The complex Jewish past of Bob Dylan

His father Abram Zimmerman was a middle-class electrical shop owner of Russian-Ukrainian Jewish descent, and his mother, Beatrice “Beatty” Stone, was of Lithuanian heritage. Dylan’s Yiddish-speaking grandmother lived with the family in Hibbing, Minnesota, and his parents were central to the close-knit Jewish community of their hometown: his father was president of B’nai B’rith, and his mother was president of the local Hadassah Women’s Zionist Organisation of America.

The town in which he grew up had so few Jews (“most of them I was related to,” Dylan later said) that it didn't have its own rabbi. So, one was wheeled in especially for the occasion of young Dylan’s simchah.

Folk singers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in 1963 in Washington D.C. (Getty)Getty Images

“Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year… He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff,” he told Spin Magazine in 1985.

“He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes. The rabbi taught me what I had to learn, and after he conducted this bar mitzvah, he just disappeared. The people didn’t want him. He didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a rabbi. He was an embarrassment. All the Jews up there shaved their heads and, I think, worked on Saturday. And I never saw him again. It’s like he came and went like a ghost.”

Jewish themes in his songs

“I’m a Jew. It touches my poetry, my life, in ways I can’t describe,” Bob Dylan told biographer Robert Shelton in 1971.

Those Jewish roots infiltrated his earlier songs through biblical imagery and references.

In 1963, the 20-year-old musician recorded Hava Nagila Blues, his own take on the folk song while recording his second album. Featuring yodelling and harmonica, it became a highlight at his Greenwich Village folk-club gigs and the outtake was later released on The Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991.

His 1967 hit All Along the Watchtower, from his eighth album John Wesley Harding, took its narrative and imagery from Isaiah 21. Meanwhile, Highway 61 Revisited referenced the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 (“Oh, God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son!’ / Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on”) – and the road known as the “Blues Highway” long before Dylan was born to Beatty and Abe a few miles away from it.

His Grammy-winning hit single Gotta Serve Somebody alluded to Joshua 24:14-15 – although it’s on the first album from his Christian period, 1979’s Slow Train Coming, and spawned covers by gospel artist Shirley Caesar and Etta James, as well as parodies by John Lennon and Devo, undercover as a Christian rock act called Dove.

But it’s his tender acoustic ballad Forever Young that remains his most explicitly Biblical song, given that it opens with a reference to the Birkat Kohanim, the Priestly Benediction from the Book of Numbers 1. With its reference to the story of Jacob and image of a ladder to the stars (“May you build a ladder to the stars /And climb on every rung”), it feels like a blessing to his youngest son Jakob (now a rock star).

Dylan’s Christian phase

Bob Dylan had famously upset his fans when he went electric at the Newport Folk Club in 1965. But the icon of Sixties counter-culture astonished his fans and fellow musicians once again by becoming a born-again Christian in the late-Seventies. This included a stint at Bible school, the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in California. Between 1979 and 1981, Dylan’s songs and concerts brimmed with references to his newfound evangelical Christianity. First up was his 1979 album Slow Train Coming, which included songs I Believe In You and When He Returns.

Soon after his (temporary) conversion, Dylan took his new faith songs to San Francisco for a two-week residency. It did not go down well. Eschewing his classics for cuts from his new gospel records, he would deliver passionate evangelical sermons to his bewildered fans. And each night that he performed at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre, picketers stood outside in protest.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s damning review of the opening night in November 1979 had the headline “Bob Dylan’s God-Awful Gospel”.

His next album, 1980's Saved, offered more gospel. Its 1981 follow-up, Shot of Love, blended the born-again theme with more secular songs and produced one of the most poignant tracks of his Christian period – and one of his all-time classics – in the beautifully tender and spiritual Every Grain of Sand. The emotional finale of his recent Rough and Rowdy tour, it was a reminder of Dylan’s Christian period.

Back to his Jewish roots

By the early 1980s, Dylan had returned to his Jewish roots. He was soon seen holding a bar mitzvah for his eldest son Jesse (born to Dylan’s first wife Sara Lownds) at the Kotel in Jerusalem. He even took his children to the Jewish summer camp he’d enjoyed as a child.

Singer Bob Dylan (left) at the bar mitzvah of his son at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on September 20, 1983Photo: Alamy Stock Photo AP Photo/Zavi Cohen

Also in 1983, he expressed solidarity with Israel in his song Neighborhood Bully. “Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man/ His enemies say he's on their land/ They got him outnumbered about a million to one/ He got no place to escape to, no place to run… The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land/ He's wandered the earth an exiled man/ Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn/
He's always on trial for just being born/ He's the neighborhood bully/ Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized/ Old women condemned him, said he should apologize/ Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad/ The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad/ He's the neighborhood bully.”

It’s said that Chabad rabbis helped Dylan in his return to Judaism. Studying with rabbis in the 1980s, he participated in services at Chabad synagogues and appeared on the Chabad telethon fundraiser in 1989, accompanying his songwriter son-in-law Peter Himmelman on harmonica in a rendition of Hava Nagila, along with Harry Dean Stanton. In mid-90s Dylan prayed with the Lubavitch Rebbe in Brooklyn, and he was later seen reciting the blessings at Yom Kippur services.

A Complete Unknown is on general release on Friday