Can a family leave its Jewishness behind?

Consider two moments in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt. In the opening scene, eight-year-old Jacob crowns the family Christmas tree with a large golden Star of David. When he is corrected, he asks, “What’s wrong with it?” His grandmother remarks, “Poor boy, baptised and circumcised in the same week, what can you expect?” Later in that scene, Ludwig, the mathematician in the family, speaks of prime numbers and the Riemann Hypothesis, half-joking that he sometimes dreams he has proved it. When I saw the play staged, it struck me that Stoppard had not abandoned his long-standing love of mathematics; he had brought it much nearer to himself, and nearer to the play’s deepest question.

Stoppard is often praised as a playwright of ideas: he could bring probability theory, thermodynamics, chaos, and even computer science onto the stage without losing the audience. He wrote Leopoldstadt, his final play, after he discovered in mid-life that all four of his grandparents and several other relatives had been killed in the Holocaust, and it is as close as he ever came to setting that discovery directly onstage. But in Leopoldstadt the mathematics is not just a clever conceit. It is a way of worrying a question that brushes against theology, a question the play never names but never quite lets go. The primes, the Riemann Hypothesis, the string figures the children make and unmake—these begin to look like his oblique way of pursuing that question.

Stoppard’s penchant for playing with numbers goes back at least to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a play that premiered in 1966 and imagines two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the protagonists. There, he fixes on probability—a coin keeps coming up heads, and the “laws” that ought to govern repeated events slowly fail. What looks like chance turns out to be something worse: the protagonists are trapped inside Shakespeare’s script. The mathematics is a joke that becomes a nightmare. It exposes the characters’ belief in a rational, probabilistic universe as an illusion. Someone else is writing the play.

By the time we reach Leopoldstadt in 2020, the tone has changed. It is still recognizably Stoppard—quick talk, bright minds—but the mathematics is no longer playful display. Ludwig is preoccupied with prime numbers and the great conjecture that would govern them: the Riemann Hypothesis. Primes, numbers that cannot be factored into simpler pieces, look scattered and irregular, yet the hypothesis suggests that their apparent randomness hides a deep and beautiful order. The question, left unsolved, hangs in the air above an assimilated Jewish family in Vienna. They have new surnames, Christmas customs, sons who dream of serving the emperor. They live as if Jewishness were a feature that could be quietly factored out. The primes insist otherwise.

In that setting, the mathematics acquires new weight. Irreducible numbers in the abstract begin to rhyme with irreducible persons in the concrete. At the start of the play, there are so many of them: grandparents, cousins, in-laws, children. By the final scene, set in 1955, the stage has thinned. Most of those “units” are gone. The crowd that once filled the drawing room now survives mostly as names on a folded family tree and as fading faces in a photo album. What had once seemed like one more prosperous Viennese clan turns out, in retrospect, to have been a set of marked lives—primes, as it were, that the surrounding society could not and would not factor into the smooth integer of “Austrian.”

In another scene, the children’s game of cat’s cradle makes the same point in a different key. It is a kind of elementary topology: one loop of string passed from hand to hand into changing forms, never cut. The figures change wildly; the crossings and tensions move around. But the string is the same continuous object throughout. As the game proceeds, the boy Nathan intuits what this means: The knots along the loop maintain their relative distances because the loop itself remains unbroken. Ludwig points at Nathan: “This is a mathematician.” What matters, Stoppard is saying, is preserved rather than erased by distortion. Seen alongside the prime-number talk, the game comes to look like a little parable of Jewish history as the play presents it. In Leopoldstadt, the Merz family pull themselves into successive patterns—Jewish and Catholic, Austrian patriots and Zionist sympathizers, Old World intellectuals and New World exiles—but the underlying thread does not disappear. It is not something they can trim away while leaving the rest intact.

It matters, too, that Stoppard singles out Riemann. Bernhard Riemann’s name carries a double legacy Stoppard quietly borrows: the prime-number conjecture that bears his name and the idea that space is curved from within. Space is no longer a blank flat stage with objects moving across it but a surface that can buckle and bend under what it holds. Without turning Leopoldstadt into a lecture, the play keeps both halves of that legacy in view. Jewish identity appears in the play as something like a prime—an element that cannot be decomposed—and at the same time as something that helps determine the shape of historical reality itself and of Stoppard’s own stage. Europe does not simply happen to have Jews in it. The presence and near-destruction of this people bend the whole field.

In The Message in the Bottle, Catholic novelist and essayist Walker Percy pauses over a fact he thinks we no longer find strange enough. “Where are the Hittites?” he asks. Why is it that you can meet Jews in New York, or New Orleans, or Paris, and treat the encounter as perfectly ordinary, while no one meets a Hittite on the subway? The Hittites once had a splendid civilization; the Jews, by comparison, were a small and obscure people. Yet it is the Jews who are still here, recognizably themselves. “It is remarkable,” Percy observes, “that no one considers the event remarkable.” The puzzle for him is not only Jewish persistence but also our lack of amazement at it.

That passage is not so much a historical argument as a jab at our world-picture. Percy is diagnosing a certain habit of mind—the “theoretical” habit that flattens everything into population groups and social forces. In this flattened world, “Jew” becomes one more ethnic descriptor among others. Percy insists, however, that the word does not behave that way. It is a word that drags with it an entire and very peculiar history, a story that resists being pressed into neutral sociological categories. Any account of the human world that treats “There are Jews in New York” as a trivial fact is missing something fundamental and mysterious about reality.

Percy makes the point even more sharply in The Thanatos Syndrome through a slightly mad parish priest, Father Smith, who quizzes the protagonist with a sort of free-association test: “Clouds,” “Irish,” “Blacks,” “Jew.” The first three summon clichés. The last, to Father Smith’s satisfaction, conjures specific people—Max, Sam, Julius, Ben. His conclusion is stark: “The Jews—cannot—be—subsumed.” By that he means they cannot be tucked away under a general heading (Caucasians; minorities; “people of faith”) without remainder. However far they stray from practice or belief, Jews remain a particular people with a history that resists classification. The word behaves as if it were the name of someone, not the label for a slot in a sociological table.

There is a risk here, and Percy knew it: the risk of turning Jews into instruments of someone else’s proof. His way of guarding against that danger is to keep dragging the word “Jew” back to concrete faces and to the very real catastrophes that have befallen them. Still, he does recruit their irreducibility into an implied argument.

Stoppard will not go that far. Leopoldstadt contains no priest in the tower, no explicit sermon about Israel. Yet the play has its own way of making a similar demand on the audience. The Merz family act, for decades, as though their identity could be decomposed into safer components—bourgeois respectability, imperial loyalty, even cultured Catholicism—and their Jewishness quietly set aside. Their neighbours and rulers prove otherwise. In 1938, the classification the family has tried hardest to reduce is the only one that counts, and that classification proves lethal. In that sense, Leopoldstadt is a long refutation of the belief that Jewish identity can be factored away without falsifying what the world is really like.

Set beside Percy’s writings, the difference of idiom is obvious. Stoppard’s mathematics is psychological before it is philosophical. The primes and the cat’s cradle carry the weight of shame, denial, belated grief. Percy’s language is openly metaphysical and, at times, apologetic. Yet both men are pushed toward similar verbs. Leopoldstadt shows a Jewish family that cannot, in the end, be decomposed into the identities they would rather inhabit. Percy tells us that the Jews cannot be subsumed under the theoretical categories our age prefers. Both resist the same reductions: the breaking down of Jewishness into religion, ethnicity, and “heritage” on the one hand, and its translation into abstract demographic labels on the other.

For a Christian reader, this is a fraught but necessary region to enter. It is one thing to notice, with Percy, that Jewish irreducibility unsettles any neat secular narrative of history; it is another to remember, with Stoppard, that behind every “sign” are particular lives, not raw material for theological reassurance. What they share, though, is a refusal to accept a picture of reality in which Jewish peoplehood can be treated as an accidental detail. In Percy’s image, the continued presence of Jews where there are no Hittites is a scandal to any theory that treats history as an indifferent process. In Stoppard’s, the disappearance of most of the family, and the stubborn survival of a few, is a scandal to any story Europe might tell about itself that fails to account for what was done to them.

Rereading Percy’s Hittites passage and remembering the primes and the loop of string passing hand to hand in Leopoldstadt, I find in Stoppard’s last work for the stage a way of saying, in a language he knew well, that there is at least one people with whom the histories we tell have not managed to come to terms, one thread that cannot be cut without destroying the pattern, one set of “primes” that cannot be treated as interchangeable with the rest of the integers. Percy suggests that this people, who cannot be folded into the usual categories, is a sign of something more. Stoppard leaves the question open. Between them, they mark the edge of any honest account of human affairs: a line beyond which the Jews are neither example nor type, but a fact that both theory and piety can approach only with reserve. What remains is a mystery neither can exhaust.