People of Destiny

THE MAGIC PEOPLE: AN IRISHMAN APPRAISES THE JEWS (158 pp.)--Arland Ussher--Devin-Adair ($2.75).

Anyone wishing to "acquire a bloody nose," remarked a British reviewer last year, need only go to Dublin or Belfast and spout a few well-chosen lines from Arland Ussher's The Face and Mind of Ireland. Ussher, an Irish philosopher and art critic, paid his people handsome compliments, but he also larded in some remarks that no Irishman could take lying down--e.g., "To all appearance the Irish really have no sexual life, beyond the minimum necessary to perpetuate their cantankerous species."

Critic Ussher also declared that the Irish are in some respects not unlike the Jews, "a race for whom I have always felt a warm sympathy." Ireland, like Israel, "has a sense of some special destiny, which enables her to bear her discomfitures with fatalism and secret pride." And in his new book, a study of Jewish history, religion and character (and of gentile anti-Semitism), Ussher embarks on an analysis whose sympathetic tone in no way dims its invigorating conclusions.

Hope & Purpose. Generations of gentile children, begins Ussher briskly, have made their first acquaintances with the Jews through the Old Testament--"the greatest of books for children." Noah and the Ark is a "fulfillment of every child's dream--a 'zoo' which is in the home and a home which is on the move." But the story of the Flood also contains a deep lesson in the outlook of the Jews: God's effort to make a new start with the human race was instantly understandable to them, for in Jewish eyes "despair . . . is the supreme irrationality."

Christian and pagan philosophers have proclaimed the sadness and transience of human life. But the Jew, who has known more of tragedy than most men, has remained "the one true optimist; his love of life is 'strong as death.' " And he has held firm to the belief that "tachlis [purpose] and not tragedy . . . is the meaning of life."

The Other Cheek. It is the Jew's sense of special purpose, says Ussher, that has made him an object of resentment to the non-Jewish majority--who have spent centuries trying savagely to persuade the Jew that he has no claim to a creed of hope and purpose. During most of history, the Jews have responded with Gandhi-like nonresistance. The tragi-comical result, says Ussher, is that the Jews have acted in essence like Christians, and Christians as followers of the tribal Jehovah. But Jewish doggedness, in Ussher's view, has harmed as well as saved the Jew. It has given him, in his urban life, a "peculiar and stern conditioning," robbing his intellect of "fresh and erratic blooms." Nature has become to him "a lost Eden." It is Ussher's hope that Jew and gentile may fashion an intellectual merger of their complementary talents. Too much the speculative philosopher to say exactly how, Ussher does leave a gentle trail of hints. The Jews, he implies, might take less heed of the Talmud's warning ("Go not near the Grecian wisdom--it has no fruit but only blossoms") and flavor their love of practical purpose with a dash of the gentile gift for the fanciful. Gentiles, on the other hand, might do well to stop hymning their capacity for "the purest intuitions," which have a nasty habit of emerging in the form of "mob spirit."

What would seal the merger nicely, but is least likely to happen, says Ussher, is for the Jews "to accept the greatest of their sons" and for the Christians "to honor the race which produced the greatest child of man."

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