Ruth Langer's review. With this massive, best-selling book, James Carroll, speaking as a devoted Catholic, throws down a gauntlet to his church, challenging it to confront more effectively its past history of anti-Judaism and to eradicate more radically its causes and consequences. Carroll is passionate and genuine in this call; it echoes from the depths of his being throughout the book and when one hears him speak. Indeed, when Brandeis University sponsored a conference on the book, the strength of his personal voice impelled Jewish respondents to begin a comparable Jewish process of eshbon hanefesh soul searching , a step that has been largely lacking so far from Jewish-Christian conversation.
The questions that need to be addressed here are whether this was merited, and whether this book should become an influential history of the Jewish and Christian relationship.
Rather, he presents himself as a novelist driven by his personal struggle to resolve his relatively recent and horrified recognition that antisemitic structures deeply molded his Catholic identity. Carroll conceives of history as a multi-stranded thread that arcs through time, creating a narrative with a beginning, middle and an end. While this converts unwieldy masses of facts into a compelling story, it is not usually good history. History is messy, and messiness does fit an encyclopedic book that aims at narrative unity.
The result is massive oversimplification throughout. He prepared himself for this book by immersing himself in the rich resources of the Boston theological community, allowing himself to be convinced by the interpretations of, often single, experts on a particular period.
This results in some bizarre interpretations of the history and content of kabbalah and other aspects of Jewish mysticism. Most of the scholars on whom Carroll relies, though, are credible, but his immense bibliography simply has strange lacunae and frequently lacks depth. The problem is that the best scholars disagree with each other, sometimes seriously.
