The Klausner Family

The surname Klausner does not belong to the most numerous category of Jewish names — those derived from a place of birth, an ordinary trade, or a paternal given name. It belongs to a rarer and more revealing onomastic family: names derived from institutions of learning. The Klaus — from southern German and Yiddish kloyz — was a closed study hall, distinct from the ordinary synagogue, often maintained through a charitable foundation so that a scholar could study there full-time without worry about subsistence. He who studied there, or who served it, became the Klausner. The great surname repertories attest to the diffusion of these learned names throughout the Russian Empire, Poland, and Galicia [Dictionaries of East European and Judeo-German Surnames, Avotaynu].

One must measure what such a name says about the hierarchy of values proper to Ashkenazi Judaism. In a society where one could name oneself after a trade or a piece of land, to name oneself after the house of study was to inscribe in the surname itself the centrality of talmud torah, study as divine service. The Klaus also embodied a concrete communal virtue: the charity (tsedaka) that financed it manifested the conviction, deeply Talmudic, that the community must maintain its scholars as a collective good. The name Klausner thus carries, implicitly, the trace of an ideal of learning sustained by solidarity — this interweaving of knowledge and beneficence that runs through the memory of Israel. Hebrew moral literature, largely transmitted through these same institutions, made disinterested study the summit of man's duties [Dan, 1996].

It is in the Lithuanian and Russian space that the Klausner lineage acquires a precise historical face. Joseph Gedaliah Klausner was born in 1874 in Olkeniki (Valkininkai), in Lithuania then under Russian rule, in a family steeped in religious tradition and living the extraordinary ferment of Eastern European Jewry at the end of the century. The family soon moved to Odessa, the cosmopolitan port on the Black Sea that had become, in the decades 1880–1900, one of the great centers of the Hebrew renaissance and the Zionist movement. There, the young Klausner grew up in contact with the major figures of Hebraic Odessa: Ahad Ha'am, theorist of cultural Zionism, and Hayim Nahman Bialik, who would become the national poet of the Hebrew language.

This geography is not anecdotal. Odessa was the laboratory where Hebrew, a liturgical and scholarly language, became once again a language of living culture, of journalism and of creation. Historians of the Jewish cultural renaissance have shown how much this period—between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s—was one of a conscious reconstruction of language and literature in service of a reawakening national identity [Bechtel, 2002]. The Klausner lineage inscribes itself precisely at this juncture: on one side the traditional house of study inscribed in its name, on the other the Hebrew modernity in the process of inventing itself. The passage from one to the other—from the Klaus to the Hebrew journal, from the Talmud to literary criticism—sums up an entire generation of Eastern European Jews who made fidelity to the sacred language the very instrument of their entry into modernity.

The documentary summit of this lineage is the work of Joseph Klausner (1874-1958). Trained at the universities of Heidelberg, where he studied philosophy and Semitic languages and obtained his doctorate, he became one of the intellectual architects of the Hebrew revival. He directed the journal Ha-Shiloah, a literary periodical founded by Ahad Ha'am, a central forum of modern Hebrew high culture. But his masterwork is monumental: his History of Modern Hebrew Literature, in several volumes, which undertook to establish as a learned discipline the study of everything the Hebrew language had produced since the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) — a project in which the very name of "the man of the house of study" finds its full accomplishment.

This enterprise touches upon a cardinal virtue of Jewish tradition: transmission (masoret), the care to gather, order, and save from oblivion the written heritage of a people. In writing the history of Hebrew literature, Klausner did not merely erect a body of knowledge: he accomplished an act of collective Memory, extending in scientific form what medieval copyists and compilers had done for ethical and poetic literature. The historiography of medieval Hebrew poetry from Spain and Hispanic-Hebrew romance literature, like that of the liturgical piyyutim of the Maghreb, belongs to the same vast project of preserving a literary tradition dispersed across continents [Wacks, 2010] ; [Zafrani, 1970]. Klausner, as a historian, was one of its great architects for the modern Hebrew sphere.

His fidelity to Hebrew and his commitment to collective life remained not merely theoretical: professor of Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from its founding, he trained generations of students and was a laureate of the Israel Prize. In 1949, he was even presented as a candidate for the presidency of the newly founded State of Israel. The implication in the city, here, extends knowledge: the scholar becomes a public figure, embodying the Jewish idea that study has meaning only when returned to the community.

One of the most audacious intellectual gestures of Joseph Klausner was his work dedicated to Jesus, Yeshu ha-Notzri ("Jesus of Nazareth"), published in Hebrew in 1922. In it, he undertook, in the Hebrew language and for a Jewish readership, a historical study of Jesus recontextualized within his Jewish milieu of the Second Temple. The work caused scandal in certain circles — that a Jewish scholar should write about Jesus, and in Hebrew, seemed transgressive — but it marked a turning point: it opened the way to an entire tradition of Jewish studies on the Judaism of Jesus, of which Geza Vermes would later be one of the most rigorous continuators [Vermes, 1978].

This gesture manifests a virtue that the Jewish tradition sometimes names emet, the requirement of truth, and which joins intellectual tolerance: the courage to look squarely at a figure made foreign by centuries of polemic and to restore it to its Jewish roots, without complacency or animosity. By treating Jesus as an object of Jewish History rather than as a taboo, Klausner was precisely exercising the "historian's craft": submitting to the tribunal of criticism what collective Memory had frozen [Bloch, 1949]. He also touched upon the formidable question of the relationship to the stranger and the other religion — not to dissolve it, but to understand it, which is another form of respect. This enterprise inscribes itself within a long Jewish reflection on the boundary between the proper and the foreign, between the Law of Israel and the nations, a reflection that has structured Jewish thought since Antiquity [Hayes, 2015].

The Klausner lineage does not end with the historian. Joseph Klausner was the great-uncle of writer Amos Oz (1939-2018), born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem, one of the greatest Hebrew-language novelists of the twentieth century. In his vast autobiographical narrative A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002), Oz gave both an admiring and clear-eyed portrait of his learned great-uncle and the family home in Talpiot, Jerusalem, where erudition and cultural Zionism reigned. This book is an exemplary case of intersection: the family memory transmitted by the great-nephew comes to illuminate, nuance, and sometimes humanize the public figure established by the archive.

The shift from the name Klausner to the pen name Oz — a Hebrew word meaning "strength," "courage" — is itself laden with meaning: the writer great-nephew inherits the Hebrew vocation of the lineage while freeing himself from the weight of an illustrious surname. The continuity is striking: from one generation to the next, the Klausner-Oz family devoted its existence to the Hebrew language — one to write its learned history, the other to make of it a worldwide literary work. This transmission of passion for the language, from the historian great-uncle to the novelist great-nephew, embodies most closely the ancient ideal contained in the name: the house of study become hearth of creation. The renaissance of Hebrew literature, of which Joseph Klausner was the historian, finds in Amos Oz one of its living accomplishments [Bechtel, 2002].

Beyond the two great figures, the Klausner lineage participates in a broader current of contemporary Jewish thought: one that sought, after emancipation and despite the catastrophes of the twentieth century, to reformulate the Hebrew source in the languages of modernity. This current unites apparently distinct trajectories — the historian who reconstructs a literature, the novelist who reinvents it anew, the philosopher who traces back to the biblical and talmudic source of ethics. The thought of Emmanuel Levinas, who made the trace of the infinite and responsibility toward the other the heart of the Hebrew source, sketches the spiritual horizon in which these vocations take on meaning [Chalier, 2002].

Attention to language, among the Klausners, is never separable from an ethics. To write the history of a literature is an act of fidelity to the dead and the disappeared, a refusal to let oblivion prevail — the virtue of care devoted to what was. One must also accept the shadows: Joseph Klausner was a convinced Hebrew nationalist, whose political positions, marked by Zionist maximalism, gave rise to debates, and his grandnephew Amos Oz chose instead the path of compromise and peace. This tension, far from weakening the lineage, reveals its vitality: one and the same family would bear, on the most burning question of its time — the relationship to war and the foreign — consciences in dialogue. This is yet another way of dwelling in history in the Jewish manner: through loyal controversy, mahloket le-shem shamayim, the dispute for the sake of heaven. The ancient Yiddish and Hebrew literature, in which this family culture plunges, had already made speech and debate an art of living [Baumgarten, 1993].

From the closed study house of Eastern European communities to the chair of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from the Klaus to the novel translated throughout the world, the Klausner lineage will have followed a single thread: fidelity to the Hebrew language as a place of the spirit. The name already spoke of the man of study; history has confirmed it beyond what any etymology could have foreseen.

If one must name, among all, the virtue that this lineage will have best expressed, it is the contribution to Jewish thought and knowledge through the transmission of language: the quasi-priestly care taken to gather, write and give life to the literary heritage of Israel. Joseph Klausner made it a science; Amos Oz made it a work. Both, in working the Hebrew language, prolonged the immemorial gesture of copyists, poets and masters of the study house, linking the destiny of a family to the collective memory of a people that has always recognized itself in its books. To this central virtue are added intellectual courage — that of writing about Jesus in Hebrew, of speaking truth against taboos — and involvement in the city, up to the public stage of the reborn State. The Klausner lineage thus illustrates this conviction that the craftsman of history held as first: to understand the past in order to illuminate the present [Bloch, 1949]. In this, "the man of the study house" will never have left his dwelling; he will only have enlarged it to the dimensions of a literature and a people.