Joshua Gruen and Sarah Blumenthal

Joshua Gruen and Sarah Blumenthal are the married rabbinical couple whose partnership forms the emotional and theological core of E. L. Doctorow's City of God. Their union is presented as a rare meeting of kindred spirits—both are rabbis, both are devoted to a modern, intellectually rigorous faith, and both are transfixed by each other in a way that the novel's narrator, Everett, finds almost miraculous. Their relationship is defined not only by their love but by their shared project of building a new kind of Judaism, one that embraces modern scholarship and questions tradition, a project that continues to shape the lives of those around them long after Joshua's death. The memory of their marriage, and of Joshua himself, becomes a powerful, enduring presence that both complicates and enables the novel's central romance between Sarah and Thomas Pemberton.

Identity and Introduction

Joshua Gruen and Sarah Blumenthal are introduced together as the co-founders of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, a small, radical congregation meeting in a converted parlor on the Upper West Side of New York City. The narrator, Everett, first encounters them when he visits their home, a brownstone where the synagogue occupies the second floor, with an Ark at one end, a platform table for reading the Torah, shelves of prayer books, and rows of bridge chairs. Sarah is described as an assistant rabbi at Temple Emanuel, a woman with a pretty smile, high cheekbones, light hair in a short, au courant cut, and granny glasses, who needs no cosmetics. Joshua, in contrast, is a thin, wiry man with a runner's build, not an ounce of fat on him, genuinely modest, with a characteristic frown of self-judgment and a serious, gentle soul. He is neat and meticulous in his thinking, with a very natural serious precision of mind. Everett is immediately transfixed by both of them, marveling at the rarity of encountering people of Godliness whom one wants to be anywhere near.

The Partnership and the New Faith

The couple's shared intellectual project is the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, which they built together. Their approach is to take the various aspects of Jewish teaching and practice, consider their historic sources and theological rationale, and hold them up to modern scholarship, separating what is inessential or intellectually untenable from what is truly crucial and defining. The weekly Sabbath service on Friday evening, with a replay on Saturday morning, has a traditional liturgical beginning and ending but an extended seminar discussion as its middle, led by the rabbi rather than delivered as a sermon. The congregation includes a professor of Comparative Religion at Columbia, a judge of the State Supreme Court, a young woman from the Actors Studio, a married couple of physicians, a Barnard junior, and an elderly white-haired man carried up the brownstone stairs by his son. Everett finds these evenings fascinating, and notes that the first five books of the Bible have, under the group's analysis, become the collected texts of different historical sources, J, E, P, and D, a discussion that connects to the work of scholars like J. L. Kugel. Sarah's role in this project is central; Everett wonders, with some anger at himself, whether she had depended on Joshua for her theology, and whether she was capable of carrying his ideas forward after his death.

The Shadow of the Holocaust

The couple's life is profoundly shaped by the Holocaust history of Sarah's father, who was a runner in the Kovno Ghetto as a ten-year-old boy. Sarah tells Everett that her father was not appointed a runner like the fictional Yehoshua in Everett's manuscript; it was more happenstance, because even before he was orphaned, he made himself useful, darting about as a little fellow until the community came to depend on him. His official runner's cap came only toward the end, and it saved his life in more ways than one. Sarah's own identity is inseparable from this inherited trauma. She explains that after learning the language, she turned political and helped raise money to get Russian Jews out of the Soviet Union, then changed her major to Judaic studies as a junior at Harvard, and finally decided to go to Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. She describes this path as incremental and unplanned, a continuous stubborn assertion, directed even to her father. It was only after she met Joshua and they began talking that she realized that ethnicity, incorporating the tradition in oneself, is not enough—that one can do the reading and not even have begun. Joshua's presence in her life was thus catalytic, helping her move from ethnic identity to a deeper, more questioning religious commitment.

Joshua's Death and Sarah's Widowhood

Joshua's death, which occurs before the novel's main action, leaves Sarah a widow with two young sons, Jacob and David. Everett observes that Sarah's mourning is complicated by her new faith; according to EJ, the formal year of mourning is an inessential, on the theory that whatever it takes to remember and memorialize the dead must come naturally from the heart. Yet Sarah's grief is palpable and enduring. When Thomas Pemberton, who is in love with her, considers converting to Judaism, he reflects that he makes no move because he fears it would trivialize him in her eyes, revealing a lack of understanding of her serious, smiling, irrevocable widowhood. He also mourns Joshua, describing him as a thin, wiry little guy, really intelligent, genuinely modest, a serious, gentle soul. Sarah's continued devotion to Joshua's memory is so strong that when she and Pem begin to develop a courtship, Everett feels like a chaperon, noting that they regard each other with a degree of attention they are not even aware of, yet they would not hear of his leaving them by themselves, afraid of descending to importuning on Pem's part and of the enduring presence of Joshua in her mind.

Legacy and the Wedding

Joshua's legacy continues to shape the novel's climax. At Pem and Sarah's wedding, Pem gives a speech in which he acknowledges that their union could not have occurred except in the wake of death—the death of her father's childhood, the death of her dear, intrepid, brilliant rabbinical partner, Joshua, father of her sons Jacob and David. He speaks of the continuing catastrophe of their generations, the crisis of their own lives and the lives of their parents and grandparents. Sarah's own grief is visible even at this moment of joy; when an elderly congregant challenges her theology at an EJ service, Everett wonders if he sees in her eyes a longing for her husband's resurrection. The memory of Joshua is thus not a barrier to Sarah's new love but a foundation for it, a shared history of loss and faith that Pem understands and honors. The relationship between Joshua and Sarah, though ended by death, remains the emotional and intellectual standard against which the novel's other relationships are measured, a testament to a partnership that was both deeply personal and profoundly theological.