Tree of Knowledge

The Tree of Knowledge stands at the center of Mary Antin's account of her childhood intellectual awakening, the chapter title under which she gathers the story of a pious little girl who outgrew the answers her teachers could give. The image draws on the biblical tree in the Garden of Eden, but Antin transforms it: where Eve's reaching for knowledge brought expulsion and loss, this child's reaching brings her closer to a truth she must discover on her own. The tree becomes the emblem of a mind that refuses to stop at the authorized limits of learning, and the chapter records both the failure of the traditional teachers and the child's quiet, persistent triumph over their limitations.

The Limits of Traditional Education

The Tree of Knowledge grows in a soil of educational narrowness. In the Polotzk of Mary Antin's time, Jewish scholarship was confined to the Hebrew language and literature, and even these limited stores were not equally divided between men and women. A girl was considered "finished" when she could read her prayers in Hebrew, following the meaning with the aid of the Yiddish translation prepared especially for women. If she could sign her name in Russian, do a little figuring, and write a letter in Yiddish to the parents of her betrothed, she was called "wohl gelehrent"—well educated. The standard was deliberately low, and the chapter's framing makes clear that this narrowness was not accidental: in countries where Jews have equal rights with the rest of the people, they lose their fear of secular science and learn to carry their ancient religion with them from century to awakening century, dropping nothing but what their growing spirit has outgrown. But in countries where progress is to be bought only at the price of apostasy, Jews shut themselves up in their synagogues and raise the wall of extreme separateness between themselves and their Gentile neighbors. The survival in Russia of medieval injustice to Jews was responsible for the narrowness of educational standards in the Polotzk of her time.

The Pious Child and Her Questions

Against this background stands a little girl who seemed the very model of piety. She recited the long Hebrew prayers, morning and evening, before and after meals, and never skipped a word. She kissed the mezuzah when going or coming. She abstained from food and drink on fast days when she was no bigger than a sacrificial hen. She spent Sabbath mornings over the lengthy ritual for the day and read the Psalms till daylight failed. Yet this same child could give as good an account of the Creation as any boy of her age. She knew how God made the world. Undeterred by the fate of Eve, she wanted to know more. She asked her wise rebbe how God came to be in His place, where He found the stuff to make the world of, and what was doing in the universe before God undertook His task. The questions were not impertinent; they were the natural reach of a mind that had been taught the story of Creation and wanted to understand it fully. But the rebbe's replies were unsatisfying, and the child discovered that he was but a barren branch on the tree of knowledge.

The Discovery of the Rebbe's Limits

The discovery was made in silence. The good little girl never betrayed to the world, by look or word, her discovery of his limitations, but continued to accord him, outwardly, all the courtesy due to his calling. This restraint is characteristic of the whole episode: the child's rebellion is entirely internal, a matter of private judgment rather than public defiance. Her teacher having failed her, the young student carried her questions from one to another of her acquaintances, putting their answers to the test whenever it was possible. By this means she established two facts: first, that she knew as much as any of those who undertook to instruct her; second, that her oracles sometimes gave false answers. Did the little inquisitor charge her betrayers with the lie? Magnanimous creature, she kept their falseness a secret and ceased to probe their shallow depths. The irony is gentle but unmistakable: the adults who were supposed to be her teachers were, in fact, her inferiors in knowledge, and she protected them from the shame of her discovery.

From Question to Experiment

"What you would know, find out for yourself": this became the student's motto, and she passed from the question to the experiment. Her grandmother told her that if she handled "blind flowers" she would be stricken blind. She found by test that the pretty flowers were harmless. She tested everything that could be tested, till she hit at last on an impious plan to put God Himself to the proof. The progression is carefully drawn: from the rebbe's barren branch, to the false oracles among her acquaintances, to the grandmother's superstition about the blind flowers, and finally to the boldest test of all. Each step moves further from the authority of tradition and closer to the authority of personal experience. The child who had once accepted the mezuzah, the fast days, and the Psalms without question now trusts only what she can verify with her own senses. The Tree of Knowledge, which had failed her in the person of the rebbe, becomes a tree she must climb herself.

The Significance of the Tree

The Tree of Knowledge is more than a chapter title; it is the organizing image of Mary Antin's account of her own intellectual formation. The biblical allusion carries a double weight. On one hand, the tree is the source of the knowledge that the child seeks, the forbidden fruit that Eve took and that this child will not be deterred from taking. On the other hand, the tree is the measure of what the traditional teachers lack: the rebbe is a "barren branch," a dead part of a living tree, unable to nourish the mind that reaches toward him. The child's persistence in the face of this barrenness is the chapter's central drama. She does not abandon her quest when the rebbe fails her; she carries her questions elsewhere, tests the answers she receives, and finally resolves to find out for herself. The motto she adopts is the seed of the scientific temper, and the chapter shows it taking root in the unlikely soil of a pious Jewish girlhood in Polotzk. The Tree of Knowledge, in Antin's hands, becomes the symbol of a mind that will not be bounded by the narrow educational standards of her time and place, and that is already preparing, in the privacy of her own thoughts, to leave the old world behind.