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WARNING

 This is a sample of an essay by a student who "just didn't know where to start. "  You may copy the essay if you wish but please use it only as a guide to good writing.  Turning it as your work would be plagiarism and could get you kicked out of school

Taking the Blame for Humanity:

The Idea of the Scapegoat in E.L.Doctorow’s

The Book of Daniel

Many religions have the idea that the sacrifice of a person or many people will please the gods. In Mexico the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice to please their gods until the Spaniards arrived to conquer the country. The Spaniards ended human sacrifice in Mexico in the name of their Christian god. The ironic thing about this was that their god, Jesus Christ, was sacrificed symbolically every time the invading Spaniards held their religious services. This is still true in the Christian service today. The wine that is consumed in the ritual by the priest stands for the blood of Christ and the wafer eaten by the worshippers represents his body. The Christian religion is based on the ancient religious practices of the Jewish people, and the founder of this religion was Jesus of Nazareth who was a Jew. The Jews are a Middle Eastern people with a very long history. The Bible used by the Christians and Jews today is based on the ancient stories of the Jews who were originally called "Hebrews.". These stories are collected in books called "The Old Testament" by the Christians and "The Torah" by the Jews. The story in the Bible on which E.L.Doctorow’s novel, The Book of Daniel is based, tells of the way in which the Daniel in the Bible and his friends, who were Jews, were used as scapegoats by a series of Persian emperors. What Doctorow’s novel says is that two American Jews, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were used as scapegoats by the US government which executed them on charges of spying for the Russians during the 1950s.

In one of the stories in the Jewish Bible a goat is led out into the desert and its throat is cut. The belief of the Jews of that time was that the goat was the symbol for all of the bad things that the people had been doing, and that when the goat is sacrificed to god the sins of the people are destroyed also. This is the origin of the idea of the "scapegoat." The idea is repeated in a book of the Bible entitled "The Book of Daniel which is discussed in greater detail below. The same theme of the scapegoat is repeated symbolically in the biblical story of Jesus of Nazareth. This story is told in the Christian part of the Bible which is called "The New Testament" or "The Gospels." Christians today believe that Jesus of Nazareth chose to be tortured to death by Roman soldiers as a sacrifice to his father who is God. According to the Christian belief, Jesus died the horrible death of crucifixion so that all of the sins of humanity would die with him. This is the scapegoat idea as it appears in historical time.

E.L.Doctorow’s novel, The Book of Daniel uses the idea of the scapegoat at many levels. It tells the story of an American Jewish couple who were executed in the electric chair on the charge of being Russian spies and giving away secrets concerning the atomic bomb. Doctorow’s uses the idea, first used in the biblical Book of Daniel, of the Jew as the scapegoat for society. Doctorow bases his novel about the Rosenbergs on the story of Daniel which is found in the Old Testament. Daniel was a Jewish subject of Persian emperors. When these emperors became angry or afraid of the unknown they tried to sacrifice Daniel and his brothers who were well known members of the Jewish community in that country. Daniel’s brothers were thrown into a fiery furnace, but the fire did not consume them and they survived. Later, Daniel was thrown into a den of lions. He should have been eaten by the lions, but God protected Daniel and he walked out of the lion’s den without a scratch. The story of the much more modern Daniel in Doctorow’s novel does not have such a happy ending, for in this story Daniel is the son of Doctorow’s fictional Rosenberg couple.

Daniel  and his sister Susan are the fictional children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In Doctorow’s novel they are called the Isaacsons. Like the real people they were modeled on, The Rosenberg’s were members of the Communist Party of the United States. They were charged with passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. How lower middle-class people from the Bronx got possession of atomic secrets to pass to the Russians was never explained by the American government of the day. In the novel Daniel’s father owns a small radio repair business and Daniel’s mother, Rochelle, is a housewife. When the FBI begins to investigate the Isaacsons it is terrifying for the family; especially for the children. The FBI men sit in a car outside and watch the house. Daniel’s father is brave at first:

"That is outrageous!", he says. "Don’t you see it is part of the treatment. They are trying to shake us up. But we’re too smart for them. We’re on to them. They can sit out there all night for all I care".

Nevertheless, the FBI finally come and take Daniel’s father Paul away. Then the family is devastated. A lawyer hired by the Communist Party tries to defend Paul and Rochelle, but it looks as if everything has been planned to go against them. Eventually they are executed in the electric chair, and the children have to live with their loss and their terror.

Doctorow suggests in the novel that the US government really had very little evidence on which to convict the Isaacsons. The long and painful process of their arrest, their interrogations, and their trial consists of bullying by the FBI and the court. Doctorow portrays American society in the cold war years of the 1950s as hysterical and frightened. The great enemy of the United States in those days was believed to be the Soviet Union. It was feared that the Soviet Union might develop an atomic bomb and drop it on the United States. This was the period in American history called "the Cold War." In the novel we see the process of choosing a sacrificial victim through the eyes of two children. It makes the real life history of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their two children more frightening. After the trial no further evidence of Soviet spying came to light that would show that the Rosenbergs were guilty of any crime. Doctorow’s novel was published in 1971 long before any information of any kind was available. What the author believed then, is much easier to believe now, namely, that Rosenbergs were classic scapegoats. Like Paul and Rochelle Isaacson in the novel, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were chosen for sacrifice by a nation that believed that it was facing great danger and was terrified of the unknown.

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