 Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's event. My name is Ilana Tahann and I am the lead curator of Hebrew and Christian-Oryan collections at the British Library. Today we are presenting a lecture by Norman Lebrecht on Jewish writers who changed the world part of a program of events supporting our exhibition, Hebrew manuscripts, Journeys of the written word. The exhibition provides a snapshot of the range and richness of Hebrew manuscripts in the British Library's collection and reveals the power of the written word to bring people together. Just a little housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions during the event, you can submit them throughout in the question box below. Norman will answer a selection of questions towards the end of the event. You'll find social media links below the video in case you want to continue the conversation on other platforms. You can also find more about this event and read the speaker's bio using the link to more information. Please do use the menu above to visit the bookshop to get copies of books by Norman and also to give us feedback and to donate to the British Library. The British Library is a charity. Your support helps us open up a world of knowledge and inspiration for everyone. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I'll be reading a profile for Norman Lebrecht. Norman Lebrecht is the world's best-selling author on classical music. He's the author of the critically acclaimed book, Why Muller. His Whitbert Award-winning novel, The Song of Names, is currently being developed into a feature film. Aside from the history of Western music, he has a lifelong passion for the culture and chronicles of the Jewish people. His book, Genius and Anxiety, How Jews Change the World Between 1847 and 1947, on which this lecture is based, is an exploration of a 100-year period during which a handful of Jewish men and women had a profound effect on the globe. He lives in London and writes for the spectator and the Wall Street Journal and is working on his fourth novel. Now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, we'll turn the time over to Norman Lebrecht. Good evening. I've always wanted to be locked in the British Library alone at night. And finally, my dream has come true. Just opposite me over there is rare books and music. You'll find me if you need me. But I might just share a few ideas with you beforehand. They give me the key, by the way, I can get out. Around 1880, two years on either side of 1880, two young men invented new languages. One was in Paris, the other was in Warsaw. They were both called, their first name was Eliezer, which is a common name among Ashkenazi Jews. It's the name of Abraham's servant in the Bible. The Eliezer in Warsaw was called Eliezer Zamenhof and he invented a language called Esperanto. He was an optician. He had a vision, as opticians do, and his was that world peace could be brought about if we all spoke the same language. The only way we were going to speak the same language was if he invented it from scratch. And that's exactly what he did in 1878. He published his first dictionary of Esperanto, which contained, for instance, words like, for large, large was grande, small was mal grande. That makes sense, doesn't it? Father was patro, mother was patrino, which seems a little bit patronizing, as it were. But that's how Esperanto functioned and that was his new language. In Paris at the same time, another Eliezer, this one is called Perlman, decides that he is going to reinvent the Hebrew language as a spoken everyday language. Now Hebrew was commonly referred to as a dead language. It wasn't. It never was. Like Latin, it was used down the ages as a currency of scholarship. It was used as a way for rabbis discussing the laws of Judaism. And it was also a classical language and people had it in their lives and in their prayers, as they did with Latin. But for functional everyday purposes, it was practically useless and for all sorts of reasons, it didn't have a modern vocabulary. You couldn't say, you could say table because tables existed in biblical times, but you couldn't say a watch didn't have a Hebrew word. So this young man, Eliezer Perlman, who later changed his name to Eliezer Ben Yhuda, invented the Hebrew language and drew upon many of the other major languages in order to fund his new vocabulary. So that, for instance, for words about food, he drew most of that obviously from French. Pineapple became ananus in French and in Hebrew and so on and so forth. For more technical and mechanical terms, he used German. For some courtesies, he used Arabic. By this time he'd moved to the Holy Land and he'd acquired Arabic as a language. And there were a few English terms. My favorite word in modern Hebrew is the one that he used on arriving in Palestine, very hot and very thirsty, and what he wanted was an ice cream. How do you ask for an ice cream in Hebrew when there is no such thing in Scripture? And he thought, well, where does ice cream comes from? It comes from Italy. That's where they make the best ice creams. In Italy ice cream is called gelato. Therefore, in modern Hebrew it is going to be glida and so it is to this very day. This play with languages, this play with words is endemic in Hebrew scholarship right the way back to the Mishnah and the Talmud. We find ancient rabbis in the second century and the sixth century arguing about Haldian and Persian origins and cracking puns in those languages to express themselves and to have a little fun with language. Language was plastic. Language was something you could mold. It is very much a Jewish tradition that has lived with us down the ages. But what I want to talk about this evening is three writers, three Jewish writers who changed the major European languages between the middle of the 19th and the middle of the 20th century. And if we have time, we will also look at a couple of complete non-entities, people that you probably never heard of who changed the works of two major English writers. In the period that we are discussing, between the middle of the 19th and middle of the 20th century, there are about three dozen individuals who changed our perception of the universe, of how the world functions, of how we think, of how we structure our lives, how we structure our governance. Of these three dozen individuals, about half are Jews. And one of the main thesis of my book Genius and Anxiety is to look at how it was possible that Jews who amounted to 0.02% of world population were able in that extraordinary period to provide half of the iconoclastic thinkers of the time. But let's just focus on three writers who changed three languages, German, French and English. And the first of them is a man who is known as Heinrich Heine, although his real name was Harry. He was born in Hamburg, which was always a very anglophile town and did a lot of trade with the United Kingdom. And so boys who were born in Hamburg were more likely to be called Harry than they were Heinrich. And he was clearly a very bright young man. And towards the end of his teens, he went to Berlin to get his first collection of poems published. And it was a sensation, it was around 1820. And he gets invited to all the great houses, the great bankers' houses in Berlin. He is a fixture of society. He is much loved, he is much adored. And inasmuch as he entertains the Nouveau Reich in Berlin, he also scoffs at them and scorns them. And since the houses to which he is invited are mostly the Jewish Nouveau Reich, he coins various aphorisms about them that some of them are starting to convert to Christianity. He says Christianity is the admission ticket of Jews into European culture. He scorns the ones who become Christian and then in 1827 he becomes Christian himself. He contradicts himself the whole time. Everything that he does, everything that he says is ironic. In 1831, he has to leave Germany because he's in trouble with the censors. He moves to Paris, in Paris he becomes a fixture. He, in addition to writing poetry, he is a music critic. As a music critic, he accepts subsidies from musicians in order to write their reviews. The ones who don't pay him get terrible reviews. He is a sort of person who is, he's a wild card. There isn't great malice in him but there is an awful lot of mischief and he is very endearing in all sorts of ways. From the very beginning, he has changed the way the poetry sounds and reads in German. German at this time, literary German, is the German of Luther. It's the German of Goethe. It's the German of Schiller. It is very heavy. It speaks in very, very long sentences and only when it gets to the very end of the sentence, which might be a whole page, does it bother to use a verb? And only then do you know what the person who is writing is actually writing about. And Heiner just writes German as if it's hip-hop. He writes everyday German. He writes poetry in the everyday German that people speak in their normal discourse. Denkisch an Deutschland in die Nacht, dann bin ich von dem Schlaf gebracht. I think of Germany at night and then any thought of sleep takes flight. He is homesick. But to write a sentence of such simplicity flies in the face of everything that has been known of German up until that point. Within all of this, he remains intensely Jewish in his preoccupations, in his wit, in his humour, in the subject that he addresses. This Christianized Jew who was formerly German and is now French writes a very, very long essay, Screed, if you like, on the subject of the Jewish Sabbath. He calls it the Princess Sabbath. And it's an affectionate Screed. He describes in minute detail how people prepare for the Sabbath, how they welcome it in, how they sit down at their table, how they organize their lives around it, and then the food, the synagogues that they go to, and the prayers that they say, and the foods that they eat. And in the middle of this very, very long verse, he offers an ode to one of the typical Sabbath dishes, which is known in Yiddish as Schollent, in his rather more fragrant German as Charlotte. It is actually a French word from Scho and Lang. Scho being hot, Lang being slow. It was a stew that you put in the oven before the Sabbath and allowed to bubble very, very slowly over 16 or 18 hours before it is finally eaten at the Sabbath lunch. And Heine, in his ode to the Chollent or the Charlotte, says out of nowhere, Charlotte, Schöner Götter Funken, Tochter aus Elysium. What? Chollent, the beautiful divine spark, the daughter of Elysium? Any German person hearing that verse knows where it's from. It's the most famous couplet in the German language. It's by Schiller, and it has been taken by Beethoven for the climax of his ninth symphony. It is the summit. It's the high point of German culture and civilization. And Heine is applying it to this very simple, rather stodgy, fragrant, but in no way sophisticated Jewish dish that is eaten by every Jewish household on the Sabbath for its lunch. And He goes on and says, Charlotte is the Himmelspeise, die der Liebe her Gott selber, eins der Moses kochen, leert er auf den Berges hinein. This dish, listen to me, Christians, Jews, whoever you may be, this dish is the one that God himself taught Moses how to make when he went up the Sinai mountain. Excuse me? This is a poet and a social commentator who is placing the Jew in his own way at the very, very heart of European Christian western civilization, and he's doing it in a simplified German that flies in the face of the dignity of the German language as prescribed by Luther and Goethe and Schiller. And this is the genius of Heiner. Nobody can stand in the face of what he's doing. Nobody can resist it. All of the composers light upon Heiner for writing their leader. Schubert takes six of his songs for the great winterizer. Schumann, I think, takes 40 of Heiner's poems. So he is at the very, very heart of German culture and every day and in every way, as he writes his poems, he's changing the German language. He is doing it subversively. He's doing it knowingly as a way of asserting his own heritage and as a way of making German more acceptable, more accessible to people outside the German language. One of the great attractions of Heiner to somebody who reads German as a foreign language, as the second or third or fourth language, is it so readable? You can pick up a volume of Heiner's verse and without knowing any German and with just a dictionary at hand, you can make sense of it because the context of what he's doing is so different. So German from the age of Heiner is never going to be the same and Heiner, being Heiner, is full of contradictions and full of aphorisms and full of witticisms and Bournemouth and I'm going to have to cut short because there are so many other writers to talk about, but I'll just give you what are reputed to be his dying words. Somebody has come to him and said, Harry, you need to see a priest. You really are dying now. And he says, no, no, no, I don't want a priest. He says, Le bon de Dieu, pardoner, God is going to forgive me, c'est son métier. It's his job. That was Heiner, the man who changed languages. If he'd had a little bit longer, he could have changed French as well. But that falls to another person a little bit later. In Project Forward, 40 odd years, in 1888, a young man called Jacques Bizet brings his best friend to his mother's salon in Paris. Jacques Bizet is the son of Georges Bizet, composer of Carmen. His mother, Jean-Vierve, is, in my estimation, the model for her late husband's Carmen. She's a fiery character. She's unstable in many ways. But after her husband dies, she marries a lawyer and reinvents herself as a wealthy patron of the arts. And she has the most established salon in Paris. And all the great artists and many rising politicians come and sit in the salon of Madame Strauss, discussing the great philosophies, discussing the new works of art. You would find Forêt playing a new... a new etude. You would find Saint-Saëns in her salon. You would find Guy de Maupassant reading one of his new stories. And you would find this 17-year-old kid who's been brought along by her son, whose name is Marcel. He wears a white gardenia in his buttonhole. He's impossibly precocious. And from the first time that he comes to Madame Strauss' salon, he dominates it. He seems to know all of the arts. He seems to be more poetic than the poets. He knows whatever it is the musicians are playing and correct them on some of their technique. He is a terrible know-all. He is quite insufferable to everybody, except Madame Strauss, who adopts him in her own way and cultivates him and allows him into her world because she sees not just his potential, but she sees in him something of her own immortality. Remember, she has previously been cast as the wildly promiscuous Carmen by her first husband. And what she would like is the respectability of being a salonier in Paris. And she thinks this young man, Marcel, whose surname is Proust, will do that for her when he eventually gets around to composing his great works. Proust comes from an upper-middle-class family. His father, who is not Jewish, is a public health official. He's a doctor. He's quite celebrated in his own way. His mother, who is Jewish, is a very dominant character. And it's 20 years from this time, from 1888, from his 17-year-old bursting into the salon, before Marcel Proust finally discovers himself as a writer. Before he can begin to write, before he can publish anything, he has to wait for his mother to die. And once she is dead, he writes a short story, which is published on the front page of one of the Paris newspapers, and it's about a man who kills his mother, obviously. Proust begins from this time, it is now 1907, to think of the grand novel that he is going to be writing. And he thinks of it in a way that no novel has ever been written before. Clearly, it's not going to be a short story. It's going to be a very, very large story, and it's going to feature all of the people that he's met in Madame Strauss' salon, especially she herself. She becomes the Duchess de Guermont. And he's going to write it in a way that the French language has never been written before. And you know this, the moment you open the first page of A la recherche de temps perdu, and you read his opening sentence, which is, I need hardly tell you, longtemps je me suis couché du bonheur, which in English means, for a long time I used to go to bed early, listen to the two, and you will immediately hear the difference, longtemps je me suis couché du bonheur, the musicality of that sentence, the weight that he puts on the adverb at the beginning of the sentence. Who would start a novel with an adverb? I mean, an adverb in English is one of the worst things you could possibly use. There are better ways of describing things than using an adverb, pour ce longtemps je me suis couché du bonheur. And he has you gripped from that moment. He has you gripped by the musicality of his language, by the rhythm of his opening sentence, and by the way that you know he's going to take you somewhere that you've never been before and he's going to hold you there. Because what he is unfolding is the first stream of consciousness novel. Everything unfolds. He goes to bed early. His mother has put him to bed and kissed him good night, but he doesn't want to let her go. As an adult he is remembering this moment through the smell of a Madeleine biscuit. He smells that on his mother's hands, on her breath or something. And this has brought him back to that moment as a child where he doesn't want his mother to go and she has gone and he has to try and recover her. And some of the most primal instincts are revived in his memory in a profoundly Freudian way. There is an Oxford scholar who identifies ten of Freud's methods of analysis in the great work of Marcel Proust. Freud never knew Proust, never read Proust, Proust never met Freud. These things were shared unconsciously somehow possibly through their Jewish way of thinking. Within this great novel, Freud has changed... Proust, I beg your pardon, that's a Freudian-Proustian slip. Proust has changed the way of what a novel might be and of how we relate to it and where we are going with it. What does this have to do with Proust being Jewish or being aware of his Jewishness or having some part of his Jewish unconscious, as Freud would say, operating within his very, very, very grand scheme? And the clue I think is in that stream of consciousness and in the way that he's writing because he's writing effectively in the present continuous. There are no tenses in Proust. The child is instantly the man, the man reverts to be the child. The boy may be with his mother or he may be with a girlfriend or he may be with an older lady who is his patron. In all of these things, the tenses are mixed and Proust's present and future roll into one another. Where else in literature do we find this? Except in the Hebrew of the Bible which is written in the present continuous. Not as in the beginning God created Heaven and Earth which is a mistranslation but in the beginning of God's creation of Heaven and Earth the Earth was this and so on and so forth and then these things were happening. It is all in the present continuous. And so when the Book of Genesis returns for a second time to the story of creation that is still part of the same continuum Marcel Proust has absorbed that both as a child in his Bible studies and in his Jewish unconscious. One of the things that connects the Jewish thinkers of these times the iconoclasts, the ones who remade the world and refashioned Western thought is a way of thinking that they're no longer necessarily aware of. It's what I call a collective cultural unconscious which is a way of expressing themselves and a way of asking questions that are pretty much unique to people of Jewish origin. Whether that still exists today a hundred years later I'm not sure but at that time it was very much within the air that they breathed and within the way that they expressed themselves. And so we've seen how Heine changed German poetry and how Proust changed French literature. What about English? If I were to ask you which was the most radical and revolutionary novel in the English language you would tell me without hesitation Ulysses of course by James Joyce of course who was not Jewish in any way. He was Irish. He hadn't. If he knew any Jews in Ireland it would have been by coincidence because in Joyce's time in Dublin there were in the whole of Ireland only about 2,000 Jews and he had no formal contact with them. However the hero of Ulysses the central figure in Ulysses is Leopold Blum. Blum. He's Jewish. He tells you as much. He tells you that he's become Christian but he also tells you that he's Jewish. He acts Jewish and he thinks Jewish and he talks Jewish and many of the expressions that he uses in Ulysses are quasi-Jewish expressions. He also has a completely astonishing and unexpected knowledge of Jewish practices and Jewish ritual. He knows about the Passover Seder. Not only does he know about the Passover Seder he also knows the song that concludes the Passover Seder which is the Khadgadja which is my father bought a kid and then the kid was slaughtered and there's a long process of people killing each other until God puts it all right and kills the angel of death. It's a little nursery rhyme with which we conclude the Seder of Passover. How does James Joyce the Irishman become familiar with a ritual which is intensely and exclusively Jewish? To find out you have to go to Trieste which in those days was in Austria and is now in Italy. Trieste was a port on the Adriatic and Joyce took himself there with his girlfriend in 1907 and became an English teacher at the Berlitz School. One of his pupils there was a man called Etore Schmitz who was, as it happens, Jewish. The two became very good friends Schmitz who is known by his literary name as Italo Svevo and his author of the first great Italian modernist novel Zinnu's Conscience. Schmitz taught James Joyce what he knew about being Jewish. If Bloom is Jewish he is partly Joyce and he is partly Schmitz and within the character of Bloom you see these two halves working together. Now, Ulysses is radical and revolutionary because it's language. Like the language of Heine it's everyday language. It's language as heard rather than written. It shook things up tremendously. It shook things up so much that when the first copy was smuggled in England in 1922 the director of public prosecutions had the book banned as unmitigated filth and obscenity. It must have been really, really good for him to do that. Why did he have such a strong reaction to it? Not just because of the sexual references within the book which are fairly graphic but because Joyce in Ulysses completely flips the image of the Jew in English literature. He's changed the English language but he's also changed the perception of the stock villain in English literature which is the Jew. Up until Ulysses the Jew was only used as a pejorative figure a villain, a criminal, a usurer, a philanderer starting with the merchant of Venice in Shakespeare with Shylock and going on to Fagan in Dickens and to Melmott in Trollop and to Svengali in De Morrier and then onwards after George to G.K. Chesterton to John Bucken to Agatha Christie even to Graham Greene in the character of Collione in Brighton Rock. The Jew was a stock figure in English literature. It was a hate figure. It was untrustworthy. It was in some way subversive undermining society and undermining the novel. You knew where you were with the Jew in an English novel. He was the rotter. Along comes Joyce. He isn't. He isn't at all. Bloom is very sympathetic character. He's a decent man. He doesn't quite understand his situation. He doesn't quite understand why Molly is unfaithful to him. He has a little inkling of it but he's not quite there. The way Joyce describes him is as a cultured all-round man. In other words, he's a stereotype of everything every intelligent person would want to be. He is an ideal character without actually being idealised Joyce turns the Jew into something that is desirable and admirable and central to English literature. And so we have in these three chapters three Jews who have turned three literatures in the major European languages onto their head. But to conclude, I want to give you two little stories about two people you've never heard of at all who changed the English novel. One is a woman called Eliza Davis. I visited her grave recently in Wilson Cemetery. Eliza Davis comes into the life of literature when in 1859 Charles Dickens' marriage finally breaks up and he's free to go off with his mistress. He sells his house in central London and he sells it to a Jewish solicitor. Green, what am I saying? Dickens refers to him by a rather pejorative term. He calls him a Jew-usurer. He's a fairly respectable West End solicitor wealthy enough to buy Dickens' home. And Dickens then asks if his wife would like some of the fixtures and fittings. His wife, whose name is Eliza, does. They pay an extra £20 for them. And shortly afterwards, Dickens then writes to another of his friends saying, oh, they've been absolutely perfect. I mean, they've been completely upright. I've had no problems at all with the transaction. Sold the house, gone, done. Four years later, he gets a letter from Mrs. Davis, Eliza Davis. She's collecting money for a charity. She's the mother of 10 children. She's an established lady in middle-class society. And I don't know if you've ever come across a Jewish lady of that kind who is running a charity, but they're very, very hard to resist. And she writes him a letter soliciting funds for a worthy charity that she's looking after. And Dickens duly contributes and sends her a check and sends her a nice note. She then writes to him saying, thank you so much, Mr. Dickens. Now, about your terrible novel, Oliver Twist and that character, Fagan, you've got him completely wrong. You've got 240 references to Fagan as the Jew. And you refer to him as ugly and you refer to him as unremittingly awful. Have you ever met a Jew in your life? Do you know anything about this? Do you know what you're actually saying here? And with this begins the longest correspondence that Dickens has with anybody outside of his immediate circle. And he's replying to Eliza Davis and she's replying back to him. She is barely literate. She makes all sorts of orthographic mistakes in her letters to Dickens, but she's not bothered. She's attacking him over Fagan. And the end of their transaction is that Dickens then calls back Oliver Twist and for the next edition, which is in the collected edition of the works of Charles Dickens, he revises it and he removes something like 200 of the pejorative references to Fagan thanks to Eliza Davis. And in the very last of his novels, our mutual friend, he inserts a character, Rhea, who is a completely idealized and therefore almost unbelievable character who is Jewish and of the greatest imaginable beneficence. This Eliza Davis has, in some way or other, not bowed orized Oliver Twist, but she has required Dickens to think about what he's doing as a writer, to think about stereotypes, to think about demonizing a particular people because he's read bad things about them without, until the point that he met Eliza Davis' husband and sold him the house, without, apparently, ever having met a Jew in his life. The other one, and I've just about got time to tell this, the other English novel is by George Elliott, who is regarded as a superior novelist in every way to Charles Dickens, except she didn't, she was by no means as much of a bestseller. George Elliott was a scholar of religion. She was interested in comparative religion, but she never really had much to do with Jews. But in her private life, she had taken up with a married man, George Lewis, whose wife had run away and was now living with the editor of the Daily Telegraph. This gets quite complicated and I won't take you any deeper into it, but George Elliott, at this point, becomes an outcast in polite Victorian society and so the people that she gathers around her at her Regent's Park house tend to be a bit marginal, a bit fringe, like herself a bit angular to the main thrust of polite society and polite conversation. One of them is a curator who's brought to her from the British Library. It was the British Museum at the time, but I'm so pleased to be talking about it in the British Library now. And his name was Immanuel Deutsch. Deutsch was a poorly paid scholar of Near Eastern languages. He was born in Silesia. He'd been recommended to the British Library by a bookseller in Berlin, where the British Library did many of its purchases, and he was happiest when he was among old manuscripts and he was doing his scholarly work and he required very little of anything. He sent of his meager salary, he sent two-thirds of it back to his parents in Silesia. But at this time he was working on an essay, which was the first essay in English, the first 50,000 word essay in English on the Talmud. And it became the talk of the town, so much so that he was invited to Downing Street and asked if he would mind accompanying a military expedition to Abyssinia in case they came across any manuscripts there that he could help with. George Eliot alighted upon him as a treasure and made him a friend. He would go to visit George Eliot once a week, taught a Hebrew. He eventually had just enough money to pursue his dream, which was to go and travel to the lands of the Near Middle East to Italy and to Greece and to Egypt and finally to the Holy Land itself. And in the Holy Land he had a revelation and he found that what he most desired was that there should be a future in which the Jews could return to their ancient land. He came back to London and presented this idea to George Eliot, who was smitten by the romance of it. He'd also come back with a terrible stomach ache. He went to a surgeon. The surgeon removed a very large tumour from his stomach and told him he didn't have very long to live. He was taken in by a vicar in Marilobon. He taught the vicar's wife Arabic poetry and George Eliot came to visit often. And he continued to infuse and infuse her with this idea of the Jews returning to their own land. When he died, George Eliot was about to go with her partner to Paris and he found her looking pensive on a park bench and said, what are you thinking? And she said, I'm going to write. I'm going to write a novel of this man in manual Deutsch. And the novel was Daniel de Ronde. The influence of Daniel de Ronde is almost immeasurable. It was one of her great successes. It is a flawed novel in many ways. It's a novel of two halves. One half is the English Rose, who is the heroine. The other half is Daniel de Ronde, who is this romantic Jewish character. He doesn't know that he's Jewish until late in the novel. Eventually finds himself going off to the Holy Land to start a new Jewish settlement there. The impact of Daniel de Ronde was stronger than anything else in the momentum of the newborn movement that became known as Zionism. It spread like wildfire. There was a pirate translation into Yiddish by the end of the first year. It was translated into Hebrew. It was read by Jews everywhere across Europe, from Russia through to this country, through to the Mediterranean lands. It was read by Theodor Herzl on the night before the Zionist Congress. Every Zionist leader afterwards had spoken of the influence of Daniel de Ronde. Daniel de Ronde and the idea of Zionism begins with this very Christian, rather proper English novelist, George Elliott, and her encounter with Oscar Immanuel Deutsch. And I've run out of time, and they won't let me stay in the library overnight if I do that. So I'm going to have to pause for a moment because I also understand that there have been a number of questions that have been coming from people who've been listening. It's a Jewish way of approaching a concept and of arguing a concept. And if I were to give you an example, I would give you one from Science, which is to do with the invention of the contraceptive pill. Ever since the dawn of time, men and women have been trying to have sex without having babies, and they were pretty spectacularly unsuccessful at it as we who are here today can testify. And through down the ages they asked themselves, how can we do this? How can we enjoy sexual pleasures without conceiving? And none of the methods that they came across were satisfactory. Until in the late 1930s, three individuals asked, rephrased, reframed the question. They all happened to be Jewish. They didn't know each other. They lived in different countries. But the question that they asked was not, how do we have sex without having babies? They said, and this is a classic Talmudic formulation, they said, in what condition must a woman be in order that she cannot fall pregnant? Think about it. In what condition must a woman be in order that she cannot fall pregnant? Eliminate all the obvious. And you arrive at the only one possible answer that she's pregnant already. If she's pregnant already, she can't conceive through intercourse. From that answer that she's pregnant already, the three scientists realized that all they had to do was to simulate pregnancy in a woman and then she wouldn't be able to conceive. From there to the invention of the contraceptive pill is just two short steps. It's a different way of framing a question. It's a different angle of approaching problem. And much of it is rooted in Talmudic discourse and in fact, even before that, in Mishnahic discourse in the way the ancients in the second century approached a problem, often a physical problem of this kind. How important is the role of humor? In Heine, it's everywhere. You cannot have a line of Heine without, you cannot have a page of Heine without at some point or another bursting out laughing at some little joke that he's made. Remember I quoted earlier his homesickness poem as an exile for Germany. I think of Germany at night and then I can't sleep. Well, that poem carries on and if I can find it here, I ought to be able to find it because I wrote the book, if I can find it here as I'm sure I can, it goes on as follows. He's talking of Germany and then he's talking of his mother and then he's talking of his motherland and we don't know whether he's talking about his mother Betty or about Germany. The two become confused. Years came and years went past since I saw my mother last, twelve years lie behind us while my longing yearning rises. My longing and my yearning rises we're getting caught up in the emotion of this. There's no humor here, this is very serious. The old lady has bewitched me. I always think of the old lady. May God preserve her. In Germany, die Gott erhalte. Anybody who knows German will know Gott erhalte Franz der Kaiser is the national anthem of Austria. So into his own supposed homesickness and his own missing love for his mother, missing his mother, missing his motherland, he's suddenly putting in a little dig at the Austrian national anthem. He's full of humor. At times almost nothing but humor. With Proust the humor is much more subtle. The humor is social humor. He's poking gentle, sometimes not so gentle from the aristocrats that he's writing about and even in these send-ups a Madame Strauss who is caricatured in his book realizes what he's doing to her, realizes that he's pointing up all the flaws that she worked so hard to cover up with makeup and still loves him for it because it's done gently and it is done with humor. There are other forms of humor. There's the ironic humor of Heine. There's this affectionate humor of Proust and there are many others, some of them quite savage. Yes, there are strong links between all the ancient Near Eastern languages and it's very difficult to know what came first but they all feed off each other and they borrow from each other. So Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Haldian, Persian are intermingle. When one reads the Mishnah, the first text of Jewish law, the Mishnah is ostensibly written in Hebrew but there are many words in Aramaic and others in Persian and others in Greek and others whose origin are really quite obscure. Where it becomes real fun is when Eliezer ben Yehuda then integrates them into modern Hebrew and makes verbs out of nouns which were never verbs and they gain a whole new life in a different aspect. The success of modern Hebrew, the time Eliezer ben Yehuda is writing his dictionary, the first word in modern Hebrew, I mean what do you think that could be, celestial voice? Ice cream is close but it wasn't, there was one before it. It was dictionary. Obviously you're writing a new language, the first word you need is dictionary. So dictionary in Hebrew is Milan. And at that time nobody spoke Hebrew as a discourse, as a way you couldn't, you know, you couldn't have a conversation in Hebrew, you couldn't close a deal in Hebrew and this all starts and comes up and it flows. It's also at a time that other languages are revivifying, it's the beginning of the resuscitation of Finnish and of Welsh. And of course as I mentioned of Esperanto, well today there are about 2,000 people who speak Esperanto as their mother tongue and there are about 10 million people who speak modern Hebrew as their mother tongue. So that's the relative success of that language revival. That's really difficult. Jewish writers writing today who have that impact, I think I would say, I mean no longer writing because he's dead, but Philip Roth certainly defined aspects of America, showed us aspects of America that have been forgotten that we never knew about and did so in a language and in a way that he used language that no one else dared to do. Philip Roth would establish a rhythm in his writing that was so compulsive on the reader that by the end he didn't need punctuation, he would write a closing sentence of 250 words with barely a comma because he had you right there. Something else about Joyce and Ulysses that I didn't mention before, that great closing monologue of mollies. Pardon? Yeah, I know. I can't go back to Joyce. Somebody else alive. I suppose Philip Roth was the last one, although there may be others that we don't know of yet, others yet unborn. To have that sort of impact, it's much more difficult in this world also because literature is not what it was. Literature is challenged by so many different media. It's no longer central as it was in the time that Heine and Proust or Joyce were writing it. So with regret I would say no, but I wish it were otherwise. Thank you so much for listening to me. You've been a wonderful audience and I'm now going to hunker down in the British Library for the night. Envy me, please. Thank you very much, Norman, for this compelling lecture and thank you, the audience, for joining us at today's event. Please remember to have a quick look at the show and provide us with any feedback. We have an exciting range of events to support the exhibition. Join us on the 15th of October for an expert panel conversation giving an insight into the lives of Jews in the medieval period. We hope that you have enjoyed today's event. The British Library is dedicated in opening up a world of inspiration and ideas. To make a donation, please click Donate Now at the top of the page. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for attending today's event.