Toward the end of Bernard Malamud’s last novel God’s Grace—one of the strangest books I’ve ever read1—the protagonist, Calvin Cohn, a Jew and the sole human survivor of a nuclear apocalypse—watches helplessly while Esau, an intelligent chimpanzee, snatches his baby and eventually, as I recall, smashes her head against a rock.2
The mother, who I’m sorry to report is also a chimpanzee, survives.
You see, Cohn has somehow finds himself on an island populated by chimps, baboons, and at least one gorilla, some of whom can talk. So he tries to civilize these fellow primates, including the one with whom he mates, but eventually, like the half-man, half-animal creatures in Island of Dr. Moreau, they degenerate and overthrow him.
The novel itself is a bizarre mating of The Tempest, The Chosen, and Planet of the Apes, and when I read it, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But thinking of it now in light of recent events, it strikes me as a potent reminder of something Western culture seems eager to forget—that we are primates and, moreover, that primates are no angels.
For a long time, people thought they were. In his book 19963 Demonic Males, anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham explains how early studies characterized chimps as existing in peaceful coexistence with neighboring troops. Eventually, however, we discovered that our closest relatives in the animal world, chimpanzees were prone to ruthless violence, including gratuitous mutilations, against members of their own species. Indeed, researchers like Jane Goodall witnessed entire troops of chimps get wiped out by their rivals. Infanticide, we have since discovered, is not uncommon among primates, including even inter-species infanticide. There have been documented accounts, for example, of groups of chimpanzees murdering infant gorillas.
So when people respond to the October 7 massacre in Israel, when they say of Hamas things like, “they are even less than animals; animals don’t behave that way,” they are speaking with understandable emotion but are not reflecting any real understanding of animals—or people. Animals make war. Animals murder babies. Animals mutilate. Anyone familiar with cats, much less chimps, knows this.
So am I calling Hamas animals? Yes, I am, but we are too, we Jews, we non-Jews, everyone capable of reading this article. Like it or not, we are a species of primate, and for all the blah-blah about the lovely, promiscuous, peaceful bonobos—a chimp-like primate reputed to live in loving, non-violent matriarchies4 —we are closer to chimps than to them.5
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Harari argues that all of us are the descendants of a tribe of humans that pretty much wiped out Neanderthals. We are, he suggests, the offspring of a genocidal sub-species of human. Harari’s conclusions have been disputed, of course. But what cannot be disputed is that humans are animals, and animals are murderous.
Now some thinkers, most famously Steven Pinker in the aptly—and I would argue naively—titled The Better Angels of Our Nature, will tell us we’re becoming less and less violent all the time. Just look at the statistics. The rate of violence in the world is trending down, he argues.
But one nuclear bomb, it has been said, can ruin your whole day. It can also do considerable violence to your statistics. Steven Pinker’s findings won’t amount to much if the current conflict turns into World War III.
But what does all this have to do with Judaism?
There’s a story I remember hearing somewhere, I think from Rabbi Akiva Tatz, but I’m not sure. It went something like this.
Three venerable old rabbis were studying Torah in someone’s home when a servant girl passed through their room wearing only a shift.
“Nu?” said one of the rabbis after she passed by. “Does she think we are angels?”
Judaism recognizes we’re not angels, that, even respectable old rabbis can lust when a scantily clad girl passes by—because they are human beings.
Not everyone realizes this. Some people do believe humans are angels. The violent ones are just “Angels with Dirty Faces,” like the kids in the 1938 movie.6
In that film, you had a bunch of tough, street-smart “Bowery Boys” whose angelic nature is obscured by the dirt of poverty, deprivation, and criminal influence. They are hoodlums because society made them that way, not because they’ve been allowed to remain that way.
The idea comes straight out of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who believed that all that was wrong with people came from social conditioning and that if you just left kids in a “state of nature,” they’d grow to be generous and kind. That line of thinking was later adopted by Marx, who saw capitalism as responsible for greed and competition—as opposed to, say, our inborn nature.
Rousseau didn’t know much about chimps murdering gorilla infants. And Marx had no knowledge of pre-capitalist sapiens murdering Neanderthals.7
Nietzsche and Freud, being more astute observers of human nature, knew better. They argued that humans, being animals, have animal desires, blood lusts that are not the products of civilization but are at war with civilization. People don’t commit acts of terror and violence because they are socialized to do so but because they are insufficiently socialized not to do so.8
That’s why Judaism has evolved a complex system for, among other things, regulating human behavior. Jews are, in a sense, some of the most repressed people on the planet, and rightfully so, I would argue, because there’s an awful lot in humans that needs to be repressed.
What am I getting at? Here’s what I’m getting at.
When I think of the Holocaust, when I think of “Never again,” what I think is not “never again” will we allow Jews to be victims. That goes without saying.
For me, it’s more like the September 11 motto, “Never forget.” And the thing that we must never forget is not any one act of terrorism or even some four years of it in Europe.
For me, “Never forget” means never forget that human beings are animals and that it is as natural for humans to murder and maim as it is for other primates.
I don’t recall who it was, but some two weeks ago, just after the reports of the massacre, rapes, baby killings, and hostage-taking were coming out, some commentator said something like, “I thought as human beings we were past this.”
Really?
No one with even a rudimentary knowledge of recent history ought to be that naive. The Bosnian War with its “ethnic cleansing” and the Rwandan Genocide were only thirty years ago. They were followed by wars in the Congo that include only six years ago reports of mass rape, cannibalism, and dismemberment.
Am I surprised that Hamas terrorists were able to commit atrocities in Israel? Yes, of course. Am I surprised that they chose to? No. Because I know what humans are. Because I have family memories of my grandparents’ being murdered by the so-called “cultured” Germans.
I’m sorry, none of this sounds very perplexed—or very pleasant, for that matter. The connection to my “brand” might not be clear.
But I suppose it goes something like this. Judaism teaches us that we not only have an animal soul but a Godly one as well. And that they are basically at odds, if not at war, with one another.
I guess the perplexed part is not knowing whether the Godly soul is an actual thing or just a metaphor for Judaism’s taming of the animal soul.9 I guess I’m perplexed about how to feel the Godly soul’s reality with the same confidence, the same certainty I have about the animal soul.
I know the animal soul exists because I’ve seen it in myself. In fact, I’ve had to battle it quite a bit over the past couple of weeks. That’s one reason I didn’t attend a “Jewish Voice for Peace” rally last night in Atlanta to counter the idiocy on display there. I didn’t trust myself to keep the animal soul in check.
I see evidence of the animal soul everywhere. The Godly soul, not so much.
But I want it to be there. I want to be more than a primate, more than a bonobo wannabee.
I guess I’m also left questioning about which is going to win in the worldwide battle for the soul of mankind. In Malamud’s novel, the animal soul seems to triumph over the Jew’s attempt to civilize it.
But (spoiler alert!), at the very end, after Cohn and his half-chimp daughter are killed, the one gorilla on the island finds Cohn’s kippah, puts it on his head, and says “The Shemah,” the short Jewish prayer declaring God’s oneness to the Jewish people.
Is Malamud saying you can kill the Jew, but you can’t kill Judaism? That the Godly soul will always find a way back from seeming destruction? And if so, is Malamud correct, or is it just a story to comfort us in a morally blind universe?
Listened to, TBH.
Since I have the book on audio, it’s hard for me to leaf through and confirm my summaries. And I don’t feel like springing for a hard copy or Kindle edition just for a little more accuracy.
I read this book for my dissertation as part of my project to counter utopian notions about sex and gender.
And maybe bonobos are no bonobos. In his book, Wrangham takes to task primatologists who jumped to conclusions about chimp peacefulness based on limited study. He and others don’t seem to consider the same may be true of bonobos, that we are projecting our hopes onto them, and that they may, in fact, not be so perfect. I found at least one article suggesting as much, though you have to wade through a lot of “bonobos-are-peace-love hippy” articles to get to it.
I don’t mean genetically. There are some indications bonobos are closer to us in that respect. But in terms of evolution, humans are no angels, and we’re also not bonobos.
This was the first of one of cinema’s longest running franchises, alternately known as “The East Side Kids” and “The Bowery Boys.” I spent many a 70s Sunday afternoon watching these movies on channel 5 in New York.
Postmodernists tend more to see humans as a blank slate rather than angelic, upon which cultural discourses are written that drive humans to hateful violence. But it amounts to the same thing, and, of course, no one can point to any actual models of long-term peaceful human existence facilitated by the likes of Foucault and Derrida.
In the case of Freud, he saw socialization as a necessary evil always frustrating the animal nature of humanity; our “discontents” result from an uneasy compromise between our desires to act on instinct and the rules that facilitate the comforts of civilization. Nietzsche had a darker view, more nihilistic. He seemed to want to liberate the animal soul from the “slave mentality” imposed by Judaeo-Christian values and social norms. Some say the logical progression from Nietzsche is to the Nazis, but really it’s to the Marquis De Sade.
Which is not to suggest it is entirely successful in doing so. It’s a case of managing, not eliminating.