Chouchani

There are said to be strange superstitions among those former Essex postgraduates who found academic employment, a conventional career. There are odd practices that would themselves be worthy of scholarly analysis. Is it really true that you have to leave your back door open in case a former associate raps at your window? Is it true that a place must always be left at your table in case a former Essex postgraduate arrives unbidden for a meal?

Some say that there is a secret fund into which the more solvent former Essex postgraduates pay upon which their poorer fellows might draw; that there is a shadowy Institute of Study, a secret society with secret rituals, akin to the Freemasons, to which all the former Essex postgraduates belong. That there are secret handshakes and secret winks; that certain signs allow one former Essex postgraduate to recognise another, even though they belonged to different academic years and might never have met at their alma mater.

How can he explain it to me?, W. wonders. He recalls the legend of Chouchani, the Talmudic master who taught both Levinas and Weisel.

No one knows anything about Chouchani, W. says, where he was born or grew up; where he acquired his immense learning which was not just about Judaism and Jewish matters, but mathematics, too – philosophy – the arts. How many languages did he speak? All the living languages of Europe, and a few dead ones besides. He spoke fluent Hungarian; fluent Basque. He lived like a tramp, unkempt, wandering, staying for a while with those he took as his pupils.

You had no choice if Chouchani took you as his student, W. says. He selected you, not you him. He'd bang on your window; he'd demand to be admitted to your home. And there he would stay, night after night. There, demanding nothing but attention to the intellectual matters at hand. Nothing but study, and seriousness in study. And then, just like that – did he think you'd learnt enough? – he disappeared. Just like that, he was gone, his room cleared – disappeared.

But we know now where he went, this Mary Poppins of Jewish studies. We can trace his path: one year he was in New York, the next, Strasbourg, the year after, Jerusalem. And didn't he die in Montevideo? Wasn't it in Uruguay that his tombstone can be found, and on it, the lines, 'His birth and his life are bound up in a secret'.

And it's still secret, despire the internet, despite Facebook. Still secret, despite all kinds of philosophical detective work. Whole books have been written about him, he who did not write a line. Whole websites have been set up about him, he who never allowed himself to be photographed. 

His mastery of the Bible, the two Talmuds, the Midrash, the Zohar and the work of Maimonides. His mastery of the latest theories in mathematics, in physics. His total knowledge of literature, ancient and contemporary. His philosophical learning …

Can I imagine it?, W. says. Well, now I am to imagine an entire generation of thinkers who rose to the same heights. I am to imagine an entire generation of Essex postgraduates in whom thought was burning.

How harsh he was, Chouchani! How harsh they were with one another, the Essex postgraduates. How merciless in debate he was, Chouchani! But they, too, were merciless, W. says; they, too, would let nothing pass. How serious he was! But they too were serious, the Essex postgraduates. Thought, to them, was always a matter of life and death.

Had Chouchani really held a knife to the throat of one of his pupils, who was slow to understand the repercussions of Tossafot's commentary? Well, a knife had been held to his throat, W. says, in Essex University Student Union because of some misunderstanding or another, some slowness about Heidegger's commentary on Kant, and rightly so! He needed to be taught a lesson, W. says. He needed to learn!

And hadn't he, in turn, held knives to the throat of younger Essex postgraduates! That's another superstition: that the former Essex postgraduate keep a knife in the house at all times, blade sharpened. A knife that might be used against him if he becomes abetrayer of thought, or that he might use on one of thought's betrayers. So I'd better watch it when I visit him, W. says.