Geza The Jew

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Providential Accidents: An Autobiography

Geza Vermes
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) 258 pp., 21 b&w illus. $24.95 (paperback)

Geza Vermes is one of the most prominent and most productive Dead Sea Scroll scholars in the world. His is the most widely used translation of the scrolls, now in its fifth edition. He is also a leading scholar in what is referred to as historical Jesus studies. He speaks elegant English with a Hungarian accent, has a funny name that almost no one pronounces correctly (GAY-za Ver-MESH) and is an Oxford don. If that isn’t enough to pique your interest in his autobiography Providential Accidents, add to that that he was born a Jew, was converted to Catholicism, became a priest, fell in love with another man’s wife, lived with her, then married her, left the church and returned to Judaism. Yet, salacious it is not.

Vermes was born in 1924 into a Hungarian Jewish family that had already assimilated. His father, born with the recognizably Jewish name Weisz, early in life changed it to the more Hungarian sounding Vermes. At six, Geza was placed in a Catholic school in the small town where they lived; at the end of the school year, the entire family converted; Geza had nothing to say about it.

His mother became a devout Catholic. (Ironically, it didn’t help—she was killed as a Jew in Auschwitz.) Even after his conversion, his father showed little interest in Catholicism and continued to be friends mostly with Jews. Although the family was now Catholic, Geza’s mother forbade her son to mention the change to Grandma. He never did. At least for his father, the decision to convert was apparently based on the simple fact that they would all get on better if they were Catholic too, a small price to pay for people who were not devoted to Judaism anyway. I say “too” because it was never possible for them to shed the stigma of Jewishness entirely—and they knew it. They were always aware that they were Jews as well as Catholics. A brilliant, only child, Geza was taunted by his “truly” Catholic classmates as “Jewboy.”

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Anti-Jewish legislation was enacted in Hungary as early as 1938. The baptismal certificates of the Vermes family failed to protect them: Only those converted prior to 1919 counted as Christians. Although he graduated from the gymnasium (high school) with top marks in every subject, as a Jew Geza had no chance of being admitted to a university. He says if he could have gone to a university, he would have studied Hungarian literature; he wanted to be a poet. Under these circumstances, however, he opted for the priesthood and a theological curriculum because “it seemed to offer the only real prospect for a higher education…The idea of becoming a priest did not strike me as extraordinary, since despite my recent experiences of discrimination I still saw myself as a Catholic, albeit with Jewish ancestry…[T]he urge to go on studying was irresistible. Learning was my primary aim; the rest formed the necessary means, which I accepted in all honesty.”

He applied first to the Jesuits, but was rejected. He did not then know that at the time “the Society of Jesus refused in principle to tolerate Jewish converts among its ranks.” He lowered his aim and was accepted to the theological college of his local diocese. At 18, he donned a soutane.

Although Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany during the war, the Nazis did not enter Hungary until 1944. It was then that Jewish lives were imperiled. On March 19 of that year, Adolph Eichmann arrived in Budapest to organize the Final Solution for the Jews of Hungary. Geza was saved by his concerned superiors, who shunted him from place to place and supplied him with a document certifying that he was exempt from the anti-Jewish decrees because he was an ordained deacon of the church—a false claim since he would not be a deacon for another four years. His meals were often brought to his room, and he remained out of sight even during mass.

By the end of the war, he had fled to Budapest. While most Jews from rural areas ended up in Auschwitz, the Jews of Budapest were relatively unharmed; the authorities apparently thought that the large, dispersed Jewish population would deter the allies from bombing the city. In the end, however, the Jews were rounded up and herded into a ghetto. Hundreds were led to the banks of the Danube and shot, but within the walls of the seminary, Geza was safe. As he put it, “Outside, terror reigned.”

After the war his provincial seminary opened once again, and he renewed his friendship there with two men who, like himself, were of Jewish ancestry: “If I were asked now why as a Catholic seminarian I chose two seminarians of Jewish ancestry as my closest confidants, my honest conscious answer would be that I was not particularly aware of their Jewishness, but found them personally and intellectually more congenial than the rest. No doubt, subconsciously there was more to it than that. These friendships marked the start of a slow internal metamorphosis which took more than twenty years to mature.”

Knowing the superior educational facilities run by the Dominicans, he decided to try (twice) to join the Dominican order, but was turned down. “The Dominicans were traditionally as unwilling to admit Jewish convert candidates as the Jesuits.” Having now been rejected by both the Jesuits and the Dominicans, Vermes decided to try the Fathers of Notre-Dame de Sion, an order that had been founded by two French Jewish converts, the brothers Ratisbonne: “I was longing for a congenial setting where my Jewish origin would not be a disadvantage.” He was accepted and made his way to the order’s seminary in Belgium.

Paradoxically, although when the order was organized the nuns dedicated most of their devotions to praying for the conversion of the Jews and the fathers devoted themselves to organizing the Confraternity of Prayer for the Jews, Geza Vermes seems to have devoted himself (in addition to his studies) largely to bettering Christian-Jewish relations and understanding. Together with his mentor and friend Paul Démann, a priest of Jewish ancestry who, like Vermes, would one day leave the priesthood, they planned a crusade “against the age-old Christian anti-Judaism in the Catholic Church.” In Cahiers Sioniens, a journal they edited (with a third convert from Judaism, Renée Bloch), they published articles that they hoped would lead the church “to acknowledge nineteen hundred years of error in her attitude to Jews and to expiate all the injustice resulting from religious antisemitism. The very idea struck the older fathers…as obnoxious.” In the end the trio of editors was vindicated: The Cahiers “represented the vanguard of Catholic thinking.”

Vermes also wanted to fight on the academic battlefield, especially against the church’s strictures on academic freedom in studying the Scriptures. As he puts it, “Church directives issued in scriptural matters prior to the Second World War not only hindered, but to all intents and purposes destroyed, freedom of 031enquiry into the Bible among Catholic students…The powers that be in Rome saw modern Bible research as a direct threat to their doctrinal authority…[Their] dictates [were] so primitive and old-fashioned as to put Catholic exegesis beyond the pale of academic respectability.” The Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch could not be questioned, nor the Davidic authorship of the psalms. The biblical narrative in its literal sense was to be accepted as historical.

Two brilliant French savants attempted a reform—which in the latter half of the 20th century proved successful. One, Abbé Alfred Loisy, who died in 1940, was publicly excommunicated. The other, the founder and longtime director of the French École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem, Father Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938), managed to express himself more carefully than Loisy; his influence and that of his school remains vast to this day. The great break came with the papal letter of Pope Pius XII entitled Divino afflante Spiritu, published in 1943. Nevertheless, Vermes was cautioned to tread carefully. Biblical exegesis “was a somewhat dangerous task in the late 1940s.”

At that time Vermes’s interest began turning to the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. It was in that connection that he applied for and received permission to “read and possess prohibited books with the exception of obscene or expressly anti-religious works.” Still devoted to the church, he received his priestly ordination in 1950.

His efforts to obtain access to the recently discovered but largely unpublished scrolls were soon rebuffed. The “cult of secrecy,” as he calls it, prevented him from studying them. Father Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique, who directed the excavations at Qumran and assembled the “notorious…Jew-free” (Vermes’s words) editorial team of which he served as editor in chief, has been described as “charming,” “brilliant,” “lively,” “warm,” “a raconteur of extraordinary gifts” with “a fantastic sense of humor.”^a Vermes, however, found de Vaux “high-handed” and “tyrannical,” a man who “exercised a kind of patriarchal authority over all matters pertaining to the publication of the Scrolls.” In Vermes’s judgment, de Vaux (as well as several members of the original editorial team) was not only anti-Israel, but anti-Jewish.

In a book on the scrolls published in 1953, Vermes referred to some scroll fragments he had seen at the École Biblique, for which de Vaux criticized him, writing to him that “I regret a little that here and there you should have made public pieces of friendly information given to you when you stayed at the École. This may give undue authority to the factual errors contained in your book,” citing only the wrong numbering of the caves and an erroneous attribution of ownership of some of the fragments.

In 1954 Vermes traveled to England, where a friend took him to visit a professor from Exeter University who 032is identified only by his first name, Charles, for Charles was married to a woman named Pamela, the future Mrs. Vermes. Pam, too, had converted to Catholicism. Her ancestry, however, was not Jewish, but high church. Her grandfather was the well-known editor of the Church Times and had written numerous religious tomes.

Even at their first meeting, Geza and Pam discovered that they were “two fellow spirits.” Pam had been educated by the Sisters of Sion and thought little of the ideas they taught. She sensed the Sisters’ “superior attitude towards Judaism, an attitude which in fact completely changed after Vatican II.” Pam anticipated that Geza would defend the order; instead he expressed his wholehearted agreement. Already they were “friends.” The next year, 1955, Charles and Pam invited Geza to stay with them for a fortnight. “As far as I can recall, the idea that my return…might imply anything more than straightforward friendship did not occur to me, except perhaps once. But I quashed the thought as a pure flight of fancy.”

Once there, however, “the innocent joy of the reunion lasted only a day or two; then suddenly it dawned on me and on Pam that this was not just ordinary friendship: we were in love. The realization filled both of us with delight mixed with torment and fright.” They soon told Charles: “It would have been futile [to hide it] because the change was so obvious.”

As for the church, Vermes found his “loyalties were already divided. On the one hand, I felt—and still feel—a sentiment of gratitude for the help and protection I had received during the years of ordeal in the 1940s. But on the other hand, by that time I also saw the darker sides of the church, her less than exemplary behaviour towards the Jews over the centuries, and her highly objectionable attitude in more recent times towards the search for truth in biblical studies.” Vermes writes, “The priestly ideal was the least of my concerns…There was nothing to counteract the magnetism of love.”

The happy couple took up residence at Newcastle after Geza landed a teaching post at the local university, where he was to stay until called to Oxford eight years later. When Pam’s divorce came through, he and Pam were duly married, immeasurably improving their social status. After all, “in the atmosphere of the late 1950s, what is called partnership today counted as living in sin, not quite the thing for a lecturer in divinity in those days.”

He confesses that at the time he was spiritually confused. He and Pam engaged in “personal, internal prayer and spirituality without accompanying social manifestations.” They did not consider themselves members of any denomination. Later, she would describe herself as a “religious agnostic.”

Geza, however, was soon drawn into the Newcastle Jewish community, at first as a result of an adult education series he taught on the Dead Sea Scrolls. His students “unintentionally and invisibly paved the way towards my re-encounter with Judaism.” With them, he went to his first synagogue service in 40 years. He met a Hasid (an observant, mystically oriented Jew) who told him a story about a pearl that was lost in the mud yet remained precious.

When he came to Oxford, he again found himself “more and more immersed in Jewish society and very much at home in it.” In 1971 he was appointed editor of the scholarly Journal of Jewish Studies. He joined a synagogue. Nothing deeper than that. No epiphany. No sudden light. “I did not deliberately move from A to B, from Christianity to Judaism. By this time, Christianity, with its fundamental tenets of the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, etc., was already behind me. I did not leave it, but imperceptibly grew out of it. Nor was I inclined to embrace Judaism in its conventional form. Organized religion of any description with set rites and customs no longer suited me…Those who expected something dramatic, a story of ‘conversion,’ will no doubt 033be disappointed, but alas I cannot oblige, as there is nothing to report.” But he is (once more?) a Jew.

Vermes recounts his work on the scrolls, as well as the struggle to wrest them from the small editorial team that controlled them (in the interest of full disclosure, I must add that he also recounts my own role in that struggle and the fact that during the fateful summer of 1991 we were, as he puts it, “in constant contact”; we have remained friends ever since). He also recalls the rewriting (with others and involving “twenty years of slave labour”) of Emil Schürer’s classic, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ; his writing of a trilogy that places the historical Jesus in a Jewish context; the history of biblical scholarship that he witnessed; Pam’s work on Martin Buber; academic personalities; and much else of interest both personally and academically.

As for the situation of the scrolls today, “Qumran studies have never been healthier,” Vermes comments. “[Today] it is hard to understand the extreme foolishness of the previous four decades.”

Regarding his work on Jesus the Jew, the first book in his Jesus trilogy, he writes, “Since it is generally believed that books on Jesus owe their existence more to the religious experiences of their authors than to problems surrounding the subject, it was automatically assumed by many that the same rule applied to me, especially in the light of my (presumed) spiritual wanderings. However, in my conscious knowledge, the purpose of writing the book had nothing to do with theological pre-occupations or with self-justification, a kind of Apologia pro vita sua, but was the unplanned outcome of the preliminary research which produced the first part of the [rewritten Schürer volumes].”

His work on the historical Jesus led, among other things, to his appointment as a consultant on The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. His role was to make suggestions; the final decisions were up to the editors. Only when the dictionary was published did he learn that his suggestion regarding the entry on Jesus had been accepted. The previous edition read: “The name of the founder of Christianity.” The new definition reads: “The central figure of the Christian faith, a Jewish preacher (c. 5 BC–c. AD 30) regarded by his followers as the Son of God and God incarnate.”

Today, as he notes, it is “a cliché” to situate Jesus in his Jewish context, as someone who lived and died a Jew, who did not intend to found a new religion. He assumes that no one now would be offended by these ideas. I am not so sure. I recall a lecture to a University Women’s Club where one contingent almost walked out in the middle of my talk when I suggested that Jesus lived and died a Jew. And I wonder how some Bible Review readers would react to Vermes’s Jesus the Jew.

As a prologue, rather than an epilogue, Vermes describes Pam’s death in 1993. She died unafraid after a two-year struggle with lung cancer, the result of heavy smoking. They had been together 36 years. As she expired, he repeated her favorite psalm in Hebrew (Psalm 73:23): Va’ani tamid ‘immakh; ‘ahazta beyad yemini (I am with You always; You hold my right hand).

She had once told him of her hope for him after she was gone: “I hope someone nice will turn up to take care of you.” And so it was. “The miraculous accident suddenly struck. I cannot describe it, as it is too marvelous and private.” Together Geza and his new wife and her seven-year-old son weekly visit Pam’s grave, there “to pray for all those we love and for the world.”

Cats can have nine lives, not people. But the case of Dead Sea Scroll specialist Geza Vermes will make you wonder. His remarkable life is now encapsulated in an autobiography, reviewed herein.