A high percentage of the best historical novels have been written with the classical world as background. One thinks of Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian,” Robert Graves’s “I, Claudius,” John Williams’s “Augustus,” Steven Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire,” and those of Mary Renault’s novels set in ancient Greece. Milton Steinberg’s “As a Driven Leaf” (1939) is another splendid historical novel, this one set in second century Jerusalem and Antioch, one generation after the destruction of the Jewish Temple (A.D. 70) and during the rise and suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt under the Roman rule of the Emperor Trajan.
The author of “As a Driven Leaf” was the rabbi at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, where he was famous for his learning and the power of his sermons. A student of the legendary philosopher Morris R. Cohen and for a time the disciple of the rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Steinberg, who died in 1950 at the age of 46, left behind two nonfiction books—The Making of the Modern Jew (1934) and Basic Judaism (1947)—still read in our day. A second, unfinished novel, “The Prophet’s Wife,” was published posthumously in 2010.
“As a Driven Leaf”—the title comes from Job 13: 24-25: “Wherefore hidest Thou Thy face.../ Will Thou harass a driven leaf?”—is a book with something like a cult following. The novelist Chaim Potok remembered how exhilarated he felt, as an adolescent in an Orthodox yeshiva, to find a book that so powerfully captured his own youthful religious turmoil. The other day someone told me that his brother-in-law, after reading the novel 20 or so years ago, decided to go to rabbinical school.
Ambitious in scope, the theme of “As a Driven Leaf” is the conflict between reason and revelation, science and faith that faces Elisha ben Abuyah, Steinberg’s protagonist. Handsome, highly intelligent, born to wealth, Elisha is brought up under the guidance of a Greek tutor. When Elisha’s father dies, an uncle, orthodox in his Jewish belief, takes responsibility for the boy’s upbringing and sends him off to be educated by a learned rabbi, a man whose saintly simplicity and wisdom win Elisha’s heart and set him on the path of Jewish learning. He becomes one of the most promising young rabbis of the age, rising to become a member of the Sanhedrin, the supreme court composed of the most learned men in Judea.
Elisha ben Abuyah was a historical character, a Jewish apostate, about whom not all that much is known. He is said to have lapsed into hedonism, replaced Jewish ethics with pagan aesthetics, and betrayed the Jews to the Romans during the Bar Kochba rebellion. With great novelistic skill, Steinberg fleshes out the bare bones of information we have on Elisha ben Abuyah, breathes life into him and into the large cast of characters he encounters in the novel, and gives his story impressive dramatic unity.
In the novel Elisha contracts a disappointing marriage to a woman of crabbed and conventional views whose miscarriage prevents her from having children. He finds succor in the home of a disciple, whose two young children later die of plague. “It is not in our power,” a dictum of the Jewish sages runs, “to explain either the happiness of the wicked nor the suffering of the righteous.” The death of these children turns Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah’s mind to doubt, and to searching for answers to the world’s mysteries outside the realm of Torah and Jewish learning.
Greek learning is where this search soon leads. A crucial book for Elisha is the geometry of Euclid, in which he discovers what Jewish learning cannot deliver: cold axiomatic proofs set out through a series of indisputable propositions. As Elisha puts it later in the novel, favoring Greek learning over Jewish learning: “Their success, I am convinced, followed from the fact that they started from the foundations. We, on the contrary, have always tried to bolster a pre-established case.” Elisha ben Abuyah’s intellectual wandering ends in apostasy and eventually with his excommunication from the rabbinate.
The first part of “As a Driven Leaf” is set in Judea; the second, in Antioch in Syria. In Antioch, Elisha’s search for certainty takes him further afield—to study Gnosticism, the arguments of the agnostics, the doctrines of the Cynics. Steinberg was learned in Greek and Latin, and steeped in ancient history, and the detailed settings of his novel have a clinching convincingness. In Roman Antioch Elisha encounters the barbarity of the Roman slave markets, the bloodiness of the gladiatorial arena, where his fellow Jews are put to death at the command of the cruel Roman praetorian prefect, Marcus Tineius Rufus. Elisha’s own past reverence for the Pax Romana is wiped out as he sees, “with such fearful clarity, that no society, no matter how great the achievements of its scholars, can be an instrument of human redemption if it despises justice and mercy.”
Like the Old Testament God, Steinberg puts Elisha through arduous tests: the temptation of adultery, the seductions of intellectual vanity, and more. Elisha comes to self-knowledge, but the secrets of the universe remain withheld from him. He feels his error in hoping for certainty in life, in abandoning his people and his religion out of intellectual hubris, when he also comes to realize that important truths do not await at the end of a syllogism. Faith and reason, he finally grasps, need not stand opposed. “On the contrary,” he tells his old disciple, “salvation is through the commingling of the two, the former to establish first premises, the latter to purify them of confusion. ... It is not certainty that one acquires so, only plausibility, but that is the best we can hope for.”
In his spiritual wanderings Elisha has gone too far, and can never again accept the authority of his old religion. At the novel’s close, his search continues. “Older, sadder, wiser, I go seeking now, through faith and reason combined, the answer to this baffling pageant which is the world, and the little byplay which has been my life.”
One imagines that in writing “As a Driven Leaf” Milton Steinberg was writing about his own intellectual conflict over the issue—faith or reason, and in what proportions?—that remains fundamental to thoughtful people to this day. The tension that this conflict stirs in a first-class mind in his novel is compelling, and the incisive portrait of the man caught up in it is what gives “As a Driven Leaf” its standing as a masterpiece.
