“A Line Still Taut Between Me and Them”: Paul Phillip Levertoff, daughter Denise, and the Jewish Christian Borderzone

• In Event: Jews, Inheritance, and Postwar American Literature

Abstract

Unlike the Israeli government or some Jewish religious denominations, Jewish literary history tends not to care much about parental lineage. If you say you are Jewish, and contribute to the fundamentally messy entity called “Jewish literature,” then you are in. This is certainly true for the American poet Denise Levertov, who despite having converted to Catholicism, is nonetheless recognized as a “Jewish poet.” She is named in the Jewish Women’s Archive, and her work appears in such arbiters of canonicity as the Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature. These inclusions, however, obscure a fascinating and important story about familial inheritances, literary influence, and religious belonging—requiring us once again to rethink the category of “Jewish literature.”

Long married to a Jew, Levertov never actively embraced Jewishness; nor did she deny it. Instead, when asked about her religious/cultural identity, she usually deflected the query with something like “I am passionate about social justice.” Nor did she dissemble when it came to her family origins: her Welsh mother was raised in the Scottish Church, and her Russian Jewish father was said to be a descendent of Reb Shneur Zalman, the founder of Chabad Lubavitch. What is routinely overlooked, however, is that this same father, Paul Phillip Levertoff (spelled thus), né Feivel, after receiving rabbinic ordination at 17, converted to Christianity—eventually becoming what Eliot Wolfson describes as “the patriarch of Jewish Christian writers.” Not only did Levertoff establish Europe’s first Hebrew-Christian congregation, but he translated Augustine’s Confessions into Hebrew and contributed to the Soncino edition of the Zohar. Furthermore, he was radically innovative when it came to crafting a hybrid theology, arguing that the Kabbalah is a source text for such Christian precepts as the “Mystery of the Cross—the mystery of the word made flesh.” All of this plays out powerfully in his daughter’s early verse, giving us beautiful and provocative instances of what the Jewish Christian borderzone may engender.

Author

• maeera shreiber, University of Utah