Rabbi Lawrence W. Raphael

This introduction is inspired by the following traditional folk saying: "Why were human beings created? Because God loves to hear stories."

Mystery stories, mystery novels are one of the most popular types of fiction published today. Some of you may know that there are more than 10,000 mystery titles in print at any one time. Other than romance novels more mystery and crime novels are sold than any other fiction genre. The New York Times has one-half of their list in both paper and hardback that are mysteries. Also, in The New York Times, Marilyn Stasio devotes a bi-weekly column to crime and mystery novels.

Why this popularity? Several reasons I believe - I will share with you a couple of them as I speak today. The first comes from a book written by a Belgian sociologist, Ernest Mendel, titled Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (University of Minnesota, 1984). He quotes the thinker and social philosopher Walter Benjamin who made these comments 75 years ago: "In a brilliant flash of intuition, Walter Benjamin once observed that a traveler reading a detective story on a train is temporarily suppressing one anxiety with another. Travelers fear the uncertainties of travel, of reaching their destinations, of what will happen when they get there. They temporarily suppress (and thus forget) that fear by getting involved in innocent fears about crime and criminals that, they well know, are unrelated to their personal fate."

My own travels in this genre of mystery fiction began seriously in 1972 when I was a rabbinic student at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion. Shortly after being initiated into this genre, my wife Terrie suggested that I combine my passion for mysteries with my interests in Jewish studies. So my hunt for a good mystery now revolved around seeking Jewish mysteries that featured Jewish characters. That journey was primarily responsible for this book. It was easy to find the mysteries of Harry Kemelman that had begun to define this sub-genre, but the real research began after I'd read all of his popular Rabbi Small stories.

Rabbi David Small first appeared in Kemelman's Friday the Rabbi Slept Late in 1964. Thirty-two years later, his last book was published, The Day the Rabbi Left Town. It appeared shortly before his death and it featured the now-retired Rabbi Small who had by now moved out of Barnard's Crossing (a Boston Back-bay suburb). In all of these novels, Small solved cases using skills that he'd honed in his talmudic studies; also in all of them, he had his pulpit in a very accurately described suburban congregation.

Throughout the 1970's and the early 1980's, my quest for Jewish detectives, police officers, and private eyes netted a modest return. Since that time, there have been an increasing number of mysteries with Jews who are detectives by profession or by accident, and whose Jewishness may be peripheral or central to their lives and the plot. Since 1986, in fact more than 150 of these Jewish mystery novels have been published. They can be found in the bibliography I created which includes American mysteries where the main protagonist is Jewish.

Here are a few things that I have learned about mysteries and Jewish identity:

First, as the Jewish educator Steven Steinbock has noted, there is something essentially Jewish about mystery fiction. Like the story of Creation, a mystery begins with chaos and ends with everything solved and in its place. The Bible also flows with whodunits. In its earliest tales, God plays detective, such as when asking Eve how she came to eat the fruit and when asking Cain about his brother. The mystery is all about right and wrong, crime and punishment, justice and mercy.

Second, the detective novel is an invention of the nineteenth century, when it sprang up nearly simultaneously in England and America with the development of a rational system of laws. Couple the basic human sense of curiosity, fondness for puzzles, and interest in violence with the growing need for police forces to maintain order and prevent violence during the social and economic changes of the nineteenth century and the result was an ideal atmosphere for the beginning of the detective novel. Prior to that, tales of outlaws appeared, but they were usually romanticized stories of attractive rogues, or allegedly true accounts of villains who met bad ends and whose punishments served as warnings to readers. These stories emphasized the villain. Whether romanticized or demonized, the robber or murderer was always the centerpiece of the story, not the person who caught the villain.

To understand how these stories shifted focus to the detective, I am indebted to Natalie Kaufman and Carol Kay, two scholars who have written about mystery fiction in their book, G is for Grafton. They explain that the word "detective" did not appear in the English language until 1842, when its first recorded use was in the name of a new department of the Metropolitan Police Force in London: The Detective Division. The word "detected" had been in existence as far back as the fourteenth century, when it meant, "disclosed," "open," or "exposed."

During the Medieval and Renaissance periods, crime was often solved by confession, which was usually obtained by torture; or by the testimony of a witness or an informant, also frequently obtained by torture. For centuries, self-confession was the basic method of solving a crime.

Transformation of the adjective "detected" into the noun "detective" indicates the nineteenth century's recognition that there was a new method of solving crime. This new method centered on the abilities of someone to think through the details of the crime and rationally conclude the identity of the criminal. Exposure of the criminal was done by the detective, not the criminal. This new method, which seems obvious to us today, was a radical consequence of a great modern shift in popular thinking about the way in which the world operated and how it could be understood.

The shift had begun in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment and its reliance on rational thought instead of divine revelation as a way to understand the universe. People came to believe that they were not merely passive receptacles of divine knowledge, but were also capable of generating knowledge.

This increased awareness meant that a single human being could observe the natural world, postulate a theory to explain a phenomenon, and prove that theory through experimentation and analysis. This methodology had many antecedents, including the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century. There were many other heroes along the way, but this scientific method reached an important point with the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859.

This phenomenon found it's way into the Jewish world with the early reformers of Judaism in Germany and later the United States. They understood that their senses and their rational understandings of the world around them had some merit and some basis for dealing with the world of religious revelation.

Now it is time to turn to more contemporary events. In recent years, the ever-increasing interest in mystery novels has witnessed an incredible onslaught featuring a recurring character in novels. This has happened during a period of time when there has been a growing sense of isolation and loneliness in our lives. This loss of a sense of community is attributed to many forces.

One way of understanding them is to refer to what I call the "Law of Unforeseen Circumstances." For example, the widespread introduction of air-conditioning was certainly welcome, but it moved entire families from the front porch or to the fire escape, where they had talked with neighbors. Now they are sealed in the privacy of their homes, or they use a computer as a way of being connected with others. The loss of opportunity for human interaction is very real and quite serious. We all need human contact in order to be emotionally healthy, and most of us figure out some way to get it.

So, at the same time that bookstores are packed with books with such titles as How to Be Your Own Best Friend or Making Your Spouse Your Friend, we also devour mysteries, and we welcome the familiarity of their characters. This warmth and connection with which readers talk about their favorite detectives reveals the importance of these characters in their lives. These characters meet a need for friendship and relationships in our lives.

I want to make a claim for a parallel in our religious realm: one result of the Jewish tradition of returning each year to the biblical characters and their stories as we read the weekly parashah is that once again, we are able to relate and connect with the real-life characters, with all their faults and their mistakes, like our patriarchs Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Leah and Rachel. We read them again and again as they come to life each year and we see parts of ourselves in them each time in slightly different ways.

So another reason for the popularity of mysteries is explained by using an example from Kaufman and Kay about Sue Grafton's character, Kinsey Millhoune.

As they have written:

Grafton's ability to defeat the enemy in a terrifying final confrontation encourages us to think that someone might actually be able to clean up the mess we see all around us in the late twentieth century. At the same time, the personal struggles she goes through in order to do that clean up reassure us that our own fears and phobias are both normal and manageable. If Kinsey is scared of getting an injection from a nurse, yet is also capable of running after a murderer and tackling him to the ground, then maybe we can gather up our nerve to ask the boss for a raise, or hold our teenagers to a curfew, or perform whatever bit of daily living is a challenge for us. Things gone wrong can be corrected, at least to some extent, and, equally important, they can be corrected by someone who has foibles much like our own.

Much of the appeal of these novels, then, lies in the dual appeal of escape from our daily lives and of reassurance that we can cope with our daily lives. While most of us don't chase scam artists into Mexico or become the target of a contract killer, we do know the fears of being the next person to be downsized at the office, or being mugged on downtown streets, or finding drug paraphernalia in our child's room. The best of the mystery novels allow us to confront those fears by fictionalizing and exaggerating the bogeyman into the worst possible situation - murder - and offering the detective as the knight who slays the dragon for us. We get the thrill of the big scare, but all in the safety of our comfortable chair (or wherever we like to read), plus we have the reassurance that the dragon can be slainÑand by someone not all that different from us.

P. D. James, the popular and highly regarded British mystery writer, concurs. She states: "I think there can be little argument that the crime novel can be literature. After all, man has always concerned himself with problems of moral choice, with the nature of good and evil, and with that unique crime for which there can be no reparation to the victim, murder. Our earliest myths are concerned with violent death, and with the bringing of order out of disorder."

So, one of the key reasons for the popularity of good mystery writers is their ability to give voice to our contemporary feelings, while at the same time, giving us the reassurance of a credible central figure who can hold back the darkness for one more day. The hard-boiled private eye represents clarity and vigor, the immediacy of justice no longer evident in the courts, an antidote to our confusion and our fearfulness. In a country where violence is out of control, the private eye exemplifies order and hope, with the continuing, unspoken assertion that the individual can still make a difference. The private eye novel is still the classic struggle between good and evil played out against the backdrop of our social interactions.

This is how mystery writer Jody Jaffe (who is Jewish and has written, Horse of a Different Killer among others) explains it to us:

But just like you don't buy the first horse you look at, unless you're stupid like I am, you don't usually catch your killer first time out. After finding two of them myself, I can attest to that. What I've learned in my brief career as a fashion-writing detective of sorts is that solving murders is a metaphor for living life; both are full of curveballs, red herrings, wrong turns, missed opportunities, and, most of all, foolish assumptions. But if you're lucky, you work hard, say your prayers, and your karma's right, the guy in the white hat kicks butt.

So, we turn to the Jewish stories and when we do so it might be useful to have a definition of what a Jewish story is. They are Jewish stories because they fit into one or more of the categories suggested by Dov Noy, the founder of the Israel Folktale Archive in Haifa. According to Noy, there are four major qualities of Jewish stories. The first is Jewish time, the second is Jewish place, the third is Jewish characters, and, the last is a Jewish message or moral.

So, in addition to enjoying them as mysteries, we read these stories because they are Jewish stories. In addition, what can this literature illustrate about Jewish identity?

To the popular division of mysteries into private eye, police procedural and armchair detective can be added three sub-categories based on Jewish identity and the role of Judaism in each mystery. To this end I have developed a division of mysteries that is reflected in the bibliography that I have created.

First is the Assimilated Jewish Mystery (you can look at my bibliography for a definition and a listing). While Jewish protagonists are in dozens of mystery novels, they are often highly assimilated and sometimes intermarried. Many of them express their identity thinly in cultural and ethnic forms. That thread, however, which binds many Jews to their ancestors and to their co-religionists, has not entirely disappeared. Sometimes, it may appear very tenuous, other times it may be knotted and even quite twisted. But nonetheless, it still connects the protagonist with other Jews and with Judaism. Often the God of their ancestors has been abandoned, but the cooking of their mothers has been remembered. And when the cooking of their mothers has been forsaken, our protagonists invent alternative lives and stories that can be tasted, smelled or hinted at in these pages. The wider body of this detective literature is one more example of how we now celebrate and appreciate ethnic differences in America.

The second category is the Acculturated Jewish Mystery. In this category, the protagonist is acculturated and some aspect of the character's or the plot's development is related to their sense of Jewishness. These Jewish heroes and heroines of detective fiction mirror in many ways the 2.5 percent of the American population that Jews comprise. They behave in ways similar to what we have learned about the contemporary American Jewish community. Like other Jews, acculturation may have blurred distinctions between them and their gentile neighbors, but a sense of people hood has not been entirely lost. They often reflect that wide group of Jews who marry non-Jews (presently at the rate of approximately 50 percent), whose commitment to Jewish education is minimal, whose Jewish identity is often marginal and whose Jewish attachments are peripheral. Yet they remain clearly Jewish, even if Judaism plays no role in furthering the plot of these mysteries.

There is a third and smallest category of novels that I call Affirmed Jewish Mysteries. In these books, the Jewish characters are clearly identified as Jews and the Jewish religion or tradition helps advance the plot. These mystery novels are those that are most often commercially popular. There are a handful of Jewish mystery writers who have merged their interest in solving a crime with their desire to illuminate some aspect of Judaism and the Jewish community. Perhaps these books owe their popularity to the interests of some Jews who are turning to some form of Jewish tradition. For them, it is nice to have your exposure to tradition reinforced by a fictionalized account of Jewish heroes.

This last category interests me the most when it combines good writing with Jewish content. In a recent article that just appeared in Moment magazine, the author Roger Kamentz writing about Jewish fiction notes that: "Identifying writers as Jewish because of birth or religion, [accidental] however, is something I object to. The writing must have a certain inner quality to be defined as Jewish. Jewish writing can also be about Jews or Judaism [sort of Jewish]. Real Jewish writing [real and authentically Jewish] is both - Jewish inside and out - and it takes place everywhere, not just Manhattan or Brooklyn. [October 1999]

Much can be learned from these books. Here is one excerpt from Stuart Kaminsky's Lieberman's Folly. The context is that Abe Lieberman has avoided being elected president of his Conservative Chicago shul and Bess, his wife, has been given the honor. As Kaminksy writes,

The services were, as always, the major meditation of Abe Lieberman's week. He had, in his life, gone through the usual range of emotions about religious services. For ten years, through his twenties, he had been a silent atheist, boycotting the services his father had made him attend as a boy. For another ten years, after he was married, he had toyed with becoming a Buddhist, a secret Buddhist but a Buddhist nonetheless. When Bess insisted that Lisa have religious training and tradition, Leiberman had gone to services when he couldn't avoid it. The constant thanks to God were at first an irritant. Then, on Yom Kippur, he had had an insight. The services, he discovered, were a meditation, something he could get lost in, not greatly different from Buddhist meditation. The Hebrew words of praise, said by the congregation and the rabbi and sung by the cantor were a mantra.

Having made this discovery at that age of fifty, Lieberman had stopped fighting his tradition, though he was still not sure about what he made of the universe. But he was not only comfortable with services, he looked forward to them, to being lost in prayer, to sharing the ritual with others. He wasn't sure whether he attributed this to his age or wisdom. He did not choose or need to explore the questions. That it was comforting was sufficient.

The phenomenon of learning about other cultures through mystery literature is illustrated by the popularity of Tony Hillerman, who has written best-selling mysteries that take place in the Navajo reservations of Arizona and New Mexico; of Walter Mosley, who writes about African Americans in Los Angeles; of William X. Kienzle and Andrew Greeley, who both write about American Catholics; of Georges Simenon, who writes about the French; and of Batya Gur, who writes about Israelis. Some Jewish mystery writers use Judaism to provide information about and insights into a way of life that is fascinating to many. The material concerning Jewish culture is not merely used as background. It also provides insight into character, which in turn demonstrates motive. A bonus for the reader is the ease with which such material as Jewish ritual, observance, learning, and tradition contextualizes or amplifies the story or plot and is used as the occasion for the occurrence of a crime.

Presented in this small segment of the world of popular detective fiction is a vast array of characters, plots, sub-plots and circumstances that give us ourselvesÑcontemporary American Jews.

So, in keeping with the folklore quote at the beginning, now is the time to enjoy good Jewish stories.

Back to top