On First Hearing about Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is a very old methodor discipline. Only recently, however, has it become a great worry to me, as some of my critics, as well as friends, have begun to attribute my interest in it, my penchant for it, or whatever skill I may have acquired through it, to the instructions which I received from my academic elders and betters. The truth, on the contrary, is that the very word hermeneutics, if spoken at all, was greeted with great disapproval in the various English-speaking academies which I attended. But anyone who had a more or less orthodox Jewish education, as I did in Warsaw before 1939, would not have required university instruction in this method; one absorbed it with mother's milk, or at father's knee, or uncle's as in my case. I record the song by which my uncle made me aware of this discipline not only because of an autobiographer's usual vanity, but also because it has seemed unknown to anyone to whom I have spoken of it (though I have not sung it, it is true; I cannot sing in tune and so do not try). Perhaps some reader of this account may complete my recollection of it. To set the scene: we were mithnagdim. The word means opponents and was coined by the now fashionable hassidim for those Jews, whether orthodox or not, who rejected their views and practices. In my family the dietary laws and synagogal obligations were observed (at any rate partially) according to the Talmudic and later traditions which had been simplified and digested by the great Joseph Caro in the sixteenth century. But we were also westernizers. Silk hat and square-cut frock-coat was what my grandfather wore to the synagogue. An enlightened Polish nationalism as well as a firm attachment to national Jewishness (in the form of Zionism) were a dual family ideology. My uncle, who was my father's senior, had antiquarian inclinations and

Art · Audiology · Hermeneutics · Linguistics · Theology · Medicine · Philosophy · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies