Jonathan Miller (JM) [To the viewer]: Now in his long professional life, as one of Americas most distinguished playwrights, Arthur Miller has brought warmth, wit and intelligence to bear on the American scene. When I met him in his New York apartment, I asked him about his early life, about his attitude to Judaism, an the extent to which he felt that there has grown up in our time, a strange association in the Christian mind between Judaism and disbelief. The idea that there's something peculiar about the Jews which makes them peculiarly susceptible to profane disbelief.
Arthur Miller (AM): Well of course, antisemitism goes under a thousand disguises, and one of them is certainly that the Jews are atheists - well of course they don't believe in Christ, urr... and that makes anybody, if not an atheist, then close, urr... a heathen perhaps.
JM: When you were a boy, in Brooklyn, were you in an orthodox or observing family?
AM: They were observing two, three times a year. Apart from that they were busy trying to live... make a living and the rest of it. Urr... we were not... they were... if they were anything they were observant, or orthodox, but that only occurred during the high holidays, the rest of the time they were free to do whatever they wanted, they didn't go to the synagogue every Saturday, they didn't pray... It was a kind of a... obedient nod in the right direction.
JM: But as a child of that type of family, which I suppose in some way it was similar to mine, though it was perhaps less observant than the one you describe, did you yourself begin to differ from the orthodox background from which you came?
AM: Well I tried to be a religious person when I was 12, 13, 14, it lasted about two years.. and then it simply vanished... I simply lay down one evening to go to sleep and I woke up the next day and it wasn't there, anymore. And I guess it was part of growing up that I would be searching for my... my roots somewhere... and, urr... I found them elsewhere. I couldn't find them in religion because, especially in the depression 30s seemed absolutely absurdly irrelevant. We were in the midst of a terrific social crisis here, and the religious in general had nothing to say about it.
JM: But were there other reasons apart from the, urr... the political irrelevance of religion did you have, as it were, other reasons, say, sort of rational reasons for thinking...
AM: Well, of course I no longer could believe... I quickly at some point in my late teens began to read ???? surmising that the idea of religion was a creation of man's longing to signify, to a permanent part of the universe, and as I've grown older... I have to respect some of the religious people because some of them, as you know, during the struggles we've had have been terrific. And they've been motivated by religious principle in many cases... and therefore I don't dismiss the --corrupt recording - eep!--. But myself personally, I don't have the talent to believe. That's the way I look at it. I simply haven't got... I keep seeing my grandfather instead of God, and it doesn't work anymore. But philosophically, if I can use that word, uh, it just seems to me so patent that, uh, what we... what man has done is to project himself into the heavens where he can be all powerful, as he is not here, and moral, and decent, and vengeful and all the things he's not allowed to do on the Earth. And to don that white garment and the beard and... and be what he wished, in his dreams, he could be. And... I just can't get past that.
JM [To the viewer]: These childhood memories prompted another thought about the extent to which religious scepticism amongst certain Jews was associated with left-wing sympathies, so I asked Arthur Miller if he thought that this supposed association had any part to play in the development of 20th century antisemitism.
JM: There is an undoubtedly close relationship between Jews and the left, and also a sort of trio of beliefs - disbelief in God, Judaism, and an affiliation with the very political movements which might have to be the ones which might have to be recruited to bring about a solution to the problems that you've described.
AM: Yeah...
JM: So why do you think that, what is this relationship?
AM: Yeah... For one thing, the Jews felt... that was a different period than now in one respect. The antisemitism in the United States was rampant. It was open... uh... for example many people had to go to Europe to become doctors. They couldn't... they weren't admitted to Colombia University, to... almost all American universities had a quota on Jews and it was very small. There was the largest radio audience in the United States was for a man who was quoting Goebbels all the time...
JM: This was Father Coughlin...?
AM: ... Father Coughlin. He had audience accepting for FDR. He was saying how wonderfully the Nazis had dealt with unemployment, how fine it was that they were defending their racial purity, this from a Catholic priest. I remember walking down the street in Brooklyn one day, a hot day in the middle of July, and all the windows were open, and I think it was on a Sunday afternoon, and from one house after another you could hear that voice, and it was a sneering... raucous... he was a real rabble rouser. He blamed the Jews for the depression, that was the fundamental thing. That the money lenders had been thrown out of the temple, but they were back in, and they controlled the currency, they controlled the big corporations, they controlled everything, secretly. They were the secret demon underlying the troubles of the state. I was a worker in those days, I was out driving trucks and the rest of it, and you could cut it with a knife. It was brutal, and it was open. There was no question about it. So Jews were already positioned vis-a-vis the society as being... uh... they weren't being killed... they were being gently and firmly kept out of the main stream. No big corporation had Jewish executives, it was unheard of. So one understood what persecution might be... and therefore you were driven to the left because the right were not interested in these problems, nor were most liberals. It was too dangerous. After all a shipload of Jews from Germany arrived in New York harbour and was not permitted to land. And these were not impoverished, desperate people, you know, these were middle class people, to have had the money to make this trip, and to pick up all their stuff and move out of Germany. And they were sent back... the name of the ship was the St. Louis. And then they went from here to Cuba where, from the studies I've read, the Americans did not want the Cuban government, which was then a dictatorship of the right, to let them in because it would show up what we had done, and reveal the cruelty of what we had done. Nobody was interested in confronting this thing and they were sent back to Germany and I presume they were all killed.
JM: Well, I remember talking to a Polish intellectual, uh, and him saying, "We can accept the idea that Jesus was Jew, but what sticks in our throat is the idea that the Holy Mother was Jewish.
AM: Oh God... it's exhausting just to think about the... where to begin to throw light on this whole thing is... I wrote a play called, 'The Creation of the World and Other Business', which is about Genesis and... I didn't mean to, but I got involved with the Bible in a way that I never had before. And it's very interesting that the old Rabbis... whoever put the Bible together, which was obviously written by different people at different times in history. They could have chosen any book to start the Bible, there was no doubt... the whole thing was lying on a table in front of them, some editor had to say this is the opener. And they opened with a fratricide. And the fratricide was there, I suppose, because that's the worst thing that can happen... is that two brothers, one of them is killed by the other brother, because it doesn't involve the outsider.
JM: And yet it does you see... I remember reading, I don't know whether you ever saw this book by Ruth (?)Melankof(?) called, "The Outsider", and it's a collection of images in art history of the representation of these various figures in the Bible, and in the early years of the 16th century Cain is Jewish, Abel is gentile.
AM: How did that happen?
JM: Just the way they... is order to get round the problem of the fratricide they had to somehow retrospectively identify the villainous Jew...
AM: Isn't that wonderful?
JM: It's quite extraordinary. In some of these early German pictures you see this blond Abel, and this ringletted and bearded Cain.
AM: I'll tell you a quick story... in the late... early fifties I was travelling with a friend of mine in Foggia because at the moment he was looking for an aunt he'd never met who was a school teacher in the city of Foggia, and we found her and he's Italian American and Catholic, and she was curious to know what I was. And he said, "He's ebreo" ... "He's Jewish", and she looked surprised, and he said, "You know, the people in the Bible.". She said, "Oh yes, well as long as they believe in Christ...".
Of course, I suppose it's inevitable, and will always be there to some degree, that ones own group being most familiar is less dangerous than an out group, which is always menacing because it's strange. They look different. They don't speak the way we do. They break their boiled egg in the narrow end instead of the broad end. This is going to go on forever, but when politicians seize upon these differences or these apprehensions...
JM: Particularly the religious differences...
AM: And when they make religious differences the centre of the centre of the political program, that's when the end is nigh.
JM [To the viewer]: Well the end certainly felt a bit nigh when we met as the war in Iraq was already well underway, so I asked Arthur why it was that scepticism is increasingly seen by many Americans as politically incorrect. As subversive, unacceptable, and of course unpatriotic.
JM: I get the impression that from the vantage point of Europe for the last 18 months at least, and perhaps before, that Atheism or disbelief, or scepticism is seen by many Americans as politically incorrect, as subversive and unacceptable. Am I right in thinking that?
AM: It's probably the case. They certainly, uh... the religious overlay of patriotism has come into fashion. It's always there of course in this country, we've more people go to church than I think anywhere, but it's gotten heavier now. They invoke God at any opportunity whether it's buying an automobile...
JM: Do you think that's... is that since 9/11, or do you think...
AM: It was always there, but it's gotten thicker, it's gotten heavier because it's such an easy way to cuddle up to what they think the majority is about, which is this slavish kind of worship of something, and it's a political event.
JM: But it is the first time for many years you've had a government... a president...
AM: I don't recall it ever being the government itself doing this. It could have happened, but I'm not aware of it. I mean, I never heard of a government calling upon faith based agencies taking care of the sick, and the unemployed, and the rest of it. Formerly the government simply did these things - as much as they ever did.
JM: And one also gets the impression that the enterprise in Iraq had a sort of faith-based...
AM: Oh yeah...
JM: ...patriotism - it wasn't just patriotic - it was Christian patriotic.
AM: Of course in wartime I suppose we did that in the second world war to a degree, but it was never laid on with a trowel this way. Uh, I think Roosevelt called upon God occasionally, but he didn't bother him too much.
JM: Did you ever get the impression that although he called upon God, which he might have done, as it were, nominally, did you ever get the impression that he was, in fact, Christian beyond the call of duty?
AM: He was not using it. This is now being used as a means of persuasion. It's patent, it's obvious... they call upon God to initiate a program... whatever it may be, a civil program of some sort, and they lard it over with some religious verbiage to make it seem as though you oppose this, you oppose the Lord. There are a lot of Americans, I think they're a minority, but very vocal, are really aching for an ayatollah. I think they would love to have a department of religion... we go back to the early 17th century perhaps... and have a church... at official church. But they've convinced a lot of people to forget that this country was founded by people who were really escaping the domination of a governmental religion... and who... breath freely here with great gratitude that they didn't have to obey a church government - a churchly government.
JM: But they then became as theocratic as the people that they left.
AM: It seems to be something that has to be resisted on principle from one generation to another. At the moment it's tougher than ever because the government itself is blatantly on the side of an official religion, I think. What is bothering me about the whole thing is that we're now, more and more confronting a real issue in this country about the attempt of the religious... so-called religious because I'm not sure they are religious - I think they're very nationalist people... and the wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal, in my opinion. I... if you look at the... every... I suppose every violent conflict in the world now is being led by priests, rabbis or Muslim clerics. It's quite amazing. I wonder if it has ever happened, or if it has happened in hundreds of years. It's the church militant in all these religions. They've moved into... they've added that lethal mixture of religion and nationalism to the programs that they sell... it's... and the reason it's lethal is because to believe in a religion means that you don't believe in a different religion. You can't believe in two religions. You've got to believe in one, and the other ones are wrong.
JM: ... and often to be destroyed.
AM: ... and deserve to be combatted, and destroyed. I mean it's implicit in the whole idea of religious belief, I think, in the normal way that religious belief is thought of. You can't be both a Catholic and a Protestant.
JM: Well now there seems to be what would previously have been almost inconceivable... this unholy alliance between fundamentalist evangelical Christians in the United States and orthodox Jews, who are combining to... support the...
AM: The Christian zealots believe that Christ will return when the Jews become Christians. This news is going to come as a shock to most of the Jews when they hear it, but that's the program... that Armageddon comes, at which point the Jews become believers in Christ, and Christ returns, and we're off to the races. It's pretty heady stuff.
JM: And it's become particularly virulent in the last, almost two or three years.
AM: Yeah. It's a form of intellectual bankruptcy which I think... it's taken over a lot of the political space.
JM [To the viewer]: Well, although he's considerably older than I am, I think it's fair to say that neither Arthur Miller or myself could be described as spring chickens. So it seemed reasonable to ask him what he felt about the prospect of a life after death.
AM: Everything I say, which is very sceptical if not worse, is conditioned by one thing, and that is we don't know where life started, or how. Nobody really knows that, and death is the... the end of consciousness is awesome mystery that anybody who has lived through it all knows he has no answer to. The idea that that consciousness could vanish... be no more... is unacceptable. It simply cannot... I have no way of accepting this.
JM: Well now, in your refusal to accept it, are you tempted to assume that in some mysterious way that it continues after some sort of, as it were, vacation...
AM: That's right...
JM: That it will resume in some way?
AM: That's what I find myself hoping.
JM: Really?
AM: Oh Yeah. And then I think, well, it does continue in art. And that the artist finally leaves us with his consciousness.
JM: So that your work will out-last you, but do you feel in any way, are you tempted to believe or hope that in addition to the work, in which your memory will be preserved, that you yourself in some alternative version, embodied, will continue to exist and be conscious?
AM: I can't... I no longer can contain that idea, no. But for others, for instance, my wife of forty years died about a year and a half ago, and uh, I'm surrounded by all her stuff... of her life. And the idea that she's not here is still... it defeats some impulse to create... recreate her, but I know what that impulse is. It's simply the inability to accept this absurdity... that all that consciousness and all that beauty simply isn't there any more.
JM: And you don't as, obviously as believers do, Christians perhaps more than Jews, that there will be some sort of rendezvous?
AM: No, this is beyond me. I don't have that at all. I don't believe it. I think, as I've said, if there is memory - because what we're talking about is a form of remembrance - if there is that, it's in the deeds that one did or the art that one created or... in some cases perhaps in the children, but no more.
JM: So you can't, as I can't, make sense of the idea of a continuing consciousness that outlast the death of the body in which that consciousness would, as it were, identify itself as being-
AM: Wouldn't it be lovely?
JM: You think it would be lovely?
AM: Well, of course there'd be so many of us. It'd be a rather crowded area. I think it'd be like the subway at five o'clock in the evening, you wouldn't- you'd wish you could get off, I think.
JM: But in addition to the, as it were, the population problem-
AM: The urge is always there, I think. The urge to preserve this thing, and if you're not careful I suppose, you could venture into everlasting life. But as I said earlier, death is the ultimate perplexity... particularly, not the body so much, as the consciousness, the ability to observe, to talk, to store up images, which is... we spend 60... 70... whatever... many years accomplishing, and in a breeze it blows away. I think though we're stuck with the Earth and with the lives we've got and, uh, the... the immortality notion is simple past my capacity to really believe in. I never could figure out what we Jews believe about an afterlife. I have a feeling that it doesn't quite exist. It's a skeptically area.
JM: Well, I'm always told by people who know, or seem to know, that it's not altogether different from a seminar at Columbia. That you in fact go to um...
AM: You enrol!
JM: You enrol, and Moses teaches you to infinity, the finer points of the law.
AM: And there's no way out of it!
JM: But that seems like locking the door after the horse has bolted!