"My name is Ruben Blum and I’m an, yes, an historian. Soon enough, though, I guess I’ll be historical. By which I mean I’ll die and become history myself, in a rare type of transformation traditionally reserved for the purer scholars."
What the narrator means here is that with his death, he will instantly become a historical document. Since he is a historian, this suggests that with death he literally becomes what he does. This same metaphorical logic can be applied to other disciplines, though only those limited to what Blum refers to as pure scholarship. It seems an odd metaphorical concept upon which to base the opening paragraph of a novel, but the end of that opening paragraph clears up the confusion as Blum muses over one of the distinguishing spiritual differences between Jews and Christians: one believes in Flesh becoming the Word while the other believes in Word becoming Flesh.
"The Spanish Inquisition, he claimed, introduced the idea that a person could not essentially change or be changed, but was in fact defined and determined by corporeal factors, by how many degrees tainted they were from that prelapsarian or just premiscegenated state the Spanish called limpieza de sangre: blood purity."
The “he” making this claim is the pre-eminent member of the titular family, Ben-Zion Netanyahu. Since the story is set in the past, Ben-Zion enjoys the status of pre-eminence and has a young son named Benjamin who will go on to make a name for himself in the future due to some job he will have in the Israeli government. For now, however, Ben-Zion is the lion of the Netanyahu family, and he has arrived in America to present a fascinating theory about the impact of the Spanish Inquisition on Iberian Jewish history. What is at stake in Ben-Zion’s radicalism is his view that the Catholic Church specifically instituted the notorious Inquisition to challenge the widely held acceptance that practitioners of the Jewish faith could convert to Christianity. This redefinition, according to Ben-Zion, is the flash point in history at which Judaism transformed from religion into a separate race. And, of course, it is this very distinction that is the fundamental basis for modern anti-Semitism.
"I’m ashamed too to think of how entertained I was by the programming, whose lack of options, whose lack of range, is boggling by today’s standards. Game shows and westerns, that was all, game shows and westerns, which were essentially the same to the American mind: zero-sum scenarios of winners and losers, mettle tested by luck."
This quote is made from the perspective of the future as Blum looks back over the decades which saw the rise of cable television and streaming networks. The social commentary is extrapolated from the meticulous awareness of what television programming was like in the 1960s and is stimulated by the sight of young Benjamin Netanyahu sitting in front of the Blum family's color television set (still a status symbol at the time) absolutely enraptured by the western dramas which dominated prime time programming back then. The narrative perspective of the novel is an essential element for understanding the relevance of this quote. Since the narration is that of a much older Ruben looking backward, his thought processes are also influenced by the realization that the little kid staring snake-eyed at the western morality plays like Bonanza grew up to become a far-right authoritarian Prime Minister of Israel. Within this frame of reference, his socio-political construction of the impact upon the body politic by a constant stream of westerns and game shows for much of broadcast television’s first two decades of existence is engendered by a direct connection to Benjamin Netanyahu’s future reputation as a dominant political figure in the 21st century.
