is a descendant of Yishai, David’s father, in Isaiah. But Moshiach will be a leader, not necessarily a king. The measure of him will be his faithfulness to Jewish law first, and his promotion of Jewish law. Jewish law itself says that it cannot apply to non-Jews. The first test for Moshiach is that he is a frum Jew; the second that he influences Jews to increase their frumkeit. All others need not apply.

The rest of Gaspar’s speech flows from ignorance of the test of Mosiach. Jewish law, like every reasonable code of law, deals with actions, not emotions. Even the 10^th commandment about coveting, turns out later to deal with taking action on the emotion, not the emotion itself.

Then Wallace makes a tragic mistake. Gaspar can’t worship Moshiach. Nobody can. Moshiach is a man, not Gd. Nothing in the prophets says Moshiach is Gd; that is impossible.  The Prophets of the Jewish Bible are there to reinforce Jewish Law, not change it. The Greeks might worship demi-gods like Dionysius or Heracles, but if Gaspar thinks the Jew told him he could worship a man, he wasn’t listening very closely.