Association for Jewish studies 2009- 33(1)

THE JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES

AJS

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Kabbalah © 1997 by Mark Podwal, Courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York.

VOL. 33, NO. 1 • APRIL 2009

AJS Review ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES NEW YORK, NEW YORK EDITORS Elisheva Carlebach, Columbia University Robert Goldenberg, SUNY Stony Brook BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Charlotte Fonrobert, Stanford University ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Eugene Sheppard, Brandeis University EDITORIAL BOARD Michael Alexander, Temple University Pamela Barmash, Washington University in Saint Louis Yaakov Elman, Yeshiva University Talya Fishman, University of Pennsylvania Gershon David Hundert, McGill University Riv-Ellen Prell, University of Minnesota Jeffrey Rubenstein, New York University Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University Magda Teter, Wesleyan University Chava Weissler, Lehigh University MANAGING EDITOR Stanley Mirvis The AJS Review (ISSN 0364-0094) is published twice annually by the Association for Jewish Studies The AJS Review has been subsidized in part by a contribution from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation. Manuscripts for consideration should be e-mailed as a MS Word or rich text file to the AJS Review managing editor at [email protected]. Books for review should be sent to Prof. Charlotte Fonrobert, Stanford University, Department of Religious Studies, Building 70, MC 2165, Stanford CA 94305-2165. © 2009 by the Association for Jewish Studies. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopy, or otherwise, without permission in writing from Cambridge University Press. General enquiries from the USA, Mexico, and Canada should be addressed to the New York office of Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge. org/us/information/rights/contacts/newyork.htm; general enquiries from elsewhere should be addressed to the Cambridge office http://www.cambridge.org/uk/information/rights/contacts/ cambridge.htm; permission enquiries from Australia and New Zealand should be addressed to the Melbourne office http://www.cambridge.org/aus/information/contacts_melbourne.htm; enquiries regarding Spanish-language translation rights (only) should be addressed to the Madrid office http://www.cambridge.org/uk/information/rights/contacts/madrid.htm. Publishing, Subscription, and Advertising Offices: Cambridge University Press, 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, U.S.A.; or Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8RU, England. Annual subscription rates for Volume 33, 2009: Institutions print and online £101/$172; institutions online only £88/$150; institutions print only £95/$162; single part £50/$83, payable in advance or on receipt of invoice; institutional check or credit card only. Special rates exist for members of the Association for Jewish Studies; membership information can be found at http://www.ajsnet.org. Information relating to AJS Review can be found at http://www.ajsnet.org/ajsreview.htm. AJS Review and all other Cambridge Journals can be found at http://journals.cambridge.org/ Photocopying Information (for users in the U.S.A.): Notwithstanding the above, the Item-Fee Code for this publication (0364-0094/09) indicates that copying for internal or personal use beyond that permitted by Sec. 107 or 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law is authorized for users duly registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), provided that the appropriate remittance is paid directly to: CCC, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923. U.S.A. Specific written permission must be obtained for all other copying; contact the nearest Cambridge University Press office. Postmaster: Send address changes in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico to: AJS Review, Journals Dept., Cambridge University Press, 100 Brook Hill Drive, West Nyack, NY 10994-2133, U.S.A. Send address changes elsewhere to: AJS Review, Journals Dept., Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8RU, England.

THE JOURNAL

AJS Review OF THE

ASSOCIATION

FOR JEWISH

VOLUME 33, NUMBER 1

STUDIES APRIL 2009

TABLE

OF

CONTENTS

STATEMENT FROM THE INCOMING EDITORS ........................................................................1 ARTICLES Ken Frieden Neglected Origins of Modern Hebrew Prose: Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives ............................................................................................................... 3 Shai Secunda Talmudic Text and Iranian Context: On the Development of Two Talmudic Narratives ........................................................................................................ 45 Dimitry Shumsky Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews: Franz Kafka’s “Jackals and Arabs” between Bohemia and Palestine .................................................................................................... 71 Alyssa M. Gray The Formerly Wealthy Poor: From Empathy to Ambivalence in Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity .......................................................................................... 101 Susan Einbinder Theory and Practice: A Jewish Physician in Paris and Avignon ................................. 135 REVIEW ESSAY Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies ..................................................................... 155 BOOK REVIEWS JEWISH HISTORY

AND

CULTURE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Marc S. Bernstein. Stories of Joseph: Narrative Migrations between Judaism and Islam CAROL BAKHOS ............................................................................................................ 165 Ian C. Werrett. Ritual Purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls JONATHAN KLAWANS .................................................................................................... 167 TALMUD , MIDRASH, AND RABBINICS Shmuel Safrai ‫ז״ל‬, Zeev Safrai, Joshua Schwartz, and Peter J. Tomson, eds. The Literature of the Sages. Second Part: Midrash and Targum, Liturgy, Poetry, Mysticism, Contracts, Inscriptions, Ancient Science, and the Languages of Rabbinic Literature MARTIN S. JAFFEE ........................................................................................................ 169

Devora Steinmetz. Punishment and Freedom: The Rabbinic Construction of Criminal Law AZZAN YADIN ............................................................................................................... 173 MEDIEVAL JEWISH CULTURE Cedric Cohen Skalli, ed. and trans. Isaac Abravanel: Letters ERIC LAWEE .................................................................................................................. 176 Ephraim Shoham-Steiner. H.arigim be‘al korh.am: Meshuga‘im u-metsora‘im ba-h.evrah ha-Yehudit be-Eropah bi-Yeme ha-benayim PINCHAS ROTH .............................................................................................................. 178 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. The Censor, the Editor, and the Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century KENNETH STOW ............................................................................................................ 181 MODERN JEWISH THOUGHT AND THEOLOGY Steven E. Aschheim. Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad WILLI GOETSCHEL ........................................................................................................ 185 Christian Wiese. The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions ERIC JACOBSON ............................................................................................................ 188 Ken Koltun-Fromm. Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority ALLAN ARKUSH ............................................................................................................ 190 Abraham P. Socher. The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy ADAM SHEAR ................................................................................................................ 192 MODERN JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY Naomi Seidman. Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation TODD SAMUEL PRESNER .............................................................................................. 195 Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese, eds. Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives CLAIRE E. SUFRIN ........................................................................................................ 198 Margit Schad. Rabbiner Michael Sachs: Judentum als höhere Lebensanschauung MICHAEL A. MEYER ..................................................................................................... 201 Todd Presner. Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration SEBASTIAN WOGENSTEIN ............................................................................................. 204 Katherine Elizabeth Fleming. Greece: A Jewish History Annette B. Fromm. We Are Few: Folklore and Ethnic Identity of the Jewish Community of Ioannina, Greece STEVEN BOWMAN ......................................................................................................... 207

Jack Kugelmass, ed. Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship SHARON GILLERMAN .................................................................................................... 210 Julian Levinson. Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Literature and American Literary Culture EMILY KOPLEY ............................................................................................................. 212 YIDDISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE Benjamin Harshav. The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution YAIR LIPSHITZ .............................................................................................................. 215 MODERN HEBREW LITERATURE Michael Gluzman. Ha-Guf ha-Z.iyoni: le’umiyut, migdar u-miniyut ba-sifrut ha-Ivrit ha-h.adashah MICHAL BEN -HORIN ..................................................................................................... 218 GENDER STUDIES Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism CAROL CONAWAY ......................................................................................................... 222

AJS Review 33:1 (2009), 1 © 2009 Association for Jewish Studies doi:10.1017/S0364009409000014

S TATEMENT

FROM THE

I NCOMING E DITORS

We wish to express our thanks to the AJS Board of Directors for giving us the honor of serving as Editors of the AJS Review. As we take up our duties, we first salute our predecessors, Professors Martin Jaffee and Hillel Kieval, on the high quality of the journal now entrusted to us. They have set us a model of diligence and excellence that we shall be hard pressed to match. They have our admiration and our gratitude. Our thanks go as well to Professor Charlotte Fonrobert for her labors in the office of Book Review Editor. It is no easy task to get reviews into print before the books under discussion go out of print, and we are pleased to report that Professor Fonrobert has kindly agreed to remain in her post. The AJS Review could not possibly appear as it does, on schedule and well produced, without the efforts of the AJS staff, headed by Executive Director Rona Sheramy. We thank outgoing Managing Editor Sarah Massey for her tireless efforts over the past years and wish her success in her new position. We look forward to working with Stanley Mirvis, the incoming managing editor.

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We have inherited a distinguished journal, and for this we are deeply grateful. Building on this strong foundation, we would like the AJS Review to reflect the full spectrum of our members’ scholarly interests in all their variety while maintaining and even raising our academic standards. We turn to you, our readers, the members of the AJS, to send us your finest work and to encourage your colleagues to do the same. As time goes on, we hope to introduce some new features to the AJS Review, and we welcome your input and comments. To celebrate a new chapter in the history of this distinguished journal, we are fortunate to have the artwork of the noted illustrator Mark Podwal gracing our cover, and we thank him for his generosity to the AJS Review. His work embodies the combination of deep Jewish literacy, graceful execution, and the leap of imagination that symbolize our aspirations for the dynamic, fluid, and challenging field that is Jewish studies.

Elisheva Carlebach and Robert Goldenberg

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AJS Review 33:1 (2009), 3–43 © 2009 Association for Jewish Studies doi:10.1017/S0364009409000026

N EGLECTED O RIGINS OF M ODERN H EBREW P ROSE : H ASIDIC AND M ASKILIC T RAVEL N ARRATIVES by

Ken Frieden1 The emergence of modern Hebrew literature has too often been represented as a straight line from Enlightenment authors’ meliz.a to “Mendele’s nusah.” in S. Y. Abramovitsh’s fiction.2 If we are to move beyond this one-dimensional geometry, we must add additional lines of development: from traditional rabbinic writing in postmishnaic Hebrew, branching out to hasidic narratives and parodies of hasidic Hebrew, and gradually leading toward a more vernacular Hebrew style. Once we have recognized the inadequacy of the older model, which culminates in hyperbolic claims for Abramovitsh’s short stories (1886–96), we can better appreciate the contributions of diverse authors such as R. Nathan (Nosn) Sternharz (1780– 1845), Mendel Lefin (1749–1826), and their successors. While conflicting ideologies of the Jewish Enlightenment and of Hasidism are reflected in many of their writings and in scholarship about them, the literary contributions of these writers have been undervalued and are seldom understood. Accepted wisdom in Hebrew literary history tells us that the maskilim favored a neobiblical style, which they considered to be “pure” (lashon z.ah. or z.eh.a); in contrast, the hasidim wrote a kind of “low Hebrew” or “folk Hebrew,” which many nonhasidic readers have scorned for the past two centuries because it was based on postbiblical Hebrew, included grammatical errors, and was tinged with

1. The author thanks the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, Hebrew University, and Syracuse University for their generous support of research in Jerusalem during 2007–2008, without which this paper could not have been written. I have benefited from conversations with Shmuel Werses, Ariel Hirschfeld, Naomi Seidman, Jonatan Meir, Vera Solomon, and Rebecca Wolpe, as well as from written exchanges with Nancy Sinkoff. I was privileged to take part in a yearlong research group, “Toward a New History of Hasidism,” organized by David Assaf and Moshe Rosman at Hebrew University’s Institute for Advanced Studies. Several participants offered helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper: Ada Rapoport-Albert, Gershon Bacon, Shmuel Feiner, Zvi Mark, Moshe Rosman, Shaul Stampfer, and Marcin Wodzinski. I would also like to thank the librarians at the Jewish National and University Library for their assistance while I was working with rare books and manuscripts in Jerusalem, and for granting permission to print the facsimile, transcription, and translation that are included in appendix II and appendix III. 2. Hayim Nah.man Bialik initiated this one-sided version of literary history in his essays on “Mendele’s nusah..” See Ken Frieden, “‘Nusah. Mendele’ be-mabat bikoreti,” Dappim le-meh.kar be-sifrut 14–15 (2006): 89–103.

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Ken Frieden Yiddish.3 This simplistic opposition has seldom been questioned, although some linguists have challenged the claim made by the maskilim that they were writing “pure” biblical Hebrew.4 Intellectual historians have emphasized the antihasidic polemics,5 and maskilic satires have been studied in depth,6 but other literary genres have been neglected. Moreover, not all maskilim embraced biblical Hebrew and meliz.a; Lefin, for example, favored mishnaic Hebrew. The genre of travel narrative merits closer attention,7 and we can learn a great deal from Hebrew narratives of sea travel that were written and translated at the start of the nineteenth century.8 It is significant that, in spite of their

3. In English, an outstanding literary history along these lines can be found in Robert Alter’s The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), especially chap. 1, “From Pastiche to Nusakh.” On “folk Hebrew” (‘Ivrit ‘amamit), Aharon Ben-Or (Orinovski) writes that “Perl points to it as a symbol of barbarism and ignorance, and we value it as the beginning of popular Hebrew, alive and natural.” See Aharon Ben-Or (Orinovski), Toldot ha-sifrut ha-’Ivrit ha-h.adasha (Tel Aviv: Yizreel, 1966), 1:77; cf. Ken Frieden, “Joseph Perl’s Escape from Biblical Epigonism through Parody of Hasidic Writing,” AJS Review 29, no. 2 (2005): 265–82. 4. Chaim Rabin, for instance, notes that the language of the Haskalah was not as biblical as the maskilim claimed: “The ability to express nineteenth-century thought in Biblical Hebrew had been built up in a long process, going back to the early middle ages, in which each generation benefited from the discoveries of its predecessors. This process included the creation of compounds and new idioms to express concepts not found in the Bible, as well as changes in the meaning of Biblical words, which were thus fitted to fill gaps in the semantic spectrum. While the forms of the words were Biblical, the syntax of haskalah literature—except for the Biblical idiomatic phrases—is that of a European language.” See Chaim Rabin, “The Continuum of Modern Literary Hebrew,” in The Great Transition: The Recovery of the Lost Centers of Modern Hebrew Literature, ed. Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), 18. 5. See, e.g., Raphael Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Eugene Orenstein, Aaron Klein, and Jenny Machlowitz Klein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985); the Yiddish and (expanded) Hebrew originals were published in 1942 and 1961; see also Mordecai Wilensky, H.asidim u-mitnagdim: le-toldot ha-pulmus she-beineihem ba-shanim 1772–1815 (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1970), vols. 1–2. Another representative earlier work is Avraham Rubinstein’s introduction to his edition of Joseph Perl’s ‘Al mahut kat ha-h.asidim/Uiber [sic] das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim (Jerusalem: Israeli Academy, 1977). Among excellent current books on the ideology of the Haskalah, see Nancy Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Providence, RI: Brown University Judaic Studies, 2004); and Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness, trans. Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverston (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002); Feiner’s Hebrew original was published in 1990. 6. Numerous scholars—such as Israel Weinlös, Shmuel Werses, Khone Shmeruk, Dan Miron, Gershon Shaked, Moshe Pelli, Yehuda Friedlander, Jeremy Dauber, and Jonatan Meir—have written about Enlightenment satire in Hebrew and Yiddish prose, including studies of Aharon Halle-Wolfsohn, Joseph Perl, I. B. Levinsohn, S. Y. Abramovitsh, and others. 7. See Moshe Pelli, “The Literary Genre of the Travelogue in Hebrew Haskalah Literature: Shmuel Romanelli’s Masa Ba’rav,” Modern Judaism 11, no. 2 (1991): 241–60. 8. For an overview of sea travel narratives in Hebrew and Yiddish, see Rebecca Wolpe, “The Sea Voyage Narrative as an Educational Tool in the Early Haskalah” (master’s thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006); in Hebrew, see her article “Gilta et America,” special issue, Davka: ’erez. Yiddish ve-tarbuta, no. 1 (July 2006): 30–31.

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Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives ideological disparities, both hasidic and maskilic authors actively contributed to the evolution of this popular genre. R. Nathan was a pathbreaking author in his own right, apart from his role as R. Nahman of Bratslav’s scribe, and his 1815 account of R. Nahman’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land was a milestone of sorts in Hebrew literary history. In a different vein and across a cultural divide, Lefin’s translations from German (ca. 1815–23), based on Joachim Heinrich Campe’s stories of adventure at sea, are stylistically as significant as any original Hebrew prose of the time. While R. Nathan worked from oral Yiddish sources and Lefin translated from printed German texts, a kind of indirect dialogue took place between their Hebrew publications. This battle of books expressed contrary ideologies and the authors’ efforts to win over readers. Both writers contributed to the evolution of modern Hebrew narrative in ways that are seldom acknowledged by literary historians. Alongside the well-known ideological encounters, then, literary skirmishes took place. From the standpoint of literary history, Lefin and R. Nathan were two leading figures in the intertextual battleground of early nineteenth-century Hebrew prose. Their competing narratives of sea voyage tested the authors’ ability and readiness to convey concrete descriptions of nature in Hebrew. At the same time, their travel literature conveyed attitudes toward natural science, geography, and the non-Jewish world. In spite of obvious differences, Lefin and R. Nathan had much in common. Because R. Nathan was raised in an antihasidic family in Nemirov, his early Hebrew education may not have been so different from that of Lefin in Satanov. Neither was an original thinker in his own right; both responded to inspiration from other sources. The turning point for Lefin came when he met Moses Mendelssohn and his circle during a sojourn in Berlin in 1780–84, whereas R. Nathan’s life changed after he met R. Nahman in 1802. There was a wide gap between their goals, as between their intellectual and religious milieux, yet some of their literary means were similar. As a basic premise, I assume the relevance of Harold Bloom’s ideas of intertextuality and literary influence, circling around the question, how do authors experience “the anxiety of influence” and attempt to achieve “strength” in relation to their precursors and contemporary rivals?9 Joseph Perl’s Megale temirin (1819), his posthumously published manuscripts, and his Boh.en z.adik (1838) show clearly that Perl was jealous of the success of hasidic works such as Shivh.ei ha-Besht.10 At the same time, R. Nathan read his opponents’ works, feared their criticisms, and directly attacked specific authors, usually without mentioning their names.

9. See, e.g., Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); and idem, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 10. See Joseph Perl, Megale temirin (Vienna: Anton Strauss, 1819), introduction by Perl’s fictional persona Ovadia ben Pesah.aya, 2b and letter 78; idem, ‘Al mahut kat ha-h.asidim, ed. Avraham Rubinstein (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1977), 77; idem, Boh.en z.adik (Prague: Landau, 1838), 24; and see also Perl’s unpublished introduction to the Yiddish version of Megale temirin, “Yosef Perls hakdome tsum ‘Megale temirin,’” YIVO bleter 13 (1930): 566–76.

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Ken Frieden It is also helpful to draw from Linda Hutcheon’s studies of parody. Hutcheon shows how parody, understood in its most general sense, functions in the form of “repetition with difference”: “A critical distance is implied between the backgrounded text being parodied and the new incorporating work, a distance usually signaled by irony.”11 Although ridiculing parody is not central to the narratives that are analyzed in this paper, it is possible to interpret some of these works—including translations and adaptations—as genre parodies. In some instances, they reappropriated the genre of travel narrative in ways that altered Hebrew and Yiddish literary history. There are ample historical clues of possible connections between the Hebrew narratives of sea travel written by R. Nathan and Lefin. As Haim Liberman and Mendel Piekarz show, hasidic authors left compelling accounts of R. Nahman’s and R. Nathan’s meetings with maskilim in Uman. Before and after 1810, R. Nahman and R. Nathan met with Haikl Hurwitz (1749–1822) and his son Hirsh Ber Hurwitz (1785–1857).12 The most astonishing record of these meetings appears in Avraham Hazan’s Kokhevei ’or. Hazan writes, for instance, .‫ואחרי פטירת רביז”ל היו ]המשכילים[ ידידים אהובים לאנ”ש ומכ”ש למהרנ”ת ז”ל‬ ‫ומהרנ”ת ז”ל היה לו ציווי מרביז”ל שידבר עמם ע”כ בכל פעם שהיה באומין היה לו וויזיט‬ .‫ מה רצה רביז”ל ממנו‬,‫ ופ”א נכנס עמם בחקירות גדולות כ”כ עד שצעק ואמר‬,‫אצלם ודבר עמם‬ After the departure of our Rebbe, of blessed memory, they [the maskilim] were dear friends of our Breslov circle, and especially of R. Nathan z”l. And R. Nathan had a command from our Rebbe z”l that he should speak with them, and so every time he was in Uman, he had a visit at their house and spoke with them. And once he entered into such deep philosophical questions [h.akirot gedolot] with them that he cried out, What did our Rebbe want from him?13

During the period in which these meetings occurred, sea travel accounts became a popular genre in Hebrew literature, and the Jewish community of Uman provided a direct link between maskilic and hasidic travel writing. In 1817, two years after 11. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 32. 12. On R. Nahman and the maskilim of Uman, see Haim Liberman’s article in Yiddish and Hebrew, respectively: “R. Nakhman Bratslaver un di Umaner maskilim,” YIVO Bleter 29 (1947): 201–19; and “R. Nah.man mi-Breslav u-maskilei Uman,” in Ohel Rah.el (New York: Liberman, 1984), 310–28. Mendel Piekarz continues in the direction suggested by Liberman’s analysis in H.asidut Breslav: perakim be-h.ayei meh.olelah, bi-khetaveiha u-vi-sefih.eiha, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1995), chap. 2. See also Shmuel Feiner, “Be-’emunah bilvad! Ha-pulmus shel reb Nathan mi-Nemirov neged ha-ateizm ve-ha-haskalah,” in Meh.kerei h.asidut, vol. 15 of Meh.kerei Yerushalaim be-mah.shevet yisra’el, ed. Immanuel Etkes, David Assaf and Joseph Dan (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1999), esp. 93–97. Other pertinent primary texts may be found in Avraham Gottlober’s Zikhronot u-ma‘asiot, ed. Reuven Goldberg (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1976), e.g., 74–75. 13. Avrham Hazan, Kokhevei ’or (first published 1933), ed. Shmuel Ha-Levi Hurvitz (Jerusalem: H.asidei Breslov, 1987), sec. “Sippurim nifla’im,” 8. Cited and discussed by Liberman, “R. Nakhman Bratslaver un di Umaner maskilim”; Piekarz, H.asidut Breslav; and Feiner, “Be-’emunah bilvad!” All translations in this article are my own.

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Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives R. Nathan had printed his first account of R. Nahman’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Haikl Hurwitz published a Yiddish translation of Campe’s Die Entdeckung von Amerika.14 According to some unconfirmed accounts, Haikl Hurwitz’s son Hirsh Ber (later known at Cambridge University as Hermann Bernard) had translated Campe’s book into Hebrew around 1810.15 Although the maskilim and the hasidim represented two opposing camps, they were well aware of each other’s actions. Khone Shmeruk and Shmuel Werses point to evidence that R. Nathan knew his opponents were reading and scrutinizing his writings. Not only does he caution his son to guard his letters “because they are forbidden to strangers, who make a mockery of truthful words,”16 but also the second edition of Sippurei ma‘asiot corrects an error that Perl mocked in Megale temirin.17 A manuscript including omitted passages from the letters that were printed as ‘Alim le-trufa contains additional evidence of R. Nathan’s fear that his letters might be read by people outside the Bratslav community. He repeatedly urges his son to keep many things secret, and he asks him to send a special stamp to seal his letters.18 In one excised letter from

14. The only known copy of Hurwitz’s translation is in the YIVO Library at the Center for Jewish History, New York. It is listed in the catalog as Haikil Horvits, Tsafnat pa’neah (Berdichev: Bak, 1817), 3 vols.; however, the YIVO copy is missing the beginning of pt. 1 and all of pt. 2. (An unrelated work that bears the same title—published in Lemberg, 1857—is in the collection of the British Museum.) Zalman Reyzn describes this rare book in his article “Campes ‘Antdekung fun America’ in Yiddish (bibliografishe notitsn),” YIVO bleter 5 (1933): 29–40. Israel Zinberg quotes two passages from the beginning and end of Z.afnat pa‘aneah. in his Di geshikhte fun der literatur bay Yidn (Buenos Aires: Alveltlekher Yiddisher kultur-kongres, 1968), 8:253–56. Using sophisticated methods of literary analysis, R. Lerner astutely analyzes the language of Hurwitz’s book in his “Tsu der geshikhte fun der literarisher sprakh onheyb 19-tn yorhundert (di shprakh fun H. Hurvitz’s ‘Tsofnas paneyekh’),” Afn shprakhfront 3 (1939): 165–90. 15. Reyzn, “Campes ‘Antdekung fun America,’” 33, based on the memoirs of a Russian aristocrat (see the Russian Evreiskaia entsiklopediia: svod znanii o evreistve i ego kulture v proshlom i nastoiashchem [St. Petersburg: Obshchestva Dlia Nauchnykh Evreiskikh Izdanii i Izd-vo Brokgauz-Efron, 1906–13], 6:848). Reyzn suggests, however, that the Russian memoirist confused Hebrew with Yiddish, and that it was Haikl Hurwitz (not his son) who had drafted his Yiddish translation by 1810. Another possibility is that there was a mix-up with the Hebrew translation Mez.iat ha-arez. ha-h.adasha, trans. Moses Mendelssohn-Frankfurt (Altona: Bonn, 1807 [5567]). 16. Sefer ‘Alim le-trufa: mikhtevei Moharnat (New York: H.asidei Breslov, 1976), 16, letter 11, dated Friday, Parshat Va-yigash (December 24, 1824). According to David Assaf, the letters from 1836–45 were edited by R. Nahman of Tcherin, while the letters from 1822–34 were edited by R. Nahman of Tulchin; they were first published in 1893 and 1896, respectively. See David Assaf, Breslov: bibliografiya mu‘eret (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2000), 68, entry 228. 17. Landkarte (map) was confused with kronikes (chronicles) in the first edition of Sippurei ma‘asiot, and Perl mocked this both in Megale temirin and in his posthumously published Ma‘asiot ve-iggerot mi-z.adikim amitiyim u-me-anshei shlomeinu, ed. Khone Shmeruk and Shmuel Werses (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1970), 162 n. See Khone Shmeruk, “Dvarim kehaviatam u-dvarim she-bedimion bi-‘Megaleh temirin’ shel Yosef Perl,” in the collection of Shmeruk’s essays, Ha-kri’a la-nav’i: meh.kerei historia ve-sifrut, ed. Israel Bartal (Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 1999), 144–55. 18. On p. 58a of the manuscript, an editor has excised the following sentences from R. Nathan’s letter:

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Ken Frieden 1841, R. Nathan writes to R. Shmuel Weinberg, “For God’s sake, carefully warn anyone who is informed about this matter that he should conceal and hide the thing away, lest it become known to strangers, God forbid [‫למען השם יזהיר מאד את כל מי‬ ‫]שיודיעו עסק ישועה הזאת שיצפון הדבר ויגנוז מאד לבל יודע לזרים ח”ו‬.”19 And at the end of a letter in 1841, R. Nathan asks his son to “hide these things away from the mockers [‫”]לגנוז דברים האלה מפני הליצנים‬20 In a seminal article, Shmuel Feiner moves beyond restating the familiar maskilic polemics. Instead, he turns the tables and shows how a hasidic writer such as R. Nathan studied and railed against maskilic ideas.21 Following Liberman and Piekarz, Feiner mentions the intriguing accounts of R. Nahman’s and R. Nathan’s meetings with maskilim in Uman. He then demonstrates that R. Nathan responded to the ideology of the Haskalah, specifically attacking works such as Shmuel Romanelli’s Masa ba-‘arav.22 Although Romanelli was a Sephardic Jew living in Italy,23 he published his travel narrative in Berlin, at the press affiliated with the Jüdische Freischule (or Knabenschule, 1778–1825).24

‫ וגם החותם מתוקן עם‬.‫נא בני להשתדל לשלוח לי א’ ]אחד[ פידילי ]פודעלע?[ עם החתיכות שחותמין בהם אגרת בלי נר‬ ‫ כי רצוני‬.‫הגאלקי כי מוכרח לי מאד והעיקר בשבילך = בשביל המכתבים שאני שולח לך שלא אצטרך להדליק נר בכל פעם‬ .‫תמיד לחתום המכתבים נא לזרז בזה‬ “Please, my son, make an effort to send me one pidele with the cuttings that are used to seal a letter without a candle. And also the seal prepared with the ball because it is very necessary to me, and the main thing is for you—for the letters that I send you, so that I won't need to light a candle each time. For it is my intention always to seal the letters please hurry in this” (58a, manuscript letter 4, dated Sunday, Parshat Vayera, 1840; in the printed ‘Alim le-trufa, this letter would fall between letters 268 and 269, p. 229). I am grateful to Zvi Mark for loaning me a microfilm of a little-known manuscript of the letters, which is held by the Russian National Library (formerly the M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library) in St. Petersburg. Israel Zinberg discusses this manuscript in Di geshikhte fun der literatur bay Yidn, 8:247–49, first appendix. Taking a more favorable view than Shimon Dubnov, Zinberg refers to R. Nathan's “flowing Hebrew” (248). 19. See the letter of Monday, Parshat Shemot, 1841, from Teplik, manuscript p. 59b, letter 14. 20. In the manuscript of R. Nathan’s correspondence, p. 63a at the end of letter 3, dated Wednesday, the 36th day of the Counting of the Omer (May 12), 1841. This letter was omitted by the editor (R. Nahman of Tcherin) between letters 323 and 324 in ‘Alim le-trufa, 271. 21. Shmuel Feiner, “Be-’emunah bilvad!” 89–124. In selecting examples from R. Nathan’s Likutei halakhot, Feiner builds upon Ron Margolin’s “Ha-’emunah ve-ha-kefirah be-torata shel h.asidut Breslov ‘al pi ha-sefer Likutei halakhot le-R. Nathan Sternharz” (master’s thesis, University of Haifa, 1991). 22. Shmuel Romanelli of Mantua, Masa ba-‘arav (Berlin: H.evrat h.inukh ne’arim, 1792). In English, see Travail in an Arab Land, trans. Yedida K. Stillman and Norman A. Stillman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989). Romanelli’s title plays on the similarity between the word mas’a (with final ’Aleph, “burden” or “travail”) and mas‘a (with final ‘Ayin, “journey”), as noted by the Stillmans in their introduction. 23. On Romanelli, see Moshe Pelli, “Literary Genre of the Travelogue,” 241–60. 24. For accounts of this school, see Joseph Gutmann, “Geschichte der Knabenschule der jüdischen Gemeinde in Berlin,” in Festschrift zur Feier des hundertjährigen Bestehens der Knabenschule der jüdischen Gemeinde in Berlin (Berlin, 1926); and Peter Dietrich and Uta Lohmann, “‘Daß die Kinder aller Confessionen sich kennen, ertragen und lieben lernen’: Die jüdische Freischule

8

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives This was also the press—Defus H.evrat H.inukh Ne‘arim—that had published Lefin’s book Mod’a le-vina in 1789. R. Nathan expressed his rejection of the Berlin Jewish school in his Likutei halakhot, in which he referred to groups of “completely wicked and notorious people, who have made for themselves a Society for the Education of Youth [‫ ועשו לעצמן חברת‬۰ ‫רשעים גמורים מפורסמים‬ ‫]חינוך נערים‬.”25 One might even find evidence of a literary rivalry in the repeated choice of titles. For example, the name Sefer ha-midot—which appears as the title of a Yiddish book in the sixteenth century—was adopted by Isaac Satanov (1784, and used again for his book-length translation of Aristotle’s Ethics in 1790) and by Naftali Herz Wessely (1786, reprinted 1818–19). In 1811 and 1821, R. Nathan—or, previously, R. Nahman himself—recycled the title as a second name for Sefer ha-alef-beit. It is no coincidence that the books by Satanov and Wessely (like Romanelli’s and Lefin’s) were published by the H.inukh Ne‘arim Press at the Jüdische Freischule.26 R. Nathan knew of Romanelli’s book from Berlin, as Feiner discusses, and he undoubtedly also knew of books published in Berlin under the title Sefer ha-midot. Maskilim and hasidim even fought over the title Mase‘ot ha-yam, as the publication history shows: After Lefin’s book was published under this title in 1818 and 1823, R. Nathan’s account of R. Nahman’s journey to ’erez. yisra’el—originally called “Seder ha-nesi‘a shelo le-’erez. yisra’el” when it was included in Sippurei ma‘asiot of 1815—was reprinted under the title Mase‘ot ha-yam in 1846 and 1850.27 Lefin’s sea narratives

in Berlin zwischen 1778 und 1825,” in Dialog zwischen den Kulturen: Erziehungshistorische und religionspädagogische Gesichtspunkte interkultureller Bildung, ed. Ingrid Lohmann and Wolfram Weiße (Münster and New York: Waxmann, 1994), 37–47. Initiated by Moses Mendelssohn and his disciples, the Knabenschule came under the influence of Philanthropism at the start of the nineteenth century. 25. R. Nathan Sternharz, Likutei halakhot, pt. 3: ‘Orah. h.ayim, Hilkhot Pesah., halakhah 7, sec. 4 (Zholkva: Saul Meyerhoffer, 1848), third numbering in 3:11b–12a. Mendel Piekarz refers to this passage in “R. Nathan mi-Nemirov be-’aspeklariat sifro ‘Likutei halakhot,’” Z.ion 69 (2004): 203– 40; the discussion of H.evrat h.inukh ne’arim occurs on p. 221. Thanks to Jonatan Meir for drawing my attention to this reference to the Berlin Jewish school. Liberman cites pertinent passages from Likutei halakhot in his “R. Nakhman Bratslaver un di Umaner maskilim.” 26. From about 1780 to 1820, the press called H.evrat h.inukh ne’arim (Society for Education of Youth) published dozens of books in Hebrew and a smaller number in German. As Zohar Shavit points out, however, there was a far greater supply of than demand for Hebrew books in Berlin at this time. See Zohar Shavit, “From Friedländer’s Lesebuch to the Jewish Campe: The Beginning of Hebrew Children’s Literature in Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 33 (1988): 385–415. After citing data on the number of pupils who attended the Berlin Jewish school, she refers to “the incredible discrepancy between the number of books and the number of their readers” (388). 27. R. Nathan’s first account of R. Nahman’s pilgrimage was published in a supplementary text consisting of twelve double-sided sheets, numbered separately, that was included under the running head “Sippurei ma’asiot” in Sippurei ma‘asiot (Osterha or Mohilev?: n.p., 1815). Entitled “Seder ha-nesi‘ah shelo le-’erez. yisra’el” (4b to 12b), this narrative forms the second part of the book that has frequently been reprinted as Shivh.ei ha-Ran. Shivh.ei ha-Ran was not, however, used as the title of a self-contained book until 1864. See Gershom Scholem, Kuntras eileh ha-shemot: Sifrei Moharan z”l mi-Breslav ve-sifrei talmidav ve-talmidei talmidav (Jerusalem, 1928), 34; and Assaf,

9

Ken Frieden were then republished in 1854 and 1859, followed by reissues of R. Nathan’s Mase‘ot ha-yam in the 1870s. Hillel Levine prepared the groundwork for the current analysis when he uncovered Lefin’s concealed polemic against hasidim in H.eshbon nefesh of 1808. According to Levine, “Lefin preferred the indirect attacks, and for this reason he does not identify the hasidim directly, by name, but instead uses a fairly systematic form of allusive denominations, such as shote and peti.”28 Nineteenth-century hasidic authors seldom described the natural world in detail, as an end in itself; when nature does appear in hasidic narratives and commentaries, it is often ascribed spiritual or allegorical meaning. Hence, travel narratives fall into a contested area, on which I want to trace a particular arc. Starting in 1807, as Israel Bartal and Zohar Shavit show, the sea travel narrative became a popular genre among maskilic Hebrew authors.29 This was a belated response to widely distributed narratives of sea travel in eighteenth-century English and German literature.30 Hebrew sea narratives range from accounts of pilgrimages to the Holy Land to tales of adventure, discovery, and shipwreck.

Breslov, 16. Nevertheless, Assaf points out that the title on the first page of Magid sih.ot (Zholkva, 1850) is “Shivh.ei ha-Ran” (15). “Seder ha-nesi’ah shelo le-’erez. yisra’el” was printed under the title Mase‘ot ha-yam (Warsaw: Lebenzohn, 1850). In his memoirs, Avraham Gottlober mentions an edition from Yosefov, 1846, and the database of the Jewish National and University Library also lists an edition of Mase‘ot ha-yam (Yosefov: Shapiro, 1846), but this copy of the book has apparently been lost. The title page of the 1846 edition of Mase‘ot ha-yam is reproduced by Liberman in Ohel Rah.el, 188. 28. Hillel Levine, “Bein h.asidut le-haskalah: ‘al pulmus anti-h.asidi musve,” in Prakim be-toledot ha-h.evra ha-yehudit bi-yemei ha-benayim u-va-‘et ha-h.adasha, ed. I. Etkes and Y. Salmon (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1980), 182–91, esp. 187. See also Hillel Levine, “Menahem Mendel Lefin: A Case Study of Judaism and Modernization” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1974). In H.eshbon nefesh, Lefin includes some very specific responses to hasidic texts, such as his implicit rejection of the notion of the Jewish nefesh elohit, which is presented by Shneor Zalman of Lyadi in the early chapters of his Tania, first published as Sefer likutei amarim (Slavita, 1796), 4–7. Lefin substitutes a universalist distinction between the nefesh behemit and the nefesh sikhlit (cf. Levine, “Bein h.asidut le-haskalah: ‘al pulmus anti-h.asidi musve,” 188). 29. See Israel Bartal, “Mordechai Aaron Günzburg: A Lithuanian Maskil Faces Modernity,” in From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870, ed. Frances Malino and David Sorkin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 126–47; and Zohar Shavit, “Literary Interference between German and Jewish-Hebrew Children’s Literature during the Enlightenment: The Case of Campe,” in Children’s Literature, ed. Zohar Shavit, special issue, Poetics Today 13, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 41–61. A translation of Campe’s Die Entdeckung von Amerika was one of the earliest sea narratives in Hebrew: Mez.iat ha-arez. ha-h.adasha, trans. Moses Mendelssohn-Frankfurt (Altona: Bonn, 1807 [5567]); an anonymous review of this volume was published in Ha-me’asef (Kislev, 1810): 97–101. In the background are sea travel narratives in Yiddish prose, as analyzed by Leah Garrett in “The Jewish Robinson Crusoe,” Comparative Literature 54 (2002): 215–28; and idem, Journeys beyond the Pale: Yiddish Travel Writing in the Modern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). See also David G. Roskies, “The Genres of Yiddish Popular Literature 1790–1860,” in Working Papers in Yiddish and East European Jewish Studies (New York: YIVO, 1975), 18–22. Roskies calls sea adventure “the main area of maskilic contribution to Yiddish popular literature before Ayzik-Meyer Dik” (18). 30. According to Maximillian E. Novak, as many as 100 editions of Robinson Crusoe appeared around 1800. See his “‘Looking with Wonder upon the Sea’: Defoe’s Maritime Fictions, Robinson

10

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives Because R. Nahman had traveled to Palestine in 1798–99, three years before R. Nathan met him, R. Nathan gathered oral history from other Bratslav hasidim— especially R. Nahman’s fellow traveler R. Shim‘on—to document this pilgrimage.31 Virtually all of R. Nathan’s sources, including R. Nahman’s teachings and tales, were in Yiddish. Hence his work as R. Nahman’s scribe often began with the translation of an oral Yiddish narrative, which was charged with religious significance, into Hebrew. In contrast, maskilim translated many secular travel narratives from German literary sources. As published by R. Nathan in 1815, the volume of R. Nahman’s Sippurei ma‘asiot describes sea travels both in fantastic tales (especially tales 2 and 10) and in the appended description of R. Nahman’s pilgrimage to ’erez. yisra’el. Among the many surprising features of R. Nahman’s tales are descriptions of adventurous voyages, including accounts of pirates, cross-dressing, and one orgy on board.32 In the hagiographical Shivh.ei ha-Ran (not yet bearing this title, but already appearing in full form in 1815), moreover, R. Nathan introduced vivid Hebrew descriptions of sea travel. R. Nathan also wrote an account of his own stormy voyage to the Holy Land in 1822, part retrospective narrative and part in the form of a contemporary journal, included in the second part of the posthumously published autobiographical work Yemei Moharnat.33 Without a comprehensive history of Hebrew travel narratives, in the hasidic and maskilic accounts of sea travel it is still possible to find elements of an intertextual dialogue or literary struggle. At the end of Megale temirin, Perl mocks one of R. Nathan’s descriptions; Perl’s main accomplishment lay in the realm of parody—mimicking and caricaturing hasidic writing for satiric effect. Similarly, on the visual level, Lefin mimics the bilingual format of Sippurei ma‘asiot (with Hebrew on top, Yiddish on the bottom of the page) in the first edition of his book ‘Onia so‘ara.34 But Lefin reached for another

Crusoe, and ‘The Curious Age We Live In,” in Sustaining Literature: Essays on Literature, History, and Culture, 1500–1800, ed. Greg Clingham (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2007), 177. 31. See Joseph Weiss, Meh.karim be-h.asidut Breslav, ed. Mendel Piekarz (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1974), 239–40. 32. R. Nahman, Sippurei ma‘asiot, tale 2, “The King and the Emperor.” 33. R. Nathan Sternharz, Yemei Moharnat, pt. 1, ed. R. Nahman of Tcherin (Lemberg, 1876), and 2nd ed. (Lemberg, 1903); the description of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land was included in the subsequent edition, Yemei Moharnat, pt. 2, ed. Israel Heilprin (Jerusalem, 1904). The only detailed study of this book I have seen is by Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 312–32, which was based on his “Jewish Autobiography in Eastern Europe: The Pre-History of a Literary Genre” (PhD diss., Trinity College, Oxford, 1990), 398–426. Since Moseley wrote his chapter on R. Nathan, manuscripts in the Schocken Library have come to light that may contribute to a new understanding of this posthumously published book. 34. Because the initial pages are missing from the only known copy of the earliest edition of this book, it is especially difficult to date. Moreover, there is no absolute certainty that the author was Lefin. Sinkoff argues convincingly in favor of this attribution in Out of the Shtetl, chap. 4: “Evidence pointing to Lefin’s hand in Oniyyah so‘arah was its (probable) publication in Zolkiew, where Masa‘ot hayam

11

Ken Frieden solution: With his sea narratives translated from Campe, Lefin charted a route to surpass the hasidic writers. Lefin countered the Bratslav literature by translating German travel narratives into equally effective and more grammatically correct Hebrew. I. S IPPUREI M A ‘ ASIOT, S HIVH. EI

HA -R AN , AND

M EGALE T EMIRIN

R. Nahman’s allegorical tales in Sippurei ma‘asiot sometimes resemble folktales but probably have most in common with the parable (mashal) in rabbinic midrash (culminating in the Tale of a Jerusalemite).35 In keeping with the traditional rabbinic mashal or drash, R. Nahman’s oral storytelling makes the tales a vehicle for expressing religious ideas. The allegorical content of Sippurei ma‘asiot usually relates to Lurianic kabbalistic ideas.36 R. Nahman’s stories, like many folktales, often lack specific names, dates, or places. In contrast to the generality of R. Nahman’s Sippurei ma‘asiot, however, R. Nathan’s independently written Shivh.ei ha-Ran has the specificity of a spiritual biography. R. Nathan’s Hebrew in Shivh.ei ha-Ran is as graphic and descriptive as that of Shivh.ei ha-Ari (known in various late eighteenth-century editions) and Shivh.ei ha-Besht (published only months before Shivh.ei ha-Ran). Even in the cases where R. Nahman narrated his stories orally, R. Nathan seems to have been responsible for most of the published Hebrew and Yiddish. Although the present study cannot dwell on the Yiddish text of Sippurei ma‘asiot, it is worth noting that it shows the modernizing and Easternizing features characteristic of leading Yiddish stylists such as Eliezer Pavir, Mendel Lefin, and Haikl Hurwitz.37 The most obvious feature of R. Nathan’s narrative Hebrew is its simplicity, as it takes a form that emulates the oral style of R. Nahman’s Yiddish tales. His preferred vocabulary is narrow, and his phrases are usually short and paratactic. I say “phrases” rather than “sentences,” because the early editions of Bratslav

and Di genarte velt first appeared, its joint publication with one of the travelogues from Masa‘ot hayam in the Vilna 1823 edition of that same title, its use of Slavic words in the Yiddish translation, and its being translated from the same source as those in Masa‘ot hayam” (195–96 n. 106). Rebecca Wolpe notes that many of the terms that are explained in parentheses in Mase‘ot ha-yam and ’Onia so‘ara are similar, “reinforcing the theory that this work also may be attributed to Lefin” (“The Sea Voyage Narrative,” 79). 35. Alternatively, “Jerusalem Tale.” See Ma‘aseh Yerusalmi, ed. Yehuda Leib Zlotnik (Jerusalem: Israeli Institute of Folklore, 1947). In English, see “Tale of a Jerusalemite,” trans. David Stern and Avi Weinstein, in Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature, ed. David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 121–42. The editors wisely conclude their collection with a translation of R. Nahman’s “dream texts”—which were referred to as sippurim h.adashim when they were first published in H.ayei Moharan (1874). 36. In English, there are several commentaries that emphasize the allegorical interpretations. See Nahman of Bratslav, The Tales, ed. Arnold Band (New York: Paulist Press, 1978); and idem, Rabbi Nachman’s Stories, trans. Aryeh Kaplan (Jerusalem: Breslov Research Institute, 1983). 37. For a discussion of the emergence of modern literary Yiddish around 1800, see Dov-Ber Kerler, The Origins of Modern Literary Yiddish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

12

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives writings (like those of Shivh.ei ha-Besht and many other books of the time) do not use commas or periods; instead, they contain something like a spaced “bullet” in the middle of lines.38 Emulating printed texts of the Tanakh, they also use the double point that resembles a colon or sof pasuk to show the end of a textual unit (not to say paragraph). Punctuation may seem to be a minor point, but the effect of hasidic Hebrew writing cannot be separated from its grammar and punctuation. For this reason, it is unfortunate that virtually all twentieth-century editions and translations imposed European grammar on these texts, which did not adhere to Western grammatical rules. In part because they were based on oral sources, R. Nahman’s narratives as conveyed by R. Nathan create a distinctive, oral-style impression. For example, a mixture of simple and run-on sentences breaks our expectations and gives an aura of spontaneity. That the use of full Western punctuation was a novelty among Hebrew readers in the late eighteenth century is evident from an unusual passage contained in Lefin’s Mod‘a le-vina. At the end of this volume, which includes “Iggeret ha-h.okhma” and a small part of “Sefer refu’at ha-‘am,” Lefin adds the following note: For the benefit of the readers (and especially of medical books where it is suitable to be very precise) … we are presenting in the manner of cantillation signs: Two points like this (:) indicate a full stop, like sof pasuk in the Holy Scriptures: One dot like this (۰) indicates a smaller stop, like etnah.ta: One dot and under it a small apostrophe like this (;) is smaller than the ethnah.ta and similar to segol: A crooked mark like this (,) is the smallest of all, and its force is like that of zakef katan….39

Western punctuation was so unfamiliar to some readers that it appeared necessary to explain it by reference to the Masoretic tropes. The style of Shivh.ei ha-Besht has been studied in some detail, with attention to its reliance on Yiddish words.40 As Lewis Glinert states, in Shivh.ei ha-Besht, “parataxis is considerably more common than in other pre-modern Hebrew genres, with particularly repetitive use of ve-. This would appear to relate to the 38. Two autograph manuscripts from the Schocken Library show that when R. Nathan composed the first part of his memoir Yemei Nathan (published in 1876 as Yemei Moharnat), he used the same minimal punctuation. Because the published versions of Breslav writings often omit, alter, or expand the original punctuation markings, it is difficult to rely on them; in any case, it is clear that R. Nathan moved easily between run-on sentences and a choppy style consisting of short phrases. 39. I thank Jonatan Meir for drawing my attention to this “Note” on punctuation, which I have quoted and translated in full in appendix I of this article. See Mendel Lefin, Mod‘a le-vina, pt. 1 (Berlin: H.evrat h.inukh ne’arim, 1789), “He‘ara,” placed at the end of the volume following the segment from Sefer refu’at ha-‘am, unnumbered, prior to the table of contents. In Divrei z.adikim, I. B. Levinsohn spoofs a hasid’s naive perception of maskilic books, including short lines and unfamiliar punctuation marks that he calls pintelekh. See Gilgulav shel Megale sod: kuntras divrei z.adikim le-Ribal ve-Yosef Perl, ed. Jonatan Meir (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2004), 73–74. and Meir’s footnote 105. 40. See Menashe Unger, “Yiddishe verter in Shivh.ei ha-Besht,” Yiddishe shprakh 21 (1961): 65–73.

13

Ken Frieden oral or casual style of the prose, which is less inclined to vary and to avoid repetition.”41 The same holds true for many of R. Nahman’s tales and for the independent narratives by R. Nathan. The Hebrew style of R. Nathan has not, however, been analyzed in depth.42 In his second introduction to Sippurei ma‘asiot, R. Nathan began a response to his critics. He apologizes for the coarse language (leshonot gasim) used in the stories. The editor of the 1850 edition explains the reason for this: R. Nahman “told the tales in the Yiddish [leshon Ashkenaz] used in our land,” and R. Nathan “translated them into the Holy Tongue and deliberately lowered himself to a simple language—in order that the matter would not be changed for a person reading them in the Holy Tongue [leshon ha-kodesh].”43 This suggests that the Yiddishized Hebrew is deliberate and intended to resemble the style of R. Nahman’s Yiddish storytelling.44 The preface to the second edition of Sippurei ma‘asiot acknowledges the criticisms that had been leveled at its Hebrew, but its “low Hebrew” enabled R. Nathan the translator to remain as close as possible to R. Nahman’s own words.45 When R. Nathan translated from R. Nahman’s oral Yiddish, he retained Yiddish and Slavic words in the Hebrew text, including terms such as kretshme (inn), portreit (portrait), zump (swamp), hormates (cannon), katoves (jokes), komedies (comedies), umpit (storm), and matros (sailor).46 Perl mocked this practice and, to draw attention to it, at the end of Megale temirin included a glossary of foreign words used by his hasidic characters. R. Nathan also incorporated many Yiddishized Hebrew words and phrases (e.g., h.okhmes, yishev ‘az.mo [from er hot zikh meyashev geveyn], medabrim shidukhim, yesh rah.mones ‘alav, nafal h.aloshes, tolesh kvorim, leiz.ones).47 In addition, he relied heavily on Hebrew words that had become established in Yiddish.48 Another sign of R. Nathan’s

41. Lewis Glinert, “The Hasidic Tale and the Sociolinguistic Modernization of the Jews of Eastern Europe,” sec. 4, in Studies in Jewish Narrative: Ma‘aseh sippur, Presented to Yoav Elstein, ed. Avidov Lipsker and Rella Kushelevsky (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2006), xxi. 42. Yehaya Rabinovitz touches on R. Nathan’s style in one chapter entitled “Darko shel Rebbe Nah.man mi-Breslav ’el sippurei-ma‘asiot shelo,” in Shoreshim ve-megamot (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1967), 163–218. 43. Sippurei ma‘asiot, second preface to the second edition, 2b. No publication data are available for this edition, which was published in about 1850. See also more recent editions, such as Sippurei ma‘asiot (Jerusalem: Hasidei Breslov, 1979), xiv. 44. Cf. Glinert, “Hasidic Tale,” xxiii. 45. Cf. Frieden, “Joseph Perl’s Escape,” 269. 46. Cf. Shmuel Werses, “Mi-lashon el lashon be-‘Sippurei ma‘asiot’ shel R. Nah.man mi-Breslav (be-‘ekeivot kri’a h.ozeret be-‘Ma‘ase be-h.akham ve-tam’),” H.ulyot 9 (2005): 9–46, esp. 41–43; see also Martin Cunz, Die Fahrt des Rabbi Nachman von Brazlaw ins Land Israel (1798–1799): Geschichte, Hermeneutik, Texte (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 186–87. 47. Werses points out numerous calques from Yiddish in tale 9 (“Of the Sophisticate and the Simple Man”) in his “Mi-lashon el lashon be-‘Sippurei ma‘asiot’ shel R. Nah.man mi-Breslav,” esp. 35–37. 48. Ibid., 29.

14

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives translation from Yiddish to Hebrew can be found in his heavy use of reflexives.49 A parallel to the Yiddish reflexive zikh often shows up in Hebrew as et ‘az.mo, a turn of phrase that seldom appears in Lefin’s Hebrew.50 For example, in a typical phrase of encouragement ascribed to R. Nahman in Likutei Moharan and elsewhere, R. Nathan writes that a person is forbidden from abandoning hope and despairing (today Israelis say lehitya’esh, but R. Nathan writes leya’esh ‘az.mo, based on the Yiddish zikh meyaesh zayn).51 Translating implicitly or explicitly from Yiddish, R. Nathan writes a Hebrew for Yiddish speakers, favoring Hebrew words that were already present in Yiddish. I will focus on the second section of Shivh.ei ha-Ran, entitled “Seder ha-nesi’a shelo le-’erez. yisra’el.”52 Immediately we find a precise intertextual link between R. Nathan and Perl. Preserving the original absence of Western punctuation, I quote from the first description of a sea journey in R. Nathan’s narrative: ‫ תיכף במעת לעת הראשון הי’ פרטינע‬۰ ‫ובבואם לספינה והתחילו ללך על הים השחור‬ ‫ והוכרחו להיות בחדר סגור ומסוגר‬۰ ‫ עד שהגלים קפצו על הספינה‬۰ ‫גדולה דהיינו רוח סערה‬ ‫ והי’ פחד גדול‬۰ ‫ והיו ברקים ורעמים ורוחות גדולות בלי ערך‬۰ ‫מחמת המים שלא יבואו עליהם‬ ’‫ ומחמת פחד לא הי’ באפשרי לישן בלילה וכו’ ואחר ד‬۰ ‫מרעש הרעמים והגשמים ושאון הגלים‬ .‫ימים באו לסטאנבול וישבו על הספר‬ And when they came to the ship and started to go on the Black Sea ۰ immediately in the first day there was a great firtina that is a great storm ۰ until the waves leaped onto the ship ۰ and they were forced to be in a closed and sealed room because of the water so that it wouldn’t get in to them ۰ And there were thunder and lightning and high winds without measure ۰ and there was great fear from the sound of the thunder and the rain and the roar of the waves ۰ and because of fear it was not possible to sleep at night and so on and after four days they came to Istanbul and sat on the shore.53 49. For a general discussion of this phenomenon, see Shmuel Nobel, “Yiddish in a Hebreyishn levush,” YIVO bleter 41 (1958): 158–75. 50. Cf. Zelig Kalmanovitsh’s discussion of Yiddishized Hebrew, as parodied by Perl, contained in Yosef Perl’s Yiddishe ksavim, ed. Israel Vaynlez (Vilna: YIVO, 1937), c–ci. See also Shmuel Werses’s many relevant chapters and articles in his Sippur ve-shoresho: ‘iyunim be-hitpath.ut ha-proza ha-‘Ivrit (Ramat-Gan: Massada, 1971); idem, Mi-lashon el lashon: yez.irot ve-gilguleihen be-sifruteinu (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996); and idem, ‘Hakiz.a ‘ami’: sifrut ha-haskala be-’idan ha-modernizaz.ia (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2001). See also “Mi-lashon el lashon: samemenei ha-nusah. be-Yiddish shel ‘Megale temirin’ me’et Yosef Perl,” H.ulyot 3 (1996): 80. 51. See Likutei Moharan (Jerusalem: Hasidei Breslov, 1988), pt. 2, sec. 78. 52. For an important prior analysis of this text, comparing it to the account in H.ayei Moharan, see Ada Rappoport, “Shnei mekorot le-te’ur nesi’ato shel R. Nah.man mi-Breslav le-’erez.-yisra’el,” Kiryat sefer 46 (1971): 147–53. See also Cunz, Die Fahrt des Rabbi Nachman. Cunz rightly observes that the four storm descriptions “are central to the literary structure” of Shivh.ei ha-Ran, and that the mortal danger presented by these storms sets the overarching narrative tone (291). His analysis is also useful for its juxtaposition of the parallel passages in Shivh.ei ha-Ran and H.ayei Moharan. 53. Sippurei ma‘asiot (Ostraha or Mohilev?: n.p., 1815), appended section with new numbering and subheading, “Seder ha-n’si‘a shelo le-’erez. yisra’el,” 5a; in the modern edition Sefer Shivh.ei ha-Ran (Jerusalem: Agudat “Meshekh ha-nah.al,” 1981), 22, sec. 9. I have preserved the original punctuation, which does not distinguish between commas and periods.

15

Ken Frieden Run-on sentences add to the breathless effect of R. Nathan’s descriptions. Although he received the details secondhand, R. Nathan successfully evokes the intensity of the experience. Then, in what seems like an anticlimactic moment, four days suddenly pass and the travelers have arrived safely and are sitting on the shore in Istanbul.54 At the end of Megale temirin, Perl took R. Nathan’s third-person description and ascribed it to hasidic travelers who wrote while fleeing crimes and scandals.55 However, the parody cuts out much of the description—an abbreviation that causes the text to sound simplistic rather than intense: ,‫ היה רוח סערה גדולה‬,‫ ובמעת לעת הראשון‬,‫ והתחלנו לילך על הים השחור‬,‫ובאנו על הספינה‬ .‫ והיה פחד גדול‬,‫עד שהגלים קפצו על הספינה‬ And we came on the ship, and we started to go on the Black Sea, and in the first day there was a great storm, until the waves leapt onto the ship, and there was great fear.56

This excerpt from the final letter, written by “The Travelers to the Holy Land” (no. 151), undoubtedly refers to the account in Shivh.ei ha-Ran. Apart from Perl’s omissions, an obvious difference is that the description purports to be a first-person plural narrative by the travelers themselves, while R. Nathan’s description is thirdperson narrative. Perl’s parody eliminates the charm and suspense of the original by paring it down to only the vaguest phrases. Perl’s quasi-hasidic passage is distinctive for another reason as well. In most of the letters in Megale temirin, hasidic characters express their views and (according to the literary fiction) Ovadia’s footnotes document that the views expressed in the letters conform to existing hasidic sources. In this case, the quotation from R. Nathan occurs in the body of the text and is ascribed to the fictional hasidic characters. Perl uses and parodies the passage in the body of his text instead of merely citing it in his footnotes. Not only do the characters’ ideas follow hasidic traditions, but their description of sea travel also echoes R. Nathan’s. Thus, Perl parodies hasidic

54. One of the few studies of R. Nathan’s style can be found in Isaiah Rabinovitch’s “Darko shel R. Nah.man mi-Breslov el Sippurei-ma‘asiot shelo,” in Shoreshim u-magamot: le-beh.inat mekoroteiha shel ha-bikoret ha-h.adasha ve-‘iyunim be-darka shel ha-sifrut ha-‘Ivrit” (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1967), chap. 6. Rabinovitch notes an “internal tension that does not tolerate any punctuation marks” in R. Nathan’s narrative voice (165). His commentary is more expressive in the Yiddish version of this essay, “Reb Nakhman Braslavers veg tsu zayne sippurey mayses,” Di goldene keyt 69–70 (1970): 175–76: “Here the narrative style is dynamic, artistic: it is so taut that it does not have any intervening pauses, just as if it were rushing to reach the fateful fact that ‘he [R. Nahman] wanted to see something and saw absolutely nothing.’” 55. Tova Cohen notes this parodic echo in her article, “Ha-h.asidut ve-’erez. yisra’el–aspekt nosaf shel ha-satira bi-‘Megale temirin,’” Tarbiz. 48 (1978–79): 339. See also Israel Bartal’s discussion of Perl’s views of the hasidic settlers in Palestine in Kozak ve-Bedoui: “‘Am” ve-“’arez.” be-le’umiut ha-Yehudit (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘oved, 2007), 45–47. 56. Joseph Perl, Megale temirin (Vienna: Strauss, 1819), 53a.

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Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives writing while simultaneously satirizing hasidic behavior and their sea voyage (which has been transformed from a spiritual ascent into a flight from scandals).57 In a somewhat similar vein, the drafts that were posthumously published as Ma‘asiot ve-iggerot contain a letter by Perl that purportedly was written by R. Nathan himself.58 This parody uses phrases taken directly from the introduction to Likutei Moharan. In addition to ridiculing R. Nathan’s language, Perl tries to show that he could do better by “completing” one tale (111–17) and writing a new tale about “The Lost Prince” (117–222). His narrative parodies in Ma‘asiot ve-iggerot fall short, however, and there is no evidence that Perl ever tried to publish the work. Only when he fully embraced the epistolary form did Perl succeed in satirizing and parodying hasidic life and letters. This ongoing intertextual battle between hasidim and maskilim may have been one impetus for Lefin’s decision to publish non-Jewish travel narratives. The broader cultural project of the Haskalah encouraged him to emulate German literary traditions. Hence, Lefin translated the narratives in Mase‘ot ha-yam (1818) and Oni’a so‘ara (ca. 1815–23) from three books for young readers by Campe using an effective Hebrew style: unpretentious, based on mishnaic Hebrew, following the grammar of modern European literature, and incorporating German or Yiddish words where necessary. The sentences are short and direct. Lefin’s prose has the clarity and directness of R. Nathan’s narratives even as he uses less Yiddishized grammar and a richer vocabulary. Before we look more closely at the interrelations between hasidic and maskilic travel writing, it is necessary to retrace some pertinent biblical sources, traditional rabbinic interpretations, and kabbalistic commentaries. II. T RADITIONAL H EBREW S OURCES

OF

S EA N ARRATIVES

To contextualize nineteenth-century Hebrew sea narratives, we need to understand the significance of Psalm 107 for hasidic and maskilic authors. References to this psalm are prominent in both R. Nathan’s and Lefin’s works. One of R. Nathan’s most graphic descriptions of a storm at sea is framed by quotations from this psalm. Moreover, Lefin refers to Psalm 107 at the beginning of his Mase‘ot ha-yam.59 In the traditional text, the verses of Psalm 107:23–29 are set off by inverted Hebrew letter nuns, marking what appear to be cadenced poetic lines: :‫יורדי הים באניות עשי מלאכה במים רבים‬ :‫המה ראו מעשי יהוה ונפלאותיו במצולה‬ 57. Cohen, “Ha-h.asidut ve-’erez. yisra’el,” 337. Other instances of this kind of parody in Megale temirin are cited by Tova Cohen (ibid., 336–38). 58. Perl, Ma‘asiot ve-iggerot mi-z.adikim amitiyim u-me-anshei shlomeinu, 99. 59. Lefin uses the phrase “yordei ha-yam… be-‘oniyot” on the title page of Mase‘ot ha-yam (1818). The 1823 edition of Onia so‘ara (Vilna: Menah.em Mann, 1823)—which includes one of the two accounts in Mase‘ot ha-yam—contains a translator’s note that refers to the psalm, and the 1859 edition quotes two lines from Psalm 107 on the verso of the title page. See Nancy Sinkoff, “Strategy and Ruse in the Haskalah of Mendel Lefin of Satanow,” in New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001), 94–95.

17

Ken Frieden :‫ויאמר ויעמד רוח סערה ותרומם גליו‬ :‫יעלו שמים ירדו תהומות נפשם ברעה תתמוגג‬ :‫חכמתם תתבלע‬-‫יחוגו וינועו כשכור וכל‬ :‫יהוה בצר להם וממצוקתיהם יוציאם‬-‫ויצעקו אל‬ :‫יקם סערה לדממה ויחשו גליהם‬ .…‫וישמחו‬ Those who go down to the sea in ships, making it their trade in vast seas, They have seen the works of the Lord and His wonders in the depths. He speaks, and a storm wind arises and lifts up the waves. They rise to the heavens and fall into the abyss, their souls melt away in calamity. They circle and lurch like drunks, all of their wisdom is swallowed up. They shout to the Lord in distress, and He removes them from their affliction. The storm becomes silent and the waves become still. And they rejoice.…60

Psalm 107 presents a storm at sea as an exemplary instance in which God’s power and goodness are revealed. The key verse for the overall theological message is repeated four times almost verbatim, with variation only in the final verb: .‫יהוה בצר להם וממצוקתיהם יצילם\יושיעם\יושיעם\יוציאם‬-‫ויצעקו אל‬ They shout to the Lord in distress, and He rescues/redeems/removes them from their affliction.61

The apparently simple notion that people are saved from danger when they cry out to God raises a contested issue: To what extent does petitionary prayer have the power to alter nature? The surprising turn of verse 26, in the middle of a phrase, from physical description to a psychological dimension—“They rise to the heavens and fall into the abyss, their souls melt away in calamity [nafsham be-ra‘a titmogeg]”— leaves room for an allegorical interpretation that was accepted by many hasidic readers. But the description is also sufficiently graphic to serve as a model for descriptions of actual sea travel. Although hasidic authors often referred to Psalm 107 as a prooftext showing the supernatural power of prayer, Lefin seems not to have followed this line of thinking. Another strong biblical echo arises from R. Nathan’s use of the term ruah. sa‘ara. While this phrase occurs in Psalms 107 and 148, an equally important prooftext can be found in the book of Ezekiel. At the beginning of Ezekiel, the prophet gives his account of how “the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.”62 This is the start of the well-known passage that became the basis for

60. The translation is my own, influenced by Harold Fisch’s rendering in The Holy Scriptures (Jerusalem: Koren, 1983). 61. Psalm 107:6, 13, 19, 28. 62. Ezekiel 1:1.

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Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives Merkava mysticism,63 a tradition central to the Zohar and its use by hasidic authors. The vision begins, “And I looked, and behold, a storm wind [ruah. sa‘ara] came from the north.”64 Hence ruah. sa‘ara is a key phrase because it suggests a rationale for R. Nathan’s detailed descriptions of the storms in Shivh.ei ha-Ran, H.ayei Moharan, and Yemei Moharnat. These storms are not random and natural; they are the travelers’ significant encounters with God’s power, on their way to the Holy Land. In a sense, the storms are theophanies, for when a pilgrim survives a ruah. sa‘ara, the outcome is regarded as a manifestation of God’s protective providence. While Campe and Lefin in some ways agree with R. Nahman’s and R. Nathan’s belief in Divine Providence (das Vorsehen or ha-hashgah.a), salvation from storms at sea takes on allegorical meaning and has the aura of a mystical event in the narratives of R. Nathan.65 Accordingly, during R. Nahman’s return journey, a ruah. sa’ara strikes with such force that “the waves rose almost to the heavens [‫]עלו הגלים כמעט עד לב השמים‬.”66 When R. Nahman expresses his confidence that the travelers will be saved, he echoes Moses leading the Israelites in their miraculous crossing of the Red Sea: “Israel was on the sea and did not drown,”67 he says, just before Passover arrives. A way to oppose R. Nahman and R. Nathan was to work from a different textual tradition, and Lefin sometimes chooses to echo the Book of Jonah. In one translation, for example, he uses the unusual phrase ha-’onia h.ishva lehishaver, alluding to the more naturalistic description of a storm—also sent by God—in Jonah 1:4.68 This phrase from Jonah may also be found in prehasidic Hebrew accounts of sea travel, suggesting that Lefin was writing out of another literary tradition.69 While Ezekiel, Exodus, and Jonah provided some phrases, Psalm 107 exerted the strongest influence on modern Hebrew descriptions of sea travel. With reference to that Psalm, Nancy Sinkoff describes part of the ideological battle surrounding sea narratives in Hebrew. Hasidim often followed a kabbalistic interpretation of the psalm; according to her paraphrase, which is based on works by Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, Isaiah Tishby, and Joseph Dan, “the mystical interpretation of verses 23–26 glosses the verbs ‘descend’ and ‘ascend’ in the psalm to address the dilemma faced by human souls inextricably mired in 63. See Gershom Scholem, “Merkaba Mysticism,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), 11:1386–89. 64. Ezekiel 1:4. 65. As Joseph Dan writes in Ha-sippur ha-h.asidi (Jerusalem: Keter, 1975), 187, “Bratslav hasidim saw in this journey, in every single chapter of it, a hidden mystical meaning.” 66. Shivh.ei ha-Ran, 9b in the 1815 edition (sec. 21 in editions after 1850). Waters reaching “the heart of the heavens” is an interesting transformation of the expected flames and smoke (from a ritual sacrifice) that reach the heavens. 67. Ibid. 68. Mendel Lefin, Sefer mase‘ot ha-yam (Zholkva: Gerson Letteres, 1818), 1a; and Mase‘ot ha-yam (Lemberg: D. H. Schrenzel, 1859), 3. 69. See, e.g., Avraham Ya‘ari’s anthologies: Mase‘ot ’erez. yisra’el (Tel Aviv: Ha-histadrut ha-Z.ionit, 1946), 229; and Iggerot ’erez. yisra’el (Ramat-Gan: Massada, 1971), 113, 228, 232.

19

Ken Frieden sin.”70 Sinkoff argues that maskilim rejected this interpretive tradition, as is indicated by a parodic passage by Perl, which she quotes from the Perl Archive: In my limited opinion, it seems that the interpretation of ‘they ascend to the Heavens, they go down again to the depths’ (Psalm 107:26) is that sometimes the tsadik descends to katnut [smallness]… in order to raise up the evil ones.71

This is Perl’s paraphrase of the mystical reading of Psalm 107, precisely the sort of hasidic view he attacks in Megale temirin. Sinkoff stresses the maskilic rejection of hasidic commentary: While the Ba‘al Shem Tov and his disciples used the psalm to encode the biblical text with the religious significance specific to hasidism and its leaders, Lefin cast it as an invitation for traditional Jews to gain a broader appreciation of the non-Jewish world, which he believed shared with them such fundamental beliefs as the concept of divine providence. He read the psalm literally, that is as a pashtan, using its lyrical biblical poetry to introduce his translations of two treacherous sea-journeys.72

In short, the hasidic tendency was to allegorize the psalm,73 while Lefin literalized its metaphor of sea travel in his Mase‘ot ha-yam. Sinkoff discusses an introduction that Lefin wrote to his Mase‘ot ha-yam, but that was not published: “In an introduction to Masaot hayam which remained in manuscript, Lefin informs his readers that he intended his translation to remind those who had fallen into dire straits, like the sailors of Campe’s tales, of God’s eternal vigilance.”74 This, however, is only part of the story. Even as Lefin emphasizes divine providence in his sea narratives, he also points to the importance of human ingenuity. As Sinkoff observes, one of Lefin’s key words is tah.bula, which refers to a strategy, stratagem, ruse, or tactic. Possibly the most striking element of Lefin’s travel narratives, translated from Campe, is the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the sailors who survive a shipwreck. Lefin expresses his distinctive ideological positions between the lines of his translated and adapted travel narratives. Sinkoff paraphrases a continuation of the pious ideology contained in his draft of the unpublished introduction: “He urged those who had been saved from danger to spread the story of their salvation as widely as possible.”75 But the beginning of Lefin’s unpublished “Translator’s 70. Sinkoff, “Strategy and Ruse,” 95. See also Nancy Sinkoff’s “Tradition and Transition: Mendel Lefin of Satanów and the Beginnings of the Jewish Enlightenment in Eastern Europe, 1749–1826” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1996), 156–69; cf. Cunz, Die Fahrt des Rabbi Nachman, 212–13. 71. Sinkoff, “Strategy and Ruse,” 96. 72. Ibid., 97. 73. Pertinent to this allegorical bent is R. Nahman’s interpretation of the verse, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you” (Isaiah 43:2), in Likutei Moharan, teaching 73 (Jerusalem: H.asidei Breslov, 1988), 89a. 74. Sinkoff, “Strategy and Ruse,” 90. 75. Ibid.

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Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives Introduction to Mase‘ot ha-yam,” not quoted by Sinkoff, points in another direction: ‫ ואל יתייאש אדם כשהחרב‬,‫לעולם אל ימתין אדם שתשתנה הטבע בשבילו ע”י נס מבורר‬ ….‫ אלא יעסוק בתחבולה ועבודה תמיד‬.‫מונחת על צווארו‬ A person should never expect that nature will change for him by means of a clear miracle, and a person should not despair when the sword hangs over his neck; instead he should prepare a plan [or tactic, tah.bola], pray, and work always.…76

Lefin uses the hitpael form in ’al yitya’esh, instead of the Yiddishized reflexive form leya’esh ‘az.mo that is found in R. Nathan’s writings. Apart from grammatical improvements of this kind, Lefin responded to hasidic texts on a broad scale, and in particular to the writings of R. Nathan. In contrast to typical maskilic shibuz., where biblical allusions and quotations predominate, sometimes a matrix of postbiblical literary relationships lies behind Lefin’s writing. The connection between his opening sentence and traditional commentaries brings out another dimension of the unpublished text. Lefin’s phrase “a person should not despair when the sword hangs over his neck [‫ ”]אל יתייאש אדם כשהחרב מונחת על צווארו‬echoes traditional commentaries.77 The basic prooftext is in the Babylonian Talmud: .‫אפילו חרב חדה מונחת על צוארו של אדם אל ימנע עצמו מן הרחמים‬ Even if a sharp sword hangs over a person’s neck, he should not deny himself [God’s] mercy.78

Quoting B. Berakhot 10a, Seforno writes, “Even if a sharp sword hangs over a person’s neck, he should not deny himself [God’s] mercy [‫אפ’ חרב חדה מונחת על‬ ‫]צוארו של אדם אל ימנע עצמו מן הרחמים‬.”79 Lefin’s use of ’al yityaesh instead of ’al yimn‘a ‘az.mo may be traced to R. Yona Gerondi’s commentary on Proverbs 14:32, in which he writes, “Even if a sword hangs over a person’s neck, he should not despair of [God’s] mercy [‫אפ’ חרב מונחת בצוארו של אדם אל יתיאש מן‬ ‫]הרחמים‬.”80 The most striking precursor of Lefin’s text, however, is a passage in 76. Joseph Perl Archive, Jewish National and University Library, folder 124, lines 1–2; underlining in the original. I thank Jonatan Meir and Avraham Weizal for their help in deciphering Lefin’s handwriting. A facsimile, a transcription, and a translation of the manuscript are contained in appendix II and appendix III of this article. 77. Judaica databases—such as the Bar-Ilan University Responsa Project and DBS Torah Treasures: The Computerized Torah Library—facilitate tracing intertextual connections of this kind. It is, however, always necessary to check the passages that have been found in more reliable print editions. 78. B. Berakhot 10a. 79. Commentary on Genesis 18:22; see H.umash mikra’ot gedolot, Bereishit (New York: Gross, 1983), 219. 80. Perush ‘al Mishlei le-rabbenu Yona Gerondi, ed. Avraham Löwenthal (Berlin: Poppelauer, 1910), 70.

21

Ken Frieden Rabbenu Bah.ye, which includes the two key phrases (and also refers to Psalm 107): ‫ אפילו חרב מונחת על צוארו של‬.…‫וצריך אתה לדעת כי כח התפילה גדול אפילו לשנות הטבע‬ .‫אדם אל ימנע עצמו מן הרחמים‬ And you must know that the power of prayer is so great that it can even change nature.… Even if a sword hangs over a person’s neck, he should not deny himself [God’s] mercy.81

Lefin directly contradicts one aspect of this line of commentary, writing that people should not expect to be able to change nature by means of prayer. Although he accepts the notion of divine providence, he rejects the supernatural powers that are sometimes associated with prayer. This belief in the power of petitionary prayer is an example of the antiscientific, mystical thinking that became common in hasidic circles, and that Lefin opposed. His unpublished introduction to Mase‘ot ha-yam therefore asserts that “a person should never expect nature to change for him by means of a clear miracle” and should rely on planning or tactics “when the sword hangs over his neck.”82 Although Lefin echoes a line of gemara and medieval commentaries, he transforms his sources to create new meaning.83 This rejection of hasidic belief in miracles was already present in Lefin’s early “Essai d’un plan de réforme” (1791–92), in which he attacks members of the “new sect” for their faith in miracles performed by their leaders.84 As stated earlier, the biblical psalms influenced early modern descriptions of sea travel. In “Seder ha-nesi‘a shelo le-’erez. yisra’el,” R. Nathan uses Psalm 107 to frame the description and subsiding of a storm. This passage follows his earlier storm description that was parodied by Perl: ‫ היה רוח סערה גדולה מאד מאד שקורין )אפרטינע גדולה מאד( והיתה הספינה‬۰ ‫ובלכתם על הים‬ ۰ ‫ ולא היה עוד בלב איש מהם להנצל מן המיתה‬۰ ’‫ יעלו שמים ירדו תהומות וכו‬۰ ‫בסכנה גדולה‬ 81. Commentary on Deuteronomy 11:13; see Rabbenu Bah.ye: Bi’ur ‘al ha-Torah, ed. Haim Dov Chavel (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-rav Kook, 1991), 3:314. 82. Mendel Lefin, “Translator’s Introduction to Mase‘ot ha-yam,” manuscript at the Joseph Perl Archive, Jewish National and University Library, folder 124. See appendix II and appendix III at the end of this article. 83. In Out of the Shtetl, Sinkoff briefly discusses Lefin’s quotations from “the classical sayings of the Rabbinic Sages.” She writes that his citations “not only gave Lefin’s work a traditional imprimatur, but also expressed his ardent belief that there was nothing incompatible between a rationalized, renewed Judaism and the universal values common to all men” (165). 84. Mendel Lefin, “Essai d’un plan de réforme ayant pour objet d’éclairer la nation juive en Pologne et de redresser par là ses moeurs,” in Materiały do dziejów sejmu czteroletniego, ed. Artur Eisenbach et al. (Warsaw: Instytut historii Polskiej akademii Nauk, 1969), 6:411, nos. 20–22. See the analysis by N. M. Gelber, “Mendel Lefin-Satanover ve-haz.a’otav le-tikun orah.-h.aim shel yehudei Polin bifnei ha-seym ha-gadol (1788–1792),” in The Abraham Weiss Jubilee Volume (New York: Abraham Weiss Jubilee Committee, 1964), 271–84, followed by a translation into Hebrew (287–301) and facsimiles from Hebrew and French memoranda (285–86, 302–305) connected to Lefin’s appearance before the Polish council that had been established to consider issues regarding the Jewish community.

22

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives ‫ והיתה לילה אחת כמו יוה”כ ממש שהכל בוכים ומתוודים ומבקשים‬۰ ’‫והיו צועקים כולם אל ה‬ ۰ ‫ ורבינו ז”ל הי’ יושב ודומם‬۰ ‫ ואמרו סליחות ושאר דברי תפילות ותחנונים‬۰ ‫כפרה על נפשם‬ ’‫ אך אשת הרב דק‬۰ ‫והתחילו כמה אנשים לומר לו מפני מה הוא שותק בעת צרה כזאת ולא השיב‬ ‫ מפני מה‬۰ ‫חאטין שהיתה מלומדת ובכתה וצעקה כל הלילה והתחילה היא ג”כ לומר לו כאלה‬ ‫ הלוואי הייתם שותקים גם אתם הי’ טוב‬۰ ‫ ואמר לה‬۰ ‫ וכמדומה שקילל אותה‬۰ ‫הוא דומם‬ ‫ ו פס ק ו‬۰ ’ ‫ ו כ ן ה י‬۰ ‫ י שת ו ק הי ם מע ל י כ ם ג” כ‬۰ ‫ א ם את ם ת ש ת ק ו‬۰ ‫ ו ב זא ת תב חנ ו‬۰ ‫לפ ני כם‬ ’.‫ יקם סערה לדממה ויחשו גליהם וישמחו וכ ו‬۰ ‫ ואזי מיד כשהאיר היום‬۰ ‫מלצעוק ושתקו‬ When they went onto the [Mediterranean] sea, there was a very great storm (which is called a very great firtina) and the ship was in great danger. They rose to the heavens and fell into the abyss. And not a person among them expected to be saved from death. And they all cried out to God. And one night was just like Yom Kippur, when everyone was weeping and confessing and begging forgiveness for their souls. And they said the Penitential Prayers and the rest of the prayers and supplications. And our Rebbe z”l was sitting and was silent. And some people began to ask him why he was silent in such a time of distress, and he didn’t reply. But the wife of the rabbi from the community of Hattin, who was educated and wept and cried out all night, also began to say things like this to him. Why was he silent? And it seems to me that he cursed her. And he said to her, If only all of you would also be silent, it would turn out well. And in this you shall be tested: if you will all be quiet, the sea will also be quiet before you. And that is what happened. They stopped crying out and became quiet. And then immediately when daylight came, He made the storm become silent and the waves became still, and they rejoiced.85

The scene of prayer and salvation appropriates Psalm 107, framing the dramatic scene by citing biblical verses.86 R. Nathan’s narrative has this feature in common with maskilic meliz.a, a characteristic that stands apart from the straightforward, Yiddishized style of his usual Hebrew narrative prose. What is the meaning of this incident for R. Nahman and R. Nathan? At odds with his fellow travelers’ expectations, R. Nahman does not cry out to God. Instead, he calls for silence. R. Nathan’s narrative asks us to believe that, in this instance, silence rather than outcry is the effective response. The climactic 85. Italics added to indicate two quotations from Psalms. From the appended section of Sippurei ma‘asiot, “Seder ha-nesi‘ah shelo le-’erez. yisra’el” (1815, new numbering, 6b), and Sefer Shivh.ei ha-Ran (Jerusalem: Meshekh ha-Nah.al, 1981), 30. Compare the descriptions of sea voyages in Sippurei ma‘asiot, tale 2 and tale 10; and see also Likutei Moharan, 12d. Lacking sufficient storm terminology in Hebrew beyond the words ruah. sa‘ara, R. Nathan and R. Nahman have recourse to the word firtina. In modern Turkish, this word means “storm, gale, tempest, hurricane”; it could be etymologically related to the Greek word φουρτούνα, meaning “storm, rough sea.” In one of R. Nahman’s tales, the Hebrew text uses a rare meaning of a Yiddish word when a storm is called an umpit (Sippurei ma‘asiot, 1815, 48a). See Groyser verterbukh fun der Yiddisher shprakh, ed. Yudl Mark (New York and Jerusalem: Yiddish Dictionary Committee, 1971), 3:1263, definition 6. 86. As Martin Cunz points out, R. Nahman’s words—as conveyed in R. Nathan’s Hebrew rendering—also draws phrases from Gen. 42:15 (“And in this you shall be tested [‫ )”]ובזאת תבחנו‬and Jonah 1:12 (“the sea will be quiet before you [‫)”]וישתק הים מעליכם‬. See Cunz, Die Fahrt des Rabbi Nachman, 310.

23

Ken Frieden phrase “He made the storm become silent” refers to God in Psalm 107. In this passage, however, there is a hint that the powerful “he” who calmed the storm was R. Nahman. Crying out to God is not effective; only the silence that R. Nahman proposes leads to a diminution of the storm. Also pertinent to Levin’s antimystical message is the sea narrative tradition reflected in B. Bava’ Batra’ 73b and R. Nahman’s commentary near the beginning of Likutei Moharan. This talmudic passage was essential to R. Nahman’s mystical thinking in that it presents Raba Bar bar Hana as a visionary traveler.87 Following a mishnaic passage regarding the sale of ships, the Gemara describes visions of sea creatures, which R. Nahman interprets allegorically. Along with the mystical reading of Psalm 107, then, Lefin also counters R. Nahman’s interpretation of the Raba Bar bar Hana passages. III. H EBREW

IN

T RANSLATION

FROM

Y IDDISH

AND

G ERMAN

After Lefin published his Yiddish translation of Proverbs in 1814,88 a scandal emerged in Galicia’s maskilic circles. It was learned that Tuvia Feder had written and planned to publish a virulent attack on Lefin’s book in a satire called Kol mehaz.ez.im. According to Zalman Reyzn, Feder’s satire was suppressed by Lefin’s friends in Brody and not published until 1853, but in its wake, Lefin “did not have the courage to go further with his undertaking of a complete, new Yiddish translation of the Tanakh.”89 This debacle—together with R. Nathan’s publication of Shivh.ei ha-Ran at the end of Sippurei ma‘asiot—may help to explain why Lefin suddenly turned to translating secular travel narratives into Hebrew in about 1815. He continued translating into Yiddish—assuming that the attribution of ’Onia so‘ara to Lefin is correct—but published no further translations from the Hebrew Bible.90 Moreover, his masterpiece in narrative translation is Mase‘ot ha-yam (1818), his Hebrew rendering of one of the accounts from Campe’s twelve-volume Sammlung interessanter und durchgängig zweckmäßig abgefaßter Reisebeschreibungen für die Jugend (1786–93; hereafter referred to as Reisebeschreibungen.) 87. Cf. Hillel Zeitlin, ’Oro shel Mashiah. be-torat ha-Breslavi, in Rabbi Nah.man mi-Breslav: z.a‘ar ha-‘olam ve-kisufei Mashiah.,” ed. Jonatan Meir (Jerusalem: Orna Hass, 2006), 76–77 n. See also Cunz, Die Fahrt des Rabbi Nachman, 214. 88. Sefer Mishlei Shlomo (Tarnopol, 1814). 89. See Zalman Reyzn, Fun Mendelssohn biz Mendele (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1923), 154–56. Reyzn’s discussion includes both an appreciation of Lefin’s Bible translations into Yiddish (157–59) and excerpts from Feder’s satire (152–53). Cf. Avraham-Ber Gottlober, Zikaronot ve-masa‘;ot, ed. Reuven Goldberg (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1976), 1:250–51, 2:10–11, 204. 90. The first publication of ’Onia so‘ara (Zholkva?: n.p., 1815?) was bilingual, and there seems also to have been a Yiddish-only edition (no extant copy is known). Lefin’s next Bible translation was not published posthumously until half a century later: Menahem Mendel Lefin, Sefer Kohelet (Odessa: Belinson, 1873). For a thorough discussion of Lefin’s art of translation from Hebrew to Yiddish, see Roland Gruschka, Übersetzungswissenschaftliche Aspekte von Mendel Lefin Satanowers Bibelübersetzungen (Hamburg: Buske, 2006). An earlier study by Simha Katz, “Tirgumei Tanakh mi’et Menah.em Mendel mi-Satanov,” including fragments from Lefin’s incomplete translations from Lamentations, Psalms, and Job, was published in Kiryat sefer 16 (1939–40): 114–33.

24

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives From a literary perspective, it is worthwhile to examine the stylistic differences between R. Nathan’s Hebrew narratives and Lefin’s translated Hebrew versions. To do this, we need to acknowledge that most of R. Nathan’s Hebrew was also translated, implicitly or explicitly, from Yiddish. As a result, the vocabulary, grammar, and idiomatic expressions in his Hebrew are heavily Yiddishized. In his autobiographical Yemei Moharnat, R. Nathan describes his method of recording R. Nahman’s teachings in 1803: And this was the manner of my writing before him. The Teaching [torah] that he spoke at a certain time, such as on the Shabbat before Hanukkah, he would afterward repeat when I was writing it down, saying it to me sentence by sentence. That is, he would speak a few phrases to me in Yiddish [leshon Ashkenaz], and I sat before him and wrote the things in Hebrew [leshon ha-kodesh] until I had finished writing the entire Teaching. And usually I read it back to him after I finished writing it.91

A basic difference between Lefin’s and R. Nathan’s Hebrew narratives, then, is that Lefin translated from (written) German, whereas R. Nathan translated from (oral) Yiddish. In the early nineteenth century, modern literary models were available to maskilim for describing sea travel; eighteenth-century British and German travel literature provided an essential source. As Zohar Shavit demonstrates, early Hebrew children’s literature—including stories of sea travel—was heavily influenced by German-language children’s literature. She also notes that “the writer most translated into Hebrew at the time was Heinrich Joachim [sic] Campe, who was regarded by Jewish writers as the most important German writer for children of the Enlightenment.”92 Lefin participated in this trend when he published his accounts of sea journeys that were based on Campe’s travel descriptions. This is an example of innovation by translation. As part of the maskilic tendency to emulate Prussian sources, Lefin was not alone in drawing from German. Israel Bartal writes, for example, that Mordechai Aaron Günzburg “saw the influence of German as a major factor in the expansion of Hebrew.”93 In one metaphorical passage, Günzburg describes the difference between him and his father: “I conceive German ideas and clothe them in the purity of the Holy Tongue, and he gives birth to his ideas in the lap of that language.”94 Lefin’s translations

91. Sefer Yemei Moharnat (1876), pt. 1 (New York: Rozenfeld, 1970), 12. 92. Shavit, “From Friedländer’s Lesebuch to the Jewish Campe,” 405–406; see also Uriel Ofek, Sifrut-yeledim ha-‘ivrit—ha-hath.alot (Tel Aviv: Porter Institute, 1979), esp. 87–92; cf. Wolpe, “The Sea Voyage Narrative,” 19–23. 93. See Bartal, “Mordechai Aaron Günzburg,” 136. 94. Cited by Bartal, ibid., 132. I have modified the translation slightly from Mordechai Aaron Günzburg, Aviezer (Vilna, 1863), 66. See also Marcus Moseley’s discussion of Günzburg in chap. 6 of Being for Myself Alone.

25

Ken Frieden of books by Campe inspired him to develop a more varied Hebrew prose style: sophisticated yet unpretentious, based on mishnaic Hebrew, but also incorporating Yiddish or German words where necessary. His short and direct sentences often simplify the German syntax. Inspired by Campe, Lefin wrote some of the most successful early narratives in modern Hebrew. Israel Zinberg astutely argues that “Lefin very successfully employed the rich treasures of the clear, pithy mishnaic Hebrew, and thereby his writing became fresh and vivid.”95 Joseph Klausner and other critics also regarded Lefin as an important Hebrew stylist who offered an alternative to maskilic meliz.a.96 Nevertheless, his narrative writings are unknown to most readers. Lefin adapted Mase‘ot ha-yam (1818) from Campe’s series, Reisebeschreibungen, Part 9.97 Campe’s adaptation was, in turn, based on a British travel report by George Keate, An Account of the Pelew Islands in the Western Part of the Pacific Ocean, and the Shipwreck of the Antelope, East-India Packet, There.98 Campe’s narrative contains a message of divine providence, at the same time that it praises the virtues of hard work, ingenuity, and perseverance. Even more importantly, perhaps, Campe provides concrete descriptions of sea travel and introduces the reader to an unspoiled, distant tribe. By 1779–80, Campe had written an adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, called Robinson der Jüngere, that was very popular and was translated into many languages, including Hebrew.99 Another frequently translated work by Campe was Die Entdeckung von Amerika (1782).100 Campe’s twelve-volume series of Reisebeschreibungen is openly didactic and aims to teach German youth while attracting their attention with adventure stories. His message is not original, and is linked to the social and educational ideals of the Philanthropist movement. 95. See Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 6 (pt. 7) of The German-Polish Cultural Center, trans. and ed. Bernard Martin (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1975), 278. 96. Joseph Klausner, Historia shel ha-sifrut ha-h.adasha (Jerusalem: Ah.iasaf, 1952), vol. 1, chap. 4 on Lefin, 224–53; and Klausner’s essay “Meh.karim be-toldot ha-sifrut ha-‘Ivrit ha-h.adasha: le-hishtalsheluto shel signon-ha-Mishna be-sifrut ha-h.adasha,” Kitvei ha-Universita ha-‘Ivrit be-Yerushalaim: Mada‘ei ha-Yahadut,” vol. 1 of Yedi‘ot ha-makhon le-mada‘ei ha-Yahadut (Jerusalem: Ha-madpis, 1926), 163–78. For another appreciation of Lefin’s Hebrew contribution, see Fishl Lachover, Toldot ha-sifrut ha-‘Ivrit ha-h.adasha (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1936), 87–91. Jeremy Dauber also mentions the mishnaic aspect of Lefin’s style in Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 217. 97. J. H. Campe, Sammlung interessanter und durchgängig zweckmäßig abgefaßter Reisebeschreibungen für die Jugend, pt. 9 (Braunschweig: Schulbuchhandlung, 1791). 98. George Keate, An Account of the Pelew Islands in the Western Part of the Pacific Ocean, and the Shipwreck of the Antelope, East-India Packet, There (London, 1788). 99. See Shavit, “Literary Interference,” 41–61. One early adaptation she does not mention is Historie fun den zeefahrer Robinzohn (Frankfurt d-Oder: Elsner, 1813), written in German with Hebrew characters. 100. See Shavit, “Literary Interference”; and Bartal, “Mordechai Aaron Günzburg,” 142. Shavit refers to Hebrew translations by Moshe Mendelssohn-Frankfurt (1807), Hermann Bernard (Hirsch Baer Hurwitz. 1810; no extant copy known; see n. 15 herein), Mordechai Aharon Günzburg (1823), and David Zamosc (1824).

26

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives Because Campe’s work was translated into Hebrew as early as in 1807, Lefin clearly was not innovative in his choice of author to translate.101 It is also pertinent that Campe and Moses Mendelssohn shared a friendship, as did Mendelssohn and Lefin. Campe directly influenced the Haskalah; as Bartal shows, his works allowed authors such as Günzburg “to convey to his readers geographical and historical information in a moderate maskilic vein. The German author, moreover, was an intimate of Moses Mendelssohn, and in the maskilic consciousness was stamped as a proponent of the universal brotherhood of the enlightened intellectuals of all nations.”102 In the preface to volume 9 of the Reisebeschreibungen (1791), Campe explains his decision not to continue publication of his Paris Diary from volume 8. He comments that the public has been flooded with writings about France in the previous two years and that he does not want to contribute any more to this excess. He deliberately turns away from describing revolutionary developments in Paris, choosing instead to tell the story of a sea adventure that contains a conservative message. The maritime equivalent of revolution was mutiny, but Campe avoids that topic; instead, he shows a captain and crew who survive adversity by means of reason, ingenuity, and teamwork. He underplays the element of insubordination (and completely excludes any mention of desire or sexuality). Accounts of sea voyages had been a popular genre for a century,103 and the lines between nonfiction and fiction were frequently blurred.104 Indeed, with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), sea adventure found a potent fictional expression. But 1790 was a red-letter date for writing about maritime events, for in this year “Lieutenant William Bligh miraculously returned to London and published A Narrative of the Mutiny on HMS Bounty.”105 This occurred soon after Campe’s English source was published in 1788. In his introduction to volume 9 of the Reisebeschreibungen, Campe further explains how he understands the message of Captain Wilson’s travel narrative, as rendered by Keate.106 The encounter with Pacific Islanders in Palau—about 500 miles southeast of the Philippines—becomes the basis for a reflection on the “noble savage.” As one critic notes, “Keate’s Account is the most thoroughgoing and elaborate presentation of the noble savage in the literature of the South

101. See Shavit, “Literary Interference,” 42ff. She writes that “the close relations between the Jewish Haskalah and German Enlightenment movements made German children’s literature during the Enlightenment an ideal, if not the most desirable, model for imitation” (44–45). 102. Bartal, “Mordechai Aaron Günzburg,” 143. 103. Of the many works on this subject, see, e.g.: Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983). 104. See Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). 105. Ibid., 172. 106. Captain Henry Wilson collaborated with George Keate (1729–97), who wrote the story of the Antelope in 1788. See Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 96–99.

27

Ken Frieden Seas.”107 But Campe takes the British source one step further: A comparison to the original volume shows that he expanded the description of the people of Palau as “noble savages.” In his introduction, for instance, Campe writes that the natives’ behavior “appears to justify completely our highest notions of the original goodness of human nature.”108 Moreover, it teaches that education is not necessarily at odds with virtuous simplicity. Campe states explicitly that this example supports the social goal of educating the lower classes.109 One of Lefin’s stated motives for translating Mase‘ot ha-yam was to prepare people to endure adversity without losing faith. In the unpublished manuscript of his introduction, he writes, “Whoever does not educate himself to gird up his loins in the days of his tranquility, does not have in him the strength to withstand a trial on a bad day.”110 In the midst of his many biblical and talmudic quotations, Lefin also inserts a universalistic message drawn from the commentary Eliahu Raba: “Whether gentile or Jew, whether slave or servant, the holy spirit rests on him in accordance with his deeds [‫]בין עבד ובין שפחה רה”ק שורה עליו לפי מעשיו‬.”111 By recounting the exemplary conduct of ordinary British sailors who survived shipwreck, Lefin prepares his readers for setbacks, emphasizing the virtues of “perseverance and wisdom.”112 For unknown reasons, Lefin’s introduction was not published. His published translation from Campe thus begins without any introduction: In the year 1783 in the month of Sivan, Captain Wilson—of the boat Antelope, loaded with about 600,000 pounds, and with a crew of about fifty men, including sixteen from the people of China—came to the city of Macao, and after three weeks they were ordered to return from there to his country, the land of England, by means of the South Sea. Immediately, from the start, this journey appeared difficult to them, subject to very dangerous hardships. Day by day a storm wind was awakened, with thunder and lightning and a great amount of rain, until the waves of the sea rose up with great fury and the ship was on the verge of breaking. The rainwater entered from above and the seawater from below until everything was wet, and the boat quaked and stormed until all of the animals and other living things around it were beaten and died.113 107. Ibid., 99. 108. Campe, Reisebeschreibungen, pt. 9, p. 1; all translations are my own. 109. Ibid., 2. 110. Joseph Perl Archive, Jewish National and University Library, folder 124, lines 30–31. 111. Ibid., lines 27–28. Cf. Eliahu ben Shlomo Zalman, Eliahu Raba (Prague: Sommer, 1812), chap. 10. After quoting Lefin’s phrase in “The Sea Voyage Narrative,” Rebecca Wolpe comments, “It is clear that Lefin sought to combine traditional Jewish attitudes and the praise of G-d with Enlightenment concepts of morality and universalism” (74). 112. Mendel Lefin, “Translator’s Introduction to Mase‘ot ha-yam,” manuscript at the Joseph Perl Archive, Jewish National and University Library, folder 124, line 36. See appendix II and appendix III at the end of this article. 113. Mendel Lefin, Sefer mase‘ot ha-yam (Zholkva: Gerson Letteres, 1818), 1a. This work contains Lefin’s adaptations of travel narratives by Captains Wilson and Hemskirk. There are few substantive differences between the original 1818 edition and the reprint Mase‘ot ha-yam (Lemberg: D. H. Schrenzel, 1859); quotations are cited from the first edition by page and side a or b. Unfortunately,

28

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives Translating from German, Lefin turns away from the allegorized and biblicized sea narratives and instead describes an actual sea voyage with a real shipwreck: .‫…בתוך שעה מועטת התקדרו השמים בעבים חשוכים ונתעוררה מהומה רבה של גשמים רעמים‬ …!‫ משברי גלים! משברי גלים‬:‫וברקים… פתאום נשמעה צעקת הצופה בראש התורן לאמר‬ . ‫ובאותו רגע ממש נדחפה הספינה בכח גדול אל הסלע‬ .‫רעד ובהלה אחזה כל העם וגם רב החובל אשר נרדם בירכתי הספינ ה‬ …in a short time the skies were covered over by dark clouds and there arose a great tumult of rains, thunder, and lightning.… Suddenly there was heard a shout from the scout at the top of the mast, saying: Breakwater! Breakwater!… and at exactly the same moment the boat thrust into the rocks with great force. Trembling and fear gripped all of the people and also the Captain, who had fallen asleep in the depths of the ship.114

This vivid description is a captivating narrative on its own terms, and it is not merely intended to convey a message or a mystical allegory. In contrast, as we have seen, R. Nathan’s account of a storm at sea culminates in R. Nahman’s suggestion that leads to the calming of the storm. In his introduction to Shivh.ei ha-Ran, R. Nathan writes that his purpose is not to tell of miraculous events but to teach musar. The events are significant for their exemplary character and for their portrayal of R. Nahman’s spiritual journey. Lefin’s graphic Hebrew description, in contrast, is a continuation of the maskilic emphasis on the importance of learning about nature and geography.115 This direction in his writing is evident in some of his earliest Hebrew writing, which was published in Ha-me’asef.116 Prominent in Lefin’s translation is the element of divine providence. While Campe admires members of the ship’s crew for their ingenuity and perseverance, he also sees God’s supporting hand in their survival. For this reason, it is interesting to look more closely at Campe’s translation of Captain Wilson’s speech to his crew, in which the captain advises them that “they could not count on any means of salvation, other than those which they find in themselves.”117 This statement of selfreliance seems to have been a bit too extreme for Lefin, who added, “Apart from salvation from above [milvad ha-teshu‘ah mi-marom], you cannot count on

pages 36b–52a are missing from the only known extant copy of the 1818 edition, which is in the collection of the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. While the account of Captain Hemskirk’s expedition is included, the account of Captain Wilson’s journey is not included in the 1823 and 1825 editions of Onia so‘ara. 114. Lefin, Sefer mase‘ot ha-yam, 1a. 115. In “Strategy and Ruse,” Sinkoff writes: “Throughout the nineteenth century, east European maskilim answered Naphtali Herz Wessely’s clarion call in Divrei shalom ve’emet (1782) that ‘the forms of the lands and the oceans (geography)’ should be an obligatory element of the secular curriculum” (89). 116. See “Mikhtavim shonim,” Ha-me’asef 5 (1789): 136–44. 117. Campe, Reisebeschreibungen, pt. 9, p. 13.

29

Ken Frieden any help except that which is in your own hearts and in the exertions of your hands.”118 Because of the dominant, universalist ideology of the Enlightenment, the particularity of separate religions never becomes an issue. In one passage, Campe describes Christian prayer: In the evening of this fortunately passed day, the Captain called the entire crew into the largest tent, in order to express the thanks of their moved hearts—in a collective prayer to the Creator of their existence, who had kept them alive until then. Never was there a more heartfelt and intimate prayer to God. At the end of this pious act it was established that in the future, every Sunday evening, it would be repeated.119

This is Lefin’s rendering: ‫ויהי בערב אסף רב החובל את כל אנשיו בגדול שבאוהלים כדי להתפלל תפלה קצרה להודות‬ ‫ קבלו‬,‫ ולאחר שגמרו אותה‬,‫ ולבקש חסדו על העתיד‬,‫להשגחה העליונה אשר עזרתם עד כה‬ .‫ ומהיום ההוא נתקשרו כולם כאיש אחד‬,‫עליהן להוועץ כן בכל יום ראשון מימי השבוע‬ And in the evening the Captain gathered all of the people in the largest of the tents, in order to pray a short prayer giving thanks to Providence from Above, which had helped them until then, and to beg for His mercy in the future; after they finished it, they agreed to commune thus every Sunday, and from that day they were bound together as one person.120

Lefin emphasizes how the social effect of prayer strengthens the bond among members of the crew. All religious sentiments are merged; the writer does not note denominational differences. In contrast, R. Nathan’s accounts are limited almost entirely to Jews. Lefin includes Campe’s extensive passages about the natives’ customs and religion,121 although he strengthens the flow of the narrative by moving these parts to the end of the book.122 118. Lefin, Mase‘ot ha-yam, p. 1b. Writing for a readership not limited to youth, Lefin excises Campe’s patronizing addresses to his young audience. For example, Lefin omits another long digression by Campe on Providence (die Vorsehung; Campe, Reisebeschreibungen, pt. 9, pp. 29–30). According to Campe, it was no coincidence that Captain Wilson brought aboard a Malaysian servant; nor was it an accident that, about a year earlier, another Malaysian had arrived at the island as the result of a different shipwreck. By these means, God enabled the British to communicate with the islanders with the help of interpreters. Campe comments, “Thus Providence guides the events of the world and the fate of people through its invisible hand, so that in the end everything leads to some intended, beneficial goal.… It is well for us that, in our own blindness toward what the future will bring, our fate stands under such a wise and well-meaning direction” (30). Although he does repeatedly affirm the role of providence, Lefin omits this passage. 119. Campe, Reisebeschreibungen, pt. 9, p. 81. 120. Lefin, Mase‘ot ha-yam, chap. 5, p. 11b. 121. When the British are preparing to leave, one of the sailors decides that he wants to remain on the island. Captain Wilson gives him advice before they depart, including this sentence: “In particular he recommended to him not to give up his religious practices, and also to celebrate a Sabbath [Sabbat] or a Sunday” (Campe, Reisebeschreibungen, pt. 9, p. 222). Lefin omits this sentence (Mase‘ot ha-yam, chap. 15, p. 31b). 122. As noted by Rebecca Wolpe in “The Sea Voyage Narrative,” 75–76.

30

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives From the standpoint of literary history, Lefin’s most significant contribution might be his efforts to convey dialogue. For example, when the ship is endangered early in Campe’s Reisebeschreibung of Wilhelm Isbrand Bonteku’s merkwürdige Abentheuer auf einer Reise aus Holland nach Ostindien, the sailors cry out simply, “Wir sinken! Wir sinken!”123 But in ’Onia so‘ara, Lefin expands Campe’s version, imagining the sailors in extremity saying, .‫ נטבענו‬,‫ נטבענו‬,‫הן גווענו אבדנו כולנו אבדנו‬ “Behold, we’re finished, we’re lost, all of us lost, we’re sunk, we’re sunk.”124

Through repetition, Lefin suggests a chorus of voices and the pathos of trying to come to terms with imminent death. At the same time, he quotes the first part of this phrase from the complaint of the Israelites in the desert: “Behold, we’re finished, we’re lost, all of us lost [‫]הן גוענו אבדנו כלנו אבדנו‬.”125 He thus succeeds in using a biblical phrase yet making it sound modern.126 IV. G OD

IN

N ATURE ?

Near the end of R. Nahman’s extraordinary tale 6, “Of the Humble King,” the hidden king disappears while being praised because of his humility. In R. Nahman’s tales, kings often appear to represent God, but the vanishing act of tale 6 is unique. To explain how this is effected, the narrator in R. Nahman’s story alludes to a talmudic passage about God, saying that “in the place of His greatness, there is His humility [‫]במקום גדולתו שם ענוותנותו‬.”127 As Zvi Mark notes, this phrase derives from the passage in B. Megillah 31a, “In every place where you find the might of the Holy One, blessed be He, there you find His humility [‫]בכל מקום שאתה מוצא גבורתו של הקב”ה שם אתה מוצא ענוותנותו‬.” Decades earlier, in an introductory passage prefacing his accounts of nature in Ha-me’asef, Lefin also quoted this passage from tractate B. Megillah (but without mentioning its talmudic source). Lefin takes the allusion in a very different direction: ‫וכן מבואר בחכמת הטבע שהטביע השם יתעלה בכוחות כל מעשי בראשית • )א( שהיא‬ ‫ שם חכמתו‬,‫ שם אתה מוצא גדולתו במקום ענוותנותו‬:‫כאיספקלריא מאירה להראות שלימותו‬ 123. J. H. Campe, Sammlung interessanter und durchgängig zweckmäßig abgefaßter Reisebeschreibungen für die Jugend, pt. 5 (Braunschweig: Schulbuchhandlung, 1788), 13. The first narrative, “Wilhelm Isbrand Bonteku’s merkwürdige Abentheuer auf einer Reise aus Holland nach Ostindien,” is found on pp. 12–58. 124. ‘Onia so‘ara (Vilna: Menahem Mann, 1823), 2. The title page is missing from the only extant copy of the bilingual edition; it is sometimes cited as having been published in Zholkva in 1815, but the date is not known. 125. Numbers 17:27. 126. Lefin was not the first Hebrew-language travel writer to incorporate this phrase in the description of a storm at sea. A precursor was Simha ben Yehoshua of Założce. See Avraham Ya’ari, Mase‘ot ’erez. yisra’el (Tel Aviv: Ha-Histadrut ha-Z.ionit, 1946), 395. 127. For an excellent discussion of this passage and tale, see Zvi Mark, Mistika ve-shiga‘on be-yez.irat R. Nah.man mi-Breslav (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 2003), 359f.

31

Ken Frieden ‫ שתכלית‬,‫ )ב( ומכאן אמרו‬:‫ שם חמלתו וחנינותו לברואיו • וכו’ וכו’ אין קץ‬,‫ושם שולטונותו‬ :‫כוונת הבריאה שני דברים • לגלות שלימותו; ולהטיב לברואים‬ And thus it is explained in natural science that God, may He be exalted, formed all of Creation with his power • (A) That it is like a shining mirror to reveal His perfection: There you find His greatness [gedulato] in the place of His humility; where His wisdom and His dominion are, there are His mercy and compassion toward His creatures • And so on, and so on, without end. (B) And from this it has been said that there are two purposes in the intention of the Creation • To reveal His perfection; and to perfect His creations.128

Lefin anticipates R. Nahman’s use of the talmudic quotation when he substitutes the reference to God’s “greatness” (gedulato) for the original “might” (gevurato).129 Yet Lefin and R. Nahman interpret this passage in radically different ways. The notion of a shining mirror, in which nature reflects God, is rejected by R. Nahman in “Of the Humble King.” Instead of a homology or resemblance between God and the world, in R. Nahman’s allegory, there is a break or discontinuity because the truthful king is surrounded by a kingdom of lies. In many passages, R. Nahman and R. Nathan flatly reject the God-in-nature concept. Whereas R. Nahman represents the material world as degraded and falling short of imitatio Dei, Lefin expresses his sense of the perfection of nature. For this reason, in one of his early articles, he chose to describe the astonishing orderliness of a beehive.130 Thirty years later, his translated account from Campe described Pacific Islanders in a kind of natural state, a state that conforms to the notion of the “noble savage” associated with Rousseau. For R. Nahman and R. Nathan, the opposite of simple faith was philosophy or sophisticated inquiry (h.akirot or, in the Ashkenazic pronunciation, h.akires). Feiner gives many examples from R. Nathan’s writings—including Makhni‘a zeidim and Kin’at H’ z.eva’ot, two anonymously published works that have not been absolutely identified as his—to illustrate this.131 According to Feiner, in Likutei halakhot R. Nathan “expresses total scorn for the natural sciences.”132 Feiner points out that maskilim such as Shimon Bloch and Perl “recommended the study of the

128. Mendel Lefin, “Mikhtavim shonim,” Ha-me’asef 5 (1789): 83. Reprinted verbatim in Lefin’s Mod‘a le-vina (Berlin: H.evrat H.inukh Ne‘arim, 1789), “’Igeret ha-h.okhma,” sec. 15, 2b. Original punctuation retained, in which the colon (:) is often used to end a paragraph and the bullet (•) is often used for a period. Hebrew printers employed by both maskilic authors and hasidic authors commonly used the bullet where European languages used periods. 129. Lefin, R. Nahman, and R. Nathan could have received the modified version of this phrase from many sources, such as Rabbenu Bah.ye (commentary on Deuteronomy 10:18), or from the traditional Ashkenazic Moz.ei Shabbat prayers, as Zvi Mark pointed out to me. 130. Mendel Lefin, “Mikhtavim shonim,” Ha-me’asef 5 (1789): 136–38. 131. In the second appendix to his H.asidut Breslav, Mendel Piekarz compares similar passages in works by R. Nathan and argues that he did write Kin’at H’ z.eva’ot. 132. Feiner, “Be-emunah bilvad!” 107; see also Ron Margolin’s thesis on Likutei halakhot (“Ha-’emunah ve-ha-kfirah be-torata shel h.asidut Breslov”) and Hillel Levine’s dissertation (“Menahem Mendel Lefin”).

32

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives sciences in general, and of the natural sciences in particular.”133 In Z.ir ne’eman, a supplement to his Luah. ha-shana of 1814–15, Perl alludes to Psalm 19: The Creator is exalted above our vision and our other senses, because He is holy and not visible to all living things, and so the Heavens and the Earth are full of his deeds, and they tell his honor and greatness.134

Feiner adds that, for Perl, “science is therefore a first tool in the ascent to recognize the hidden God, distant unto Himself.” In rejecting the natural sciences, R. Nathan seems to have responded directly to Perl in referring to “their calendars [luh.ot shelahem], which they put together in their schools.”135 R. Nathan also polemicized against Romanelli, the author of the travel narrative Mas’a be-‘arav, who defended the sciences and philosophy. In one of his published letters to his friend Shmuel Weinberg, R. Nathan discusses R. Nahman’s views, writing, “His intention was not, God forbid, to know the natural world in accordance with the wisdom of the philosophers [meh.akrim] like Aristotle and Plato, may their names be blotted out.”136 Some critics had mocked a passage on da‘at in Sefer ha-midot (Sefer ha-alef beit, part 2), and R. Nathan sets the record straight: “His only intention was to know the secret of nature, whence comes its root in the letters of the Torah and in their combinations.”137 R. Nathan penned vivid accounts of R. Nahman’s and of his own journey to ’erez. yisra’el. But R. Nathan never described nature for its own sake, an undertaking that he might have seen as a step in the direction of idol worship. R. Nahman’s travels were worth telling, in R. Nathan’s worldview, because of their deeper significance. For example, R. Nahman emphasized that before he could “ascend” and reach the Holy Land, he had to experience a descent into smallness (katnut); as part of this process, he exposed himself to humiliation and mockery during his stay in Istanbul.138 In essence, along with all of the concrete scenes of travel, Shivh.ei ha-Ran remains a hagiography.

133. Feiner, “Be-emunah bilvad!” 107. 134. Cited by Feiner, ibid. 135. Ibid., 108. Perl created the Israelitische Freischule under the influence of the Jüdische Freischule in Berlin. His admiration for the Berlin Haskalah was so great that, in his fiction, he sometimes refers to his home town Tarnopol as “Berlain.” Sinkoff discusses Perl’s activities, including his creation of the Israelite Free School in Tarnopol—the first modern Jewish school in Galicia—in her book Out of the Shtetl, 225–37. According to some scholars, Lefin was more critical than Perl of the Berlin Haskalah and Ha-me’asef; nevertheless, he did publish in that journal and at the H.inukh Ne’arim Press in 1789. 136. Sefer ‘alim le-trufa: mikhtevei Moharnat (New York: H.asidei Breslov, 1976), 176, letter of Wednesday, the 25th day of the counting the Omer (April 27, 1836). The manuscript version (11b) shows no significant passages that were excised from this letter. 137. Ibid. 138. Cf. Zvi Mark, “‘Al maz.avei katnut ve-gadlut be-haguto shel R. Nah.man mi-Breslav,” Da‘at (Winter 2001): 45–80.

33

Ken Frieden V. C ONCLUSION Lefin’s innovation or advance beyond hasidic Hebrew writing was not just that he literalized where they allegorized. He transcended the emphasis of the Berlin Haskalah on “pure” biblical Hebrew and provided a new interpretation of what “pure” Hebrew could be. The title pages of his books announced that they were written “in our pure and beautiful Holy Tongue [lashonenu ha-kadosha ha-z.ah.a ve-yafefia],”139 “in a simple and clean mishnaic language [lashon ha-Mishna ha-kala ve-ha-nekia],”140 or “in a pure and simple language [be-lashon z.ah. ve kal].”141 Lefin was able to write a clear narrative Hebrew, based heavily on mishnaic Hebrew but also including biblical and postbiblical allusions. While Lefin was not an original thinker or author of Hebrew fiction, he was an original Hebrew writer.142 He also showed that maskilim could match and outdo hasidim in the realm of Hebrew narrative. Hasidic narratives focused on spiritual events, ascent, and pilgrimage. In contrast, Lefin’s translated narratives emphasized human ingenuity and the wider world, including an appreciation of distant cultures. Expanding far beyond a worldview that places Jews and Zion at its center, Lefin published sea narratives that broaden horizons, and he adapted German travel books to support his ideals. In place of narratives that offer hasidic praises of the Rebbe, or that describe Jewish pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Lefin praises unpretentious sea travelers who work together to overcome adversity. R. Nathan’s disinterest in landscapes and local populations is countered by Lefin’s colorful descriptions of distant places and people. Translation played a central role in the reinvention of Hebrew as a modern literary language. R. Nathan developed something like oral-style Hebrew by emulating Yiddish; Lefin also worked from a living language, German, at the same time raising the level of grammar and cultural sophistication. At odds with the ethnocentric narratives of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Lefin injected universalistic tales of adventure, adversity, and survival.143 In connection with R. Nathan’s and Lefin’s Hebrew narratives, I conclude that there was an indirect dialogue and debate between hasidic and maskilic authors such as R. Nathan and Lefin; their narratives of sea travel represent an important genre in the history of Hebrew literature, both stylistically and in their contents. The contributions of R. Nathan and Lefin to the history of modern

139. ‘Onia so‘ara (Vilna: Menahem Mann, 1823). 140. More nevukhim, pt. 1, trans. Mendel Lefin (Zholkva: Saul Meyerhoffer, 1829); the same publisher printed R. Nathan’s Likutei halakhot in 1848! 141. Mase‘ot ha-yam (Lemberg: Schrenzel, 1859). The title page of the 1818 edition does not include this line, however, which suggests that it was added by the publisher. 142. Cf. N. M. Gelber’s essay on “Mendel Satanower,” in Aus zwei Jahrhunderten: Beiträge zur neueren Geschichte der Juden (Vienna: Löwit, 1924), 49. 143. In “The Sea Voyage Narrative,” Rebecca Wolpe refers to Lefin’s “somewhat universalist attitude.” She cites his quotation in his unpublished introduction to Mase‘ot ha-yam, “whether slave or servant, the holy spirit rests on him in accordance with his deeds [‫בין עבד ובין שפחה רוח ה’ שורה עליו לפי‬ ‫]מעשיו‬.” She then comments, “It is clear that Lefin sought to combine traditional Jewish attitudes and the praise of G-d with Enlightenment concepts of morality and universalism” (74).

34

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives Hebrew narrative are, in part, the result of their translations from Yiddish and German; working in translation from living languages, both R. Nathan and Lefin succeeded in writing a simpler and more readable Hebrew, which calqued contemporary vernaculars; one of the lasting accomplishments of R. Nathan and Lefin was their ability to write Hebrew in what sounds like an oral style, creating the illusion that spoken Hebrew existed in 1815–23. Whereas Perl parodied hasidic authors, Lefin outdid them by moving beyond tales of pilgrimage to ’erez. yisra’el—expanding horizons and breaking the ethnocentrism of traditional Hebrew narratives. In a sense, Lefin’s translations from German were genre parodies that countered the genre of Hebrew narratives of pilgrimage. The writings of Mendel Lefin and R. Nathan Sternharz directly influenced the course of modern Hebrew literature, as Perl’s antihasidic parodies were a conduit that carried “folk Hebrew” into the stream of secular Hebrew literature.144 In Megale temirin, Perl made a parody of hasidic letters by using them as the basis for an epistolary novel. At the same time, Lefin’s sea narratives helped create the context that made possible a new kind of mimesis in Hebrew. Influenced by Lefin’s translated narratives and by I. B. Levinson’s Divrei z.adikim (1820–30), in Boh.en z.adik (1838), Perl showed that it was possible to create the illusion of an oral-style Hebrew that could convey spoken dialogue. Even Abramovitsh followed this tradition in Mase‘ot Benjamin ha-shlishi (1878/1896), by parodying hasidic narratives of pilgrimage, while later authors such as I. L. Peretz and M. Y. Berdichevsky saw hasidic narrative as an alternative source of modern Hebrew literature. Israeli Hebrew fiction and drama have also emerged under the star of translation, explicitly or implicitly, from European languages.145 From another perspective, then, hasidic and maskilic writing may be understood as more than a neglected origin of modern Hebrew narrative. Authors such as R. Nathan and Lefin anticipated the twentieth-century linguistic processes by which Israeli Hebrew emerged—adopting, adapting, and translating phrases from other languages. Ken Frieden Syracuse University Syracuse, New York

144. Liberman argues that it is more accurate to speak of “folk Hebrew” than of “hasidic Hebrew.” See his article (in Yiddish and Hebrew) “R. Nakhman Bratslaver un di Umaner maskilim,” 219. 145. Rina Ben Shahar has shown how twentieth-century Hebrew drama developed with the help of translations from English and French. See her book Ha-lashon ba-drama ha-‘Ivrit: ha-dialog ba-mah.aze ha-‘Ivri ha-mekori ve-ha-meturgam mi-Anglit u-mi-Z.arfatit, 1948–1975 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1996).

35

Ken Frieden A PPENDIX I Mendel Lefin’s “Note” on Punctuation, from Mod’a le-vina (1789) ‫הערה‬ ‫ הצגנו כמין טעמים‬,(‫לתועלת המעיינים )ובפרט בספרי הרפואות שראוי לדקדק בהן ביותר‬ ‫( מורה הפסק גדול‬:) ‫ ב’ נקודות כזה‬:‫בכדי להקל להבין על ידיהם הכוונה האמיתית בכל מקום‬ ‫ נקודה אחת‬:‫ כעין אתנחתא‬,‫( מורה הפסק קטן ממנו‬۰) ‫ נקודה אחת כזה‬:‫כעין סוף פסוק בכתבי הקודש‬ ‫ וכחו‬,‫( הוא קטן שבכולם‬,) ‫ קוץ עקום כזה‬:‫ותחתיה תג קטן כזה );( קטן מן האתנחתא ודומה לסגול‬ ‫ דלית כתב משיטה‬:‫ קו ישר ותחתיו נקודה כזה )!( מורה על ההפלגה או על ההכרזה‬:‫כעין הזקף קטן‬ :‫ מורה על השאלה או התימ ה‬,(?) ‫ותחתיה נקודה כזה‬ For the benefit of the readers (and especially of medical books where it is suitable to be very precise), to make it easier to understand the true intent in each passage, we are presenting in the manner of cantillation signs: Two points like this (:) indicate a full stop, like sof pasuk in the Holy Scriptures: One dot like this (۰) indicates a smaller stop, like etnah.ta: One dot and under it a small apostrophe like this (;) is smaller than the ethnah.ta and similar to segol: A crooked mark like this (,) is the smallest of all, and its force is like that of zakef katan: A straight line and under it a point like this (!) indicates exaggeration or declaration: A cursive Dalet and under it a point like this (?) indicates questioning or wonderment:

36

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives A PPENDIX II Facsimile of Mendel Lefin’s “Translator’s Introduction to Mase‘ot ha-yam”

37

Ken Frieden

Reproduced from folder 124 in the Joseph Perl Archive, by permission of the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. A transcription and a translation may be found in appendix III.

38

‫‪Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives‬‬ ‫‪A PPENDIX III‬‬ ‫מנדל לפין‪ ,‬הקדמת המעתיק מסעות הים‬

‫‪146‬‬

‫לעולם אל ימתין אדם שתשתנה הטבע בשבילו ע”י נס מבורר‪,‬‬ ‫ואל יתייאש אפי’ כשהחרב מונחת על צווארו ‪ 147۰‬אלא יעסוק בתחבולה‬ ‫ועבודה תמיד שאין אדם נעשה חפשי מהן אלא במותו‪ ,‬ויהא בטוח‬ ‫בהשי”ת שישלח ברכה במעשיו באופן הסמוי מן העין‪ :‬והנה‬ ‫מלתא דלא שכיחא היא שיעיז אדם לבטוח בצדקו כ”כ ]כל כך[ עד שיסמוך‬ ‫על הנס‪ .‬אבל מי שהוא שיכור בצרותיו עשוי לשכוח בהשגחתו‬ ‫של הקב”ה‪ ,‬לכלות ידיו בחיקו ולאבד כל תוחלת ותקוה עוד‪:‬‬ ‫וע”כ ]ועל כן[ מצוה לבקר את חבירו בצר לו אע”פ ]אף על פי[ שאין בידו לתומכו‬ ‫בעצה וממון או מעשה‪ ,‬שעכ”פ ]שעל כל פנים[ יכול לזרזו ולאמץ בטחונו‬ ‫בברכת ד’‪ .‬ע”פ ]על פי[ מוסר השכל ותנחומין של אמת מדוגמא של‬ ‫מאורעות קשות שניצולו חביריו מהן לבסוף כשלא איבדו תוחלתם מן הישועה‪:‬‬

‫‪5‬‬

‫‪10‬‬

‫ומי שנפל בסכנה וניצול חייב להודות ולספר ישועת ד’ בקהל‬ ‫רב‪ ,‬בכדי ללמדם מוסר ובטחון בד’ ישתבח? לעתות הצרה‪ .‬ומה‬ ‫גם שלפעמים מלמדם אגב זה איזו עצה ותחבולה‪ ,‬וענין אחר מעין‬ ‫‪15‬‬ ‫המאורע שלו‪ :‬וכל העם יטו אזנם וישמעו‪ ,‬ובפרט אותן מעוראות ]מאורעות[‬ ‫של כמה מיני צרות תכופות בזו אחר זו‪ ,‬שהטה אדם אחד את שכמו‬ ‫לקבלם לשם פצעי אוהב הנאמן ית”ש ]יתברך שמו[‪ :‬בין ששרתה אח”כ ]אחר כך[ ברכת‬ ‫שמים על כחו לסובלם עד שכלו מאיליהם‪ ,‬או על חכמתו להמציא‬ ‫לו מפלט מהם‪ :‬ואפ’ ]ואפילו[ לא נמלט מהם‪ ,‬אלא שנפטר מתוך בטחון בד ’‬ ‫‪20‬‬ ‫לבוא מיכאן לעולם שכולו עונג ומנוחה‪ :‬שבין כך או כך חייב‬ ‫אדם לקבל דוגמא טובה מב”י ]מבני ישראל[ שכמותו‪ ,‬במדת הסבלנות ומנוחת הנפש‬ ‫שאין כל הרוחות מזיזות אותה ממקומה‪ :‬כמש“ה ]כמו שאמר הכתוב[ הבוטחים בד‬ ‫‪149‬‬ ‫כהר ציון לא ימוט לעולם ועד‪ 148,‬ונאמר טוב ללכת אל בית אבל וכו’‪:‬‬ ‫ואמנם לא די להטות אוזן לסיפורי נצחונות שאירעו לפנינו‪,‬‬ ‫אלא שיש לרדוף ולהדר תמיד אחר מעשי אנשים כאילו יהיו מי שיהיו‪,‬‬ ‫]עמ’ ב[‬ ‫לשומען מפיהם או מפי כתבם‪ :‬כמשז”ל ]כמו שאמרו חז”ל[ איזהו חכם הלומד מכל אדם‪:150‬‬ ‫ואמרו בין גוי בין ישראל בין עבד ובין שפחה רוה”ק ]רוח הקודש[ שורה עליו‬ ‫לפי מעשיו‪ 151:‬ומסתמא גם אותם הגיבורים בסבלותם מלומדי‬ ‫‪25‬‬

‫‪146. This transcription preserves Lefin’s original punctuation; all footnotes and the translation‬‬ ‫‪have been provided by Ken Frieden. Although this is not a poetic text, to facilitate comparison with the‬‬ ‫‪facsimile in appendix II, we have retained the original line breaks in Lefin’s manuscript. Thanks to the‬‬ ‫‪Department of Manuscripts at the Jewish National and University Library for granting permission to‬‬ ‫‪publish this important text; thanks to Jonatan Meir and Avraham Weizal for their assistance in decipher‬‬‫‪ing Lefin’s handwriting.‬‬ ‫‪ .147‬ברכות י‪ ,‬ע”א; ספורנו על בראשית יח‪ ,‬כב; ר’ יונה גרונדי על משלי יד‪ ,‬לב; רבינו בחיי‪ ,‬ביאור על התורה‪ ,‬בעריכת חיים‬ ‫דוב שוול )ירושלים‪ :‬מוסד הרב קוק‪ ,‬תשנ”א(‪ ,‬כרך ג‪ ,‬עמ’ ‪.314‬‬ ‫‪ .148‬תהילים קכה‪ ,‬א‪.‬‬ ‫‪ .149‬קהלת ז‪ ,‬ב‪.‬‬ ‫‪ .150‬פרקי אבות ד‪ ,‬א‪.‬‬ ‫‪ .151‬אליהו רבה‪ ,‬פרק ‪.10‬‬

‫‪39‬‬

‫‪Ken Frieden‬‬ ‫מלחמה מנעוריהם היו‪ ,‬שהבא לטהר מסייעין לו‪ 152.‬אבל לא יגעת‬ ‫ומצאת אל תאמין‪ 153:‬ומי שאינו מחנך עצמו לחגור עוז במתניו בימי‬ ‫שלוותו‪ ,‬אין בו כח לעמוד בניסיון ליום רעה‪ :‬אלא אובד‬ ‫עשתונותיו תיכף בתחלה‪ ,‬חובק את ידיו ומהרהר אחר מדותיו‬ ‫ב”ה ]ברוך הוא[‪ ,‬מוסר עצמו ליללות ולקללות ואובד ברשעו ח”ו ‪:‬‬ ‫ולתועלת אחב”י ]אחינו בני ישראל[ נעתקו עתה מסעות הללו ללשונינו‪ ,‬בכדי‬ ‫להעיר נפש המעיין להתחנך במדה יקרה זו‪ :‬כשיראה מיכאן‪,‬‬ ‫עד היכן מגיע כח ארך רוח וחכמה לראות הנולד‪ 154.‬שחנן הש”י‬ ‫לאדם‪ ,‬לעמוד בסכנות עצומות וארוכות של קור וחום רעב‬ ‫צמאון חיה ולסטים וחלאים רעים‪ :‬ולאחר שיתעורר להשגיח‬ ‫בנידון זה על כלל מקרי בני האדם בעוה”ז ]בעולם הזה[‪ ,‬ימצא שזהו מעשים בכל‬ ‫יום‪ ,‬שגיבורי כח לחסות בברכת ד’ כול ניצולים ופחד חטאים‬ ‫תבואם‪ :‬כמ”ש ]כמו שכתוב[ כי שבע יפול צדיק וקם ורשעים באחת יפולו‪ 155:‬ומאז‬ ‫והלאה יתן דעתו לאסוף]?[ זכרון מאורעות כאלו אחת אחת‬ ‫למשמרת בלבו‪ ,‬והיו לכלי זיין מוכן בידו להגן על המוטטים‪,‬‬ ‫ולנחמם במעשים שאירעו אפי’ ]אפילו[ בימיהם בעירם לעיניהם‪ :‬ובמדה‬ ‫שהוא מקשט עצמו נעשה יותר מסוגל לקשט אחרים‪ ,‬שכשם שהוא‬ ‫דובר אמת בפיו ובלבבו כך דבריו דוחקים למשכיות לב‪:‬‬ ‫אבל בזכות זה תבא עליו ברכת אובדים להינצל מכל רע ונסיון‪,‬‬ ‫‪156‬‬ ‫כמש”ה ]כמו שאמר הכתוב[ רבים מכאובים לרשע והבוטח בד’ חסד יסובבנו‪.‬‬

‫‪ .152‬יומא לח ע”ב‪.‬‬ ‫‪ .153‬מגילה ו ע”ב‪.‬‬ ‫‪ .154‬מסכת תמיד לב ע”א‪.‬‬ ‫‪ .155‬משלי כד‪ ,‬טז‪.‬‬ ‫‪ .156‬תהילים לב‪ ,‬י‪.‬‬

‫‪40‬‬

‫‪30‬‬

‫‪35‬‬

‫‪40‬‬

‫‪45‬‬

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives Mendel Lefin, Unpublished Translator’s Introduction to Sea Travels157 A person should never expect that nature will change for him by means of a clear miracle, and a person should not despair when the sword hangs over his neck;158 instead he should prepare a plan, pray and work always—for a person is not made free of them except by his death, and he should trust that the Holy One, Blessed be He, will send a blessing on his deeds, in a manner that is hidden from the eye: 5 And the rabbis taught that it is an uncommon thing that a person dares to be so confident of His goodness that he trusts in the miracle. For a person who is drunk with his troubles may forget God’s Providence, crossing his hands in his lap and losing all hope and expectation. Therefore, it is a commandment to visit one’s friend in adversity, even if it is not in one’s power to support him with advice and money or deeds, because in any case one can encourage him and strengthen his faith 10 in God’s blessings—by means of moral words and his true consolation on the example of harsh occurrences from which his friends were ultimately saved when they did not lose hope of salvation: And the person who has fallen into danger and been saved is obliged to give thanks and publicly tell of God’s salvation, in order to teach them morality and faith in God, praised be He, in times of trouble. And what’s more, sometimes one incidentally gives advice or teaches a plan of action regarding a similar situation: 15 And all of the people will bend their ears and hear, especially regarding events when several kinds of misfortune come in succession, and in which a person put his shoulder to the wheel and accepted them as wounds delivered by the loving, faithful God: Whether Heaven’s blessing will rest on him afterward by virtue of his being able to withstand them until they pass, or by his wisdom in finding

157. Lefin’s quotations and allusions seem designed to indicate that this translated book of sea adventure is compatible with pious beliefs and suitable for traditional Jewish readers. Lefin goes beyond the typical maskilic shibutz (insertion of biblical quotations) by extending his quotations into postbiblical sources such as Mishnah (’Avot), Gemara (B. Berakhot, B. Yoma, B. Megilla, B. Tamid), and medieval commentaries (Seforno, Yona Gerondi, Rabbenu Bahye). In the notes that follow, all talmudic citations refer to the Babylonian Talmud. 158. B. Berakhot 10a and medieval commentators: Seforno, commentary on Genesis 18:22, in Humash mikra’ot gedolot; R. Yona Gerondi, commentary on Proverbs 14:32; Rabbenu Bahye: Bi’ur ‘al ha-Torah, ed. Haim Dov Shevel (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-rav Kook, 1991), 3:314.

41

Ken Frieden a refuge from them: And even if he did not find refuge from them, but perished with faith in God’s assistance, 20 coming from here to a world that is all delight and comfort: For either this way or that, a person is obliged to receive a good example from other people like him, with a measure of patience and spiritual calm– such that all of the winds do not move his soul from its place. As it is written, “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, and will never be moved for all eternity,”159 and it is said, “Better to go to a house of mourning.…”160 And indeed it is not enough to bend one’s ear to stories of victory that have occurred before us; 25 instead one should chase after and exalt, always speaking of the deeds of such people, whoever they are, to listen to them from their mouths or from their writings. As the sages said, “Who is wise? The one who learns from everyone.”161 And they said, “Whether Gentile or Jew, whether slave or servant, the holy spirit rests on him in accordance with his deeds.”162 And doubtless it was also about those heroes with their sufferings, the teachers of war from their youths, [that it is said] “The one who comes to purify is supported.”163 But do not believe [those who say], “I did not toil, and I found.”164 30 Whoever does not educate himself to gird up his loins in the days of his tranquility, does not have in him the strength to withstand a trial on a bad day: But he will lose his strength immediately, from the beginning, sit idle, and reflect on His qualities blessed be He; he gives himself up to wailing and curses and is lost in his wickedness, God forbid: For the good of our brethren, the Children of Israel, these Travels have now been translated into our language, in order 35 to awaken the soul of the reader to train himself in this precious quality: In order that he will see from this to what lengths the force of perseverance and wisdom go—foreseeing the consequences165 with which God has graced human beings—toward withstanding tremendous and enduring dangers, of cold and heat and hunger, 159. Psalm 125:1. 160. [“…than to go to a house of feasting.”] Ecclesiastes 7:2. 161. M. ’Avot 4:1. 162. Eliahu ben Shlomo Zalman, Eliahu Raba (Prague: Sommer, 1812), chap. 10. 163. B. Yoma’ 38b. 164. B. Megillah 6b. 165. B. Tamid 32a.

42

Hasidic and Maskilic Travel Narratives thirst, wild animals, bandits, and severe illnesses. And after he awakens to be aware in this regard, about all that happens to people in this world, he will find that these are everyday events, 40 when heroes of strength take shelter in God’s blessing and are all saved, while fear overtakes sinners. As it is written, “For the righteous person falls seven times and stands up, while the wicked” fall at once:166 And from that time on, he [the reader] will put his mind to collecting memories of events like this, one by one to guard in his heart, and they will become weapons, ready to hand, to protect people from breakdowns, consoling them with events that have occurred even in their days and in their cities, before their eyes. And to the extent 45 that he adorns himself, he is made more capable of adorning others, for just as he is a speaker of truth in his mouth and heart, so do his words touch the depths of the heart: But by virtue of this there will come to him the blessing of the lost, to be saved from all evil and temptation, As it is written, “Many are the sufferings of the wicked, but the person who trusts in the Lord will be surrounded by mercy.”167

166. Proverbs 24:16. 167. Psalm 32:10.

43

AJS Review 33:1 (2009), 45–69 © 2009 Association for Jewish Studies doi:10.1017/S0364009409000038

TALMUDIC T EXT AND I RANIAN C ONTEXT: O N THE D EVELOPMENT OF T WO TALMUDIC N ARRATIVES by

Shai Secunda1 I. I RANO -TALMUDIC R ESEARCH AND THE I NTERNAL -H ERMENEUTICAL S CHOOL The past few years have witnessed an expansion of the range of sources that Talmudists regularly employ in their research on the Bavli.2 Scholars now turn to Iranian epic and folk literature;3 to Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and Eastern Christian ritual and theological writings;4 to Sasanian civil

1. I would like to thank the following mentors, colleagues, and friends for their gracious aid in helping me conceive of, construct, and edit this paper: Michal Bar-Asher, David Berger, Yaakov Elman, Shamma Friedman, Gershom Hepner, Geoffrey Herman, Richard Kalmin, Drew Kaplan, Reuven Kiperwasser, Menahem Kister, Jeffrey Rubenstein, Shaul Shaked, P. Oktor Skjærvø, Amram Tropper, Julie Weisman, Barry Wimpfheimer, and the anonymous reader for the AJS Review. 2. This achievement must be credited to Yaakov Elman, who has campaigned most intensely for a broadening of focus in talmudic studies. Aside from his many articles listed here, with this goal in mind, he has presented papers and organized sessions at conferences and meetings in the United States, Israel, and Germany. 3. See Geoffrey Herman, “Ahasuerus the Former Stable-Master of Belshazzar, and the Wicked Alexander of Macedon: Two Parallels between the Babylonian Talmud and Persian Sources,” AJS Review 29, no. 2 (2005): 283–98. For an earlier example, see Daniel Sperber, “On the Unfortunate Adventures of Rav Kahana: A Passage of Saboraic Polemic from Sasanian Persia,” Irano-Judaica, ed. Shaul Shaked and Amnon Netzer (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 1982), 83–100. In an article published in the same volume, E. S. Rosenthal strongly urges Talmudists to study Middle Persian language and literature. See his “La-milon ha-talmudi: Talmudica Iranica,” in Shaked and Netzer, Irano-Judaica, 38–134 (Hebrew section). 4. For the Bavli’s response to the theological debates that animated Zoroastrian and Manichaean religious polemic, see Yaakov Elman, “Acculturation to Elite Persian Norms and Modes of Thought in the Babylonian Jewish Community of Late Antiquity,” in Neti‘ot le-David, ed. Yaakov Elman, Ephraim Bezalel Halivni, and Zvi Arie Steinfeld (Jerusalem: Orh.ot, 2004), 31–56; idem, “Rav Yosef be‘idan rith.a, Bar Ilan 30–31 (2006): 9–20; and idem, “ ‘He in His Cloak and She in Her Cloak’: Conflicting Images of Sexuality in Sasanian Mesopotamia,” in Discussing Cultural Influences: Text, Context, and Non-Text in Rabbinic Judaism, ed. Rivka Ulmer (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007). To my knowledge, no one has compared Manichaean and rabbinic legal or ritual systems. A preliminary study of the uses of Nestorian literature for understanding the Talmud can be found in Isaiah Gafni, “H.iburim nestorianim ke-makor le-toldot yeshivot bavel,” Tarbiz 51 (1982): 567–76. Adam Becker has advanced the research on these Christian schools in ways that will directly

45

Shai Secunda law;5 and to other nonrabbinic sources in an effort to broaden and deepen their understanding of the Bavli and its place in the “splendid confusion” that was Sasanian Mesopotamian society.6 As Yaakov Elman has pointed out, this research trend serves as a corrective for more than half a century of scholarly neglect, which was only encouraged by a dearth of critical editions of Middle Persian literature and more general studies of Sasanian culture and religions.7 Now, following a steady output of some long-anticipated editions,8 and, more significantly, as a result of recent collaboration between Talmudists and Iranists,9 the coming years hold great promise for a radically new understanding of the Bavli and its world.

affect scholarship on the Bavli; see his Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Naomi Koltun-Fromm looks at the relationship between Eastern Christian and rabbinic exegesis in her doctoral dissertation, “Jewish-Christian Polemics in FourthCentury Persian Mesopotamia: A Reconstructed Conversation” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1994). More recently, see Naomi Koltun-Fromm, “Zippora’s Complaint: Moses Is Not Conscientious in the Deed! Exegetical Traditions of Moses’ Celibacy,” in The Ways That Never Parted, ed. Adam Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 293–307. Daniel Boyarin has generally emphasized the role of Christianity on the formation of Rabbinic Judaism. However, he does not limit his research to the Bavli and Eastern Christian writings. Still, in his “Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia,” in Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Charlotte E. Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 336–63, he hints most explicitly at the role of Eastern Christian learning in influencing what he calls the Bavli’s “indeterminacy.” 5. See Yaakov Elman, “Marriage and Marital Property in Rabbinic and Sasanian Law,” in Rabbinic Law in Its Roman and Near Eastern Context, ed. Catherine Hezser (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 227–76; idem, “ ‘Up to the Ears’ in Horses’ Necks (B.M. 108a): On Sasanian Agricultural Policy and Private Eminent Domain,” Jewish Studies: An Internet Journal 3 (2004): 95–149; idem, “Yeshivot bavel u-vatei din parsiyim ba-tequfah ha-amorayit veha-batar amorayit,” in Yeshivot u-batai midrash, ed. Emanuel Etkes (Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 2007), 31–55; and idem, “Returnable Gifts in Rabbinic and Sasanian Law,” in Irano-Judaica VI, ed. Shaul Shaked and Amnon Netzer (Jerusalem: Makhon Ben Zvi, 2008). See also Maria Macuch, “Iranian Legal Terminology in the Babylonian Talmud in the Light of Sasanian Jurispudence,” Irano-Judaica IV (1999): 91–101; and idem, “The Talmudic Expression ‘Servant of Fire’ in Light of Pahlavi Legal Sources,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 26 (2002): 109–29. For an early example that deals primarily with loanwords, see Ezra Spicehandler, “‫ בי דואר‬and ‫דינא דמגיסתא‬: Notes on Gentile Courts in Talmudic Babylonia,” Hebrew Union College Annual 26 (1955): 335–39. 6. Following Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in Mesopotamia and the Roman East (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 25. 7. Elman, “ ‘Up to the Ears,’ ” 96–101. 8. Recent editions that are important for Talmudists include A. V. Williams, The Pahlavi Rivāyat Accompanying the Dādestān ī Dēnīg (Copenhagen: Munksgard, 1990); Firoze M. Kotwal and Philip G. Kreyenbroek, The Hērbedestān and Nērangestān, 3 vols. (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 1992–2003); Maria Macuch, Rechtskasuistik und Gerichtspraxis zu Beginn des siebenten Jahrhunderts in Iran: Die Rechtssammlung des Farrohmard i Wahrāmān (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993); Carlo G. Cereti, The Zand ī Wahman Yasn (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1995); Mahmoud Jaafari-Dehaghi, Dādestān ī Dēnīg (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 1998); and Jaleh Amouzgar and Ahmad Tafazzoli, Le cinquième livre du Dēnkard (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2000). 9. This collaboration has Talmudists studying Middle Iranian languages with Iranists, resulting in the formation of working groups that consist of Iranists and Talmudists and two recent international

46

Talmudic Text and Iranian Context Interestingly, a important parallel trend has pulled the field in a different, if not diametrically opposed, direction. Renewed interest in rabbinic hermeneutics and the modes of amoraic and stammaitic interpretation of the Bible and earlier rabbinic texts has some scholars emphasizing the need to carefully analyze rabbinic data internally before running to the “foreign gods” of Sasanian Mesopotamia. Perhaps the most eloquent expression of this position can be found in Christine Hayes’s Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, published in 1997.10 Responding to Talmudists and historians who, in her view, attribute the evolution of far too many a rabbinic institution and legal innovation to historical circumstances (generally, those of Roman Palestine), Hayes argues for a renewed sensitivity to the “internal” development of rabbinic discourse, and she cautions scholars against irresponsible historicalreductionism of talmudic sugyot. Although writing a few years prior to the resurrection of “Irano-Talmudic” research, Hayes takes aim at what is perhaps this school’s most valuable research tool: accounting for the differences between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. Indeed, in the quest to explain why the Bavli so often diverges from the Yerushalmi in matters of law, theology, and style, Talmudists now consult Iranian sources in order to elucidate the differences between everyday life in Sasanian Mesopotamia and Roman Palestine. Although Hayes does not entirely discount geographic explanations of the Bavli–Yerushalmi divide—the book includes four chapters that do just that—she and the methodological school that Between the Talmuds represents clearly prioritize research of rabbinic hermeneutics over the cultural background of rabbinic texts. On reflection, these two views are not necessarily antagonistic. The fact that the pendulum of scholarly temperaments has swung in opposite directions at the very same time provides Talmudists with the opportunity to engage text and context simultaneously—and to do so with vigor. Instead of privileging one axis over the other, the measured use of advances in the study of rabbinic hermeneutics, together with an ever-increasing appreciation of the Bavli’s Sasanian milieu, can be profitably mined to produce exciting and methodologically sound scholarship. To that end, I have selected two talmudic narratives that, when carefully probed, exemplify both the challenge and the promise of the marriage of these two research trends. I will argue that careful attention to the hermeneutical engagement of two talmudic storytellers with their sources reveals a similar history of development that can be most profitably explained by recourse to the Bavli’s

conferences during which Talmudists and Iranists met together—the Sixth Irano-Judaica Conference at the University of Hamburg in September 2006, and a conference entitled “The Talmud in its Iranian Context,” held in May 2007 at the University of California, Los Angeles. 10. Christine Hayes, Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a brief summary of the positions of both schools, see Beth A. Berkowitz, “Decapitation and the Discourse of Antisyncretism in the Babylonian Talmud,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70 (2002): 743–69. Berkowitz argues for dissolution of the “hermeneuticist”/ historian divide and, interestingly enough, grounds the modern scholarly debate in the Bavli’s own struggle. My task in this article is to demonstrate methodologically how mutual engagement with hermeneutical and historical tools might appear.

47

Shai Secunda Iranian context. In both cases, older material articulates concern over the legitimacy of two rabbinic practices internally—that is, without mention of any “outsiders” or external forces that challenge, in one way or another, rabbinic authority. However, in a later form that is expressed in the final redaction of the two stories, the preexisting concerns are “externalized” and now refer to encounters between rabbis and Zoroastrians, or, perhaps, “Zoroastrianized” Jews. I argue that the externalization of previously anonymous rabbinic voices and literary characters signifies an intensification of the effect that Jewish–Zoroastrian interaction had on the rabbis and their world. II. R AVA

AND I FRA

H ORMIZ (B. N IDDAH 20 B )

The first story appears toward the end of an extensive sugya concerning rabbinic “blood science”11—the diagnostic process of ruling on women’s bloodstains in order to determine whether there is evidence of menstruation and, as a result, the need to abstain from sexual relations. Elsewhere, I have demonstrated how this sugya weaves an increasingly complicated web of stringencies and intricacies that render the practical application of rabbinic “blood science” nearly impossible.12 Instead, the Bavli relegates the practice to certain extraordinary rabbis, such as R. Hanina of Sepphoris, who, through diagnostic talent and even antinomianism, represents a new type of rabbinic hero. While the parallel Yerushalmi sugya acknowledges the difficulty of ruling on bloodstains while valorizing the extraordinary aptitude of some rabbis who do so, the Bavli sets out to marginalize the application of “blood science” through, among other rhetorical strategies, praise of the rabbinic “heroes” of earlier generations coupled with a loss of confidence in the skills of contemporary rabbis. The narrative concerning Rava and the Sasanian queen mother, Ifra Hormiz,13 in B. Niddah 20b presents us with an interesting case that in some ways depicts Rava as one such rabbinic hero, yet in others betrays deep anxiety about the practice of “blood science.” ‫אפרא הורמיז אמיה דשבור מלכא שדרה דמא לקמיה דרבא הוה יתיב רב עובדיה קמיה ארחיה‬ ‫אמר לה האי דם חימוד הוא אמרה ליה לבריה תא חזי כמה חכימי יהודאי א"ל דלמא כסומא‬ ‫ מיני דמא וכולהו אמרינהו ההוא בתרא דם כנים הוה ולא ידע‬14‫בארובה הדר שדרה ליה שתין‬ ‫ דלבא יתביתו‬15‫אסתייע מילתא ושדר לה סריקותא דמקטלא כלמי אמרה יהודאי בתווני‬ 11. B. Niddah 19a–21a. This term was coined by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert in her Menstrual Purity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 12. Samuel Secunda, “Dashtana—‘ki derekh nashim li’ ”: A Study of the Babylonian Rabbinic Laws of Menstruation in Relation to Corresponding Zoroastrian Texts” (PhD diss., Yeshiva University, 2007), 61–108. 13. We have no record, Sasanian or otherwise, of a queen mother named Ifra Hormiz, though our sources seldom provide details of the Sasanian royal family. The name appears as a client in a Mandean incantation bowl. See David Goodblatt, “’ypr’ hwrmyz Mother of King Shapur and ’pr’ hwrmyz Mother of Khusro: A Note on the Name ’ypr’/’ypr’ hwrmyz,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 96, no. 1 (1976): 135–36. 14. Ms Vatican 111 substitutes ‫כמה‬. 15. ‫ ]בתווני‬Ms Vatican 113 (and similar in Antonin). Mss Vatican 111, Vatican 127 Munich 95: ‫בתוונא‬.

48

Talmudic Text and Iranian Context Ifra Hormiz, the mother of King Shapur, sent [a sample of] blood before Rava. Rav Ovadiah was sitting in his presence. [Rava] smelled it. He said to her “this is blood of desire!” She said to her son, “Come [and] see how wise the Jews are!” He said to her, “It is quite possible that [he chanced upon it] like a blind man on a window.”16 Thereupon she sent [Rava] sixty kinds of blood, and he identified them all—[but] the last one was lice blood, and he did not recognize it. [Nevertheless,] the matter was successful17 and he sent her a comb that exterminates lice. She exclaimed, “O Jews, you dwell in the chambers of the heart!”

The tale can be logically divided into two parts. In the first half, Ifra Hormiz sends the fourth-century Amora, Rava, a sample of her vaginal blood to examine its purity status.18 Rava correctly rules on this sample of Ifra Hormiz’s blood and earns the queen mother’s praise of the Jews. A transitional passage has King Shapur doubting Rava’s expertise. This leads to the second half of the story, in which Ifra Hormiz tests Rava by sending him sixty samples of blood. Here, Rava nearly fails the examination when he is confounded by the last bloodstain.

16. The term ke-suma be-arubah also appears at B. Bava’ Batra’ 12b, where it, too, seems to connote a fortuitous circumstance. However, its precise meaning has not yet been determined. Michal Bar-Asher-Segal, “Ifra Hormiz Imma de-Shavor Malka” (unpublished paper, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2003), 14, lists three possible meanings for the phrase: (1) Rashi’s (ad loc., s.v. ve-lav ta‘ama ka-amar), that it refers to a blind man who stumbles upon a chimney (following Hosea 13:3). (2) In Middle Hebrew, the term means a ceiling window. Thus, the phrase perhaps refers to a situation where a blind man stands next to a ceiling window yet cannot see in. (3) In Ecclesiastes 12:2, arubah refers to the white of the eye. Accordingly, because only the pupil “sees,” the phrase refers to the “blindness” of that portion of the eye. 17. The Aramaic term ist‘aya miltah (the matter was successful) is ambiguous and may imply heavenly intercession or pure luck. 18. Later, I will discuss the significance of Ifra Hormiz, a non-Jewish woman, sending her menstrual blood to a rabbi for examination. Notably, Ifra Hormiz is depicted elsewhere in the Bavli as participating in Jewish commandments. See B. Bava’ Batra’ 8a (financial support for “a great commandment”—interpreted by Abaye as redeeming Jewish captives) and B. Zevahim 116b (an animal sacrifice to be brought in the name of the Jewish God). Regardless of the historicity of these accounts, they contribute to our understanding of Ifra Hormiz’s character in rabbinic culture. Not only was she seen as in awe of the Jews’ supernatural powers (B. Ta‘anit 24b and B. Niddah 20b) and financially supportive of individual rabbis (B. Bava’ Batra’ 10b, which, from a literary perspective, may be connected to B. Hagigah 5b), but also she participated in some Jewish practices as well. Accordingly, I consider the depiction of Ifra Hormiz’s initial sending of menstrual blood to Rava as not simply a test of Rava’s ability, but an expression of genuine concern for her menstrual purity. On the other hand, her subsequent sending of sixty blood samples should be understood as a test, which, like the anecdote recorded at B. Ta‘anit 24b, was initiated by her son, King Shapur. Further research needs to be conducted on the cultural meaning of Ifra Hormiz‘s image in rabbinic texts and differing conceptions of King Shapur’s wife in Syriac literature. For the time being, see Albert de Jong, “Zoroastrian Religious Polemics and Their Contexts: Interconfessional Relations in the Sasanian Empire,” in Religious Polemics in Context: Papers presented to the Second International Conference of the Leiden Institute for the Study of Religions, ed. T. L. Hettema and A. van der Kooij (Assen: Royal van Gorcum, 2004), 48–63.

49

Shai Secunda Luckily, he unknowingly sends a delousing19 comb as a gift to the queen mother, which she understands as a subtle hint at the origin of the last blood sample.20 III. R. E LAZAR B. P EDAT AND

THE

B LOOD

OF

D ESIRE (B. N IDDAH 20 B )

The preceding narrative at B. Niddah 20b is nearly identical to the first half of the Rava tale. It depicts the third-generation Amora, R. Elazar (B. Pedat), using his sense of smell to determine that a bloodstain is indeed “the blood of desire.” ‫ קמיה ארחיה אמר לה האי‬21‫דההיא אתתא דאייתא דמא לקמיה דרבי אלעזר הוה יתיב רבי אמי‬ '‫דם חימוד הוא בתר דנפקה אטפל לה רבי אמי א"ל בעלי היה בדרך וחמדתיו קרי עליה סוד ה‬ ‫ליראיו‬ Because a certain woman brought [a sample of] blood before R. Elazar. R. Ammi was sitting in his presence. [R. Elazar] smelled it. He said to her, “this is blood of desire.” After she left, R. Ammi joined her. She said to him, “My husband was [away] on a journey, and I desired him.” [R. Ammi] applied to [R. Elazar] the verse, “the secret of the Lord is with them that fear him (Psalms 25:14).”

IV. R. E LAZAR B . R. S HIMON

AND THE S IXTY B LOODSTAINS (B. B AVA’ M EZ. I ‘ A’4B)

The second half of the Rava tale shares some structural features with a story told about the fourth-generation Tanna, R. Elazar b. R. Shimon (B. Yoh.ai): 22 ‫יומא חד נפק לבי מדרשא איתי לקמיה שתין מיני דמא טהרינהו כולהו הוו קא מרנני רבנן עליה‬ ‫אמרי אפשר דלית בהו חד ספק אמ' להו אם כמותי הוא יהיו כולם זכרים ואם לאו נקבה אחת‬ ‫ביניהם היו כולם זכרים אסיקו להו ר' אלעזר על שמיה‬ One day [R. Elazar b. R. Shimon] went out to the study hall. They brought before him sixty kinds of blood. He declared them all pure. The rabbis were criticizing him. They said, “Is it possible that there was not among them one [case of] doubt?” He retorted, “If it be as I [ruled], let them all be males; and if not, [let there be even] one female among them.” They were all males. They took [the name] “Elazar” after his name. 19. Literally, “a comb that kills lice.” 20. Rava’s gift of a delousing comb should not be seen as bizarre. Because Zoroastrianism commands its adherents to destroy xrafstar (noxious creatures), which include lice, the gift would have been quite appropriate. See P. Oktor Skjærvø, “Of Lice and Men and the Manichean Anthropology,” in Festschrift Georg Buddruss, Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 19 (1994): 269–86; Maria Macuch, “On the Treatment of Animals in Zoroastrian Law,” in Iranica Selecta, ed. Alois van Tongerloo (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 167–90; and Mahnaz Moazami, “Evil Animals in the Zoroastrian Religion,” History of Religions 44 (2005): 300–317. Notably, an almost “religious” disdain for lice seems to have been absorbed by some Babylonian rabbis. See B. Shabbat 12a: “Rabbah killed [lice], and R. Shesheth killed them. Rava threw them into a basin of water. R. Nahman said to his daughter, ‘Kill them and let me hear the sound of the hated ones’ ” (emphasis added). See also Elman, “He in His Cloak.” 21. Ms Vatican 113: ‫אסי‬. (in both instances) 22. B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ 84b. The Hebrew text is a transcription of Ms Hamburg 165.

50

Talmudic Text and Iranian Context V. T HE L ITERARY D EVELOPMENT

OF

N IDDAH II

When placing the R. Elazar and Rava stories in synoptic columns, we discover that the R. Elazar traditions constitute the primary building blocks of the Rava tale.23 Niddah 20b (I) (A) Because a certain woman brought [a sample of] blood before R. Elazar. (B) R. Ammi was sitting in his presence. (C) [R. Elazar] smelled it. He said to her, “This is blood of desire.” (D) After she left, R. Ammi joined her. (E) She said to him, “My husband was [away] on a journey, and I desired him.” (F) [R. Ammi] applied to [R. Elazar] the verse, “The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him.”

Niddah 20b (II) (A) Ifra Hormiz, the mother of King Shapur, sent [a sample of] blood before Rava.

Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ 84b

(B) R. Ovadiah was sitting in his presence. (C) [Rava] smelled it. He said to her, “This is blood of desire!”

(F) She said to her son, “Come see how wise the Jews are!”

Continued 23. The critical method that I employ here and throughout the paper assumes the predominance of the role of the stammaim—the Talmud’s anonymous redactors—in the shaping and transmitting of the Bavli’s traditions. Building on the research of previous scholars such as Julius Kaplan, Hyman Klein, and Avraham Weiss, this approach was more completely developed by Shamma Friedman and David Halivni-Weiss primarily for talmudic legal passages, and then applied to talmudic narratives by Jeffrey Rubenstein. See, e.g., Shamma Yehudah Friedman, “Perek ha-isha rabbah be-bavli, be-tziruf mevo klali al derekh heker ha-sugya,” in Meh.karim u-mekorot, vol. 1 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1978); David Halivni-Weiss, Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara: The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 76–92; and Jeffrey Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

51

Shai Secunda TABLE 1 (contd.)

Niddah 20b (I)

Niddah 20b (II) (G) He said to her, “It is quite possible that [he chanced upon it] like a blind man on a window.” (A’) Thereupon she sent him sixty kinds of blood, (C’) and he identified them all, (D’) [but] the last one was lice blood, and he did not recognize it.

(E’) [Nevertheless], the matter was successful and he sent her a comb that exterminates lice.

(F’) She exclaimed, “You Jews dwell in the chambers of the heart.”

Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ 84b

(A’) They brought before him sixty kinds of blood. (C’) He declared them all pure. (D’) The rabbis were criticizing him. They said, “is it possible that there was not among them one [case of] doubt?” (E’) He retorted, “If it be as I [ruled] let them all be males; and if not, [let there be even] one female among them. They were all males. (F’) They took [the name] “Elazar” after his name.

Let us first examine the relationship between the Rava story (Niddah II) and the one that appears directly before it (Niddah I). Structurally, the two are nearly identical: (A) A woman sends or brings a blood sample to a rabbi. (B) We are told that the rabbi’s student is sitting before him. (C) The rabbi examines the blood and declares that it is not menstrual, but rather is the “blood of desire.” (F) Rabbinic or Jewish insight is praised. The similarity between the two narratives is in some aspects related to “the good story worth retelling”—a talmudic literary technique recently examined by Shamma Friedman.24 As in B. Yevamot 121a, in which an identical shipwreck 24. Shamma Friedman, “A Good Story Deserves Retelling—The Unfolding of the Akiva Legend,” Jewish Studies: An Internet Journal 3 (2004): 55–93.

52

Talmudic Text and Iranian Context legend is told about two different generations of rabbis, the hero of Niddah I is R. Elazar b. Pedat, a second-generation Palestinian Amora who appears with his student R. Ammi,25 while the hero of Niddah II is the fourth-generation Babylonian sage Rava, who appears with his student Rav Ovadiah. Actually, the mirroring of the tales is so thorough that some talmudic commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Rav Ovadiah is listed at the beginning of Niddah II even though he plays no function at all in the narrative.26 From a source-critical perspective, Rav Ovadiah’s appearance constitutes a type of “literary leftover.” Specifically, Rav Ovadiah’s appearance in Niddah II simply imitates the role of R. Ammi in Niddah I, who was needed to examine and confirm the aptitude of his master R. Elazar—a task that is missing and presumably unnecessary in the second tale. This should alert us to the possibility that, initially, a tradition told about R. Elazar was reworked to form the first half of the Rava tale. An examination of the structural relationship between B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ 84b and the second half of Niddah II yields similar results. Although there are more significant differences between them, these are outlined later. Both contain (A’), the sending of sixty blood samples before a rabbi; (C’), his ruling (with unstated results) or his citation of the purification of all, or nearly all, of these samples; (D’), a moment of doubt concerning his abilities; (E’), a miraculous or lucky confirmation of the ruling; and finally (F’), praise of the rabbi’s aptitude through either the exclamation of a laudatory folk saying or the naming of children conceived from that night’s sexual union after him.27 Daniel Boyarin and Shamma Friedman have examined the complex of R. Elazar b. R. Shimon stories collected at the beginning of the seventh chapter of B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’, in which this story appears.28 Boyarin argues for the strong literary relationship between two anecdotes there: namely, the sixty mats filled with R. Elazar b. R. Shimon’s diseased blood and pus, and the story of the sixty bloodstains.29 Apparently, the bloodstain story appears to have been worked on to fit the motifs and greater program of the R. Elazar b. R. Shimon literary cycle. This is especially clear when we take into consideration Friedman’s research 25. Alternatively, Ms Vatican 113 records “R. Assi.” The interchangeability in the manuscripts of these two close colleagues is a common phenomenon. Although R. Elazar and Rav Ammi were close contemporaries, R. Elazar gained recognition as his teacher’s colleague (talmid h.aver) and would thereby have obtained a position superior to R. Ammi. See Chanokh Albeck, Mavo la-talmudim (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1969), 224–28. In any case, the image of R. Ammi sitting in front of R. Elazar is the classic image of a student in the Bavli. 26. Rabbi Shlomo b. Aderet, H.idushei Rashba: massekhet niddah (Jerusalem: Mosad HaRav Kook, 1989), columns 111–12, and R. David Luria (ad loc. in the Vilna edition). 27. The narrator assumes that as a result of R. Elazar b. R. Shimon’s declaration that all of the blood samples were pure, the women were permitted to engage in sexual relations with their husbands, from which the “baby Elazars” were conceived. 28. Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 197–226; Shamma Friedman, “La-aggadah ha-historit ba-talmud ha-bavli,” in Sefer ha-zikaron le-Rabi Sha’ul Lieberman, ed. Shamma Friedman (Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1993), 119–64, esp. 122–32. 29. Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 204–206.

53

Shai Secunda on the relationship between the R. Elazar cycle in B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ and its Palestinian counterpart in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana. Friedman describes how B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ inherits and ingeniously enlarges and reworks an older Palestinian collection that lacks mention of the bloodstains. In Boyarin’s conception, the Babylonian collection invents grotesque elements, such as sixty bloody mattresses and bloodstains, that are barely hinted at in the Pesikta de-Rav Kahana cycle. A comparison of the B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ story with Niddah I demonstrates that they, too, are similar. Both narratives contain (A, A’), the presentation of blood samples to a rabbi; (C, C’), his declaration of purity; (D, D’), doubt concerning the ruling expressed explicitly by a group of disgruntled rabbis or implicitly by a student who checks the accuracy of his teacher’s ruling; (E, E’), confirmation of the ruling; and finally (F, F’), praise of the rabbi. The shared names (R. Elazar)30 and nearly identical structures of the two stories suggest that the B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ anecdote concerning R. Elazar b. R. Shimon’s ruling on the sixty samples of blood was drawn from an older tradition similar or identical to that of Niddah I, and then reworked to fit the larger program of the R. Elazar b. R. Shimon story cycle.31 Earlier, I proposed that the unnecessary appearance of Rav Ovadiah in Niddah II reveals that the direction of literary development was Niddah I > Niddah II. Now, I suggest that B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ is strongly related to the R. Elazar tradition found in Niddah I, and that it was reworked to fit its larger literary program. In other words, it is likely that the stam composed the entire Rava story at a relatively late date,32 drawing its material from these two earlier narratives.33 What we witness in our synopsis—two smaller literary units juxtaposed with a doubly larger unit—is actually true chronologically. Speaking mathematically, Niddah I + B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ = Niddah II. VI. T HE M EANING

OF THE

E VOLUTION

OF

N IDDAH II

We are now in a position to assess what the storyteller of the Rava narrative may have wished to convey to his audience, as well as to suggest what the tale can tell us about its own context. To do so, we will examine the differences between our story’s two sources and its final form. One significant variation is the personification 30. Of course, the stories are about two different rabbis. B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ concerns the fourthgeneration Tanna R. Elazar b. R. Shimon Bar Yoh.ai, while Niddah I is about the second-generation Amora R. Elazar b. Pedat. 31. In addition, the fact that both Elazars (B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ and Niddah I) declare the bloodstains to be pure, while we are not told in the second half of Niddah II whether Rava rules that the samples are pure or impure, indicates that the relationship between the two Elazar tales is at times even “stronger” than the correlation between the B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ story and its otherwise more direct parallel found in the second half of Niddah II. 32. I assume that it is more compelling to assume that the latter half of the Rava tale was composed from the final form of the B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ material (i.e., after it was reworked to fit the story cycle in B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’) than to propose that the second half of Niddah II was an earlier reworking of Niddah I that was later assimilated into the R. Elazar b. R. Shimon complex in B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’. 33. As is common in talmudic narratives, there are no clear historical references. Accordingly, we can only assign a relative date to these texts based on source-critical analysis.

54

Talmudic Text and Iranian Context of Ifra Hormiz as the anonymous character(s) who in the two earlier narratives brought bloodstains for examination. The storyteller’s decision to give a name to previously anonymous characters is an indication of the literary importance of that newly named individual. By supplying the rabbi with bloodstains, the women in the earlier stories merely facilitate a drama in which the rabbinic hero performs as an expert. Now, Ifra Hormiz’s entrance into the Rava narrative draws the reader’s attention to the interesting dynamic between the rabbi and the source of the blood samples. The problem that traditional and modern scholars have with Ifra Hormiz’s “non-Jewishness”34 may be attributable to their assumption that the story is essentially about Rava, and as an “extra,” Ifra Hormiz should blend seamlessly into the “set.” However, if Ifra Hormiz’s role is an important one, her religion suggests to the audience that the story is about a rabbi and a Zoroastrian precisely because it relates to the stimulating dynamic of that encounter. The structural differences between Niddah II and its antecedents are also significant. While both earlier stories end with unambiguously positive confirmations of the rabbi, the Rava tale contains more serious, open-ended moments of anxiety. Regarding the story’s first half, Niddah I concludes after R. Elazar’s ruling is confirmed (E) and praised (F). However, immediately following Ifra Hormiz’s praise in Niddah II, Rava’s skill is questioned by no less than the Sasanian King of Kings himself (G). This line has no parallel in either earlier version, in which both anecdotes close after the initial confirmation and praise of the rabbi. It is this crucial moment of doubt that acts as a transition into the second half of the tale, which, I suggest, is drawn from the B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ narrative. There, too, the primary difference between the earlier and later versions manifests itself at the end of the story. While in the R. Elazar b. R. Shimon story the rabbis merely question whether every ruling was correct (D’), in Niddah II the narrator frankly states that Rava was baffled by the lice blood (D).35 Although R. Elazar’s decision is confirmed by the miraculous birth of sixty baby boys in B. Bava’ Mez.i‘a’ (E’), Rava never comprehends the correct ruling, and he only unknowingly sends a suggestive gift to Ifra Hormiz. Most significant, King Shapur’s accusation that Rava lacks expertise and only accidentally issued a correct ruling is confirmed! Although the overriding purpose of the story is probably to show Rava’s incredible

34. Rashi, B. Niddah 20b; s.v. Ifra Hormiz; Charlotte Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 260–61; De Jong, “Zoroastrian Religious Polemics and Their Contexts”; and Jacob Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), 4:37. 35. At this point, it is worth noting that as curious as it might seem to the modern student, Ifra Hormiz’s sending of lice blood to Rava should not be read as a sort of “trick” question. The examination of bloodstains was intended to determine whether the blood was uterine, and therefore impure, or whether it stemmed from a wound in the vaginal cavity or from an external source altogether and therefore did not affect the woman’s purity status. M. Niddah 8:2 and T. Niddah 7:4 describe lice blood as a potential alternative explanation for the appearance of blood on a cloth, and B. Niddah 14a, 19b, and 58b–59a continue this inclination as well. Indeed, later in the development of halakhah, “lice blood” becomes the typical attribution of blood when rabbinic deciders wish to rule leniently. See, e.g., Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, hilkhot issurei biah 9:21.

55

Shai Secunda ability to rule correctly on the first and subsequent fifty-nine bloodstains, Rava’s lack of success at determining the final bloodstain on his own alerts the reader to some anxiety still present in the narrative. Another related narrative concerning Rava, Ifra Hormiz, and King Shapur in B. Ta‘anit 24b might confirm the observation that although the narrator wishes to demonstrate Rava’s abilities when they are tested by King Shapur, there is some residual concern that perhaps the king is indeed correct in his doubt of Rava’s aptitude: ‫ההוא גברא דאיחייב נגדא בבי דינא דרבא משום דבעל נכרית נגדיה רבא ומית אשתמע מילתא‬ ‫בי שבור מלכא בעא לצעורי לרבא אמרה ליה איפרא הורמיז אימיה דשבור מלכא לברה לא‬ ‫ בהדי יהודאי דכל מאן דבעיין ממרייהו יהיב להו אמר לה מאי היא בעין‬36‫ליהוי לך בי פיקאר‬ ‫רחמי ואתי מיטרא אמר לה ההוא משום דזימנא דמיטרא הוא אלא לבעו רחמי האידנא בתקופת‬ ‫תמוז וליתי מיטרא שלחה ליה לרבא כוין דעתך ובעי רחמי דליתי מיטרא בעי רחמי ולא אתי‬ ‫מיטרא אמר לפניו רבונו של עולם אלהים באזנינו שמענו אבותינו ספרו לנו פעל פעלת בימיהם‬ ‫ לדיגלת אתא אבוה‬37‫בימי קדם ואנו בעינינו לא ראינו אתא מיטרא עד דשפוך מרזבי דמחוזא‬ ‫איתחזי ליה בחלמיה ואמר ליה מי איכא דמיטרח קמי שמיא כולי האי אמר ליה שני‬ ‫דוכתיך שני דוכתיה למחר אשכחיה דמרשם פורייה בסכיני‬ There was a certain man who was sentenced to lashing in Rava’s court because he had intercourse with a non-Jewess. Rava beat him and he died. The matter was heard in the court of King Shapur. He wanted to torment Rava. Ifra Hormiz, the mother of King Shapur, said to her son, “Do not have any dispute with these Jews, for everything that they ask of their Master, He gives to them.” He said to her, “What is that?” [She responded,] “They ask for mercy and rain comes.” He said to her, “That is because it is the season of rain! Rather, they should request rain now in the summer season and let rain come!” She sent [the following message] to Rava, “Direct your intentions, request mercy, and let rain come.” He requested mercy and rain did not come. He said before [God], “Master of the world! ‘We, with our ears, have heard, O’ God, our fathers have told us the deeds You performed in their time, in days of old (Psalms 44:2)’—but we, with our eyes, have not seen [them]!”38 Rain came until it poured from the rain pipes of Mahoza to the Tigris. [Rava’s] father came to him in a dream and said to him, “Is there anyone who bothers heaven so much [that you forced us to help bring the rain]! [Rava’s father] said to him, “Change your place!” [Rava] changed his place. The next morning he woke up and found his bed incised with knives.

As in Niddah II, King Shapur doubts Rava’s ability, although in this case the issue concerns Rava’s ability to bring rain. When the king tests Rava during the summer months, Rava is initially ineffective, and he succeeds only by invoking the 36. ‫ ]בי פיקאר‬Following Ms Herzog. This word is a loanword from Middle Iranian *paykār, “dispute.” See Michael Sokoloff, Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Gaonic Periods (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 903 s.v. ‫פיקאר‬. 37. ‫ ]דמחוזא‬Following Ms Herzog. 38. Cf. Avot de-Rabbi Nathan B 25.

56

Talmudic Text and Iranian Context miracles that the fathers merited on their own accord and through heavenly intervention. In addition, Rava’s “success” is deemed a breach of earthly boundaries, and he nearly pays with his life. Although space does not permit a more extensive comparison of Niddah II and this related narrative, at the very least, it seems that a tradition circulated in Babylonia that doubted Rava’s abilities in general and specifically regarding encounters with the king.39 While these narratives attempt to assure the reader of Rava’s ultimate ability against the king’s misgivings, both retain some unsettling sentiments as well. A further similarity between Niddah II and the Ta‘anit tales is also worth noting. Both stories appear within the matrix of larger sugyot that express doubts about rabbinic abilities. In the case of the B. Ta‘anit tale, the subject is rabbinic success—or lack thereof—in praying for rain.40 Regarding Niddah II, anxiety concerning the ability of rabbis to determine the source of bloodstains is already present in the halakhic discussions of the larger B. Niddah sugya.41 The Gemara describes a rabbi who teaches his students about different blood colors, and ends with Rav Ashi’s statement that “[someone] like me, who does not know the difference between this [shade of red] and that—I do not examine blood [colors].”42 Later, the Gemara describes the different methods of earlier rabbis—including R. Elazar b. Pedat—to determine the source of bloodstains, but a number of later Amoraim claim that only earlier sages were competent to employ those methods of examination.43 Similarly, R. Zera expresses trepidation about trusting his sight for examining blood when he does not have the ability to understand Babylonian coinage. Finally, we read that even though he presumably had the skill, ‘Ulla would refuse to examine blood in Pumbedita because it had its own resident sage, R. Yehuda. This leads into our sequence of stories (Niddah I and II), after which the Gemara concludes with yet another reason for rabbis to decline the examination of blood. Thus, Rava’s lucky ruling and Ifra Hormiz’s praise represent the narrator’s attempt to close off anxiety about rabbinic “blood science,” just as the story about Rava praying for rain has similar goals. However, there is no denying the unsettling “loose end” that remains untied at the conclusion of Niddah II. I would argue that this represents evidence of a disruption in the fabric of the storyteller’s world, which in this case is stammaitic culture. What might lie behind this disruption of rabbinic power and confidence? To return to a previous point, why must this story be transformed into a Jewish–Zoroastrian encounter? An approach to

39. See, e.g., B. Eruvin 104a; B. Bava’ Bata’ 127a; B. Zevahim 94b; and B. Niddah 68a. I am grateful to Yaakov Elman for these references. For further discussion, see his “The Socioeconomics of Babylonian Heresy,” in Studies in Mediaeval Halakhah in Honor of Stephen M. Passamaneck, ed. Alyssa Gray and Bernard Jackson (Lanham, MD: Jewish Law Association, 2007). 40. B. Ta‘anit 24a–24b. 41. Regarding the relationship between halakhic sugyot and the narratives emended and adjacent to them, see Jeffrey Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories, 265–67; and Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, “Legal Narratives in the Babylonian Talmud” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005). 42. B. Niddah 20a. 43. B. Niddah 20b.

57

Shai Secunda these questions may be sought by fusing the two innovations of the Rava–Ifra Hormiz tale together. More specifically, it is possible to see the tale’s moments of doubt as a result of the rabbinic encounter with Zoroastrian purity laws.

VII. Z OROASTRIAN L AWS

OF

M ENSTRUAL P URITY

The maintenance of purity and the avoidance of sources of impurity, including corpses, “noxious creatures,” and menstruating women, constituted a central feature of Zoroastrianism from Young Avestan times (the first half of the first millennium BCE), through the Middle Ages, and into the modern period.44 The Zoroastrian menstrual laws were based on Indo-Iranian purity beliefs,45 which received a distinctly Zoroastrian recasting in the Young Avestan book the Widēwdād, and underwent further elaboration and intense development in the different layers of the Pahlavi Widēwdād (PV)—its Sasanian Middle Persian Zand46—in thematically based legal compilations such as Šāyest nē šāyest (Permitted and Not Permitted) and in later medieval texts.47 Still, for the most part, Sasanian Zoroastrianism has bequeathed a few sources to modern scholars with few sources that they can use to reconstruct its legal and ritual system—even the one conceived of by a minority, elite, priestly class. The world inhabited by Sasanian Zoroastrianism was “pervasively oral,” and it seems likely that much of Zoroastrian tradition was lost because it was not written down.48 This fate was probably accelerated by Islamic persecution and conversion in the centuries following the Arab conquest, the ascendance of “book culture” in Islamic lands, and the resultant decline of oral transmission. Most of the ritual texts have come down to us in the form of manuscripts no older than the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and they frequently contain technical terms whose meaning has been long forgotten. The most basic treatment of the menstrual purity laws in Sasanian Zoroastrianism can be found in the sixteenth chapter of the Pahlavi Widēvdād. Like all Zands, it consists of at least three separate layers: a Pahlavi translation of the Avesta; glosses that clarify obscure, often slavishly rendered words in that translation; and extended discussions between named and anonymous Zoroastrian

44. See Jamsheed K. Choksy, Purity and Pollution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). 45. See Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 1:294. 46. Alberto Cantera, in Studien zur Pahlavi-Übersetzung des Avesta (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004), 164–239, proves the Sasanian provenance of the Zand. 47. These include the end of the fifth book of the Dēnkard and scattered comments in postSasanian responsa (rivāyats). 48. This term follows Yaakov Elman’s description of the Babylonian rabbinic community in “Orality and the Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud,” Oral Tradition 14 (1999): 52–99. For a brief discussion of the centrality of orality in Zoroastrianism, see Philip Kreyenbroek, “The Zoroastrian Tradition from an Oralist’s Point of View,” in K. R. Cama Oriental Institute, Second International Congress Proceedings (5th to 8th January, 1995), ed. H. J. M. Desai and H. N. Modi (Bombay: K.R. Cama Oriental Institute, 1996), 221–37. See also my “The Sasanian Stam: Orality and the Composition of Babylonian Rabbinic and Zoroastrian Legal Literature” (forthcoming).

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Talmudic Text and Iranian Context authorities. While scholars have compared the first two layers to the biblical targumim, the extended discussions display the highest degree of similarity with rabbinic compilations such as the Mishnah and Tosefta in both style and content.49 VIII. T HE T HREE D ISCHARGES :

ČIHRAG , DAXŠAG , AND XŌN

The opening verse of the sixteenth chapter of the Pahlavi Widēwdād explains what Zoroastrians must do when a woman begins to menstruate. The Avesta employs three adjectives—ciWrauuaiti, daxštauuaiti, and vohunauuaiti— there and elsewhere when describing menstruating women.50 Despite the ambiguity of the meaning of ciWrauuaiti and daxštauuaiti, it is clear that each word in the triad refers to indications of menstruation. Thus, daxštauuaiti roughly means “with signs (of menstruation),” and vohunauuaiti quite certainly denotes “with blood.” The Zand slavishly translates and then glosses each word as follows: … čihragōmand [kū zard]51 daxšagōmand [tahīgōmand] xōnōmand [daštān] … … of čihrag [that is: yellow]52 of daxšag [(that is) tahīg] of blood [(that is) menstruation] …

The glosses here are unanticipated in that they appear to render each Avestansynonymous adjective differently. According to the Zand, the glosses daštān and zard apparently represent two different menstrual discharges—one regular (and presumably red), and one yellow. Although the term tahīg is itself ambiguous, its appearance elsewhere in the chapter to denote some sort of menstrual discharge53 suggests that the Zand’s three glosses may be read as a short list of various menstrual discharges consisting of yellow, blood-red, and the undefined tahīg.54 Again, these 49. See, e.g., Dan Shapira, “Studies in Zoroastrian Exegesis” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998), for a comparison to the biblical targums. See the brief comments of James Russell, “The Sage in Ancient Iranian Literature,” in The Sage in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. John G. Gammie and Leo G. Perdue (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 91. 50. Pahlavi Widēwdād (PV) 15.7, 16.5, 16.6, 16.14, 16.17., 18.67, and 18.69. 51. Following the convention in Iranian studies, glosses are marked with square brackets. 52. It is possible that zard is not what we call “yellow,” but rather is a specific color property. See, e.g., Ardā Wirāz Nāmag, ed. Fereydun Vahman (London: Curzon Press, 1986), 141, 207: “And I saw many people whose heads and beards were shaved and their faces were pale [zard], bodies rotten all over, and reptiles were creeping over their bodies.” Notably, this use of zard is similar to Hebrew yarok (green-yellow, but when describing human expression, it probably means “pale”). See, e.g., T. Niddah 5:3. 53. There are three meanings for the word tahīg in the sixteenth chapter of PV. One is “airspace” (perhaps this should be read as tūhīg, as it is spelled elsewhere in manuscripts). Tahīg may also be a legal term referring to an extra day of waiting after the cessation of the menstrual flow—as it clearly means in later Pahlavi literature. Finally, it can refer to a type of menstrual discharge. While this final meaning is only a possibility in PV 16.11.2–4 and 16.12.3, it is conclusive in 16.14. 54. Shaul Shaked has tentatively suggested that tahīg might be some sort of colorless substance, again related to its “primary” meaning of “emptiness” (private communication, June 2005). In other words, zard may mean “pale,” and tahīg may mean “clear.”

59

Shai Secunda occur despite the fact that the Avesta clearly is not doing anything other than using three adjectives to describe a menstruant. Apparently, the rabbis were not the only religious group in late antiquity who sought to attribute various menstrual colors to their scripture through the exegesis of redundant terms. Significantly, in both cases, this form of exegesis may be considered omnisignificant; that is, rabbinic and Zoroastrian exegetes offer new and distinct meanings of scriptural terms in order to avoid perceived redundancies.55 As Yaakov Elman and Yuhan Vevaina have demonstrated, omnisignificance is not only a Jewish phenomenon, as first pointed out by James Kugel,56 but here and elsewhere can be found in the work of Avestan commentators as well.57 In the sense that omnisignificance implies a distinctly reverential posture of exegetes toward the text they are interpreting, its appearance in both Zoroastrian and rabbinic works of late antiquity is yet another important area of study for joint collaboration of Iranists and Talmudists. In the specific context of the menstrual laws, it contains a further layer of significance. From a legal-exegetical perspective, the rabbis did not “need” to derive a complex taxonomy of menstrual colors from the biblical text. Like the Samaritans, they could have read the passages in Leviticus that describe menstruants and applied a more basic approach in which women themselves determine whether their discharges are menstrual, nonmenstrual, or undetermined.58 Instead, already beginning in tannaitic literature and developing in the Talmudim, the rabbis chose to develop an area of expertise entirely unanticipated in the Bible. This, in turn, required the rabbis to engage in a high level of exegetical acrobatics in order to ground the bloodstain taxonomy in the biblical text.59 Similarly, the Zand chose to link these various discharges directly to the

Alternatively, Oktor Skjærvø has suggested that tahīg renders Avestan daxštauuaiti on account of the Zoroastrian mythological origins of menstruation. Specifically, Bundahišn 4.5 describes the world’s first onset of menstruation as a sign of Ahriman’s kiss of the primal whore. This resulted in some kind of invisible (tahīg) impurity that forever accompanies menstruation. 55. Space does not permit me to delineate the rabbinic exegesis of the bloodstains. See Sifra Leviticus; Sheratzim 11:4; Zavim 4:1; Sifre Deuteronomy 152; Y. Niddah 2:3 (50a); B. Niddah 19a; and my discussion in Secunda, “Dashtana,” 62–85. 56. See Elman, “Acculturation to Elite Persian Norms,” 40 n. 13; Yuhan Vevaina’s doctoral dissertation, “Studies in Zoroastrian Exegesis and Hermeneutics with a Critical Edition of the ‘Sudgar Nask’ of ‘Denkard’ Book 9” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007), 99–135; and James Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 103–104. 57. For a similar example, see PV 18.67 regarding a man who copulates with a menstruate: kē nāīrīg ī čihragōmand ud daxšagōmand xōnōmand wēnāyihā [kū wēnēd kū daštān] āgāhihā [kū dānēd kū wināh] … When (a man copulates with) a woman who is of čihrag, daxšag and blood, observantly (wēnāyihā) [he observes that she is a menstruant woman] (and) knowingly (āgāhihā ) [he knows that that it is a sin] … The Zand explains the seemingly redundant Avestan terms of cognition by rendering them as knowledge of the facts and knowledge of the law, respectively. 58. See, e.g., Iain Ruairidh Mac Mhanainn Bóid, Principles of Samaritan Halacha (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 144. 59. See Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 103–27.

60

Talmudic Text and Iranian Context Avestan verse instead of relegating them to common-sense knowledge. While the Zoroastrian system did not undergo anywhere near the level of development and intensity of discourse that the rabbinic system did, the derivation of various discharges through omnisignificant exegesis represents a similar need to attach scriptural authority to this aspect of the menstrual laws. The Zand’s interpretation of čihrag as yellow, and daxšag as tahīg, appears later in the chapter as well. In PV 16.14–15, the Avesta discusses the punishment for having sex with a menstruant. In contrast to 16.13, which describes a woman who hides evidence of menstruation, 16.14–15 deals with a case in which the woman’s status as a menstruant is eminently clear: O Orderly creator …. He who at a prepaid price(?) mingles his body in action (with that) of a woman with signs, with menses, with blood, when her sign is noticeable, when her menses are clear, what is the penalty for it? Then Ahura Mazdā said: The first he approaches, the first he sits down with, one should apply thirty strokes with the horse whip, thirty with the bastinado….60

The Avesta contains an interesting play on words. In order to express the certainty of the woman’s impure status, the Avesta employs the same adjectives it used previously to describe a menstruant: yat hē ciWra daxštəm bauuaiti yat hē daxšta ciWrəm bauuaiti (when her sign is noticeable, when her menses are clear). The Pahlavi Zand takes this verse out of its plain meaning and translates as follows:61 dādār ka nāirīg *čihragōmand daxšagōmand xōnōmand was bār pad kāmagkunišnīh tan gumēzēd kū-š was bār abāg hamkarzag bēd tā ka ān ī ōy čīhrag daxšag bawēd [kū az zardīh abāz ō tahīg wardēd] ayāb ān ī ō daxšag čihrag bawēd [kū az tahīg abāz ō zardīh wardēd]. kadār *ōy ast tōzišn u-š guft Ohrmazd kū sīh pad abar zanišnīh abar zanišnīh asp-aštar sih srōšōčaranām. Creator: When a woman of čihrag, daxšag, of blood, mingles her body in willful action many times [that is she comes into (sexual) contact many times with him]. Until when the čihrag becomes daxšag [that is, it changes from yellow back to tahīg] or that of daxšag becomes čihrag [that is, it changes from tahīg back to yellow]. What is the atonement (for) that? And Ohrmazd said: thirty strokes *should be struck upon him for the crime (with) the horsewhip, (and) thirty (with the) bastinado.62 60. For a related passage, see PV 18:67. 61. See Jehangir C. Tavadia, Šāyast nē Šāyast: A Pahlavi Text on Religious Customs (Hamburg: Friederichsen, de Gruyter, 1930), 79, in reference to this passage: “which gloss, it may be added, does not explain the original.” 62. PV 16.14–15.

61

Shai Secunda The Zand’s initial translation of the Avesta is quite direct. The word bawēd, the present-singular form of the Pahlavi verb for being (budan), predictably renders Avestan as bauuaiti. Yet the Zand’s gloss for bawēd, namely wardēd, connotes “turning” or “changing,” and it emphasizes another aspect of the Pahlavi verb budan—that of “becoming.” Therefore, instead of understanding the phrase to mean “when her sign [ciWra/čihrag] is noticeable, when her menses [daxshta/ daxšag] are clear,” the Zand perceives čihrag as physically changing into daxšag and vice versa. Like the opening verse of the chapter, this section also implies that čihrag and daxšag are two different substances and not simply repetitive adjectives that describe a menstruant. Accordingly, once again čihrag is glossed as zard (yellow) and daxšag as tahīg. I suggest that in an effort to give a sense of divine authority to the decisions that Zoroastrians had to make regarding vaginal discharges, the Zand links the substances to scripture. However, as I stated previously, unlike the rabbis, the Zoroastrian priests did not devise a complex system of pure and impure discharges that led to a new kind of ecclesiastical expertise. We only have hints in the Pahlavi Widēwdād, and one explicit statement in Šāyest nē šāyest,63 that express an actual position on examinations of bloodstains. Again, the Zand in the opening verse of PV 16 implicitly considers regular (red), yellow, and tahīg discharges impure because they require a woman who experiences them to get herself to the daštānistān (menstrual “hut”). The Zand in PV 16.11 also treats tahīg as an impure substance.64 Šāyest nē šāyest 3.14–18 closely follows the laws of tahīg outlined in PV 16.11. A synoptic study of Šāyest nē šāyest 3 and PV 16 reveals that Šāyest nē šāyest 3.19 is based on PV 16.11.2. Šāyest nē šāyest 3.19 states, čihrag ka gōn bē wašt ān ī pēš ān-iz ī pas az daštān bē āyēd rēmanīh ēdōn bawēd čiyōn daštān (Regarding) čihrag: When the color has changed, that which comes before and also that which comes after menstruation is impure. It is as (regular) menstruation.

The Šāyest nē šāyest passage appears to be interpreting a phrase from PV 16.11.2, ud harw čiš ēdōn bawēd čiyōn daštān, or “and everything is like menstruation.”65 This clause is apparently understood to mean that all “things” (čiš)—or discharges 63. 3.19. 64. In PV 16.11.1, Kay-Ādur-Bozēd interprets the Avestan statement in 16.11 to rule that a menstruant must wait at least four days before examining herself, and only then may she purify herself, at the earliest, on the fifth day. In PV 16.11.2, Sōšāns explains that purification within the first three days is impossible because there is a concern for tahīg—in other words, that she will emit this particular substance and it will render her menstrually impure. In addition, tahīg discharge is the concern that forces a woman to wait an extra day following the cessation of her menstrual flow, provided that this occurs within nine days of the flow’s commencement. 65. In the larger context of PV 16.11.2 as it has come down to us, the phrase refers to a woman whose period has started again, either after a break in her menstrual flow or after she has menstruated through an entire cycle. PV considers both of these cases (harw čiš) as if she has began her menstrual

62

Talmudic Text and Iranian Context (čihrag)—are to be considered impure. Šāyest nē šāyest either reflects a different version of the Pahlavi Widēwdād or, alternatively, reinterprets it to mean that the undefined “thing” in the phrase harw čiš (everything) refers specifically to discharges. Despite the fact that in an extensive passage, PV 16.2 is concerned with the legal parameters of the onset of menstruation, it is striking that there is no indisputable mention in the Zand or in subsequent medieval responsa of women or priests checking the appearance of vaginal discharges. Even though Zoroastrian law was careful about determining the exact moment of menstrual impurity, and, accordingly, there are two explicit references to examinations in that passage (PV 16.2.3 and 16.2.5), these two cases seem to relate to verifying simply whether there is an emission at all and not to the particulars of a discharge’s appearance.66 IX. THE RESULT OF RABBINIC AND ZOROASTRIAN DIFFERENCES ON RULING ON BLOODSTAINS In sum, Zoroastrian law considers, but rejects, legal differentiation between the colors of vaginal discharges. Thus, we might say that rabbinic concern over ruling on bloodstains, which is already present in other parts of the sugya at B. Niddah 19a–21b, is a looming concern for the narrator of the Rava and Ifra Hormiz tale precisely because the connotations of that encounter were a great source of anxiety. The narrator’s attempt to allay this concern betrays the rabbinic lack of confidence to rule on bloodstains. While this lack of confidence might previously have demonstrated a form of basic religious piety (stringency in the face of doubt) or an awareness of the “decline of the generations,” it becomes acute in daily contact between Jews, who were lenient in this matter, and Zoroastrians, who were more stringent. Although the tale is clearly a literary construction that does not record an actual historical event, it does preserve important information regarding its narrator and his world. First, at the risk of stating the obvious, the story confirms our knowledge that Babylonian rabbis recognized the significance of menstrual impurity in Zoroastrian life.67 It also goes far beyond this by expressing a two-pronged rabbinic fantasy: first, that the rabbinic menstrual impurity laws are essentially superior to the competing Zoroastrian system; and second, that rabbis are consulted by Sasanian royalty regarding purity matters. At the same time, in the

cycle anew (ēdōn bawēd čiyōn daštān), and she must wait an extra day (tahīg) before purification is possible. However, it seems that Šāyest nē šāyest understands or uses this phrase differently. 66. An interesting method of checking an aborted substance for signs of human development is discussed in PV 5:49 and in subsequent Zoroastrian literature. It is worth noting that this method, which consists of soaking the fleshy “knot” in bull’s urine, is similar to methods recommended in the Bavli (B. Niddah 22b) that have the woman soak unidentified birth-like discharges in lukewarm water. Still, there is no similar technique recommended for determining the nature of vaginal discharges—a matter certainly more common and important for everyday Zoroastrian observance. 67. See B. Ta’anit 22a; and B. Avodah Zarah 18b, 24b.

63

Shai Secunda form of two moments of doubt, the tale retains traces of anxiety concerning these very claims: Do the Jews really curry royal admiration, and are rabbis truly unassailable in their diagnosis of bloodstains? X. R AV K AHANA

AND THE

M IN (B. S ANHEDRIN 37 A )

The same dual focus on internal hermeneutics and external circumstances might be applied to another talmudic story to reveal a remarkably similar development. Once again, we find older, “anonymous” rabbinic concerns “externalized” and placed in the mouth of a character who apparently represents Zoroastrianism: ‫ ההוא מינ' לרב כהנא אמריתו נדה שרי לאתיחודי בהדי גברא איפשר אש בנעורת‬68‫אמר ליה‬ ‫ שושנים לא יפרצו‬69‫ואינה מהבהבת אמ' לי' התורה העידה עלינו סוגה בשושנים שאפילו כסוגות‬ ‫בנו פרצות‬ A certain min said to Rav Kahana, “You say that a menstruant is permitted to seclude herself with [her] husband. Is it possible for fire to be near flax without singeing it?” [R. Kahana] responded, “The Torah testifies of us, “Hedged with lilies (Songs 7:3).” That even like hedges of lilies they will not make breaches among us.

I. H. Weiss and, more recently, Eli Ahdut and Yaakov Elman have argued persuasively that the anonymous “heretic” (min) here is a Zoroastrian70—or at least someone who espouses Zoroastrian views.71 They have also explained that at root of the debate is the daštānistān, or menstrual “hut” in which Zoroastrian women must sit from the onset of menstruation until purification at least five days later.72 The min challenges the rabbinic menstrual laws by claiming that if menstruants are not segregated, husbands and wives will not be able to avoid intimacy. Rav Kahana responds by claiming that the Torah testifies of the Jews that they are compared to hedges of lilies. All Jews, even those as (spiritually) 68. ‫ ]אמר ליה‬Following Ms Herzog. However, Ms Munich 95, ed. Barko, Yalqut Shimoni, and Ra’avan all connect this passage with the previous one and read: ‫ליה … והיינו כדאמר‬. 69. ‫ ]כסוגות שושנים‬Following Ms Herzog. Ms Munich 95: ‫'בסוג' של שוש‬. ed. Barko: ‫בסוגה בשושנים‬. Ra’avan: ‫כסוגה של שושנים‬. 70. I. H. Weiss, Dor dor ve-doreshav (Vilna: Rom, 1921), 2:14; Eli Ahdut, “Jewish-Zoroastrian Polemics in the Babylonian Talmud,” in Irano-Judaica IV, ed. Shaul Shaked and Netzer (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 1999), 29–30 [Hebrew numbering]; and Elman, “He in His Cloak,” 136–37. 71. Recent work by Yaakov Sussman demonstrates that previous claims that min connotes only Christian groups are unfounded. See his “H.eqer toledot ha-halakha u-megillot midbar Yehudah: hirhurim talmudiyim rishonim le-‘or megillat ‘miqs.at ma‘ase torah,’” Tarbiz 59 (1990): 11–76. See also Christine Hayes, “Displaced Self-Perceptions: The Deployment of ‘Mînîm’ and Romans in B. Sanhedrin 90b-91a,” in Religious and Ethnic Communities in Later Roman Palestine, ed. Hayim Lapin (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 1998), 249–89. For a more general study of the phenomenon of literary deployment of “Others” in rabbinic texts, see Hayes, “The ‘Other’ in Rabbinic Literature,” in Fonrobert and Jaffee, The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, 243–69. 72. For the daštānistān, see J. J. Modi, The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Parsees (Bombay: British India Press, 1922), 170–73; and Secunda, “Dashtana,” 210.

64

Talmudic Text and Iranian Context frail as lilies, can be trusted not to have sex while secluded with their menstruant wives.73

XI. T HE S OURCES

OF THE

R AV K AHANA TALE

Since ancient times, the Song of Songs has been interpreted allegorically. Most fundamentally, the interplay between the book’s male and female lovers has been read as an expression of the relationship between God and the Jewish people. Similarly, the rabbis have read a whole host of characters into the text, such as Gentiles, Moses and Aaron, various Jewish leaders, and the Jewish court system.74 Indeed, Palestinian sources understand the beginning of Songs 7:3 as referring to the Sanhedrin—the highest Jewish court: ‫שררך אגן הסהר שררך אלו סנהדרין מה תינוק זה כל זמן שהוא במעי אמו אינו חי אלא מטיבורו‬ ‫כך אין ישראל יכולין לעשות דבר חוץ מסנהדרין שלהם אגן הסהר אדרה דאזהרה אבון בר חסדי‬ ‫אמר אית אתרין דקריין וצווחין לזהרא סהרא אל יחסר המזג אל תחסר סנהדרין מעשרים ושלשה‬ ‫דבר אחר אל יחסר המזג אל תחסר סנהדרין מופלא שלה דבר אחר אל יחסר המזג אל תחסר‬ ‫סנהדרין זה שהוא ממזג לה את ההלכה כההיא דתנינן תמן מזג שני חלקים מים ואחד יין מיין‬ ‫השרוני ד"א אל יחסר המזג לא נחסר מזגא דעלמא המד"א ה' רועי לא אחסר‬ “Your navel is like a round goblet (Songs 7:3)”—this refers to the Sanhedrin. Just as a fetus, as long as it is in its mother’s womb, it does not live except through its navel [cord], so too Israel cannot do [any]thing except through their Sanhedrin. “A round goblet [agan ha-sahar]”—the threshing floor of enlightenment [adrah de-azharah].75 Avun b. Hisdai said, “There are places 73. Our interpretation follows Ms Herzog and the larger redactional scheme of the sugya. However, Rashi (ad loc., s.v. sugah) explains that the hedge of lilies refers to lenient biblical legislation, such as the menstrual laws, which permits a husband and his menstruant wife to be secluded together despite the danger that they might become intimate. Rashi’s interpretation does not take into account Rav Kahana’s opening phrase, “the Torah testifies of us …”—which implies that the lily metaphor is applied to the Jews themselves and not to their laws. More problematic, according to Rashi’s explanation the continuation of the sugya is incomprehensible. The sugya proceeds by citing Reish Laqish and R. Zera’s teachings as offering alternatives to Rav Kahana’s teaching: ‫ריש לקיש אמר מהכא כפלח הרמון רקתך אפילו ריקנין שבך מלאין מצוות כרמון רבי זירא אמר מהכא‬ ‫וירח את ריח בגדיו אל תיקרי בגדיו אלא בוגדיו‬ Reish Laqish said from here, “your temples (rakkatekh) are like a pomegranate split open (Songs 4:3).” Even the emptiest (rekanin) among you are as full of meritorious deeds as a pomegranate [is of seeds]. R. Zera said from here, “And he smelled the smell of his raiment (begadav) (Genesis 27:27).” Read not begadav (his raiment) rather, bogedav (his traitors). The phrase “rabbi X said from here (‫)פלוני אמר מהכא‬,” means that Rabbi X suggests an alternative prooftext to convey the same idea as the previous authority. If Rav Kahana’s statement is concerned with the weakness of some biblical prohibitions, it is hard to see how Reish Laqish and R. Zera’s description of the value of “empty” and “traitorous” Jews supports his idea. 74. See Daniel Boyarin, “Shnei mevo‘ot lemidrash shir hashirim,” Tarbiz 56 (1986–87): 479–500. 75. See Michael Sokoloff, Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 36, s.v. ‫אדר‬. According to the Mishnah, the Sanhedrin met in a

65

Shai Secunda that call and term the moon, “sehara’.76 “In which no mingled wine is wanting [yehaser ha-mezeg]”—the Sanhedrin should not lack twenty-three (members for a quorum). Another opinion: “In which no mingled wine is wanting”—the Sanhedrin should not lack its mufla’.77 Another opinion: “In which no mingled wine is wanting”—The Sanhedrin should not lack this one who “dilutes the Law.” As it is taught there [in a Mishnah],78 “ ‘mezeg’ means two parts water and one part wine using Sharon wine.” Another opinion: “In which no mingled wine is wanting,”—Let us not lack the butler of the world,79 as it says, “the Lord is my shepherd; I will not lack (Psalms 23:1).”80

As is typical in midrash, the beginning of the next stich is interpreted differently in a number of sources.81 “Your belly is like a heap of wheat” is seen as referring to the book of Leviticus, the people of Israel, or, once again, the Sanhedrin. However, all the sources interpret the final phrase, “like a hedge of roses,” as somehow related to the challenge of observing the menstrual laws. I have described the Palestinian exegesis of Songs 7:3 in some detail in order to demonstrate an interesting structural correlation between these sources and B. Sanhedrin 37a. Rav Kahana’s discussion with the min takes place in a sugya that is primarily concerned with the seating arrangement of the Sanhedrin. M. Sanhedrin 4:3, the Mishnah that is the focus of the sugya in which the Rav Kahana anecdote is found, requires the Sanhedrin to sit in a semicircle. Accordingly, R. Aha b. H.anina begins the sugya by searching for a biblical prooftext for this requirement. He subsequently quotes a baraita’ that is quite similar to the midrash found in Songs Rabbah 10 and is later expanded in the Pesikta Rabbati parallel. Once again, the lover’s navel is interpreted as a metaphor for the Sanhedrin—though here it supports the Sanhedrin’s location on the Temple Mount. Similarly, the word sahar is understood via a homonym—sehara (the moon). In addition, mezeg, the diluted wine, is employed to require a quorum of twenty-three members. The image of the belly, which most Palestinian sources do not relate to the Sanhedrin, in the Bavli is connected to the benefit derived from the Sanhedrin. It is possible that, initially, the Bavli even connects the phrase “hedged with lilies”

chamber on the Temple Mount (M. Sanhedrin 11:2). The rabbis refer here to the Temple Mount as a threshing floor since according to tradition, King David bought the land from Arvana the Jebusite who used it for that purpose. See II Samuel 24. 76. This is probably a reference to the semicircle seating arrangement of the Sanhedrin. See textual parallels. 77. The meaning of this term is contested. See Z. A. Steinfeld, “Mufla shel beit din,” Sinai 82 (1978): 24–40. 78. M. Niddah 2:7. 79. The meaning of this term is unclear. See Sokoloff, Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, 298 s.v. ‫מזוג‬. 80. Canticles Rabbah 7:3. Cf. Pesikta Rabbati, Parshat Ki Tissa §10. 81. Cf. Canticles Rabbah 7:3; Psalms Rabbah 2:15; Pesikta Rabbati; Ki Tissa 10; Avot de-Rabbi Nathan A (ARNA) 2; Avot de-Rabbi Nathan B (ARNB) 3; and B. Sanhedrin 37a.

66

Talmudic Text and Iranian Context to the Sanhedrin.82 On the other hand, Rav Kahana’s response to the min is based on an alternative reading of the conclusion of Songs 7:3 that is related not to the Sanhedrin but rather to the menstrual laws.83 In other words, the Bavli’s structure generally follows the Palestinian midrashic model in which Songs 7:3 is initially understood as referring to the Sanhedrin, and is later connected to Israel and the menstrual laws. This is explicated in Avot de-Rabbi Nathan B (ARNB), which introduces the “menstrual interpretation” as a preferred alternative to reading “hedged with lilies” as a metaphor for the sages.84 According to our understanding of Rav Kahana’s response to the min, the Bavli also shifts the meaning of Songs 7:3 in the same direction by first interpreting the verse as referring to the highest court and then to the lowest element of Jewish society. Another element of the Rav Kahana anecdote is also expressed most clearly in the ARNB parallel. Unlike the Bavli, which cites the midrashic treatment of Songs 7:3 because of its reference to the Sanhedrin, ARNB is primarily interested in the lily metaphor as it relates to rabbinic enactments aimed at protecting the menstrual laws from even inadvertent violation. Indeed, as a unit, ARNB 3 is devoted to a discussion of “biblical fences”—that is, biblical enactments aimed at protecting more serious prohibitions from being transgressed. The chapter opens with two examples of such fences. First, there is the prohibition against secluding oneself with a close relative in order to prevent a violation of the incest laws. Second, there are the rules against any kind of playful contact with a menstruant. This leads into the exegesis of Songs 7:3, cited earlier. Although all of the Palestinian sources highlight the lack of social pressure to keep the menstrual laws because of the fact that the temptation to transgress them occurs in the privacy of one’s bedroom, the passage in ARNB explicitly 82. I assume this based on this derasha’s placement in a midrashic collection devoted solely to the Sanhedrin, and also based on parallels with ARN. Nevertheless, the meaning of the clause is somewhat unclear. See also Raphael N. N. Rabbinovicz, Dikdukei sofrim, 2 vols. (New York: M.P. Press, 1976), Sanhedrin, 21, note daled. 83. Note that Ms Herzog does not record the linking terminology, “ve-haynu ke- (and that is like …)” found in other manuscripts and witnesses that introduce the Rav Kahana anecdote as supporting the first exegesis of Songs 7:3. 84. ARNB 3 (ed. Schechter 112, cf. Hans-Jürgen Becker, Avot de-Rabbi Natan: Synoptische Edition beider Versionen [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006], 323) states, ‫ אם כן למה‬.‫סוגה ]בשושנים[ אלו חכמים ותלמידי' ]שהם[ סגים את ישראל בתפלתם ]מפני[ הפורעניות‬ ‫ אלא פירות שאינן‬.‫ מי ממחה בידיו‬,‫נאמר סוגה בשושנים אלא אשתו נדה בבית עמו שמא ילך לו עליה‬ [‫ אלא המצות שישראל עושים ]בסתר[ שהן ]רכות‬.‫מעושרות עמו בבית שמא יאכל מהם מי ממחה בידיו‬ .‫כשושנים לכך נאמר סוגה בשושנים‬ “Hedged with lilies”—these are the sages and students who protect (sagim) Israel from misfortune with their prayers. If so, why does it say, “hedged with lilies?” Rather his wife is with him in the house. Perhaps he will go to her—who will protest? Or if there are untithed fruits with him in the house, perhaps he will eat from them—who will protest? Rather, these are the commandments that Israel performs [in private] which are soft like lilies. Therefore it says, “hedged with lilies” [emphasis added].

67

Shai Secunda contrasts the stringent “fence” that forbids seclusion with relatives with the permission granted to a husband and wife to be alone even when she is menstruating. Thus, ARNB calls the fence aimed at protecting the menstrual laws a “weak fence,” as a man may be alone in his house with his menstruant wife even though no one is around to prevent them from becoming intimate. Of course, the most fundamental connection between the Rav Kahana anecdote and the Palestinian sources is the understanding that “hedged with lilies” somehow refers to the menstrual laws. The root of this association is explicated in some of the Palestinian parallels: ‫ לוי בנוהג שבעולם אדם נושא אשה בן ל' שנה בן מ' שנה‬85‫א"ר‬ ‫משמוציא יציאותיו הוא בא לזקק לה והיא אומרת לו כשושנה אדומה ראיתי ופורש ממנה מיד‬ R. Levi said, “According to the custom of the world a man marries a woman when he is thirty [or] forty years old. After spending his money [on the wedding feast] he comes to unite [himself] to her. And [if] she says, “I have seen [a drop of blood] like a red lily,” he separates himself from her immediately.86

What is particularly interesting about this source is that although it stems from the ancient association of red lilies with menstruation, the actual midrashic mechanism reads the lilies in terms of the flowers’ softness, and it understands the metaphor as expressing the vulnerability of certain “soft,” in other words, vulnerable, commandments. While Rav Kahana’s response to the min also focuses on the flowers’ “softness” and does not explicate the lily–menstruation association, it departs from the Palestinian sources and identifies the lily metaphor with morally weak Jews.

XII. T HE R EWORKING

OF THE

S OURCES

OF THE

R AV K AHANA TALE

In sum, the Bavli passage and the Palestinian sources share much in terms of content and structure, namely the lily–menstruation association, the structural similarity of the interpretation of Songs 7:3, and, finally, the concern that the menstrual laws are vulnerable because of the privacy granted to a husband and wife.87 At the same time, the Rav Kahana narrator reworks his sources in a distinct way. First, an initially “internal” concern is “externalized” through its transformation into a dialogue between a rabbi and a Zoroastrian-style min. In addition, the lily 85. Canticles Rabbah 7:3. 86. This dramatization draws from a Leviticus Rabbah tradition (19:6 and parallels) about the Judean King, Yohayah.in, who withstood a similar test after being granted a conjugal visit with his wife in prison. 87. We should also add that Richard Kalmin has recently demonstrated that stories told about minim in the Bavli are often taken from Palestinian sources. See his Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 98–101. Because these minim stories are subsequently reworked in the Bavli, the evidence that they provide has more bearing on rabbinic Sasanian Mesopotamia than on rabbinic Roman Palestine.

68

Talmudic Text and Iranian Context metaphor is shifted from referring to commandments to referring to Jews. An interesting feature of the ARNB parallel is that although it raises the issue that the menstrual laws are in constant danger of transgression because of seclusion, it does not solve the problem. In other words, the passage is essentially descriptive—it states that there are certain “biblical fences” that are weaker than others, and leaves the discussion at that.88 This is in contrast to Rav Kahana’s response, which solves the problem by claiming that the Torah testifies to inherent Jewish piety. As in the Rava-Ifra Hormiz tale, the “Zoroastrianization” of previously anonymous characters or concerns signifies that the Jewish–Zoroastrian encounter constituted a new source of anxiety for old problems. Here, a concern that already existed in Palestine is placed “in the mouth” of a Zoroastrian-style min—that is, someone who represents an external threat to rabbinic authority. Recent research by Christine Hayes has demonstrated that talmudic narrators strategically employ “Others,” such as Romans and minim, in order to express controversial ideas that lie outside normative rabbinic tradition but were indeed entertained by the rabbis—or at least their constituents. It seems plausible that the presence of Zoroastrian menstrual “huts” in Babylonia encouraged some Jews to consider adopting the stringency of forbidding seclusion with a menstruant. The narrator of the Rav Kahana anecdote first marginalizes this suggestion by placing it in the mouth of a min. He then responds to the argument by expressing a form of religious pride. The narrator implicitly claims that although, when secluded, a man and woman normally cannot be trusted to keep their sexual passions in check, the Torah assures that “we Jews”—even the lowly ones—are able to resist this temptation. The tale thus simultaneously acknowledges the libidinous dangers of permitting menstruating women to remain at home with their husbands as well as Zoroastrian pragmatism in relegating them to menstrual “huts”—while it claims that Jews need not worry about these issues. This, too, can be related to the dynamics of the Rava–Ifra Hormiz tale. Like the Rav Kahana anecdote, the Rava story also attempts to instill confidence in the exceptionality of Jews—here, rabbis—to diagnose bloodstains successfully against a background of rabbinic and Zoroastrian unease with this very practice. The goal of this paper has been to demonstrate through source critical and “contextual” analysis that both tales mirrored the dynamics of Sasanian Mesopotamia and its complex net of cultural and religious tensions. Beyond our immediate conclusions, we hope that the paper will encourage further research concerned with the Bavil and its place in the culturally effervescent world of Sasanian Mesopotamia. Shai Secunda Yale University New Haven, Connecticut

88. It is possible that this description is intended to act as a warning. Still, no warning is explicated.

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AJS Review 33:1 (2009), 71–100 © 2009 Association for Jewish Studies doi:10.1017/S036400940900004X

C ZECHS , G ERMANS , A RABS , J EWS : F RANZ K AFKA’ S “J ACKALS AND A RABS ” BETWEEN B OHEMIA AND PALESTINE by

Dimitry Shumsky I. “J ACKALS

AND

A RABS ”

BETWEEN

J EWS

AND NON -J EWS

Franz Kafka’s short story “Schakale und Araber” (Jackals and Arabs) was published in October 1917 in the monthly journal Der Jude, the intellectual organ of German-speaking Zionism founded and edited by Martin Buber.1 The narrator, an unidentified and pleasant-mannered European man traveling in the desert, makes a stop at an oasis in an Arab area. The circumstances of his journey and its objectives are unknown. It becomes apparent from his story that the man has come to the Arab desert merely by chance “from the far North,” and that he has no intention of remaining in the area for long.2 All of a sudden, shortly after his “tall [and] white” Arab host has retired to the sleeping area, the narrator finds himself completely surrounded by a pack of jackals.3 One of them, who introduces himself as “the oldest jackal far and wide,” approaches the man and implores him to solve once and for all the long-standing dispute between the jackals and the Arabs, as the traveler alone—a man hailing from those countries in which reason reigns supreme, which is not the case among the Arabs—is capable of doing so. Once the jackal elder has related to the European traveler the story of his tribe’s tribulations, and how they have been compelled to reside alongside the “filthy Arabs” from one generation to the next, another jackal produces a pair of scissors, which, according to the jackals’ ancient belief, is to serve the long-awaited man of reason “from the North” to rescue them from their abhorrent and hated neighbors.4 But at that moment, the Arab caravan leader appears, wielding an immense whip. The reader learns that

1. “Schakale und Araber” appeared together with another short story of Kafka’s, “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” (A Report to an Academy), under the joint title “Zwei Tiergeschichten” (Two Animal Stories); see Franz Kafka, “Zwei Tiergeschichten: I. Schakale und Araber,” Der Jude II (1917–18): 488–90. The notations that follow refer to Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, ed. Gabriel Josipovici (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). 2. Kafka, Collected Stories, 176. 3. Ibid., 175. 4. Ibid., 177, 178.

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Dimitry Shumsky not only was the Arab awake while the jackal elder sought to persuade the European man to undertake the salvation project and listening attentively to the jackal’s words, but in fact, he has been well aware of the jackals’ intentions for a long time: It’s common knowledge; so long as Arabs exist, that pair of scissors goes wandering through the desert and will wander with us to the end of our days. Every European is offered it for the great work; every European is just the man that Fate has chosen for them. They have the most lunatic hopes, these beasts; they’re just fools, utter fools.5

It appears, though, that the jackals’ continual attempts to outwit the Arabs by eliminating them at the hands of a European while they are asleep do not unduly arouse the Arabs’ anger, but rather amuse them greatly. And so, the Arab caravan leader, who has brought for the jackals the carcass of a camel that expired that night, lashes them hard with his sharp whip, as he observes, not without pleasure, how the jackals are torn between their fear of the Arab’s whip and their craving for the carcass of his camel.6 The European, whose tendency not to interfere in the local dispute between the jackals and Arabs is evident throughout the story, now nevertheless appears unable to stand aside at the sight of this wanton cruelty toward the ravenous animals, and he takes hold of the Arab’s arm as the latter once more wields his whip.7 Although the jackals have not won the longedfor active support of the representative of European reason for their cause, he is at least willing to ease their suffering and, to some extent, to moderate the confrontation at its peak. Indeed, the Arab is eventually convinced of the futility of whipping the jackals as they eat the carcass, and he leaves them to continue their feast undisturbed.8 Largely influenced by the “text-immanent” approach that emerged in literary criticism precisely at the time Kafka’s work was in vogue following the Second World War,9 most of the earlier students of “Jackals and Arabs” were reluctant to treat the story against its immediate historical background, attempting instead to interpret it “from within.” It is hardly surprising, therefore, that interpretations of this sort ignored an “external” fact—the Jewish national orientation of the periodical in which “Jackals and Arabs” first appeared—and thus did not inquire into any possible Jewish-based context of the story.10 Herbert Tauber claimed that “in the character of the Arab the unalterable, inexorable law of the World is opposed to [humanity’s] all vain dreams of redemption,” as represented in the jackals’ glorification of cleanliness, in itself “a parody of the human dream 5. Ibid., 178. 6. Ibid., 178–79. 7. Ibid., 179. 8. Ibid. 9. Helen Milful, “Kafka—The Jewish Context,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 22 (1978): 227. 10. On Der Jude’s national Jewish orientation and its position in the German Jewish intellectual world toward the end of the First World War and thereafter, see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 33–35.

72

Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews of light and cleanliness.”11 To Charles Neider, the jackal–Arab dichotomy hints at “the incommensurability between nature and spirit,” respectively.12 Walter Sokel was convinced that the story illustrates aspects of Kafka’s relationship with the writer’s father: the parasitic yet rebellious jackals representing Franz Kafka, himself pitted against the powerful and self-confident Arab, who stands for Hermann Kafka, the father, the prototypical “self-made man.”13 André Németh, for his part, saw the jackals as European Jews and the whole story as a description of Jewish–Gentile relationships with their alternations of tolerance and intolerance, thereby marking an interpretative direction that became the dominant reading of “Jackals and Arabs” from the late 1960s on.14 Indeed, following the first methodical and detailed analysis of “Jackals and Arabs” by William C. Rubinstein, an agreement in principle among scholars began to take shape with regard to the story’s “Jewish” context.15 The main direction of interpretation that emerged held that the pairing of “jackals” and “Arabs” represents the dichotomy of the Jews and the non-Jewish world, respectively. For Rubinstein, that which clearly indicates the “Jewishness” of Kafka’s jackals is their zealous adherence to the idea of “purity” (Reinheit in the original), to which they contrast the “filth” of their eternal neighbors the Arabs, alluding to the Jewish customs of kashrut and bodily purity.16 The scissors that the jackals ceremoniously present to the man “from the North” so that he will cut the throats of the hated Arabs allude, in Rubinstein’s view, to the “Covenant between the Pieces” concluded between God and Abraham as related in Genesis 15:1–21, or, alternatively, to the rite of circumcision.17 But most important of all, according to Rubenstein, is the figure of the narrator, in whom he saw none other than the personification of the biblical Messiah, whose task is to deliver the people of Israel (the jackals) from their Gentile oppressors (the Arabs).18 Unlike Rubinstein, Jens Tismar found in “Jackals and Arabs” a more concrete intellectual and sociopolitical dimension. In his understanding, this story reflects the author’s critical perception of Jewish existence in the Diaspora, which was influenced by Zionist criticism on this matter. The jackals—the parasites residing in an “Arab” country, whose physical existence is completely dependent on the masters of the land—symbolize, according to Tismar, the Jews of the Diaspora in general, and Western Jews in particular, while the

11. Herbert Tauber, Franz Kafka: An Interpretation of His Works (London: Secker & Warburg, 1948), 70. 12. Charles Neider, Kafka: His Mind and Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 81. 13. Walter H. Sokel, Franz Kafka—Tragik und Ironie; Zur Struktur seiner Kunst (Munich: Albert Langen, 1964), 146. 14. André Németh, Kafka ou le mystère juif (Paris: J. Vigneau, 1947), 35–38. 15. William C. Rubinstein, “Kafka’s ‘Jackals and Arabs,’” Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht 59, no. 1 (1967): 13–18. 16. Ibid., 16. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 14–15.

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Dimitry Shumsky Arabs represent the Wirtsvolk, a productive, territorial people rooted in the soil of their homeland, a model of the nation that Zionism sought to create.19 Rubinstein’s theological-messianic interpretation was combined with Tismar’s “Zionist” interpretation by Hartmut Binder in his Kafka-Handbuch,20 and by Ritchie Robertson in his thorough research on the Jewish political aspects of Kafka’s writing.21 Thus, a triangular interpretative construct took root in the study of “Jackals and Arabs”: The jackals were seen as the wandering Jews of the Diaspora in general and the Jews of Western Europe in particular, piteous, cowardly, and impotent creatures whose very existence is at the mercy of the territorial nations; the Arabs as free non-Jews, upright and powerful, “a nation as all the nations,” as in the Zionist vision of self-normalization; and the narrator as a messianic figure, in whose beneficial intervention the jackals/Jews continue in vain to put their faith, as a parable of the refusal of the Jews of the Diaspora in general, and the assimilationist Western Jews in particular, to take responsibility for their own destiny and existence.22 The trend toward reading “Jackals and Arabs” within a Jewish-Zionist context, notable in Kafka studies since the 1970s, reflects the growing recognition among scholars of the importance of Zionist influences on Kafka’s worldview, and consequently on his literary writing. Whereas the first works devoted to Kafka at the time of his “rediscovery” in the 1940s and immediately following the Second World War rejected outright the assertion of his Zionist friend and literary executor Max Brod (1884–1968) as to Kafka’s deep inner commitment to the Zionist idea, more recent research has generally acknowledged Kafka’s complex position on Zionism, which cannot be described in one-dimensional terms as “pro-” or “antiZionist.”23 Without agreeing with Brod’s somewhat dogmatic and oversimplified assertion that Kafka was a Zionist von innen,24 and on the strength of a thorough perusal of the author’s diaries and letters, the research literature of the past two generations or so has thus sketched an ambivalent portrait of his rejection–attraction relationship with Zionism, a dynamic of inner tensions and conflict that was to mature into a gradual acceptance of the Zionist option from his late twenties onward. Thus, alongside what has been perceived as Kafka’s outright manifestations of interest in national Jewish culture—such as his admiration for the performances 19. Jens Tismar, “Kafkas ‘Schakale und Araber’ im zionistischen Kontext betrachtet,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 19 (1975): 311–13. 20. Hartmut Binder, Kafka-Handbuch (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1979), 2:329. 21. Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 164. 22. Sander L. Gilman offered a different “Jewish” interpretation, emphasizing the centrality of the difference in eating customs between the “jackals” and “Arabs,” and regarding Kafka’s story as a parody of the Jewish customs of ritual slaughter and kashrut. See Sander L. Gilman, Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge, 1995), 150–53. 23. On this point see Milful, “Kafka—The Jewish Context,” 227, 230. 24. Max Brod, Über Franz Kafka (Frankfurt: Fischer Bücherei, 1966), 271; see also Felix Weltsch, Religion und Humor im Leben und Werk Franz Kafkas (Berlin-Grunewald: F. A. Herbig, 1957), 38.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews of the Galician Yiddish theater in Prague in 1910–1225 and his later (and rather successful) efforts in the years 1917–23 at mastering the Hebrew language26— an additional significant aspect is frequently mentioned in the recent scholarship on Kafka and Zionism/Jewish nationalism: the “Bar Kochba” connection, a reference to the Prague Bar Kochba Association, which was the focus of Zionist activity in Kafka’s hometown from 1900 to 1914. Indeed, the “Zionism” toward which Kafka took his measured steps from 1910 on was first and foremost a local Prague Zionism, represented above all by the Bar Kochba circle. Two of its chief “agents of Zionism,” with whom Kafka maintained close intellectual and personal ties—despite strains and reconciliations—were clearly identified with this Zionist group: Hugo Bergmann (1883–1975), Kafka’s classmate from the Altstädte German gymnasium and the association’s spiritual leader in the decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War, and Max Brod, who, though he never officially joined Bar Kochba, was a full participant in its intellectual and cultural activity after becoming a declared Zionist around 1910.27 The principal channel along which Kafka came to be exposed to Zionist discourse at the beginning of the second decade of the last century were the gatherings of this group, which he regularly attended with Bergmann and Brod, and in which he even participated in discussions of Zionist issues.28 And the journal that was mentioned in his diaries and letters more frequently than any other printed item, and which he read regularly from 1911 on, was none other than the weekly Selbstwehr, the organ of Prague Zionism, which from 1910 on was exclusively controlled by associates of Bar Kochba.29 Furthermore, the Zionists of the Bar

25. Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 12–30; Anne Oppenheimer, “Franz Kafka’s Relation to Judaism” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1977), 42–46; Vivian Liska, “Neighbors, Foes, and Other Communities: Kafka and Zionism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 13, no. 2 (2000): 348–49; Niels Bokhove, “‘The Entrance to the More Important’: Kafka’s Personal Zionism,” in Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond, ed. Mark H. Gelber (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004), 26–27; and see also Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1958), 176–81. 26. See, e.g., Hartmut Binder, “Kafkas Hebräischstudien: ein biographisch-interpretatorischer Versuch,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 11 (1967): 530–33; Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 241; Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, 224–25; Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 41–42; and Alfred Bodenheimer, “A Sign of Sickness and a Symbol of Health: Kafka’s Hebrew Notebooks,” in Gelber, Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond, 259–70. 27. Christoph Stölzl, Kafkas böses Böhmen (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1975), 134–36; Milful, “Kafka—The Jewish Context,” 230; Binder, Kafka-Handbuch, 1:375; Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason, 63–70, 290; Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, 13–14, 141–42; Hillel J. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870– 1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 99–100, 138–41; Alter, Necessary Angels, 39–42; and see also Ritchie Robertson, “The Creative Dialogue between Brod and Kafka,” in Gelber, Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond, 283–96. 28. Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend, 181–82. 29. Hartmut Binder, “Franz Kafka and the Weekly Paper ‘Selbstwehr,’” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 12 (1967): 135, 140; and Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 126.

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Dimitry Shumsky Kochba circle, who conducted a protracted intellectual dialogue with Martin Buber after his appearance before them in Prague with his famous Three Addresses on Judaism in 1909–10, played, alongside Buber, a central role in establishing Der Jude in 1916, as well as in determining the content of its first issues, one of which included Kafka’s “Jackals and Arabs.” Indeed, by early November 1915, Brod had urged Buber to invite Kafka to contribute to the future Jewish national journal.30 In view of all this, once the adherents of the “Zionist” interpretation of “Jackals and Arabs” had argued that the tale reflected the state of relations between Jews and non-Jews (as seen by Kafka at a time when he was influenced by Zionism), it would not have been unreasonable to expect them to address the question of whether, and how, this picture related to the perception of relations between Jews and non-Jews in the views of the Zionists of the Bar Kochba group who were close to Kafka. In fact, the Bar Kochba Zionists’ perception of the relations between Jews and non-Jews during the period under discussion related first and foremost to two rather more specific and concrete contexts: Bohemia, from whose soil and in the face of whose local challenges their Zionism had grown, and Palestine, the focus of Zionism’s political aspirations. Scott Spector, in his Prague Territories, has been the only one to study “Jackals and Arabs” against the background of the multinational Prague experience of the author and the intellectuals close to him, and he proposed a view of the story as a reflection of the relationships between Jews, Germans, and Czechs in Prague and Bohemia, as perceived—in his understanding, to be discussed later—by Kafka and the Prague Jewish intellectuals nurtured on German culture, among them the Bar Kochbaites.31 Notwithstanding Kafka’s deliberate use of the term “Arabs,” Spector did not consider the relevance of the contemporary Palestinian context of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in unraveling Kafka’s message in the story. Tismar did indeed note that within the context of the journal Der Jude, concepts such as “Arabs” and “desert” symbolized the geographic area that constituted Zionism’s ultimate goal.32 In her doctoral dissertation, Anne Oppenheimer noted somewhat more explicitly that the story “has a comment to make on the Arab–Jewish conflict.”33 But these writers chose not to discuss this issue in any great depth, and therefore they did not address the specific Zionist viewpoint of the Middle East, as seen from Prague. The anti-Zionist propaganda discourse among intellectuals in the Arab world following the establishment of the state of Israel did not hesitate, on the other hand, to read Kafka’s “Arab” quite literally. But as Atef Botros recently and convincingly showed, these anti-Zionist interpretations altogether tear Kafka’s story from its historical context, viewing it as an early reflection of the 30. Arthur A. Cohen, introduction to The Jew: Essays from Martin Buber’s Journal “Der Jude,” 1916–1928, ed. Arthur A. Cohen (University: Alabama University Press, 1980), 10–11. 31. Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 191–94. 32. Tismar, “Kafkas ‘Schakale und Araber,’” 314. 33. Oppenheimer, “Kafka’s Relation to Judaism,” 268.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews wars between Israel and the Arab countries.34 Botros identified in the story an echo of the deep apprehension among Prague Zionists, especially Bergmann, about the fate of the Zionist minority in Palestine, which in their view had an exaggerated estimation of its strength in the face of the hostile Arab majority.35 And just as Spector interpreted Kafka’s story as a depiction of the relations between Jews and non-Jews restricted to a single, concrete, local context—Bohemia— without looking into its possible link to the Palestinian realm of relations, which aroused undeniable interest among the readers of Der Jude, its editors, and particularly among the Bar Kochba contributors to the journal,36 Botros, too, restricted his interpretation to a single Jewish–Gentile arena—Palestine— without considering that this arena was viewed by them from the perspective of a different Jewish–Gentile arena, namely Bohemia, where events occurred with which they were required to contend in the most direct manner. In her recent book Kafka and Cultural Zionism, Iris Bruce offered a twofold interpretation of the story, viewing “Jackals and Arabs” as both a Zionist satire of Jewish life in the Diaspora and a critique of some contemporary Zionists’ derogatory descriptions of Palestine’s Arabs as uneducated and uncivilized.37 Still, she did not address an assumable Bohemian background of the story, other than to briefly refer to Spector’s work.38 The goal of this article is to demonstrate that “Jackals and Arabs” incorporates a dual reference to the relations between Jews and non-Jews in both Bohemia and Palestine, compatible with the manner in which these multinational arenas were analyzed in the views of the Zionists of the Bar Kochba circle who were close to Kafka, first and foremost Hugo Bergmann and Max Brod. The development of this interpretation will entail grappling with a number of issues that directly touch upon some of the central aspects of this circle’s sociocultural position and national perception, a few of which have been discussed in scholarship from a tendentious point of view, and thus are due for reevaluation, while the majority have yet to be adequately studied: What was the position of the intellectuals identified with the Bar Kochba Association within, and in regard to, the triangular Czech–German–Jewish relations in Habsburg Prague? What was their 34. Atef Botros, “Literarische ‘Reterritorialisierung’ und historische Rekonstruktierung—Zur europäischen und arabischen Rezeption von Kafkas Schakale und Araber,” Leipziger Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 3 (2005): 229–30. 35. Ibid., 230–38. 36. It is sufficient to mention in this context Hugo Bergmann’s article “The Genuine Autonomy,” in which he particularly emphasized the centrality of the issue of Arab–Jewish relations for the future of the Yishuv, and also traced the first outlines of its solution by way of the binational arrangement, and the article “On the Arab Question” by Hans Kohn, also one of the leading members of Bar Kochba in the prewar period, who for the first time in the Zionist movement raised the Nationalitätenstaat model (i.e., a binational state), in reference to the political future of Palestine. See Hugo Bergmann, “Die wahre Autonomie,” Der Jude 3 (1918–19): 368–73; and Hans Kohn, “Zur Araberfrage,” Der Jude 4 (1919–20): 567–69. 37. Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 154–57, 185–88. 38. Ibid., 154.

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Dimitry Shumsky view on the state of ethnic relations in Palestine in the face of the Zionist settlement there? And above all, is it possible to discern any connection between the Bar Kochbaites’ approach to the Czech–German–Jewish question in Bohemia and the Arab–Jewish question in Palestine? II. “J ACKALS

AND

A RABS ”

BETWEEN

J EWS

AND NON -J EWS IN

B OHEMIA

Spector, whose Prague Territories is without doubt an original and fascinating combination of scrupulous textual analysis and innovative theoretical perspective on fin-de-siècle Prague’s intellectual and cultural history, is, as mentioned, the only scholar who has sought to read “Jackals and Arabs” in association with the author’s local experience in his multicultural and multinational hometown.39 Spector interpreted the figurative triangle of jackals–Arabs–narrator as a parable of the Czech–German–Jewish relationship: The jackals, abject but instilling fear to some extent, represent the Czech masses; the Arabs, powerful and proud, are the Prague Germans; while the mysterious figure of the narrator-mediator is none other than Kafka himself—the German-speaking Prague Jew, gripped with apprehension and fear at the sight of the tumultuous jackals/Czechs, and pressing himself close to the caravan of the Arabs/Germans.40 A reading of this sort faithfully reflects Spector’s more general interpretation of the cultural experience and intellectual work of the Prague Jewish writers and thinkers of Kafka’s generation and background. The German-writing Prague Jewish intellectuals, among them the Zionists Bergmann and Brod, are presented in his book as people who grew up in and were shaped by a kind of German cultural bubble. While their ancestors, Spector asserted, had been “centered on a map of universalist and hegemonic German high culture,” the generation of the sons found itself devoid of any real cultural ground.41 Faced with the continuous erosion of German hegemony and the flourishing of the young Czech culture, members of the generation of Kafka, Bergmann, and Brod felt themselves to be isolated on a kind of island, which “belonged no longer to the past, and could find no place for itself in the future.”42 In order to extricate themselves from this spiritual-cultural isolation, these German Jewish intellectuals initiated a comprehensive and varied cultural project, which included the expressionist creations of Franz Werfel and Paul Kornfeld; the energetic efforts of Brod and the poets Otto Pick and Rudolf Fuchs to translate Czech literature into the German language; the Zionism of Bergmann, Brod, and the Bar Kochbaites; and the innovative literary writing of Kafka. This project, according to Spector, was founded with the intention 39. According to the Austrian population census method, which adopted the category of “everyday language” as a criterion for defining one’s national affiliation, Prague’s population in 1900 numbered some 415,000 “Czechs” (speakers of Czech on a day-to-day basis) and 33,776 “Germans” (speakers of German on a day-to-day basis), while the 27,289 members of the Jewish religion were divided among these two groups—55 percent Czech speakers as an everyday language, and 45 percent German speakers. 40. Spector, Prague Territories, 191–92. 41. Ibid., 20. 42. Ibid.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews of staking out a spiritual space between the two surrounding cultures, the Czech and the German, a space that would provide this group a kind of shelter to escape the realities of modern nationalism.43 Despite its dimension of intercultural bridging, and alongside the considerable sympathy for the Czech people on the part of individuals such as Brod and Kafka, Spector argued, their view of the Czechs and their culture was not devoid of a certain Orientalist imagery, characteristic of the contemporary German culture’s hegemonic discourse on the “essence” of “Slavness.” One of this discourse’s prominent features was its tendency to identify Slavs with their physical element, with special emphasis placed on the fairer of their number, a factor that provided the logic for Spector’s identification of Kafka’s pack of jackals with the masses of the Czech people.44 Spector’s perception of the origins and the sociocultural patterns of behavior among Jewish Prague’s intellectual elite surely constitutes a renewed version of the Germanocentric approach to the study of Prague and Bohemian Jewry at the end of the long nineteenth century, a perspective that retains its relatively dominant position in the historiography despite important research developments in the direction of a more balanced presentation of the relations between Jews and non-Jews in this region. This school, which regards the German–Jewish axis as the primary, relevant context for understanding the nature of relations between Jews and their Bohemian and Prague sociocultural surroundings, reigned supreme in scholarship until some two decades ago.45 In the eyes of its adherents, the history of the modernization of Jews in Czech lands is confined to the story of their economic, social, cultural, and political integration with the German component of their environment. To the extent that research guided by the Germanocentric approach addressed the phenomenon of Bohemian Zionism in general, and the Bar Kochba Association in particular, it tended, unsurprisingly, to emphasize almost exclusively its German Jewish context. Thus, the members of the Bar Kochba circle, including Kafka’s friends Bergmann and Brod, were presented as former German assimilationists or acculturationists who, even after becoming Zionists, maintained their deep involvement in the social and cultural life of Prague’s liberal German community, remained constant in their unreserved commitment to the Germanocentric Habsburg establishment, and persisted with their inner struggle between Jewishness and Germanness.46 43. Ibid., 17–20, 234–40. 44. Ibid., 176. 45. Hans Tramer, “Prague—City of Three Peoples,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 9 (1964): 305; Ruth Kestenberg-Gladstein, “The Jews between Czechs and Germans,” in The Jews of Czechoslovakia: Historical Studies and Surveys (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968), 1:32–33; Stölzl, Kafkas böses Böhmen; Michael A. Riff, “Czech Antisemitism and the Jewish Response before 1914,” Wiener Library Bulletin 29, nos. 39–40 (1976): 8–20; Gary B. Cohen, “Jews in German Society: Prague, 1860–1914,” Central European History 10 (March 1977): 28–54; idem, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); and idem, “Jews in German Liberal Politics: Prague, 1880–1914,” Jewish History 1, no. 1 (1986): 55–74. 46. Stuart Borman, “The Prague Student Zionist Movement: 1896–1914” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1972), 28–29, 157; Michael A. Riff, “The Assimilation of the Jews of Bohemia and the

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Dimitry Shumsky In his groundbreaking book in the study of Jews of the Czech lands in the modern era, Hillel J. Kieval took issue with the traditional representation of Bohemian and Prague Jewry in the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as a bastion of German culture in the center of a hostile Slav world.47 Against this, he indicated for the first time a number of highly significant demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural processes that had gradually occurred in Bohemian Jewish society in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and that had matured into a very tangible undermining of Bohemian and Prague Jewry’s German orientation at the turn of the century. In contrast to the Germanocentric historiographic image of ongoing Jewish alienation from the surrounding Czech-speaking majority, Kieval established a sound claim for the continuity of everyday contacts between the Jews and the Czech population beginning in the preemancipation period, during which most Bohemian Jews were continually wandering through the Czech rural areas.48 This phenomenon became more entrenched during the internal Jewish migration that occurred in the two decades following the political changes of 1848–49, when a considerable part of rural Jewry set their sights on the Czech provincial towns, in which they became integrated with the burgeoning Czech middle class and gradually became what Kieval defined as “Czech-Jewish assimilationists.”49 This type of Czech Jew, many of whom moved to Prague in the last quarter of the nineteenth century following the severe crisis experienced by the Czech economy in the provincial towns in the 1880s, became, according to Kieval, the generators of radical change in the self-image of the sociocultural profile of Jews in the Bohemian capital at the beginning of the twentieth century: from “German Jewry” to “Czech Jewry,” a process he defined as “secondary acculturation.”50 This development, the prime institutional agent of which was the vociferous Czech Jewish assimilationist movement, found its manifest expression, according to Kieval, in the gradual decline of the phenomenon of the German-language Jewish primary schools, in the ever-wider adoption of Czech as the day-to-day language of communication among Prague Jews, and, above all, in the growing reservations of

Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 1848–1918” (PhD diss., University of London, 1974), 189–90; Stölzl, Kafkas böses Böhmen, 93; Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival, 262; Zohar Maor, “Mistika, yetsira u-sheiva el ha-yahadut: ‘Ch.ug Prag’ be-tehilat ha-mea ha-esrim” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005), 79, 150, 172–74, 247, 275–77; and Steven E. Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 13. See also Wilma A. Iggers, “Die Prager Juden zwischen Assimilation und Zionismus,” in Berlin und der Prager Kreis, ed. Margarita Pazi and Hans D. Zimmermann (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1991), 22; Hartmut Binder, “Paul Eisners dreifaches Ghetto: Deutsche, Juden und Tschechen in Prag,” in Le monde de Franz Werfel et la morale des nations, ed. Michel Reffet (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001), 111; and Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 37. 47. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 3. 48. Ibid., 10–12. 49. Ibid., 25–27. 50. Ibid., 4, 198–200.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews more and more Jews about the traditional and blind reliance upon the Germanocentric Habsburg establishment.51 Of particular importance to our discussion is Kieval’s challenging of the Germanocentric view of the phenomenon of Prague Zionism in general, and that of the Bar Kochbaites in particular, which is one of his book’s central foci of study. First, in speaking specifically of Bergmann, Bar Kochba’s moving spirit, Kieval was the first to discern a number of significant rifts in Bergmann’s German cultural exterior. It becomes apparent that, alongside his studies at the Altstädte high school in Prague, the young Hugo maintained rather close sociocultural ties with the Czech-speaking environment during frequent family visits to the village of Chrastice in central Bohemia, the birthplace of his father Siegmund/Zikmund.52 Kieval, moreover, questioned the Germanocentric representation of Bar Kochba Zionism at a more abstract level. He asserted that one should place Bar Kochba and the Prague and Bohemian Zionists in the wide sociopolitical context in which the Czech Jewish assimilationist movement developed. Notwithstanding the obvious differences between the Czech Jewish assimilationists and the Zionists with regard to national issues, we are speaking, Kieval claimed, of two phenomena of a similar type as far as the conceptual frame is concerned. For, in a similar fashion to the Czech Jewish movement, Prague Zionism and the Bar Kochbaites presented Bohemian Jewry with an innovative national alternative, while challenging the anachronistic path taken by the liberal German Jewish bourgeoisie.53 It would seem, however, that in the context of a discussion of the Bar Kochba Zionists, Kieval’s critique of the Germanocentric approach is still too circumscribed. In attempting to include in his Bohemian Jewish narrative first and foremost those with a clear Czech Jewish affinity, whose existence had been almost completely ignored by Germanocentric historiography, he naturally turned his sights on the followers of the Czech Jewish movement and the Prague Zionists who originated from Czech provincial towns. On the other hand, in speaking of the Prague-born members of the Bar Kochba circle who had been nurtured on German culture, such as Max Brod and the leaders of the association on the eve of the First World War, Hans Kohn and Robert Weltsch, the impression gained from Kieval’s book is that these were basically monocultured German Jewish figures, while the extent to which they were actually influenced by the surrounding Czech majority is insufficiently clear. It is only in the case of Bergmann that Kieval, as mentioned, clearly indicated the centrality of the meeting with the Czech language and culture in Bergmann’s everyday experience, alongside his German education and intellectual activity in the German language. But because the traditional Germanocentric representation of the sociocultural portrait of Bar Kochbaite Zionism essentially remains outside the realm of criticism in Kieval’s book, the Czech–German Bergmann appears instead as

51. Ibid., 48–58, 60–63, 198–99. 52. Ibid., 100. 53. Ibid., 113, 198–203.

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Dimitry Shumsky a somewhat exceptional phenomenon in relation to the other members of the circle. In order to complete the reevaluation of the Germanocentric narrative in the historiography of Prague’s Jews and Zionists, it is worth clarifying that the phenomenon of gradual erosion on the part of the local Czech component of the exclusive status of imperial German culture in relationships between Jews and their environment was paradigmatic in the case of the sociocultural experience of key figures in the Bar Kochba Association, as well as among the members of the wider circle such as Brod and Kafka. Indeed, in line with the overwhelming majority of Prague Jews of their generation, they were educated in German culture, and the German tongue was their primary intellectual vehicle. Nevertheless, in everyday life, they and their families were exposed to the Czech environment, language, and culture. They grew up in buildings with ethnically mixed populations who spoke different languages, in which the Czech component was prominent—Bergmann and Kafka in “Czech Jewish” buildings, Brod, Kohn, and Weltsch in “Czech German Jewish” ones.54 This constituted an exception to the accepted residential patterns among the Jews of Prague, whose most intimate spheres of life tended toward an existence separate from non-Jews, and who preferred to have other Jews as their neighbors.55 Unlike most of their schoolmates in the German high school, who throughout their schooling boycotted the study of the Czech language (apart from Weltsch’s class, half of which did partake in them), and also unlike the majority of students in the German high schools throughout Bohemia at the same period, Bergmann, Kafka, Brod, and Weltsch consistently studied Czech by choice.56 And insofar as “Kafka’s” two Zionists, Bergmann and Brod, are concerned, it is of particular importance to 54. For information on the ethno-language composition of the population of the apartment buildings of Bergmann, Kafka, Brod, Kohn, and Weltsch, see, respectively, Archiv hlavního mĕsta Prahy (AHMP), fond sčítaci operaty, I–131, 1900; AHMP, fond sčítaci operaty, I–602, 1900; AHMP, fond sčítaci operaty, I–527, 1900; AHMP, fond sčítaci operaty, I–349, 1911; and AHMP, fond sčítaci operaty, V–125, 1901–10. 55. Cohen, “Jews in German Society,” 49–51. 56. For Bergmann and Kafka, see AHMP, fond školní katalogy, Neměcke st. gymnasium, Stare Město, 1–8 třída, 1893–1901/K. k. deutsches Staats-Gymnasium Prag, Altstadt, 1893–1901, KlassenKatalog, I–VIII Klasse; for Brod, see AHMP, fond školní katalogy, Gymnasium neměcké statní, Stepanská ul., 1–8 třída, 1894–1902/K. k. Staatsgymnasium, Prag Neustadt, Stephansgasse Hauptkatalog, 1894–1902, I–VIII Klasse; for Kohn, see AHMP, fond školní katalogy, Neměcke st. gymnasium, Stare Město,1–8 třída, 1902–10, K. k. deutsches Staats-Gymnasium Prag, Altstadt, 1902–10, KlassenKatalog, I–VIII; for Weltsch, see AHMP, fond školní katalogy, Neměcke st. gymnasium, Stare Město,1–8 třída, 1901–1909/K. k. deutsches Staats-Gymnasium Prag, Altstadt, 1901–1909, KlassenKatalog, I–VIII. Hartmut Binder found that the study of the Czech language in Bohemian German high schools fell into the category of “relatively compulsory study” (relativ obligater Lehrgegenstand), and that German-speaking students for the most part did study the Czech language (Binder, “Paul Eisners dreifaches Ghetto,” 116). And yet, according to statistical data from the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century, only 38.6 percent of all the students in Bohemian German high schools chose to study the Czech language. See Karl Hellmut, “Die Gymnasien und Realschulen in Böhmen im Schuljahre 1906–07,” Deutsche Arbeit 7, no. 4 (January 1908): 244.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews note that their day-to-day exposure to the Czech environment, language, and culture was consistent with their genuine reservations about the hegemonic German cultural discourse on “Czechness” in Bohemia, which fluctuated between denying the Czechs’ very national existence and labeling them with the same derogatory colonialist terms used by Europeans to describe the natives of Africa.57 Moreover, one can clearly establish that a receptiveness toward the neighboring national culture that was different from that on which they had been nurtured, and a challenging of the German discourse on Czechs, constituted a fundamental component of the immediate sociocultural background of both these men’s approach to Zionism, and made their significant mark on shaping the substantive dimension of their politics. Bergmann’s memoirs of his friendship with Kafka in the Altstädte high school reveal the complexity of the two friends’ sociocultural location relative to the binational non-Jewish Prague environment. It turns out that what first brought them together was, above all, their families’ common rural Czech background.58 In light of this, they both felt fairly alienated in the company of those Jewish classmates who, toward the end of their studies, began to emulate the customs of nationalistic German students. Around 1899, the two friends plucked up some courage and decided to discard the anti-Slav discourse that had completely taken hold of their classmates. This was, related Bergmann, shortly after Kafka and he had joined the class “blister” (Blase), as the German high school students termed the secret student associations. This association, which was composed almost entirely of Jewish students, was built on the model of a fraternity (Verbindung), an organizational pattern characteristic of nationalistic German students. Members of the “blister” were supposed to wear the blue ribbon when not in school and got together each week for a ceremonial banquet (Kneipe), as was customary among the “grown-up” students. One of the Kneipe’s symbolic high points was the singing of nationalistic German songs, first and foremost “The Watch on the Rhine” (Wacht am Rhein), which the German students regularly sang when gathering at the “German casino” on the “German” promenade Am Graben/Na přikopě, with the declared intention of provoking the Czech population and initiating a violent confrontation with it. The singing of “The Watch on the Rhine” during the banquet of his “blister” classmates had, according to Bergmann, the selfsame anti-Slav connotations. And thus, when the long-awaited singing began toward the conclusion of this German Jewish fraternity’s Kneipe, and all the young men stood up enthusiastically, Bergmann and Kafka were the only ones to remain demonstratively seated. To the great relief of both, they were expelled from the “blister,” with its hostility toward their Czech neighbors and their culture.59

57. Pieter M. Judson, “Inventing Germans: Class, Nationality and Colonial Fantasy at the Margins of Hapsburg Monarchy,” Social Analysis 33 (September 1993): 47–48. 58. Shmuel Hugo Bergmann Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Arc 4° 1502/156. 59. Ibid.

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Dimitry Shumsky It was not by chance that Bergmann remembered this confrontation with the discourse of Deutschtum in Prague as a most significant milestone in the development of his awareness toward the point at which he turned to Zionism.60 Upon coming up against one of the more grotesque manifestations of the Germanocentric position in the Bohemian capital, such as the rendering of “The Watch on the Rhine” by Jewish youngsters on the banks of the Vltava, the young Bergmann became ever more aware of the gap between the Germanocentric discourse that recognized the existence of but one Kultur in Bohemia and Prague, regarding them as geocultural entities of sorts affiliated with Vienna and Berlin, and the multicultural realities in this region. On the other hand, the more Bergmann became exposed to the opposing influences of the local multicultural and, indeed, multinational environment beyond the “blister” of his class, as the burgeoning Czech element was continually challenging the component of German acculturation within him, so did the sense of a particularistic Jewish self take on a sharper form for him. This was part of his recognition of the complexity of the local Bohemian landscape’s national-cultural character, which was denied by the Germanocentric discourse, in general, and of his identification with the Czech challenge to German hegemony in particular. When he came to the national Jewish Bar Kochba Association through the cracks that grew evident in the monocultural, Germanocentric “blister” of his educational environment as a result of the challenge of Czech nationalism, the Zionist Bergmann saw in the divestment from the imperial German discourse and in the search for a dialogue with the local Czech nationalism the guiding principles for the deportment of a Jewish nation in the multinational Bohemian arena. Thus, in one of his first Zionist articles, in which he proposed a series of measures for amending the curriculum in German-language Jewish community schools with the aim of transforming them into an infrastructure for the renewal of Jewish national life in Bohemia, Bergmann presented the issue of the teaching of the Czech language and putting it on an equal footing with German within the framework of Jewish education as nothing less than a Jewish national issue.61 This means that, as someone who would from now on fight tirelessly for official recognition of the Jewish nation as part of the local Bohemian and Prague multinational landscape, he first of all sought to abolish the logic of the hegemony of the imperial German component over the relations of Jews with their linguisticcultural surroundings, in the aspiration of establishing Zionism—the third local nationalism—as an element that would work for reshaping Bohemia as a space for a more balanced, trilateral of its three national groups.62 Bergmann expressed himself in even clearer language in his programmatic article “Prager Brief” of 1904, in which he laid out his position on the issue of the triangular relations between the burgeoning Jewish nationalism in Prague and

60. Ibid. 61. Hugo Bergmann, “Jüdische Schulfragen,” Revue der israelitischen Kultursgemeinden in Böhmen (October 1903): 3. 62. See Hugo Bergmann, “Der jüdische Nationalrat,” Selbstwehr, November 1, 1918, 2.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews Bohemia, the imperial Austro-German element, and the Czech national movement. In his opinion, Bohemian Zionism’s most tangible objectives should be perceived in light of a highly significant sociocultural process that was gradually evolving among the Jews of his country—the process of “Czechification” (Die Tschechisierung).63 It should be noted here that by this term, Bergmann does not mean to indicate a process of assimilation with the Czech nation, nor is he referring to “the Czech transformation” in the sense of “the second acculturation,” as Kieval believed.64 Nonetheless, his sentiments were expressed upon observing a trend toward greater exposure to and awareness of Czech national culture on the part of Jews, a trend that he welcomed and thought that Zionists should strive to promote. He believed that Jews educated in German culture could harness this trend to extricate themselves from the ghetto-like hermetic circle of “Germanness,” and could find themselves in a dynamic and vibrant cultural experience that would motivate them to seek meaning in a particularistic Jewish existence in their concrete local environment.65 Unlike Bergmann, Kafka’s other Jewish friend, Max Brod, had no family ties to a Czech rural background. His mother Fannie hailed from the German region of Gablonz/Jablonec in northwestern Bohemia, while his father Adolf, the manager of the United Bohemian Bank, could have served as an example of successful Jewish integration into the German-speaking Prague bourgeoisie. Indeed, the father’s principled stand against the tradition whereby Germans ignored the Czech environment is particularly noteworthy, as is his consistent aspiration to raise his children in the spirit of receptiveness toward the national Czech culture, of which we learn from the son’s memoirs. Through the father’s personal story of his sudden realization “that there indeed does exist another people in Prague that also has a high culture and great ability,” a story not devoid of self-irony, the young Brod learned how the ephemeral sense of German cultural superiority had gradually eroded already in his father’s generation among considerable parts of the city’s Jewish population.66 In light of his father’s early awakening from the blindness toward Czech national existence that was still prevalent among a great many ethnic Germans and Jews brought up on Deutschtum in Prague, it is not surprising that, unlike many of his primary school friends, the young Max was not sent to the German Altstädte high school but to the German high school on Stephan Street. In his autobiography, Brod noted obscurely that these were “two different high schools … two worlds far apart, with no contact between them.”67 Indeed, it suffices to look at the composition of the pupils in Brod’s class according to the criterion of their geocultural origin and to compare it to that of the pupils in Bergmann and Kafka’s class in the 63. Hugo Bergmann, “Prager Brief,” Jüdische Volksstimme, January 15, 1904, 5. 64. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 113. 65. Bergmann, “Prager Brief,” 4–5. 66. Max Brod, “Zikhronot mi-tekufat ha-hitbolelut,” in Prag vi-Yerushalayim, ed. Felix Weltsch (Jerusalem: Keren ha-Yesod, 1954), 53–54; see also idem, Streitbares Leben: Autobiographie (Munich: Kindler Verlag, 1960), 178. 67. Brod, Streitbares Leben, 234.

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Dimitry Shumsky Altstädte; by doing so, we might comprehend the nature of the difference: Approximately one-third of the pupils in Brod’s class were born in the Czechspeaking areas outside Prague, compared to one-sixth in the class of Kafka and Bergmann.68 Once he had taken an independent stand and developed into one of the most productive and acclaimed writers in Prague’s German literary arena, Brod openly placed himself on the same collision course with the consciousness of German cultural hegemony in Bohemia that had been staked out by his father and the sociocultural and multinational environment in which Brod himself had grown up. A decisive milestone as he made his way along this path, following which Brod, by no coincidence, turned to Zionism, was his short novel Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen (A Czech Housemaid), written in 1909.69 Basically the story of the love of a young German clerk for a Czech girl of rural origin, this book contains first and foremost a sharp satirical sting directed ostensibly at that selfsame coma of German imperial denial of the presence of a local Czech national-cultural element in Bohemia from which his father Adolf had previously awakened. The central protagonist, a Vienna-born German by the name of William Schurhaft, suffers from a sort of emotional deficiency: Lacking the basic ability to perceive the actual reality around him and to connect to it, he is able only to comprehend the world of abstract concepts. To cure him of this deficiency, his father sends him to Prague because there, according to the father, [H]istory is in the making, as if before your eyes, in the midst of a war between the two nations at its center. … The ring of the foreign tongue will reach your ears together with the sound of the window panes shattering in the war over it. There, the sense of reality will at last rise up in you. You can’t possibly continue in your ways there and fail to pay attention to the real world.70

And yet, it seems that all this is in vain: William fails to discern in Prague the slightest sign of a second culture, and he does not hear a single word of Czech. He is surrounded only by Germans: “my landlady … is an old German maid … the owner of my office is a German … as are all his clerks … and even the small boy who brings me my meals.”71 It is only when he comes across a young Czech servant girl, with whom he falls in love, that the protagonist is extricated from his isolation in the hermetically sealed German camp. He is then faced with the reality of the existence of another people alongside him, and thus he finds the ability to see the tangible world. While he sought to emphasize the dimensions of German blindness toward the Czech surroundings, Brod succeeded in giving the reader the impression that his hero is unaware not only of the Czechs’ concrete existence, but also of their images in the German cultural and public discourse. Still, once William suddenly 68. See note 56 herein. 69. Max Brod, Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen (Leipzig: Axel Juncker Verlag, 1909). 70. Ibid., 11. 71. Ibid., 20–21.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews “discovers” that the majority of “German” Prague’s residents speak Czech, and once he understands the essential demographic and socioeconomic processes that led to the change in Prague’s linguistic-cultural profile from the end of the nineteenth century, it becomes apparent to the reader that at the core of his blindness toward the Czech neighbors rests a firm opinion of the nature of the Czech people, which to him and to other Germans is regarded as certain, indisputable knowledge. After hearing from his beloved the story of the economic crisis that beset her village and led to a mass exodus of its inhabitants, some of whom ventured abroad while others turned to the industrialized “German” cities, thereby joining the internal Czech wave of migration toward “German Bohemia” that incessantly undermined its “Germanness,” the protagonist admits that his previous perception of Czechs was unfounded, and thereby reveals to us its main element: The Czechs do not want to return to the village, they no longer believe in fables, the city, with its adventures and experiences, they like it … how different, otherwise, things are in reality from that which we imagine when we say “a people.” One attaches to them on the outside labels of the sorts of things that we only guess at, or about which we have some kind of feeling; one talks of longing for some homeland, and here we have a gray-haired man going off gaily to America.72

It thus transpires that in the perception of the hero and those who share the illusion of the “Germanic” nature of Prague and Bohemia’s industrialized cities (no doubt the same illusion that enabled the members of the “blister” of Kafka’s and Bergmann’s class to imagine themselves on the banks of the Rhine), a number of welldefined character traits are attributed to the Czech residents of Bohemia. First and foremost, the Czechs constitute, according to this perception, a static population entity of sorts from a sociodemographic point of view, composed of agrarian laborers shackled forever to their rural homeland, somewhere far away from the urban, industrialized, and dynamic “German Bohemia.” From the beginning, the German protagonist thus fails to sense any sign of “Czechness” in Prague,73 as he believes that the Czechs have yet to arrive, in both senses, at “the German Prague”—both from a mental point of view, as they maintain deep emotional ties to the countryside and the rural way of life, and consequently from a tangible physical point of view. However, it now becomes apparent to the protagonist of A Czech Housemaid that following “the severe crisis of Czech agriculture”74— namely, the grave crisis that in the 1880s beset those branches of the Czech food industry linked to agriculture following the steep decline in grain prices that resulted from the rapid development of railways and steamships75—the Czech masses gained an unexpected capacity for impressive demographic 72. Ibid., 118–19. 73. Ibid., 20–21. 74. Ibid., 118. 75. Jan Havránek, “The Development of Czech Nationalism,” Austrian History Yearbook 3 (1967): 230.

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Dimitry Shumsky mobility, uprooted themselves from their homes in rural areas, which in the German “imagination” had been intended for them for eternity, and laid “siege to the German land.”76 The Czechs, as the amazed German observer is made well aware, are subject to the same processes that operate in different historical moments among humanity in general. Like the Germans, they feel at home in the city’s dynamic and turbulent atmosphere; as do the Germans, they create a variety of cultural artifacts in their language that will serve as an anchor and support as they experience the instability of the city; and, above all, like the Germans, they, too, appear to the German protagonist as a “nation … of many talents and considerable beauty.”77 This recognition of the Czechs’ nationhood leads Brod’s hero, for the first time, to an awareness of the power of the national dispute between them and the Germans, and to recoil from “the struggle for existence” that is waged “with bitterness and fury.”78 And yet, at the same time, it becomes ever clearer to him that without this recognition of the Czechs’ national existence, and all the more so of Prague and Bohemia’s binational character, it will be impossible to build a bridge between the opposing camps. Without harboring any illusions as to the hope of ever bringing all the antagonism and power struggles between Czechs and Germans to an end, he thinks that it would be possible to control the conflict, reduce the friction and tensions, and wage “a softer, more moderate … war,” if only the other Germans would recognize, as he does, that “there are many children in the land, and the German lands … are partitioned in an inequitable manner.”79 As related in Brod’s autobiography, A Czech Housemaid constituted the first link in the chain of circumstances that culminated in his joining the circle of Bar Kochbaite Zionists. Leo Hermann, then chairman of the Bar Kochba Association and one of Hugo Bergmann’s most prominent followers, published a critique of the novel in the Prague Selbstwehr and in the Brno/Brünn Jüdisches Volksstimme, in which he disagreed with the author on the issue of the relations between the nationalities in Prague.80 This critique considerably angered Brod, who took issue in particular with what he saw as the critic’s simplistic attempt to attribute to him the view that intimate contact could serve as a model of sorts for the solution of the Czech–German conflict in Bohemia. Brod initiated a meeting with Hermann to clarify matters, which he described as protracted and tempestuous, and following which he began to move ever closer to Prague Zionism. Upon reading Hermann’s critique, which turned out to be more favorable than the way it was presented in Brod’s autobiography, one finds sharply discerned insights with regard to the novel’s subversive dimension and the process of the author’s repositioning within Bohemia’s multinational arena. Hermann found in A Czech Housemaid first and foremost a commendable expression of the author’s own contempt for “the faithful students of the Jewish-German clique of 76. Brod, Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen, 118. 77. Ibid., 119 (emphasis added). 78. Ibid., 118. 79. Ibid. 80. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 124.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews journalists” (getreuer Schüler der israelitisch-deutschen Journalistenclique), who presented themselves as the primary guardians of “Germanness” against “Czechness,” thereby further inflaming the passions of those involved in the national conflict. But in seeking “the basis for understanding” (Verständigungsbasis) between Germans and Czechs, Brod, in Hermann’s opinion, stopped halfway. A Jew writing in German in Prague, whose protagonist undermined the position typical of the Prague German Jewish elite and sought a solution to the national problem in Prague that concerned above all ordinary Jews, nevertheless failed even to mention the Jews in his novel. But it is impossible, according to Hermann, to speak of Deutschtum in Prague, and certainly not of ordering the relations between the nationalities in Prague, without considering the conduct of the local Jewish component. Because he ultimately chose not to confront the local national-cultural reality in all its complexity, Brod was content to provide a rather imaginary literary solution to the Prague national conflict (the feeling of love transcending the boundaries between the nationalities), the validity of which in Prague’s polarized reality was questionable. On the other hand, Hermann hinted, there certainly were circles among Prague Jewry, to which the critic himself belonged, that were promoting a more effective approach toward the local problem of nationalities. And perhaps the author, who had already taken his first essential step toward a new perception of the local scene when he took issue with the support provided by Jewish power to Prague’s “Germanness,” would eventually formulate the foundation for a bridge between Prague’s nationalities rather more stable than the hotel bed on which the novel’s protagonists were united.81 Hermann thus saw in Brod’s short novel the work of a Zionist in the making, to the extent that the author approached the salient points of the same basic view of the complexity of Prague’s national-cultural existence that had guided the path of Bar Kochbaite Zionism since the days of Bergmann’s leadership. Because Brod had resolutely rejected the Germanocentric representation of Bohemia as affiliated with a hegemonic, imperial meta-entity, while pointing out its bicultural and binational character, all that was left for him to do in order to complete his personal subversion of the discourse of denial of Bohemia’s cultural and national diversity was, in Hermann’s implied opinion, to recognize the Jews’ own national existence as an additional cultural-national entity to those of the Germans and Czechs. In referring to A Czech Housemaid, Spector claimed, with some justification, that in Brod’s description of the relations between “Germanness” and “Czechness” in dichotomous gender-based terms of a “Western,” cerebral, and emotionally and spiritually mature German man against an “Eastern,” “primitive,” “childish,” and unstable Czech woman, there was an echo of the contemporary German–Bohemian gender and nationality discourse. And yet, faithful to the representation of the German-writing Jewish intellectuals of Kafka’s Prague as a German Jewish “island” somewhat cut off from the concrete sociocultural reality of their environment, Spector appears to have gone too far in regarding 81. Leo Herrmann, “Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen,” Jüdische Volksstimme, April 20, 1909, 9.

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Dimitry Shumsky A Czech Housemaid above all as a sort of German Jewish colonialist fantasy expressed in Orientalist and gendered language. In his words, “It is the first source to look for a clue to the morass of issues of desire and patronization, longing and disdain, in the Germano-Jewish gaze to the East.”82 As the daily lives of Brod and his family were far from being led within a Germanocentric circle isolated from the influences of the local national environment, his little novel reflected first and foremost the peak of the author’s own search for alternative channels of identification to that of the Germanocentric imperial one, modes that would be compatible with the picture of Prague’s multinational world that had already revealed itself to his father Adolf many years before it was expressed by the protagonist of A Czech Housemaid. Brod, then, found this channel in the Zionism of Bergmann and Bar Kochba, which saw in the balancing of the Jews’ German educational-cultural affiliation with a deepened receptiveness toward the Czech majority an existential need for their national future, and also sought to shape the ideological dimension of Bohemian Jewish nationalism as a position from which to engage in dialogue with the local national movement.83 As in the case of Spector’s analysis of A Czech Housemaid, it is likewise extremely difficult to accept his Germanocentric interpretative tendency with regard to the way in which he reads Kafka’s “Jackals and Arabs.” Insofar as one can see the jackals–European traveler–Arabs triangle as an encoding of Kafka’s Bar Kochbaite friends’ view of local Prague reality (and in contrast to Spector’s interpretation), it would appear that the jackals, longing for the voice of European reason in the face of the Arabs’ “filth,” rather than representing the Czechs, in fact denote the “German” Jews of Prague, “the foremost guardians of Germanness” against Czechness, according to Leo Herrmann, whose persistence in ignoring the national-cultural existence of the Czechs and whose part in fanning the flames of the Czech–German conflict the Bar Kochba Zionists strongly criticized; the European traveler, who would not tarry for long in the region, does not represent Prague’s German Jews, but rather the imperial AustroGerman establishment on which these Jews pinned their hopes, and the erosion of whose hegemony in Bohemia “Kafka’s” Zionists had well discerned; and the proud and upright Arabs, for their part, who scorned the jackals for continuing to adhere to their baseless belief in Arab inferiority, rather than representing the Germans, in fact represent the Czechs, whose national pride had for some time been recognized by Bergmann, Brod, and, one may assume, by Kafka himself. III. “J ACKALS

AND

A RABS ”

BETWEEN

J EWS

AND NON -J EWS IN

PALESTINE

As far as the approaches of Prague Zionism to the question of Arab–Jewish relations in Palestine are concerned, scholars of Zionism and the Arab–Zionist conflict have not failed to discern the firm stand taken by the former Bar 82. Spector, Prague Territories, 174. 83. See Dimitry Shumsky, “On Ethno-Centrism and its Limits: Czecho-German Jewry in Fin-de-Siècle Prague and the Origins of Zionist Bi-Nationalism,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 5 (2006): 184–88.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews Kochba leaders on this issue during the period of the British mandate, at a time when Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn, and Robert Weltsch became known as the Zionist movement’s most consistent spokesmen for the idea of an Arab–Jewish binational state.84 And yet, neither these historians nor the students of the Zionist movement in Habsburg Prague have considered the early voice of Bar Kochba Zionism prior to the First World War on this matter. It was none other than Bergmann, who, in 1911, about a year after his return from a visit to Palestine (August–September 1910), presented his “Notes on the Arab Question” in the Viennese Zionist journal Palästina.85 In this article, Bergmann leveled trenchant criticism at the Zionist policy of ignoring the needs of the Arab residents of the country, both with respect to the accelerated purchase of land and the separate management of the economy, and above all at what seemed to him the Zionist settlers’ palpable blindness toward the very fact of the existence of Arabs in Palestine. In truth, there was nothing new in the actual criticism of the modes of Zionist settlement and of the immigrants’ dismissive attitude toward the natives. Yitzhak Epstein (1862–1943), one of the pioneers of the teaching of the Hebrew language in the Yishuv, had already castigated these phenomena in 1907 in his famous article “She’ela ne’elma” (Hidden Question).86 As a veteran of the Jewish Yishuv, rather than as a visitor from abroad, he leveled wide-ranging and serious accusations against his Zionist associates for neglecting the question of the relations with the majority population of the country, a problem that encapsulated, in his opinion, the seeds of future calamity. And yet, precisely against the backdrop of Epstein’s “Hidden Question,” to which Bergmann’s article was, to a certain extent, written as a response, one can appreciate the special point of view on the Arab–Jewish question of the visitor from Czech–German–Jewish Prague.87 In referring to the question of the national awareness of the Arabs of Palestine, Epstein categorically concluded that “In Palestine there is as yet no Arab movement in the national sense … of this concept.”88 He emphasized how great were the extent and depth of the ties that the local Arabs felt toward their homeland, in which their fathers and forefathers had lived for “twenty jubilees.”89 Yet he was first and foremost alluding to the “natural” ties of the Arab peasants to the property on which they had worked for generations, and to the primordial bond of 84. See, e.g., Aharon Kedar, “Brith Shalom [1925–1933],” Jerusalem Quarterly 18 (1981): 56; Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948: A Study of Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 122–25; Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 164–69; Hagit Lavsky, Before Catastrophe: The Distinctive Path of German Zionism (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 141; Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brith Shalom, 1925–1933 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 85. Schmuel Hugo Bergmann, Tagebücher und Briefe, ed. Miriam Sambursky (Königstein/Ts.: Jüdische Verlag, 1985), 1:27–38; and Hugo Bergmann, “Bemerkungen zur arabischen Frage,” Palästina 8 (1911): 190–95. 86. Yitzhak Epstein, “She’ela ne’elma,” Ha-shiloah. 17 (1907–1908): 193–206. 87. Bergmann, “Bemerkungen,” 195. 88. Epstein, “She’ela ne’elma,” 196. 89. Ibid., 194–95.

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Dimitry Shumsky traditional Arab society to the graves of their ancestors.90 As described by Epstein, Arab society of Palestine thus takes the form of a somewhat static and petrified entity, the diametric opposite of European societies that had undergone processes of modernization, and also of the society of the Zionist settlers who hailed from these places. Indeed, Bergmann likewise pointed out that Palestinian Arab society was on the whole a premodern peasant society. At the same time, however, he identified modernization processes occurring within it that had not been noticed by the Zionists, and he sought to bring to the fore in particular the dimension of potential power contained within these processes, even if these were but the initial trappings of modernization. He utterly rejected the perception that was prevalent among broad Zionist circles, according to which Jewish settlement in the country, and it alone, could lay the foundations of modern life in the region. What Bergmann discerned was that phenomena identified with modernization, such as industrialization and the development of trade and infrastructure, had already begun among Palestine’s local population, and were in fact gathering considerable momentum, even if this was not yet sufficient to provide employment for the working class in the making.91 Moreover, in contrast to Epstein’s assertion that “the Muslim will not leave his country, will not wander afar,” because “the lower a man’s level of development and the narrower his field of vision, the stronger the ties that bind him to his country and his region and the harder it is for him to leave his village and his field,” Bergmann actually emphasized that the Arab population of Palestine and the adjacent territories had in fact lately been in a state of constant demographic movement.92 He thus clearly discerned the flow of Arab migration from the area of Lebanon to the Galilee, which he claimed had gained momentum in recent years. There was also the phenomenon of Arab migration to the United States, but when they had succeeded in saving the desired sum abroad, Bergmann noted, many of them returned to their homeland in the Middle East, purchased land in the Lebanon area and the Galilee, and in many cases eventually chose to return and lay down roots in northern Palestine.93 This is precisely the context within which Bergmann referred to the matter of the Arab residents’ awareness of their ties to ihre Heimat.94 Unlike Epstein, who presented the Arab residents of the country as a collective of primitive workers with an umbilical connection to the land of their ancestors, and whose sights were set only on their ancient customs, which accurately reflected, as it were, the foundations of their present life, Bergmann saw a Palestinian Arab of a different sort, closely resembling a citizen of a modern European nation in the making. Bergmann’s Arab—a native of Lebanon or Palestine—is rather exposed to modern life, wandering about the Middle East and even the wide world in 90. Ibid., 195. 91. Bergmann, “Bemerkungen,” 191. 92. Epstein, “She’ila neelama,” 195; Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 26–27. 93. Bergmann, “Bemerkungen,” 191–92. 94. Ibid., 192.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews search of fresh economic opportunities. At the end of his peregrinations he finds himself in Palestine, and, faced with this dynamic experience, the awareness of his attachment to Palästina is reshaped as a consciousness with an outright nationalsecular flavor, which collides with the national consciousness of the Zionist settlers.95 Thus, at so early a stage did the visitor from Prague point out nothing less than the beginnings of the conflict between two local modern nationalisms in Palestine, the Jewish and the Arab. To him, a resolution of this conflict was not impossible, if only the Zionists would adopt a position of open dialogue with the local national environment. As an immediate and concrete means of promoting this position, Bergmann proposed the establishment of a local Zionist newspaper in the Arab language, with the aim of clarifying to the new neighbors the ultimate goal of Zionism, which was, as Bergmann understood it, to create the fabric of Arab–Jewish cooperation in the country, all the while emphasizing both peoples’ attachment to Palästina.96 But the basic prerequisite for the adoption of such a mode of conduct on the part of the Zionists was their recognition of the very foundation of Arab nationalism—embryonic as it might be—in Palestine, and this is the foremost of Bergmann’s “Notes on the Arab Question.” It is perhaps no coincidence that from the end of 1910 on, a few months after the leader of the Bar Kochba circle had visited Palestine and shortly before the appearance of his “Notes on the Arab Question,” the Bar Kochba organ Selbstwehr began to pay increasing attention to the Arab national challenge in Palästina. Up to this time, indeed, there had been virtually no mention of the local Arabs’ tangible existence in the weekly’s few references to the situation in Palestine. At most, we find intellectual discussions on Muslim influences in Palestinian folktales, and the rare representations of the local population appear only in religious (Christen und Moslems) and anthropological (Beduinen) terms.97 Now, beginning in December 1910, Selbstwehr began publishing with some regularity the “Palästinanachrichten” column, which for the first time presented the Araber to its readers as a collective entity with national traits and intentions, destined to compete with the Zionist Jewish element in the country. It appears at times as though the anonymous journalist who penned this column was none other than the author of “Notes on the Arab Question” himself. Thus, the weekly paper reported on the accelerating pace of growth of the upper Galilee, while placing particular emphasis on the “tremendous impetus” of the local Arab population. Many of the prosperous Arabs were, according to this report, designing their houses in the European style. Furthermore, numerous peasants were traveling to the United States for several years, and once they had accumulated sufficient funds there for the purchase of a house and land in Palestine, they returned to their homeland. Thus, one could discern the national confrontation between them and the Zionist settlers, who were likewise returning to their 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 195; see also idem., Tagebücher und Briefe, 1:35. 97. See, respectively, “Volkssagen im heutigen Palästina,” Selbstwehr, July 22, 1910, 1–2; “Von der deutschen und der jüdischen Palästina-Bank,” Selbstwehr, May 13, 1910, 2; and “Zur Lage der jüdischen Kolonien in Galiläa,” Selbstwehr, September 16, 1910, 4.

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Dimitry Shumsky homeland.98 This state of affairs, with its increasing escalation, as Selbstwehr would warn with growing urgency in the course of 1911, compelled the Zionists, as its contributors saw it, to promote the settlement project alongside continuous negotiations with the Arab public and its representatives. Notwithstanding the correspondents’ somewhat intuitive sense that the Arab–Jewish national conflict in Palestine would become ever more severe, a situation in which a form of constructive dialogue would develop did not appear to them as an unattainable objective. Selbstwehr saw in the willingness to open up to the language and culture of the local Arab environment an essential immediate step that the Zionists should take toward the inauguration of this dialogue. First, it would be well to promote the teaching of the Arab language in Jewish schools in order to prepare Jewish youngsters for active participation in the written Arab discourse in Palestine, which for the most part displayed a suspicious and hostile tendency toward Zionism.99 In a similar vein, the paper argued that it was already time to work toward founding a Zionist newspaper in the Arab language.100 Like Bergmann, who was to make an identical proposal several months later in his “Notes,” Selbstwehr thus urged the Zionist settlers to take a direct stand, as Zionists writing in the Arab language, in the face of what it perceived as the Arab nationalist discourse in Palestine, in order to attempt to confront it face to face, and thereby nurture channels of bridging and mutual understanding between Zionism and the local Arab nationalism.101 Upon reviewing the voice of Bar Kochbaite Zionism on “the Arab question,” it is difficult not to discern a number of similarities between the ways in which Bergmann and Selbstwehr perceived the reality of Palestine and Max Brod’s presentation of the state of interethnic relations in contemporary Prague and Bohemia, as revealed to the protagonist of his A Czech Housemaid. In the same way that Brod sought to extricate his German and German–Jewish readers in Bohemia from long-standing blindness to the socioeconomic, political, and demographic changes that had occurred among their Czech neighbors in recent generations, and which had reshaped them as a national political collective evenly matched with the German collective as far as meeting the challenge of modern life was concerned, so, too, did Bergmann and his like-minded colleagues on the Bar Kochba weekly wish to turn the Zionist settlers’ attention to the initial budding of such development among the local Arab population. And as Brod’s Czechs had no intention of returning to the villages from which they had come, but rather sought to continue residing in the “German” cities while contesting the view of Bohemia’s industrialized regions as “German land,” so, too, did Bergmann’s and Selbstwehr’s Arabs strike roots in the ports of “the Land of Israel,” waging fierce anti-Zionist propaganda in their press while regarding the transfer of the ownership of land from Arab to Jewish hands, even though it was done legally, as the transfer from one national ownership to another and as evidence

98. “Palästinanachrichten,” Selbstwehr, December 9, 1910, 5. 99. “Palästinanachrichten,” Selbstwehr, July 14, 1911, 4. 100. “Palästinanachrichten,” Selbstwehr, February 3, 1911, 4; and March 17, 1911, 4. 101. “Palästinanachrichten,” Selbstwehr, July 14, 1911, 4.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews of the Zionist quest for Jewish national hegemony over the country. And as Brod thought that, in order to promote a solution to the Czech–German conflict at its peak, the German minority must cease to ignore the national existence, material distress, and cultural-spiritual reality of their Czech neighbors, and relinquish the remnants of their political hegemony in Bohemia, so were Bergmann and the Selbstwehr journalists convinced that in order to prevent the outbreak of the Arab–Jewish conflict in Palestine, the Jewish minority had to recognize fully the local ethnonational characteristics of “the Land of Israel,” withdraw from the hegemonic political intention to achieve a Jewish majority in the country, and put a stop to their autarchic economic and cultural deportment while demonstrating a willingness to engage in negotiations with the emerging local nationalism over the possibilities of Arab–Jewish coexistence in a shared land.102 It is interesting to note that the means that Bar Kochbaite Zionism proposed in order to pave the way for dialogue with the Arab nation in the making were very similar to the path that Bergmann and the Bar Kochba leadership urged the Prague community establishment to adopt in relation to the Czech surroundings, namely, acquiring knowledge of the language of a neighboring local nationality. As Bergmann had in 1903 wished for the inclusion of the Czech language in a new curriculum in Prague’s Jewish schools, so did Selbstwehr in 1911 propose the teaching of the Arab language in Jewish schools in Palestine.103 Bergmann’s Palestinian Arabs thus resemble Brod’s Czechs in that the national existence of both is unrecognized by their neighbors, who became exposed to the trends of modernization at an earlier stage; Bergmann’s Zionist settlers thus closely resemble Brod’s Germans, and, in fact, also the Jewish proponents of German hegemony in Bohemia, against whom Bergmann himself had railed when still chairman of Bar Kochba in the years 1903–1904. We have, indeed, no way of establishing conclusively whether Bergmann was influenced by the novel of one of his close friends when he wrote his “Notes on the Arab Question.” It can, at most, be determined that the “Arab question” was discussed by Bergmann and Brod between the end of 1915 and early 1916 in the correspondence between them, but this provides no clue to the dual comparison between Bohemian Germans/German Jews and Zionist settlers on the one hand, and between the Czechs and Arabs on the other.104 And yet, Bergmann explicitly used this precise comparison as late as 1921, when he sought to illustrate to his former Bar Kochba colleague Robert Weltsch the dimensions of Jewish ignorance of the existence of the Palestinian Arabs as an entity with a genuine nationalpolitical awareness: “We are blind to the Arabs, precisely as we in Bohemia were blind to the Czechs, and only saw Vienna and the Germans.”105 Needless 102. Bergmann, “Bemerkungen,” 192, 190, 195; and “Palästinanachrichten,” Selbstwehr, July 14, 1911, 4. 103. Bergmann, “Schulfragen,” 3; “Palästinanachrichten,” Selbstwehr, July 14, 1911, 4. 104. “Matai ha-milh.amah hi ha-hekhrah.: h.alifat ha-mikhtavim ben Hugo Bergmann le-ven Max Brod,” Molad 3, no. 26 (1970–71): 268–72. 105. Letter from Hugo Bergmann to Robert Weltsch, May 30, 1921, in Tagebücher und Briefe, 1:162.

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Dimitry Shumsky to say, despite his use of the first-person plural (“we … were blind to the Czechs”), Bergmann was not referring to himself, nor to his friends in the Bar Kochba Association. For, as we remember, their Zionist activity in the Bohemian arena—and that of Bergmann himself first and foremost—was motivated largely by a wish to balance their ties to imperial German culture with a sociocultural affiliation to the local Czech national environment. He was surely referring to all those Jewish defenders of German cultural-political hegemony in Bohemia and Moravia, who were wont to ignore the importance of a local sociocultural and political element in the form of Czech nationalism, and turned their backs on the language and culture of a local neighboring population in favor of adherence to imperial cultural-political ties. The central elements of the Zionist movement in Palestine were thus, in Bergmann’s assessment, suffering from the same type of blindness toward the increasingly nationalist tendencies among the local population, while turning their gaze to the capital of the British Empire, thereby closely resembling the Viennese political orientation on the part of many among the Jews of Bohemia and Prague at the end of the Habsburg era.106 It is difficult to assume that a comparison of this kind between the attitude of Jewish settlers toward the nascent Arab Palestinian nationalism and that of the Germanocentric Prague Jews toward the Czech national movement at the height of its development had not occurred to Bergmann already in 1911, when he first observed the ways of the Zionist settlement in Palestine and the reactions of the local Arabs to them. For, at the time of making his critical voice heard in “Notes on the Arab Question,” the example of the Czech–German–Jewish triangle appeared before his eyes as part of his life experience, rather than as a past memory, as in 1921, about one year after his immigration to Palestine. But even had this not been the case, one may at least determine that the authors of “Notes on the Arab Question” and A Czech Housemaid, whose Jewish national awareness was shaped while they were questioning the logic of the imperial Austro-German hegemony and upon the repositioning in the Bohemian multinational arena alongside the Czech nationality, followed occurrences in Palestine and in Bohemia, respectively, from the same viewpoint, as it were, that enabled them to identify in the local environment more than one national trend, and motivated them to seek ways of bridging the neighboring nationalities. This somewhat peripheral viewpoint, located ostensibly at the margins of the “imperial” and at the center of the “local,” and which thus focuses the spotlight on the totality of national-cultural forces operating in the local space, rather than on the unnuanced imperial image of this space, was evidently shared by the author of “Jackals and Arabs.” Indeed, to the extent that one can regard Kafka’s jackals– European traveler–Arabs triangulation as a parable in the spirit of the Bar Kochbaite perception of the relations among the Jewish adherents of Deutschtum in Prague, the imperial Germanocentric Habsburg establishment, and the local Czech national environment, one can also discern in it Bar Kochba Zionism’s clear gaze turned increasingly toward a different Jewish–imperial–local triangle,

106. Ibid., 161.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews namely, the one that was emerging in the Middle East. According to this reading, the jackals represent the Zionist settlers in Bergmann’s “Notes on the Arab Question,” entrenched in their position of Eurocentric alienation in relation to the local Arab environment; the European traveler represents the European powers pursuing an imperial interest in Palestine and the Middle East, upon whose support political Zionism relied blindly, a dependence compared by Bergmann in his letter to Robert Weltsch to the conduct of the Germanocentric Jews of Habsburg Bohemia; and the Arabs represent the Palestinian Arabs, or at least those elements manifesting a national awareness, on whom Bergmann and Selbstwehr focused their readers’ attention. As an aside, someone who would have been likely to support an interpretation of this sort to some degree was none other than Kafka himself. We know that Martin Buber, who upon reading “Jackals and Arabs” and “A Report to an Academy” was very eager to see these two stories appear in his journal, suggested to Kafka that they be published under the common title of Gleichnisse (Parables). Kafka, however, rejected this proposal politely yet firmly: “May I ask you not to call the pieces parables; they are not really parables. If they are to have any overall title at all, the best might be: ‘Two Animal Stories.’”107 In my view, this resistance on Kafka’s part, accompanied by an assertion that rejected a priori any sweeping allegorical interpretation of the two stories, tells us that some of the figures he created in them represented no more and no less than themselves, as they existed only in the reality of the author’s imagination. And as far as “Jackals and Arabs” is concerned, both the “Arab” and the “European traveler” are precisely this type of figure. Did Kafka read the “notes” of his classmate in Palästina, a journal of which he had at least one issue in his possession in October 1912, when he offered it to his fiancée Felice Bauer?108 Or was he perhaps exposed to the Arabs’ national representation through the Bar Kochba weekly, which he had, one remembers, begun reading regularly in 1911, the same year in which Selbstwehr first drew for its readers the figure of the Palestinian Arab with a striking resemblance to the man of a European nation?109 Or did he even directly hear Bergmann’s impressions of the latter’s visit to Palestine, as we are, after all, speaking of two long-standing childhood friends? It is reasonable to assume that it was not deliberation over these questions that prevented Western scholars from reading Kafka’s “Arab” literally, but rather the author’s description of the Arab as “white,” and also as upright—not only regarding his carriage, but also in relation to his selfperception and self-confidence. On the strength of this description, no doubt, those scholars who addressed the specific identification of Kafka’s “Arab” saw him as an unmistakable European: Tismar and Robertson assumed that this was a general representation of “Western” non-Jews, while Spector was more specific 107. Emphasis added. Franz Kafka to Martin Buber, May 12, 1917, in Letters to Friends, Family, Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 132. 108. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974), 16. 109. Binder, “Kafka and the Weekly Paper ‘Selbstwehr.’”

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Dimitry Shumsky in recognizing an allusion to the “potent and proud” Prague Germans.110 Yet the Palestinian Arab, to whose actual existence—and even more so, to whose potential existence in the foreseeable future—Bergmann and Selbstwehr alerted their readers, had, in truth, a “European” appearance, at least with regard to the nationalmodern outline of his physiognomy. Kafka’s Arab is thus also like this—a man well aware of his people’s vital interests, who has no difficulty exposing the crafty scheme of his jackal neighbors to persuade hesitant European elements to harm these interests. This kind of representation of the Arab, which considerably added to the significance of the image of the Palestinian Arab presented by Kafka’s close friend and by the Prague Zionist weekly that he regularly read, was diametrically opposed to the approach toward “the Arab question” shared by British diplomats and the leaders of political Zionism, who, in the period of the “Great War,” completely ignored the existence of the Arabs as an element of any political weight in the country.111 It is superfluous to note that this approach, which found its most prominent expression in Chaim Weizmann’s view that the Arab residents of Palestine were at least four hundred years behind the Zionists in their self-awareness, was baseless.112 There is broad agreement among the historians who have studied the political trends in the Arab society of Palestine on the eve of the First World War that, notwithstanding the lack of an Arab Palestinian national movement in the organizational-political sense, the apprehension over Zionist policy among the strata of educated urban Arabs (the Ayaan) began in those days to take on an outright national-political dimension.113 While the strata among which such developments occurred were indeed extremely thin, Kafka observed them, as a matter of course, primarily through the magnifying glass of Bergmann’s “Notes on the Arab Question” and of the “Palästinanachrichten” column in Selbstwehr, while adding to what he saw by employing his literary skills. In other words, while he was, in truth, looking only at the initial outlines of the figure of a politically upright Arab, Kafka had in fact discerned the entire portrait, and thus created the impression of a somewhat anachronistic picture, ahead of its time. Faced with the tendency of the leaders of political Zionism to deny that processes comparable to those occurring in Europe may also evolve in the local Arab Palestinian environment, and consequently their strategic diplomatic tendency to pin their political hopes on casual 110. Tismar, “Kafkas ‘Schakale und Araber’”; Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, 164; and Spector, Prague Territories, 191. 111. Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 1914–1918: British–Jewish–Arab Relations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 12, 67. 112. Joseph Heller, “Emdotehem shel Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and Jabotinsky be-sheila he-aravit—mekhkar hashva’ati,” in Idan ha-z.iyonut, ed. Anita Shapira, Jehuda Reinharz and Jay Harris (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2000), 217. 113. Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement: 1918–1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974), 28; Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 226–27; and Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 62–67. On the nationalist-autonomist movements among the Palestinian Arabs on the eve of World War I, see Eliezer Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 150–51.

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews European visitors, a rather ominous scenario took shape in Kafka’s perception: The jackals fail to convince the man “from the North” of the inferiority of the Arabs, and the most that the European is prepared to do is to take hold of the Arab’s arm to prevent him from flaying them with his whip.114 But it is even worse than this: The visitor from Europe, who, according to the jackals, has “the kind of intelligence that is not to be found among Arabs,” “[is] making only a short tour of [the jackals’ and Arabs’] country,”115 while it is the Arabs who, it turns out, are no less intelligent than he, will remain forever, and will continue to constitute a permanent challenge to the jackals’ existence. IV. C ONCLUSIONS The name of the Prague Zionist association with which Franz Kafka’s Zionist friends were identified may be misleading. Shimon Bar Kochba was, after all, the man who led the last bloody rebellion of Jews against Rome, and it follows that the association’s adoption of this name should ostensibly allude to a suspicious, nationalistic, and even militant standpoint toward the non-Jewish surroundings. Yet the choice of the name Bar Kochba almost certainly resulted first and foremost from the influence of the play of the same name written in 1897 by Jaroslav Vrchlický (1853–1912), the renowned Czech poet and playwright, who, on his part, showed considerable interest in the history of the Jews and their culture, translated the works of the American Yiddish poet Moritz Rosenfeld into the Czech language, and maintained close intellectual ties with the founders of Prague Zionism.116 This is to say that in the contemporary Bohemian Jewish context, the name Bar Kochba furnished evidence of the dimension of Jewish receptiveness toward the Czech environment, language, and culture, rather than of a narrow, ethnocentric perception of Jewish existence. The aims of the Bar Kochba Association as a Jewish national movement were thus not confined to nurturing particularistic Jewish national content in Bohemian Jewish life, such as Hugo Bergmann’s aspiration to revive the Hebrew language in a concrete manner among his comrades in the association; of no less importance to them was the mission of reshaping relations between the Jews and their local (multi)national environment.117 In itself an indirect consequence of the initial questioning of the imperial Germanocentric link among Bohemian and Prague Jewry in the face of the challenge of Czech nationalism, Bar Kochbaite Zionism sought to impart added validity to the final dismantling of Austro-German political hegemony in the Czech lands, to which the German Jewish alliance served as a central pillar, and thereby to contribute to transforming Bohemia and Moravia into a common multinational framework, in which legitimacy would be granted to the particular development of all local nationalities, including the Jewish one. 114. Kafka, Collected Stories, 179. 115. Ibid., 176. 116. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 97. 117. Ibid., 101.

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Dimitry Shumsky Bar Kochba Zionism’s aspiration to change the patterns of Jewish conduct vis-à-vis a long-armed empire on the one hand and the local sociocultural surroundings on the other was not confined to the Bohemian context. The more the Bar Kochbaites looked toward the land with which Zionism’s political hopes were entwined, the more the sides of the Palestinian triangle of forces achieved clarity for them: the Zionist settlers, the great powers, and the local Arabs at the beginning of the crystallization of their national-political awareness, as a side unseen by the former two. So, the trenchant criticism that Hugo Bergmann, the leader of the Bar Kochbaites and their mouthpiece, leveled at the Jewish settlers for their refusal to contemplate the first buds of Palestinian Arab nationalism sounded like a veritable echo of the call to arms of Brod, Leo Herrmann, and Bergmann himself against the Prague German and German–Jewish discourse of hegemony that stubbornly denied the strong presence of the neighboring Czech nationalism and its political demands. The author of “Jackals and Arabs” was not a Zionist activist. He was not involved in the effort of his close friends to trace the ideological directions of Bar Kochbaite Zionism, but in the main observed these from a distance with considerable intellectual interest and with somewhat muted sympathy. And yet, Kafka’s links to the Bar Kochba circle were not confined to intellectual curiosity and ties of friendship with some of its prominent members. Most important, he was identified with the Bar Kochba members in a deep sociocultural sense, as someone who daily experienced that erosion of the dominant status of the German affinity in the face of the Czech challenge, which honed the Bar Kochbaites’ Jewish national awareness, and also shaped their understanding of Zionism as a move toward the Jews’ self-repositioning within local multinational networks and against the identification of the Jewish minority with the imperial forces. While in Kafka’s case the experience of this collision between imperial and local non-Jews did not lead him to adopt an explicit, national Jewish position, it transformed him into a sharer of the Bar Kochba Zionists’ criticism of what appeared to them the incredible blindness of Germanocentric Jews on the one hand and Zionist settlers on the other, toward what was occurring in their concrete local surroundings. “Jackals and Arabs”—written in the last days of the Habsburg state, which denied the severity of its local national problems, and in the first days of local Palestinian nationalism, whose existence had thus far been denied—thus signaled the apex of this criticism. Dimitry Shumsky Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem, Israel

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AJS Review 33:1 (2009), 101–133 © 2009 Association for Jewish Studies doi:10.1017/S0364009409000051

F ROM

T HE F ORMERLY W EALTHY P OOR : E MPATHY TO A MBIVALENCE IN R ABBINIC L ITERATURE OF L ATE A NTIQUITY by

Alyssa M. Gray1

Students of poverty in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim social, literary, and legal contexts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages have noted the phenomenon of wealthy people who fall into poverty and the provision of charitable assistance to them.2 This essay’s principal purpose is to point out an important difference between the development of attitudes toward the formerly wealthy poor in rabbinic literature of late antiquity and in other religious and legal contexts. Peter Brown notes evidence of late Roman empathy for the wellborn poor, hypothesizing that this empathy can be attributed to a desire to preserve these remnants of the old, proud plebs romana in the uncertain sixth century.3 Ingrid Mattson demonstrates that between the eighth and tenth or eleventh centuries CE, Islamic jurists moved in the direction of taking the “social and economic context” of a poor person into account in determining that person’s legitimate needs.4 By contrast, as this essay will show, rabbinic literature of late antiquity moved in the

1. The author wishes to thank Dr. Aaron Panken for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this essay. The author alone is responsible for any errors. 2. For some observations on the needs of the formerly wealthy poor in the late antique Christian context, see, e.g., Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002), 59–60; in Islamic law, see, e.g., Ingrid Mattson, “StatusBased Definitions of Need in Early Islamic Zakat and Maintenance Laws,” in Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts, ed. Michael Bonner, Mine Ener, and Amy Singer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 31–51; and for medieval Egyptian Jewry, see Mark R. Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 36–41, 67–70. 3. See Brown, Poverty and Leadership, 59–60. 4. Mattson, “Status-Based Definitions of Need,” 31–32 n. 1 and passim. Particularly telling is Mattson’s description on p. 42 of the shift from Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi’i’s view of alms as intended “to lessen the gap between rich and poor in a local community” (eighth and ninth centuries CE) to that of later legal scholars, who viewed alms as intended “to alleviate individual needs— needs that are calculated according to the rank and status of individuals.”

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Alyssa M. Gray opposite direction, from third-century empathy for the formerly wealthy poor to growing ambivalence in the fourth through the seventh centuries.5 This essay also has two methodological goals, the fulfillment of which will yield evidence for the rabbinic shift from empathy to ambivalence vis-à-vis the formerly wealthy poor. The first goal is to remedy the lack of a comprehensive collection and analysis of the sources about the formerly wealthy poor. The second is to read these sources within the literary and redactional contexts in which they are found and which provide a framework for their proper interpretation.6 The current lack of a comprehensive and contextual analysis of the traditions about the formerly wealthy poor has left scholars in related fields scratching their heads over isolated and admittedly strange stories. For example, in his important study on poverty and episcopal leadership in late antiquity, Brown notes that the Talmud “toyed with surreal cases” of such persons being maintained in the standards to which they had become accustomed.7 One “surreal case” to which Brown refers is undoubtedly that of the first-century sage Hillel, who was said to have provided an ‘ani ben tovim (a poor person of good family) with a horse to work with and a slave to serve him, or, according to the Bavli, with a horse to ride on and a slave to run before him—with Hillel serving in the latter role one time when no slave could be found.8 Mark R. Cohen similarly discusses the “hyperbole” of the story of Hillel supporting the ‘ani ben tovim.9 While a comprehensive and contextual study of the sources about the formerly wealthy poor may not completely remove the veil of “surreality” and “hyperbole” that surrounds some of these texts, it will enable us to understand better how these texts fit into evolving rabbinic understandings of the formerly wealthy poor. This essay will argue that tannaitic sources are the most generous and least ambivalent toward the formerly wealthy poor. The Yerushalmi begins to display some ambivalence toward this group, and the Bavli also demonstrates ambivalence, expressing it in several new ways. This essay will demonstrate this shift from a predominant posture of empathy to one of increased ambivalence, suggesting that the shift is rooted in both the changing external historical circumstances and the internal social and ideological concerns of Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis.

5. The fourth through the seventh century time frame takes in not only the amoraic periods in both the Land of Israel and Babylonia but also the period of postamoraic redaction of the Bavli (redacted ca. 600 CE). 6. For discussions of the role that literary context can play in the proper interpretation of discrete rabbinic stories and traditions, see, e.g., Alyssa Gray, “The Power Conferred by Distance from Power: Redaction and Meaning in b. A. Z. 10a–11a,” in Creation and Composition: The Contribution of the Bavli Redactors (Stammaim) to the Aggadah, ed. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 30–33 and passim; and Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 11–15. 7. Brown, Poverty and Leadership, 60. 8. This well-known story, in its various versions, will be analyzed in more detail later. 9. Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt, 39.

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor I. A P HILOLOGICAL P RELIMINARY Formerly wealthy people are referred to in late antique rabbinic compilations by the terms yarad/yardu m’nikhseihem (literally, he/those who came down from his/their possessions or he/those who lost his/their wealth),10 ’itnah.at min nikhsoi (he who came down from his possessions—found only in Yerushalmi), nah.ti . . . m’nikhseihen (those who have come down from their possessions—found only in Bavli), and ‘ani/yyim ben/b’nei tovim (poor of good family). Judging from the terminology, it seems that two groups of people are being described: those labeled in the various rabbinic compilations with some form of the phrase “coming down from one’s possessions,” and those described as the “poor of good family.” The former may be people who lost their wealth but did not have the high-status family connections of the latter. While the different terms may have originated in the historical reality of similar, yet distinct, groups of formerly wealthy poor, the poor described by the two sets of terms are not portrayed in rabbinic compilations as being so different that they cannot or should not be studied together.11 For ease of reference, this essay will refer to these unfortunates collectively as the “formerly wealthy poor,” employing more specific designations if necessary. The terms yarad m’nikhasav (the one who lost his wealth) and yardu m’nikhseihen (the ones who lost their wealth) are Palestinian expressions that appear overwhelmingly in Palestinian compilations and in Palestinian contexts in the Bavli.12 The Bavli stam only once utilizes the related phrase shema’ yered m’nikhasav—“lest,” or “in case one loses his wealth”—on B. Ketubot 67b, in the context of reconciling R. Ila’i’s ruling that one must not give more than 20 percent of one’s wealth as alms13 with Mar Ukba’s deathbed charitable gift of 50 percent of his wealth. Unsurprisingly, the Yerushalmi’s expression ’itnah.at min nikhsoi, phrased as it is in Palestinian Aramaic, is not found in the Bavli.14 A similar expression meaning “loss of wealth” appears only once in the 10. See also ibid., 37 n. 1 (fell from his wealth). 11. Cohen, in his study of the Geniza evidence, implicitly sees these two groups as related yet distinct in medieval Egypt, and he argues that what he terms “the ‘good family’ motif in the Geniza” demonstrates how poverty blurs the distinction between the underclass and those who previously ranked above them socially. See ibid., 67. 12. Yarad m’nikhasav: Y. Pe’ah 8:9, 21b (= Y. Shekalim 5:5, 49b); Y. Horayot 3:6, 48a; Bereshit Rabbah 71:6 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 2:830); Vayikra Rabbah 5:4 (ed. Margoliot, 1:111); Vayikra Rabbah 34:1 (ed. Margoliot, 2:773); and Eikhah Rabbah 3:6 (Vilna ed., 100). Yardu M’nikhseihem: M. Bava’ Kamma’ 8:6; Y. Nedarim 9:2, 41c; Bereshit Rabbah 71:6 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 2:830); Eikhah Rabbah 3:6 (Vilna ed., 100); B. Bava’ Kamma’ 86a (mishnah quote), 90b (mishnah quote), 91a (mishnah quote); and B. ‘Avodah Zarah 5a (= Bereshit Rabbah 71:6). Throughout this essay, all Yerushalmi references are to Talmud Yerushalmi According to Ms. Or. 4720 (Scal. 3) of the Leiden University Library with Restorations and Corrections (Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2001). 13. See Y. Pe’ah 1:1, 15b. 14. ’Itnah.at min nikhsoi is found at Y. Pe’ah 8:8, 21a and Y. Ketubot 11:3, 34b. For more on the Bavli’s tendency to replace Palestinian terminology in its source texts with its own, see, e.g., Alyssa M. Gray, “A Bavli Sugya and Its Two Yerushalmi Parallels: Issues of Literary Relationship and

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Alyssa M. Gray Bavli in reference to conditions in Babylonia; Rabbah presents three reasons why ba‘alei batim (householders) lose their wealth (nah.ti m’nikhseihon).15 The term ‘ani ben tovim in all of its manifestations is of Palestinian provenance, with occurrences of the term in one form or another fairly equally weighted between tannaitic and Palestinian amoraic compilations.16 The latest Palestinian occurrence of the term appears in a story told about R. Yonah (of the fifth Palestinian amoraic generation) in the Yerushalmi and Vayikra Rabbah.17 It should also be noted that Palestinian compilations refer to a possibly related category known as ben gedolim (the son of great ones), but this very small category includes only one reference to poverty.18 The term ‘ani ben tovim appears three times in the Bavli (B. Ketubot 66a and 67b), twice in Palestinian sources, and once in Babylonian discussion of a mishnah. One occurrence on 67b is simply the Bavli’s repetition of the phrase found earlier in the tannaitic and Yerushalmi versions of the story of Hillel and his generosity to an ‘ani ben tovim. The second occurrence of ‘ani ben tovim on 67b appears in the Bavli’s version of a tannaitic story about a formerly wealthy person who was lavishly provided with meat in the Upper Galilee.19 In the latter case, the Bavli replaced the Tosefta’s and the Yerushalmi’s references in the story to a zaken (elder) and the Sifrei’s reference to an oreah. (guest) with the phrase ‘ani ben tovim. This example suggests that the Bavli does not necessarily see a distinction between the ‘ani ben tovim and other cases of formerly wealthy people, which, in turn, buttresses this essay’s methodological contention that these various categories of poor should be studied together. The only truly “Babylonian” use of ‘ani ben tovim is found on B. Ketubot 66a, where Ravina uses the phrase in asking Rav Ashi whether someone who humiliated an ‘ani ben tovim should have to pay boshet (embarrassment) to the ‘ani’s entire

Redaction,” in How Should Rabbinic Literature Be Read in the Modern World? ed. Matthew Kraus (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2006), 35–77, esp. 64–72; and Shamma Friedman, “Ha-baraitot ba-Talmud ha-Bavli ve-yah.asan le-makbiloteihen dhe-b’Tosefta,” in ’At.arah le-H.ayim: meh.karim ba-sifrut ha-Talmudit veha-rabanit li-khevod Profesor H.ayim Zalman Dimitrovski, ed. Daniel Boyarin et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 163–201. 15. B. Gittin 38b. 16. The term appears in three forms. The singular ‘ani ben tovim appears at T. Pe’ah 4:10 (ed. Lieberman, 58); Y. Pe’ah 8:8, 21a; Mekhilta d’Rabbi Shimon bar Yoh.ai 23:3 (ed. EpsteinMelamed, 214–15); and Sifrei Devarim 116 (ed. Finkelstein, 174–75). The plural ‘aniyyim b’nei tovim appears at M. Shekalim 5:6 and T. Shekalim 2:16 (ed. Lieberman, 211). The simple form ben tovim appears at Y. Pe’ah 8:9, 21b (= Y. Shekalim 5:5, 49b); Mekhilta d’Rabbi Shimon bar Yoh.ai 23:3 (ed. Epstein-Melamed, 214–15); Sifrei Devarim 38 (ed. Finkelstein, 74; two occurrences); and Vayikra Rabbah 34:1 (ed. Margoliot, 2:773). The singular ‘ani ben tovim also appears twice in Palestinian stories in the Bavli (B. Ketubot 67b) and once in a halakhic context (B. Ketubot 66a). 17. Y. Pe’ah 8:9, 21b (= Y. Shekalim 5:5, 49b = Vayikra Rabbah 34:1 [ed. Margoliot, 2:773]). 18. See T. Bava’ Kamma’ 9:12 (ed. Lieberman, 45); Y. Berakhot 4:1, 7d (= Y. Ta‘anit 4:1, 67d); and Sifra Kedoshim, per. 4 (ed. Weiss). R. Yonah is represented as using ben gedolim together with ben tovim at Vayikra Rabbah 34:1 (ed. Margoliot, 2:773), although not in the Yerushalmi parallel. 19. The story is found at T. Pe’ah 4:10 (ed. Lieberman, 58); Sifrei Devarim 116 (ed. Finkelstein, 175); and on Y. Pe’ah 8:8, 21a.

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor family, who were also humiliated by their poor kinsman’s humiliation (Rav Ashi answers in the negative). Ravina’s use of ‘ani ben tovim in an exchange with Rav Ashi does not necessarily mean that the term was widely used in Babylonian legal discourse. Ravina was using the Palestinian term in asking a question about the local mishnah (M. Ketubot 6:1), and, judging from the sugya as a whole, he was most likely posing a theoretical question. Although useful as an indicator of the social historical reality that the sorry state of an ‘ani ben tovim would bring shame on his family as well as himself, we cannot generalize from this case that Babylonian rabbis typically utilized the term ‘ani/yyim ben/b’nei tovim in discussing their own native formerly wealthy poor. Moreover, unlike the Palestinians Hillel and R. Yonah, no Babylonian rabbi is described as interacting personally with a poor person labeled an ‘ani ben tovim (however, as we will see, Mar Ukba and Rava interact with poor people who fit the profile of such poor, although they are not so labeled). Therefore, we may conclude that while the Palestinian terms ‘ani/yyim ben/b’nei tovim persisted in Babylonia for use in dealing with Palestinian sources, Babylonian rabbis did not themselves regularly use such terms in describing the formerly wealthy poor in their own environment.20 The fact that the terms yarad m’nikhasav/yardu m’nikhseihen and ‘ani/ yyim ben/b’nei tovim are used in mostly—by far—Palestinian contexts strongly suggests that the category of poor represented by these terms was not necessarily of great interest to the Bavli, an issue to which we will turn later. II. TANNAITIC C OMPILATIONS AND E MPATHY W EALTHY P OOR

FOR THE

F ORMERLY

Tannaitic compilations display the least ambivalence toward the formerly wealthy poor. We will begin with M. Bava’ Kamma’ 8:6. The mishnah opens with the Tanna Kamma’s21 ruling that the fines imposed on a perpetrator for humiliating a person in public must be calibrated in accordance with the victim’s social standing: “All goes according to his [the victim’s] honor.” R. Akiva disagrees, holding that “Even the poor in Israel—we see them as if they are freemen who have lost their wealth [sh’yardu m’nikhseihem], for they are the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”22 According to the Tanna Kamma, a chronically poor person would be entitled to less compensation for a public humiliation than a wealthy person of high standing. Presumably, a person who had lost his wealth would, like his wealthy brethren, be entitled to more compensation. 20. This point has potentially great significance for the study of poverty generally in the Land of Israel and Babylonia. To the extent that certain Palestinian terms and concepts are not employed in Babylonia, or are given different meanings, we can track differences in the rabbinic communities’ attitudes toward poverty and its amelioration. 21. Literally, “first Tanna,” the term used for the anonymous speaker in a tannaitic text. 22. It is interesting that in the case of M. Bava’ Kamma’ 8:6, as in B. Ketubot 66a, discussion of a formerly wealthy person or ‘ani ben tovim comes in the context of discussing damage awards for public humiliation. This suggests that such persons were likely to endure public humiliation on account of their loss in status; the nature of this humiliation and whether it was more a subjective feeling than an objective fact remain matters of speculation.

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Alyssa M. Gray R. Akiva instead constructs all Jews, even poor Jews—whatever the cause of their poverty—as being among the formerly wealthy poor, and thus he sees them as entitled to higher compensation for humiliation. It is important to point out that the Tanna Kamma and R. Akiva agree that, in principle, the formerly wealthy poor are entitled to more compensation for public humiliation than people of lower social status. Their disagreement is over how to construct the category of the formerly wealthy poor. To the Tanna Kamma, this category is to be construed in accordance with empirical social reality: Those who were once wealthy and are no longer so are the “formerly wealthy poor” who are entitled to greater compensation. R. Akiva sees the category of the formerly wealthy poor as an ideological, not an empirical social category. R. Akiva’s ideological construction of the formerly wealthy poor as including even the chronically poor is likely a way of calling both wealthy and poor Jews to a realization of their shared noble past as children of the three great biblical patriarchs. Similarly, the story is told in M. Bava’ Mez.i’a’ 7:1 of R. Yoh.anan b. Matya, whose son hired workers and stipulated that he would provide them with food daily. The father urged him to narrow his food stipulation to bread and legumes, on the ground that “Even if you provide for them [a meal] like Solomon’s banquet, you have not fulfilled your obligation to them, for they are the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” To R. Akiva and R. Yoh.anan b. Matya, all poor Jews are constructively the “formerly wealthy poor,” all part of the same noble, wealthy family of the past. These references to all Jews’ shared descent from the patriarchs are interestingly echoed in another tannaitic tradition that constructs all Jews as “children of kings” (b’nei melakhim) for certain halakhic purposes. Advocates of the latter view include R. Yehoshua (M. Berakhot 1:2), R. Shimon (M. Shabbat 14:4), and, according to a tradition attributed to Abaye in the Bavli, Rabban Shimon b. Gamliel and R. Yishmael as well (B. Shabbat 128a). Even if all the attributions of these two related positions are accepted as reliable, only six Tannaim can be said to construct all Jews in some way as nobility. Clearly, tannaitic literature does not represent all Tannaim as sharing a construction of Jewishness that suggests an interclass Jewish solidarity.23 Sifrei Devarim 38 opens with a comparison of the water resources and fertility of Egypt and of the Land of Israel, pointing out, among other things, that in Egypt one needs to dig in order to transport water from place to place, whereas the inhabitants of the Land of Israel sleep while God sends rain down to them.24 This is immediately followed by a parable about a king who encounters one ben tovim, to whom he gives a slave. The king next encounters another ben tovim, described as pampered and engaged in royal service, with whose ancestors the king is acquainted. The king decrees that he himself would feed this latter ben tovim by hand. It is clear that the first ben tovim represents Egypt, and the second Israel. Looking for the moment only at the treatment of the two b’nei tovim, we see 23. For a very recent attempt to argue that the rabbis put forward an “antisectarian,” ethnic understanding of Jewish identity, with an emphasis on God’s love for Israel’s ancestors, see Martha Himmelfarb, A Kingdom of Priests: Ancestry and Merit in Ancient Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 174–85. 24. See Finkelstein’s comments to line 1 (74).

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor that each is presumably entitled to support based on his status: The particularly pampered ben tovim whose ancestors are known to the king receives greater and more personal attention than a “mere” ben tovim. Thus, the Sifrei accepts the notion that it is appropriate to provide for b’nei tovim in the manner to which they presumably are accustomed, and also to treat b’nei tovim differently according to their status. Moving on to the parable itself, we see that—like R. Akiva and R. Yoh.anan b. Matya—the Sifrei constructs the ben tovim as an ideological category. Egypt and Israel are both b’nei tovim, but Israel is compared to a particularly pampered descendant of ancestors (the biblical patriarchs) known to the king (God). The Sifrei could be suggesting that all Israel—rich and poor—be viewed as a ben tovim, similar to the views of R. Akiva and R. Yoh.anan b. Matya. It is also possible that the Sifrei wishes to present every individual ben tovim as an Israel in miniature, thus buttressing each individual ben tovim’s entitlement to a greater share of charitable resources. Regardless of whether either or both suggestions have merit, one point remains clear: The ‘ani ben tovim is viewed positively, and no question is raised about an ‘ani ben tovim’s entitlement in principle to a greater share of resources in recognition of his previous status or pedigree. Taken together, then, these tannaitic sources point to a consensus that the formerly wealthy poor are entitled to a greater share of resources than other poor. R. Akiva, R. Yoh.anan b. Matya, and the Sifrei accept this consensus, while advocating an ideological construction of the category “formerly wealthy poor” that includes all Jews, who are to be seen as part of the same family. Their advocacy of this view suggests the existence of an opposing tendency in the tannaitic worldview that supported and saw nothing problematic in the recognition and persistence of status and class differences among Jews. Some other tannaitic sources require consideration. Mishnah and Tosefta Shekalim speak of a “hall of the silent” (lishkat h.asha’im) in the Jerusalem Temple, so called because the “fearers of sin” would place money there secretly, and ‘aniyyim b’nei tovim would take from it secretly.25 The Tosefta claims that such “halls of the silent” existed for the benefit of ‘aniyyim b’nei tovim in every city.26 Mekhilta d’Rabbi Shimon b. Yoh.ai 23:3 (ed. Epstein-Melamed, 214–15) interprets Exodus 23:3 and Leviticus 19:15 as forbidding a judge to award undeserved money damages to an ‘ani “who is a” ben tovim so as to enable that person to be supported honorably (presumably as opposed to being supported through alms). Finally, Sifrei Devarim 116 interprets the verse “Rather, you must open your hand and lend him sufficient for his lack, in what he lacks” (Deuteronomy 15:8).27 Focusing on the phrase ’asher yeh.sar lo (what he lacks), the Sifrei comments that the poor should be provided with “even a horse and even a slave.” The Sifrei then famously illustrates this interpretation with two stories. In the first, Hillel gives an ‘ani ben tovim a horse to

25. M. Shekalim 5:6. 26. T. Shekalim 2:16 (ed. Lieberman, 211). 27. I have altered the JPS translation in order to highlight the repetition in the verse of the root “h.-s-r.”

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Alyssa M. Gray work with and a slave to serve him; in the second, the people of the Upper Galilee give a guest (oreah.) a litra’ of meat each day.28 Note that Hillel’s provision of a slave and horse to the ‘ani ben tovim is almost exactly what the king (God) is described as doing for the ben tovim (Egypt) in Sifrei Devarim 38. These tannaitic sources are all devoid of even a hint of ambivalence toward the formerly wealthy poor. Before moving on to Palestinian amoraic literature, we must consider possible evidence of tannaitic ambivalence—both examples of which appear in the Tosefta. One negative note sounded about a formerly wealthy family appears in T. Bava’ Kamma’ 8:14, where R. Shimon Shizuri recalls that his father’s family had been (presumably wealthy) householders, who lost that wealth because they adjudicated monetary cases in the presence of only one judge29 and raised small cattle.30 R. Shimon Shizuri’s recollection of this unhappy family history may be taken as an indication of a tannaitic view that loss of wealth is attributable to sin, a view that is also found in the fifth-century Palestinian compilation Vayikra Rabbah.31 Yet Vayikra Rabbah’s explanation is that the loss of wealth in general is attributable to the fact that the affected people did not “extend their hands in the performance of miz.vot” and did not do the will of their “Heavenly Father.” R. Shimon Shizuri, by contrast, is quite specific in pointing to his own family’s two specific transgressions that cost them their wealth. This difference suggests that a general theological explanation for the loss of wealth—one that clearly casts aspersions on all the formerly wealthy poor—did not yet exist in the tannaitic period, although its roots clearly did. R. Shimon Shizuri is willing to see his own family’s misfortune in that light, but overall, tannaitic literature was apparently not willing to see the loss of wealth in general as a punishment for sin in general. The second possibly ambivalent tannaitic note appears in T. Pe’ah 4:11. Looking first at T. Pe’ah 4:10, we see a tradition that if a poor person was accustomed to using wool garments (mishtamesh), he should be given them (notnin lo), as is the case with a coin (if the poor person was accustomed to being paid in that manner prior to his descent into poverty), dough, bread, and being fed directly into his mouth. The directive in Deuteronomy 15:8 to provide the poor with what they lack is the prooftext for this generosity; the verse is taken to mean that each poor person must be provided with what he specifically and individually lacks. The prooftext is, in turn, followed by the stories of Hillel and the people of the Upper Galilee and their formerly wealthy poor clients. In 4:11, the Tosefta rules

28. See the references in note 19 herein. 29. This contravenes M. Sanhedrin 1:1. 30. For prohibitions against raising small cattle in the Land of Israel, see, e.g., M. Bava’ Kamma’ 7:7; M. Demai 2:3; T. Shevi’it 3:13 (ed. Lieberman, 177); and T. Bikkurim 2:16 (ed. Lieberman, 293), which say that those who raise small cattle will never see a sign of blessing. 31. Vayikra Rabbah 34:13 (ed. Margoliot, 2:800). Later in the Bavli (B. Gittin 38b), Rabbah also holds that the loss of wealth in general is the result of specific sins. He says that for three things, householders lose their wealth (nah.ti . . . m’nikhseihon): because they set their slaves free, because they survey their fields on the Sabbath to see what work needs to be done there, and because they hold their Sabbath meals during the time when study is taking place.

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor that if a poor person made use of (mishtamesh) gold utensils, he should sell them (mokhran) for silver ones, silver for copper, and copper for glass.32 This anonymous ruling is followed by an account of the sages’ generosity to the Nabtalah family, which had fallen on hard times. T. Pe’ah 4:10 and 4:11 sit uneasily together. If, as in 4:10, we are to “give” the poor person exactly what he lacks, why, then, does 4:11 require him to sell off more expensive personal items and make use of ones of lesser value? If both 4:10 and 4:11 apply to the formerly wealthy poor, it is difficult to understand why they are to be provided with their accustomed luxuries, only to have to trade their own expensive personal items down (or vice versa). Yet it cannot be argued that T. Pe’ah 4:11 applies to a different group of poor, such as the chronically poor, for how would the chronically poor have access to gold or silver personal items? The Yerushalmi’s later reconciliation that 4:10 and 4:11 refer to different kinds of personal items—those that come into contact with the body and those that do not, respectively—is eminently sensible, although not necessarily compelled by the toseftan language. Another possibility is that 4:10, with its refrain of notnin lo, is addressed to the community and its responsibility, while 4:11, with its own refrain of mokhran u’mishtamesh, is addressed to the poor themselves. On this reading, the Tosefta does not—perhaps unintentionally—link the poor’s responsibility (4:11) in any way to the community’s responsibility (4:10); the community is thus responsible to the poor, including the formerly wealthy poor, regardless of the poor’s fulfillment of their own obligations, as in 4:11. Thus, although 4:10 and 4:11 may sit together uneasily, the Tosefta does not necessarily provide for any diminution in the munificence to be extended to the formerly wealthy poor.

III. F ROM E MPATHY TO A MBIVALENCE IN PALESTINIAN A MORAIC L ITERATURE Empathy for the formerly wealthy poor and the ‘ani/yyim ben/b’nei tovim continues to be found in Palestinian amoraic sources, subject to caveats that will be discussed later. R. Yirmiyah and R. Yosef disagree about the interpretation of Proverbs 22:28 (al taseg g’vul ‘olam [Do not remove the ancient boundary stone]).33 Both scholars read ‘olam (ancient) as ‘olim (those who ascended),

32. The Vienna and Erfurt manuscripts of the Tosefta, as well as the editio princeps, all clearly indicate that the poor person is to “sell them” and “use” others (mokhran; mishtamesh). Y. Pe’ah 8:8, 21a presents a version of 4:11 that reads notnin (we give)—that is, if the formerly wealthy poor person was accustomed to gold utensils, we give him silver ones, and so on. The Yerushalmi’s version of 4:11 was likely influenced by the presence of notnin in 4:10. Interestingly, Lieberman did not comment on this variation in Tosefta ki-Feshutah (Order Zeraim, Part I) (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1955), 186, lines 38–40. The Bavli’s version of T. Pe’ah 4:11 on B. Ketubot 68a reads mishtamesh (he must use), which is similar to T. Pe’ah 4:11, except for the missing mokhran. I will discuss this further later. 33. Y. Pe’ah 5:6, 19a. See Mordecai Margulies’s proposed emendation of the Yerushalmi sugya at Vayikra Rabbah 34:13 (ed. Margoliot, 2:800 n. 2).

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Alyssa M. Gray and each gives a different interpretation of ‘olim.34 One sage35 interprets Proverbs 22:28 as a reference to the Israelites who ascended from Egyptian slavery (‘olei Miz.rayim), while the other interprets ‘olim as a euphemistic reference to those who yardu m’nikhseihen—those who have lost their wealth. This euphemistic interpretation of ‘olim is defended on the ground that the blind are often euphemistically referred to as sagya’ nehoraya’ (those of abundant light).36 According to the latter interpretation of ‘olim, the point of the verse is that one must not transgress appropriate boundaries in dealing with those who have lost their wealth; in other words, one must continue to treat them with appropriate respect. R. Yonah illustrates how one must have regard for the wellborn poor person who has lost his wealth; he would pretend to give that person a loan, and then, when the loan was accepted, he would convert it to a gift.37 The equation of those who have lost their wealth with the blind is interestingly illustrated in the Yerushalmi’s story of R. Yose ha-G’lili’s wife’s second marriage. Her new husband is said to have lost his wealth (‘itnah.at min nikhsoi) and to have become like the blind (described euphemistically as sagya’ nehora’) who wander from place to place.38 The blind’s and the poor’s—here the formerly wealthy poor’s—shared unstable, peripatetic existence likely forms the basis of the literary link between them. This link is further illustrated in a tradition of Shmuel about the social impact of the loss of wealth. In one version of a widespread tradition, he teaches that four are thought of as dead: the blind, the leper, the childless, and the one who has lost his wealth (sh’yarad m’nikhasav).39 The last-named’s inclusion in this list is derived from God’s revelation to Moses that he could return safely to Egypt from Midian because all those who wanted him dead were themselves dead (Exodus 4:19). An implicit rabbinic midrash identifies those who initially wanted Moses dead to be the perennial Israelite

34. See Louis Ginzberg, ed., Seridei ha-Yerushalmi min ha-henizah asher be-Miz.rayim h.elek alef: Guf ha-Yerushalmi asher nimz.a be-ha-genizah ‘im shinuyei nush.aot shel ha-hoz.a’ah ha-rishonah (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1909; repr., Jerusalem: Makor, 1974), 40, in which Proverbs 22:28 is rendered as al taseg gevul ‘olim, with the yod indicating that the word is to be read ‘olim, not ‘olam. 35. The Yerushalmi uses the familiar terms h.ad amar (one said) and h.aranah amar (the other one said); presumably, the Yerushalmi redactors were unsure which sage held which opinion. The same structure appears in the Bavli as h.ad amar and h.ad amar. 36. This point about the euphemism for the blind is anonymous in the Yerushalmi but attributed to R. Yiz.h.ak in Vayikra Rabbah. Margulies proposes emending the Yerushalmi to include the name R. Yiz.h.ak; see note 33 herein. 37. Y. Pe’ah 8:9, 21b (= Y. Shekalim 5:5, 49b). See also Vayikra Rabbah 34:1 (ed. Margoliot, 2: 773). In Vayikra Rabbah, the point of R. Yonah’s ruse is made clear: The formerly wealthy person is “embarrassed to take [z.edakah],” and thus a ruse is necessary. This detail is missing from the Yerushalmi. 38. Y. Ketubot 11:3, 34b. 39. Bereshit Rabbah 71:6 (ed. Theodor-Albeck 2: 829–30); see also Y. Nedarim 9:2, 41c (attribution is to R. Simon in the name of R. Yehoshua b. Levi); Eikhah Rabbah 3:6 (Vilna ed., 100) (attribution is to R. Shmuel).

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor rebels Dathan and Abiram.40 As these characters could not have been dead— because they reappear in the Pentateuchal book of Numbers—the scriptural reference to their “death” could “only” mean that they had lost their wealth and thus suffered a sort of social death. Although we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves, it is revealing to consider how the Bavli further interprets this Palestinian source. The Bavli attributes the “four [who] are like the dead” tradition to Resh Lakish (rather than Shmuel, as in Bereshit Rabbah) and follows it up with a baraita’ that includes the unspecified ‘ani (the poor) among the four who are considered dead while alive. The Bavli conspicuously does not identify the ‘ani in its version of Shmuel’s tradition as the one who has “lost his wealth.”41 The Bavli thus seems not to be overly concerned with distinguishing in this case between the chronically poor and the poor who have lost their wealth. The poor are the poor, and however they came to be that way, they are among the four thought of as dead. The Bavli’s blurring of the categories of the chronically and formerly wealthy poor in this case is an interesting hint of its overall ambivalence—or lack of particular concern—about the latter category, a subject to which we shall return in the next section of this essay. Another interesting aspect of the Palestinian amoraic treatment of the formerly wealthy poor is the evidence of the shame experienced by such people when they can no longer give z.edakah as they once were able. Thus, their loss of wealth is also a loss of the social status they would have had through their recognition as major givers of z.edakah. R. Eli’ezer, R. Yehoshua, and R. Akiva once went to collect for the sages in Antioch on the Orontes.42 A certain Abba Yehudah, who used to give generously, had lost his wealth and so retired to his home, embarrassed, so as not to encounter the sages. His wise wife told him to sell half of his remaining field and give the proceeds to the sages, who thereupon prayed on his behalf that God make up his loss. Later, while he was plowing his remaining halffield with his cow, the cow fell and broke her leg. Abba Yehudah then discovered a large jewel. When the rabbis returned, Abba Yehudah had become fantastically wealthy, and the rabbis disclosed to him that although others had previously given more than he, they had written him at the head of their timos—“tome,” or list of donors—presumably in anticipation of the large amounts they knew he would eventually be able to give. They seated Abba Yehudah with them, reciting Proverbs 18:16 (“A man’s gift eases his way”) about him. Abba Yehudah’s loss of wealth embarrassed him because he felt he could not contribute to the sages as he was wont to do. Although the story clearly presents Abba Yehudah as righteously motivated, the honor he is shown at the end of 40. The Bavli makes this midrash explicit on B. Nedarim 64b, where R. Shimon b. Yoh.ai points out that everywhere in the Torah where people are said to be niz.im (arguing), or niz.avim (standing up— presumably for purposes of taking a stand), the reference is only to Dathan and Abiram. 41. B. Nedarim 64b; see also B. ‘Avodah Zarah 5a. 42. Y. Horayot 3:6, 48a (=Vayikra Rabbah 5:4 [ed. Margoliot, 1:110–13]). My rendering of “H.olat Antioch” as “Antioch on the Orontes” follows Burton Visotzky, Golden Bells and Pomegranates: Studies in Midrash Leviticus Rabbah (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 124.

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Alyssa M. Gray the story suggests that at least part of his initial shame may have been attributable to his awareness that his loss of wealth translated into a loss of prestige and social standing. As the example of Abba Yehudah shows, Palestinian Amoraim may have been motivated to show empathy for the formerly wealthy poor by the hope that the latter might later display generosity to the rabbis if and when their fortunes improved. Indeed, the Abba Yehudah story may have been intended to convey this message. Thus, Palestinian rabbinic warmth toward the formerly wealthy poor may not reflect mere benevolence, but rather may have been part of a calculated strategy to maintain good relationships with past and possibly future sources of material support.43 Before moving on to consider the emergence of ambivalence toward the formerly wealthy poor in the Yerushalmi, let us briefly consider the Palestinian rabbinic empathy toward the formerly wealthy poor in light of the episcopal empathy toward such poor in the later Roman Empire. Brown reports that the maternal aunt of Pope Gregory the Great (sixth century CE) and the widows of two nobles received amounts of alms that could enable them to support a large household, and that 3,000 nuns received pensions equivalent to what the common people in Rome used to receive annually in food from the annona.44 John the Deacon, a biographer of Gregory, referred to the latter as a provider for the “shame-faced poor”—those wealthy and highborn people who had fallen into poverty.45 The particular pain that the plight of the fallen wealthy could cause their fortunate brethren was articulated by Pelagius I, Gregory the Great’s papal predecessor: “I cannot without grief and heaviness of heart look at our men, whom we knew once as well-born and well-to-do.”46 At least partly inspired by Pelagius, Brown sees the late antique Christian concern with the wellborn poor as the result of an interest in preserving what remained of the old plebs romana, the Roman people. Thus, concern for the wellborn poor is part and parcel of a concern not to let the remains of the old Roman world slip entirely away. Brown’s keen insight into the late antique Christian concern with the fallen wealthy as a way to preserve remnants of former Roman glory does not find much rabbinic echo in tannaitic literature, which has little to say that would invite the inference that concern for the wellborn poor was a way of preserving former Jewish national glory. In part, this may be attributable to the differing historical circumstances of Pelagius and the rabbis: Pelagius was witness to the crumbling of Rome, while Jewish national glory was a very distant memory for the rabbis, a casualty of the terrible defeat and destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Pelagius’s wellborn poor were themselves participants in erstwhile Roman glory, while many of the Jewish formerly wealthy poor of tannaitic times may not have been alive while the Second Commonwealth stood. Yet, following Brown, one may discern in R. Akiva, R. Yoh.anan b. Matya, the “children of kings” tradition, and 43. For more on the Palestinian rabbinic interest in obtaining support from nonrabbis, see Richard Kalmin, The Sage in Jewish Society of Late Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 29–33. 44. Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership, 60. 45. Ibid., 60, 133 n. 64. 46. Quoted in Brown, Poverty and Leadership, 60.

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor perhaps also Sifrei Devarim 38 an effort to deploy contemporaneous empathy for the formerly wealthy poor in order to construct the Jewish people as a whole as a presently downtrodden people who nevertheless have a glorious and noble past. In that sense, perhaps we can see these tannaitic traditions as an effort to remind Jews in the present of some of the lost glory of a bygone plebs judaea. We will now examine a lengthy sequence of sugyot at Y. Pe’ah 8:8–9, 21a–b. This sequence of sugyot is significant because it demonstrates literarily the move from a posture of extreme generosity toward the formerly wealthy poor to one of halakhic regulation, and then to a concern about the possibility of frauds. To be clear, this essay does not claim that the literary structure of the sugya was meant to illustrate a chronological progression from empathy to ambivalence. Rather, the point is that the sugya shows, through its progression of stories and law, two practical difficulties posed by a posture of extreme generosity toward the formerly wealthy poor: a strain on communal resources and the possibility that people who appear to be (and who may present themselves as) the formerly wealthy poor may in fact be frauds. Toward the beginning of Y. Pe’ah 8:8, 21a,47 the Antbila family, reputed to be descendants of Aravnah the Jebusite (who was reputed to have sold the Temple Mount to King David),48 were said to have lived in Jerusalem. The story is told that the sages once stipulated for them (meaning “raised for them”) the large amount of 600 gold kikarim so that they would not be compelled to leave Jerusalem. The sages were said to have done this because of their midrash on Deuteronomy 15:7, which says that the heart should not be hardened, nor the fist clenched, against the indigent (’evyon) in “any of your settlements” (b’sh‘arekha). The rabbis interpreted “your settlements” to include Jerusalem.49 Although this story focuses on Jerusalem, it also bears noting that Aravnah the Jebusite was not an Israelite; it is unclear whether his descendants were.50 Regardless, the narrative emphasis on enabling this ancient, Jerusalem-connected, and Temple-connected family to remain in Jerusalem is perhaps another rabbinic echo of Brown’s observation that late Roman solicitude for the wellborn poor was, at least in part, an effort to maintain what remained of the old, proud plebs romana.51 47. The halakhah opens with the curious story of the students of R. Yehudah Ha-Nasi’, who schemed to deny ma‘aser ‘ani to one of their colleagues. I am beginning with the second story, about the Antbila family in Jerusalem. 48. 2 Samuel 24:18–25. 49. See also the parallels at Sifrei Devarim 303 (ed. Finkelstein, 321) and T. Pe’ah 4:11 (ed. Lieberman, 58). The Yerushalmi’s version is closer to that of the Sifrei, particularly the shared reference to “600 kikarim,” as opposed to T. Pe’ah 4:11’s “300 shiklei zahav.” Yet, like the Tosefta, the Yerushalmi contextualizes this story together with a tannaitic tradition about requiring a needy person to sell expensive personal items and make do with less expensive ones. 50. In the Bavli, Rav Nah.man identifies Aravnah as a ger toshav (B. ‘Avodah Zarah 24b). 51. Aaron Panken pointed out to me another such possible rabbinic echo in M. Arakhin 9:3–4. Per M. Arakhin 9:4, buyers of houses in walled cities would hide at the time of the first anniversary of the sale so that they could not be found by sellers who wished to redeem their homes. Hillel the Elder was said to have enacted an escrow arrangement whereby the sellers did not have to interact directly with the buyers in order to redeem. By making it easier for sellers to redeem, Hillel was privileging

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Alyssa M. Gray This story is followed immediately in the Yerushalmi by the well-known story of Hillel and the ‘ani ben tovim and the elder (zaken) who was supported lavishly by the people of the Galilee.52 In all Palestinian versions of the Hillel story, he was said to have provided a horse to work with and a slave for personal service to an ‘ani ben tovim. In the second story, the people of the Galilee (Sepphoris, according to Tosefta; “Upper” Galilee, according to Sifrei) provided an elder (zaken, according to Tosefta and Yerushalmi) or guest (oreah., according to Sifrei) a litra’ of meat (identified as poultry, or b’sar z.ipparim, according to Yerushalmi) each day.53 While neither the Tosefta nor Sifrei raises a question about this generosity, the Yerushalmi stam does: “And is [such generosity] possible?” The point of the question is clear: Why should one person be given such luxurious food? The ambiguous answer is that “he would not eat with others,” which could either mean that he would not eat his poultry with any other food (and thus needed more poultry to satisfy his hunger) or that he would not eat with other people, and was accustomed to being treated with extreme deference, which included the provision of a sumptuous meal for himself alone.54 The Yerushalmi’s question and answer about the elder’s story shows the extent to which accommodation must be made for a person who might be categorized as an ‘ani ben tovim. Although the Yerushalmi initially questions the lavish provision of food to the elder, it finds a justification for it. As we have already noted, accommodation for the formerly wealthy poor is found in the Yerushalmi as late as R. Yonah (fifth amoraic generation), who, when confronted with an ‘ani ben tovim, would offer a loan and then, when the money was accepted, declare it to be a gift. He used this ruse in order to provide z.edakah to ‘aniyyim b’nei tovim who were presumably otherwise too ashamed to take it qua z.edakah.55 Yet we must not lose sight of the skeptical note sounded by the Yerushalmi stam’s question: “And is [such generosity] possible?” If one were to argue that we should not impute any skepticism to the Yerushalmi’s question, it being merely an example of dialectic, an appropriate response would be to point to the redactional

the earlier inhabitants of the walled city, similar to what the sages did in the case of the Antbila family. We would add that Hillel’s enactment is possibly also another tannaitic expression of empathy for formerly wealthy sellers who may have been compelled to sell. See Aaron D. Panken, The Rhetoric of Innovation: Self-Conscious Legal Change in Rabbinic Literature (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), 22–24. 52. See the tannaitic citations for these stories in note 19 herein. 53. Note the likely role of orality in the different usage of the root z.-p-r in the Tosefta and Yerushalmi. In the former, the Galilean generosity to the elder was said to have taken place b’Z.ippuri, in Sepphoris. In the Yerushalmi, the precise locus of the generosity is not identified, but the elder was said to have received a litra’ of b’sar z.ippurim, or poultry, each day. 54. See P’nei Moshe, s.vv. “v’efshar ken” and “ela.” 55. Y. Pe’ah 8:8, 21b (= Y. Shekalim 5:5, 49b = Vayikra Rabbah 34:1 [ed. Margoliot, 2:773]). For an implicit medieval critique of R. Yonah’s policy, see the thirteenth-century Sefer Hasidim siman 1034 (ed. Margaliot, 1038–39). The latter’s implicit critique is that not every ruse will work psychologically for each individual; for some, it is better to maintain the fiction that the gift is actually a loan to be repaid.

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor context of the Hillel and elder stories. Redactional context can function as a sort of commentary on the stories. These two stories appear within a context of story and tannaitic quotation ranging from Y. Pe’ah 8:7, 21a through 8:9, 21b. Toward the end of Y. Pe’ah 8:7, the Yerushalmi discusses whether and to what extent a poor person who seeks food or clothing must be investigated (presumably to determine whether he is a fraud). The issue of fraud is taken up explicitly in Y. Pe’ah 8:9. The Yerushalmi thus “sandwiches” the stories of Hillel and the ‘ani ben tovim, and the elder and the people of the Galilee, between blocks of material that deal— either implicitly or explicitly—with the possibility of people fraudulently taking z.edakah from a community. The redactional placement of these stories suggests that the Yerushalmi sees the issue of the formerly wealthy poor as somehow connected to the possibility of fraud. The logical connection between these issues is, quite simply, the difficulty or even impossibility of distinguishing a bona fide formerly wealthy recipient of communal largesse from a fraud. To reiterate, this linkage between the formerly wealthy poor and frauds is not found in tannaitic sources; it appears for the first time in the Yerushalmi. But there is more. Even without reaching for the presence of frauds in the surrounding context, we can see the Yerushalmi’s ambivalence about the formerly wealthy poor in the sugya immediately following the stories of Hillel and the elder in the Galilee: 1. It was taught [T. Pe’ah 4:11]: “If he used gold utensils, we give him silver utensils; silver utensils, we give him copper utensils; copper utensils, we give him glass utensils.” 2. R. Mana said: “Silver and glass utensils for [direct use] with their bodies.”56 3. But wasn’t it taught [T. Pe’ah 4:10]: “If he would [wear] wool clothing, we give him wool clothing”? [The objection continues:] [T. Pe’ah 4:10] applies to [the poor’s] body [items that touch the body directly must be of high quality], [T. Pe’ah 4:11] applies to [use in ways that are] not [directly touching the poor’s] body! [Thus, R. Mana, who claims that the poor must even make do with lesser quality items that touch his body, must be wrong].57 T. Pe’ah 4:11, the passage that opens this sugya, is in tension with the Yerushalmi’s earlier stories of the Antbila family, Hillel, and the people of the Upper Galilee (as it is with T. Pe’ah 4:10). As applied to those formerly wealthy poor, the point of T. Pe’ah 4:11 would be, shouldn’t those people all have had to make do with less? R. Mana’s view—that a charity recipient must use utensils of lesser 56. R. Mana’s point is that the formerly wealthy poor must accept these lower-grade utensils, even if the utensils are for direct use (such as in eating and drinking) and not merely for use as tools or for decorative purposes. 57. My translation of paragraph 3 follows P’nei Moshe to Y. Pe’ah 8:7, s.v. “kan b’gufo v’kan b’she-eino gufo.”

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Alyssa M. Gray value even if these are utensils that he uses directly, such as for eating—heightens this tension. The Yerushalmi stam challenges R. Mana and alleviates the tension somewhat by quoting T. Pe’ah 4:10—if a (now-impoverished) person was accustomed to soft wool clothing, then that is what he should have; nevertheless, the formerly wealthy poor must make do with lower-quality versions of other items, such as tools for work or decorative items. Three points deserve emphasis. The first is that the Yerushalmi’s version of T. Pe’ah 4:11 provides that if a formerly wealthy person used gold utensils, we give him silver ones, or if he used silver, we give him copper, and so on. T. Pe’ah 4:11, as we saw earlier, says that the poor person must himself sell these items down and use ones of lesser value. Although certainty is impossible, it is reasonable to conclude that the Yerushalmi’s version of T. Pe’ah 4:11 likely reads notnin because of the presence of notnin in T. Pe’ah 4:10. However the Yerushalmi’s version of the baraita’ came to be that way, it shows—more clearly than the Tosefta—ambivalence toward the formerly wealthy poor: Whatever the formerly wealthy poor are accustomed to, we give them one grade less. The second point is that R. Mana, a fifth-generation Palestinian Amora, privileges T. Pe’ah 4:11 over the more generous T. Pe’ah 4:10, a view that is certainly inconsistent with the dominant thrust of the tannaitic attitude toward the formerly wealthy poor. Although his father R. Yonah is still represented as empathetic toward the formerly wealthy poor, the appearance of a view such as that of R. Mana at this late point is suggestive of the emergence of a shift in Palestinian attitudes. Indeed, R. Mana’s shift in attitude may help to date the skeptical question of the Yerushalmi stam, who asked “and is such [generosity] possible?” in connection with the tannaitic story of the elder in the Galilee. The third point is that the Yerushalmi stam, although challenging R. Mana, nevertheless accepts that as to certain sorts of items, T. Pe’ah 4:11 serves as a limit on T. Pe’ah 4:10. The generosity to the formerly wealthy poor that the Tosefta ambiguously left in place is now clearly bounded; in reconciling the tension in the Tosefta, the Yerushalmi has given legal definition to one sort of limit on the formerly wealthy poor. Immediately following this sugya, the Yerushalmi presents a story about an impoverished member of the patriarchal house:58 One of those of the Patriarchate lost his wealth [‘itnah.at min nikhsoi] and they [provided for]59 him in a clay vessel. He ate and vomited. A physician said to him: “The cooked food—did it not originate in the clay stew-pot? Eat from the clay stew-pot!” [That is, imagine you are eating from the clay stew-pot; this will cure your aversion to the clay vessel].60

This story implicitly challenges the Yerushalmi stam’s immediately preceding point that a formerly wealthy person should be given the high-quality items to 58. Y. Pe’ah 8:8, 21a. 59. The term used is zakhin leih—literally, “they acquired merit through him.” This is a standard Palestinian term for providing z.edakah. 60. See P’nei Moshe to Y. Pe’ah 8:7, s.v. “min ’ilein d’nasyutah.”

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor which he was accustomed if they are for personal, physical use. In this case, the physician noted through a rhetorical question that the food had likely been cooked in an earthenware pot prior to being placed in the bowl; he advised that the member of the patriarchal household should imagine he was eating straight from the cooking pot, and not pay attention to his own clay bowl. There is no indication in the story that anyone did wrong by providing the formerly wealthy man with food in an earthenware vessel, nor any indication that the physician offered bad advice. In effect, R. Mana has been rehabilitated: Notwithstanding the Yerushalmi stam’s distinction between direct and indirect use of items by the formerly wealthy poor, the impoverished patriarchal relative was treated in a manner consistent with R. Mana’s view that the formerly wealthy poor must accept lesser quality items, however personal or intimate their intended use is. Note once again that this story, which is consistent with the Yerushalmi’s version of T. Pe’ah 4:11, is inconsistent with T. Pe’ah 4:10. The Yerushalmi, in the end, privileges T. Pe’ah 4:11 over 4:10 when considering the formerly wealthy poor. To recap, then, while tannaitic sources display virtually no ambivalence about the formerly wealthy poor, the Yerushalmi does. The stam’s question about whether it really is possible to give one needy elder a litra’ of poultry per day, the contextualization of the Hillel and Galilean elder stories between materials dealing with (possible) frauds, the sources indicating that needy persons may have to learn to make do with less, and the lack of indication that any wrong was done in giving food in an earthenware dish to an impoverished member of the patriarchal household—all this indicates that, at the very least, the Yerushalmi’s attitude toward the formerly wealthy poor is less overwhelmingly positive than what we see in tannaitic literature. IV. E XPLAINING THE S HIFT FROM E MPATHY TO A MBIVALENCE IN PALESTINIAN L ITERATURE : E XTERNAL AND I NTERNAL FACTORS The tannaitic empathy for the formerly wealthy poor can be explained in light of two principal factors, and the absence of a third, which appear in the amoraic period. The first is an external economic situation that began to decline at the end of the second century, although the situation did not apparently become dire until roughly the middle of the third century CE.61 Tannaitic literature 61. For the beginning of economic troubles in the Roman Empire in the second century, see Daniel Sperber, Roman Palestine: 200–400 Money and Prices (2nd ed. with supp.; Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1991), 85; and F. Oertel, “The Economic Life of the Empire,” in The Cambridge Ancient History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 12:260. For the dire situation in the second half of the third century and into the fourth, see Oertel, 12:261, 266; Daniel Sperber, “Aspects of Agrarian Life in Roman Palestine I: Agricultural Decline in Palestine during the Later Principate,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.8 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977): 408, 414– 15, 428, 436; idem, “Trends in Third Century Palestinian Agriculture,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 15, no. 3 (1972): 243; and idem, “Drought, Famine and Pestilence in Amoraic Palestine,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17, no. 3 (1974): 272, 287, and 289. See also Gildas Hamel, Poverty and Charity in Roman Palestine, First Three Centuries C.E. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Ze’ev Safrai concludes his monumental

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Alyssa M. Gray took shape over the course of the second and third centuries (and possibly even later), with the emergence of the Mishnah around 200–220 and of at least some of the redactions of tannaitic midrashim in the latter half of the third century.62 Thus, tannaitic literature was in formation during a period when economic decline was in progress but had not yet resulted in the widespread misery and impoverishment visible in the second half of the third century and part of the fourth. That being so, extreme generosity toward the formerly wealthy poor was not as economically unviable as it would become during the amoraic period in Palestine—during which the first hints of ambivalence appear in the Yerushalmi. Writing in general terms about the economic crisis of the mid-third century, Daniel Sperber has noted that “They [monetary changes and crises] ran like destructive shudders through the social structure of the community at all its classes and levels . . . brought down the wealthy, and impoverished the poor.”63 We may turn to Palestinian sources themselves for further confirmation. In what we may presume is a description of the Land of Israel, R. Ze‘ora’ said “poverty is common.”64 The Yerushalmi there is considering circumstances that can be

study of the economy of Roman Palestine with the observation that “[t]he contemporary traditions would seem to indicate that the period under discussion [from the destruction of the Second Temple until the mid-fourth century CE] was one of dire economic straits . . . [t]here are many Tannaitic and Amoraic sources which mention economic difficulties.” See Ze’ev Safrai, The Economy of Roman Palestine (New York: Routledge, 1994), 457. Hayim Lapin recently pointed out that a comprehensive study of the history of the economy of Roman Palestine has not yet appeared; such a study would be most helpful in this context. See Hayim Lapin, Economy, Geography, and Provincial History in Later Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 141. For a study of the economic decline in the later Roman Empire from the perspective of a scholar studying the church fathers, see Barry Gordon, The Economic Problem in Biblical and Patristic Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1989). Gordon points out that “[t]he progressive deterioration of the regional economies of the Empire forms a consistent background to the economic thought of the later Fathers” (92). 62. Although the redactions of these literatures may have extended through the third and even into the fourth century, the texts reflect the tannaitic world of their formation more clearly than the amoraic world of their redaction(s). For dates, see H. L. Strack and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. Markus Bockmuehl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 255 (Mekhilta dated to second half of the third century), 259 (Mekhilta d’Rabbi Shimon b. Yoh.ai dated to fourth century), 263 (Sifra dated to second half of the third century), and 270 (Sifrei Devarim dated to the late third century). Recent scholarship complicates the dating of the Tosefta: Does it precede or follow the Mishnah? See, e.g., Abraham Goldberg, “The Tosefta—Companion to the Mishna,” in The Literature of the Sages: First Part: Oral Tora, Halakha, Mishna, Tosefta, Talmud, External Tractates, ed. Shmuel Safrai (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 283–84 (220–230 CE); Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Mishnah: A New Approach to Ancient Jewish Texts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 1–24 and passim (in a number of cases, Tosefta can be shown to be prior to Mishnah). 63. Sperber, Money and Prices, 178. 64. Y. Nedarim 9:4, 41c. To the best of my knowledge, general statements like that of R. Ze’ora’ do not appear in tannaitic compilations, suggesting that such statements are not simply rhetorical clichés found throughout rabbinic literature. Moreover, to the extent that such observations about the ubiquity of poverty are made in the context of discussions focusing on other issues (as is the case

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor considered a nolad: something new that, had a person been aware of it before he took a vow, would have caused him not to take the vow. In answer to the question of whether the poverty of a person who was prohibited by vow from benefiting from the vow taker would be considered such a nolad (thereby providing the basis for releasing the vow), R. Ze’ora’ made his point, implying that because poverty is common, a person’s descent into poverty cannot really be thought of as a nolad.65 Palestinian sources point to the exactions of Roman taxation and civic liturgies as being among the causes of poverty,66 even comparing the difficulty of acquiring adequate sustenance to the pains of childbirth, and the miracle of acquiring it as akin to the redemption of Israel.67 E. E. Urbach provides a collection of quotations from Palestinian rabbinic literature that he suggests point to a conclusion that the Land of Israel was poor, although it bears noting that some of his citations are to the Bavli or late midrashic compilations, whose evidence concerning the Land of Israel may not be fully reliable for this earlier period.68 The evidence of third-century (and beyond) economic crisis is ably summarized by Burton Visotzky, who points to the deleterious impact of “inflation, providing the grain dole, soil erosion, and enforced government service.”69 Economic hardship during the amoraic period took its toll on attitudes toward the formerly wealthy poor. While empathy for these poor did not entirely evaporate, the Yerushalmi redactors were unmistakably ambivalent toward them. The Yerushalmi stam’s question about largesse toward a formerly wealthy man—“And is such [generosity] possible?”—suggests an economically based concern. Why, then, didn’t Palestinian rabbinic empathy for the formerly wealthy poor entirely disappear during the difficult economic times of the amoraic period? Those difficult economic times themselves, which Sperber notes had run “through the social structure of the community at all its classes and levels,”70 likely underlay the rabbinic awareness that poverty is a condition that will affect everyone at one time or another. The “poor” were not, therefore, a unique and hermetically sealed social class; there was a very real possibility that even the comfortable would experience poverty at some point. R. Nah.man interpreted Deuteronomy 15:10’s “for in return”

with R. Ze‘ora’), the observations may be more confidently interpreted as reflecting widely held rabbinic perceptions of the realities of their society than as clichés—why deliberately introduce a cliché into a discussion in which it arguably does not belong? Nevertheless, the question of whether and to what extent the rabbis deploy the poor and poverty as rhetorical devices must be kept in mind and deserves study. 65. Elsewhere, the Yerushalmi sensibly attributes to “the rabbis” the notion that “no community is entirely rich nor entirely impoverished” (Y. Gittin 3:7, 45a). 66. See, e.g., Bereshit Rabbah 76:6 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 2:903–904); Y. Shevi‘it 4:3, 35b (the combined impoverishing effects of onerous taxation and observance of the cessation from agricultural labor during the sabbatical year). 67. Bereshit Rabbah 20:9 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 1:192–93). 68. See E. E. Urbach, “Megamot datiyot v’hevratiyot b’torat ha-z.edakah shel hazal,” Z.ion 16 (1951): 10 n. 63. 69. See Burton Visotzky, Golden Bells and Pomegranates, 121–22. 70. Sperber, Money and Prices, 178.

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Alyssa M. Gray (ki b’glal ha-davar ha-zeh) to mean that poverty is a wheel (galgal) that passes over everyone. Therefore, per R. Aibu, “Give to him readily” (Deuteronomy 15:10).71 In another version of R. Nah.man’s tradition,72 he describes poverty with the metaphor of a waterwheel. The wheel that emerges full from the cistern empties (into the garden); the empty wheel then returns to the cistern to refill. Thus, the rich can—or will—be impoverished, while the poor will eventually be enriched.73 This notion that poverty could strike anyone likely explains the persistence of empathy for the formerly wealthy poor into the amoraic period. The second factor that likely contributed to the tannaitic empathy for the formerly wealthy poor was the privileged economic status of many Tannaim. Secondcentury rabbis (among whom were most of the Tannaim) included landowners,74 and most of these rabbis were probably well-off, sharing the viewpoints and concerns of the wealthy.75 The economic standing of most Tannaim helps us to understand how they would be empathetic to those who had lost their wealth. But economics is not the only factor—birth and pedigree were also important. As Shaye J. D. Cohen points out, tannaitic literature includes approximately ten lists of classes in Jewish society; in these lists, for “the most part the classifications are determined by birth and are immutable.”76 As an example, the well-known mishnah at the end of Tractate Horayot (M. Horayot 3:8) dictates that priests come before Levites, who come before Israelites, who precede mamzerim,77 who precede netinim,78 who precede gerim,79 who come before the freed slave. Commenting on these lists, Cohen notes that they show that the Tannaim continued to hold to the view that “birth determined social status,” a belief that persisted alongside their “hierarchy . . . based on intellectual and spiritual attainments.”80 The emergence of the rabbis as a factor in Palestinian Jewish society after the destruction of 70 CE was bound up in struggles for influence among

71. Vayikra Rabbah 34:4 (ed. Margoliot, 2:777–78), and parallels cited in 778 n. 2. 72. Vayikra Rabbah 34:9 (ed. Margoliot, 2:792). Margulies (correctly, in my view) sees this version of R. Nah.man’s tradition as more original; see 778 n. 2. 73. For more on the Palestinian metaphor of the waterwheel, see Visotzky, Golden Bells and Pomegranates, 133. This notion is also found on B. Shabbat 151b, attributed to a Palestinian source (d’vei R. Yishm‘a’el). 74. See, e.g., Shaye J. D. Cohen, “The Rabbi in Second-Century Jewish Society,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, ed. William Horbury, W. D. Davies, and John Sturdy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3:930. 75. Ibid., 931. 76. Ibid., 941. 77. The mamzer, born of a prohibited sexual union, has no status within the people Israel according to rabbinic law. 78. The rabbis understood the netinim to be descendants of the biblical Gibeonites, who were appointed by Joshua to be “hewers of wood” and “drawers of water” (Joshua 9:27). 79. The ger is understood in the context of M. Horayot 3:8 to be the convert (ger z.edek); the rationale for his placement on the list is that he came into the holiness of Israel at a later point in his life, while the netinim were raised among the people Israel. 80. Cohen, “The Rabbi in Second-Century Jewish Society,” 3:941–42, 950.

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor themselves, the patriarchs, and the wealthy and well-connected scions of old families that had held local influence since prior to the revolt.81 Priestly descendants were also a social factor to be reckoned with, and their wealth was undoubtedly a factor in their high social standing.82 Wealth and social status thus continued to matter into the tannaitic period. Moreover, tannaitic literature points to overlap between Tannaim and priestly stock: In addition to R. Yose Ha-Kohen and possibly R. Ishmael, Saul Lieberman pointed out that the rich Tannaim were all priests—R. Ele’azar b. H.arsom, R. Tarfon, and R. Ele’azar b. Azaryah.83 Amoraic literature perpetuates the image of leading Tannaim as wealthy: R. Tarfon is depicted as a wealthy owner of fields,84 and a baraita’ quoted in the Yerushalmi stated that wealth ceased from the sages when R. Ele’azar b. Azaryah died.85 Tannaitic overlap with the wealthy and high-status priesthood, taken together with the other evidence of the persistence of birth as an important factor in the tannaitic conception of Jewish society, all likely contributed to the empathy seen in tannaitic sources for the formerly wealthy poor.86 The persistence of this empathy into the amoraic period in Palestine was likely rooted not merely in the persistence of older patterns of thought, but, as noted earlier, in the notion that emerged during the difficult economic times of the latter half of the third century that poverty was a condition that could affect everyone. Nevertheless, the appearance of ambivalence toward these poor in the amoraic period warrants attention. It was suggested previously that this ambivalence was rooted in the economic turmoil of the latter part of the third century, as resources became scarce. But there is more. It is in the amoraic period in Palestine that we begin to see literary evidence of rabbis engaging in organized charitable activity—whether on behalf of other rabbis or of the poor generally. To the extent that this literary evidence points to an underlying social reality, we may say that as the economic situation in Palestine deteriorated in the latter part of the third century and into the fourth, the rabbis became more active in social welfare issues. And, as the rabbis became more active in social welfare, they may have become more ambivalent about providing lavishly for the formerly wealthy poor. The literary evidence of such work is entirely amoraic. Although the Yerushalmi and midrash compilations do tell some stories of Tannaim (principally R. Yehoshua, R. Eli‘ezer, and R. Akiva) being involved in charitable work, this

81. See Reuven Kimelman, “Ha-Oligarkiyah ha-kohanit ve-talmidei h.ah.amim be-tekufat ha-Talmud,” Z.ion 48:2 (1983): 135, 143. 82. See Kimelman, “Ha-Oligarkiyah,” 142. 83. See Tosefta ki-Feshutah (Order Nashim, Part VIII) (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1973), 761–62, lines 44–64. Yet Lieberman did note that the Bavli describes R. Ele‘azar b. Azaryah’s wealth in more extravagant terms than we find elsewhere, and that indications of his wealth are missing from “the early literature of the land of Israel.” 84. Y. Shevi’it 4:2, 35b. 85. Y. Sotah 9:15, 24c. 86. See also Cohen, “The Rabbi in Second-Century Jewish Society,” 3:936: “In sum, tannaitic documents nowhere imply that any second-century rabbi was poor.”

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Alyssa M. Gray portrayal of those sages is nowhere confirmed by tannaitic literature itself.87 R. Eli‘ezer and R. Akiva are described as parnasim; the precise definition of this term has eluded scholars, although the office appears to have included some responsibility for social welfare.88 The Amoraim R. Ya‘akov b. ’Idi and R. Yiz.h.ak b. Nah.man are also described as parnasim engaged in social welfare.89 R. Yirmiyah is alleged to have equated engaging in communal work with Torah study.90 The various stories of Tannaim and Amoraim raising funds for rabbis are likely themselves explicable against the background of demonstrable amoraic concern with their own support.91 The literary evidence of increased rabbinic involvement in social welfare in the latter part of the third century and beyond is noticed by E. E. Urbach, who attributes it to both the deteriorating economic situation and the rise of Christian philanthropy, and by Lee Levine, who notes the greater communal influence such involvement would give the rabbis as well.92 I would add that to the extent the rabbis were more active in social welfare issues, particularly in an uncertain economic environment, the realization may have grown that they simply could no longer afford to provide lavishly for the category of poor we have termed the “formerly wealthy poor.” The final factor that may account for the appearance of ambivalence toward the formerly wealthy poor during the amoraic period in Palestine is a change in attitude about rabbis and wealth and social status. Although no Tanna is ever noted to be poor, in the amoraic period we do see a willingness to portray rabbis as poor. R. Akiva is portrayed as a poor man who became wealthy, and Shimon b. Vava’ is described as so poor that he lacked even a pressed fig cake.93 R. Yoh.anan is described as walking with R. H.iyya b. Abba, pointing out the properties he had sold off in order to fund his scholarship, a series of sacrifices that caused the latter to burst into tears.94 This portrayal of R. Yoh.anan as poor is carried over into the Bavli.95 Note that according to Vayikra Rabbah 30:1, R. Yoh.anan was a formerly wealthy poor man, albeit voluntarily so. The willingness of Palestinian rabbis in the amoraic period to portray themselves and their predecessors as poor is an interesting shift from the ideology of the tannaitic period, and one that undoubtedly had implications for amoraic attitudes 87. Shaye J. D. Cohen makes the same point. See Cohen, “The Rabbi in Second-Century Jewish Society,”:935. 88. Y. Pe’ah 8:7, 21a; Y. Pe’ah 4:9, 18c = Y. Ma’aser Sheni 5:9, 56c. See, e.g., Lee Levine, The Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine (Jerusalem: Yad Itzh.ak ben Zvi, 1989), 162–67; Catherine Hezser, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 270–73; Burton Visotzky, Golden Bells and Pomegranates, 127. 89. Y. Pe’ah 8:9, 21b. 90. Y. Berakhot 5:1, 8d. 91. Vayikra Rabbah 5:4 (ed. Margoliot, 1:110–13); Y. Horayot 3:6, 48a; and Y. Pesah.im 4:8, 31b – c. See, e.g., Kalmin, The Sage in Jewish Society of Late Antiquity, 29–33. 92. Urbach, “Megamot datiyot,” 16–27; and Levine, The Rabbinic Class, 166–67. 93. Y. Pe’ah 4:9, 18c; and Y. Bikkurim 3:3, 65d. 94. Vayikra Rabbah 30:1 (ed. Margoliot, 2:688–90). 95. B. Ta‘anit 21a.

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor toward the formerly wealthy poor. Not hiding poverty, and even willing to valorize a fall from wealth into poverty, as in the story of R. Yoh.anan, Palestinian Amoraim were thus likely less susceptible to empathize as much with the formerly wealthy poor as their tannaitic predecessors, or to see the formerly wealthy poor as automatically deserving of a maintenance of their erstwhile lifestyles.

V. E MPATHY AND A MBIVALENCE T OWARD THE F ORMERLY W EALTHY P OOR THE B AVLI

IN

The Yerushalmi is the only Palestinian amoraic compilation to express ambivalence about the formerly wealthy poor. That being so, it is interesting that the Bavli also demonstrates such ambivalence, although it is impossible to determine what this shared interest means: Is this an example of the Bavli (un) knowingly appropriating a Yerushalmi concern or inheriting a concern from Palestinian sources that fed into the Yerushalmi, or is it an independent reaction to internal Babylonian developments? Resolution of this question is complicated by the somewhat similar yet largely different literary contexts in which the two Talmuds’ ambivalence is expressed: Y. Pe’ah 8:8–9, 21a–b and B. Ketubot 67b–68a. While the precise nature of the literary relationship between these sugyot must remain undefined, what is clear is that the Bavli shares the Yerushalmi’s ambivalence about the formerly wealthy poor.96 We will begin near the start of B. Ketubot 67b. The Bavli’s version of the story of Hillel and the ‘ani ben tovim is more dramatic than what we find in the Tosefta, Sifrei, and Yerushalmi. In the Bavli, the horse Hillel provides is for riding, not for working, while the slave is meant to serve as a herald for the ‘ani ben tovim, not to provide personal service. Moreover, the Bavli adds the detail that once, when Hillel was unable to find a slave to serve in that capacity, he did so himself—running before the ‘ani ben tovim for a distance of three milin. The related story of the recipient of the Galilean largesse is called an ‘ani ben tovim for the first time in the Bavli. The Bavli also raises more questions about the latter story than does the Yerushalmi. Ultimately, Rav Ashi (sixth generation) is represented as proposing that what was unique about the provision of a litra’ of meat to this ‘ani ben tovim was that the village was small, and they would slaughter an animal to provide this poor man with his daily litra’, even though they presumably did not have a large enough population to consume all the meat. Providing for this ‘ani ben tovim, according to Rav Ashi, thus seems to have been a singularly wasteful proposition, although he does not explicitly characterize it as such. 96. The issue of whether and how literary dependency between rabbinic compilations can be demonstrated is complex. See, e.g., Shamma Friedman, “Uncovering Literary Dependencies in the Talmudic Corpus,” in The Synoptic Problem in Rabbinic Literature, ed. Shaye J. D. Cohen (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2000), 35–57; Judith Hauptman, Rereading Mishnah, passim; Alyssa Gray, A Talmud in Exile, 1–8, 22–29 and passim; and idem, “A Bavli Sugya and Its Two Yerushalmi Parallels,” in Kraus, How Should Rabbinic Literature Be Read.

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Alyssa M. Gray One clear characteristic of the Bavli versions of these two stories that sets them apart from all the Palestinian versions is, to utilize Mark Cohen’s and Peter Brown’s terms, their more “hyperbolic” or “surreal” nature.97 Cohen and Brown put their fingers on a discernible characteristic of many Bavli versions of Palestinian stories, which we might describe as a tendency to rework the stories in more extreme or dramatic ways.98 In some cases (e.g., B. Ta’anit 21a), the heightened drama may be attributable at least in part to changes made to the story in the course of fitting it into its new literary context, but context does not account for all cases of heightened drama—notably not the Hillel and Upper Galilee stories we see on B. Ketubot 67b. It is most likely the case that these stories were retold in this more dramatic fashion in Babylonia before they were fixed in place in what we now know as B. Ketubot 67b.99 However they came to be this way, the Bavli’s “hyperbolic” versions of these stories cannot now be viewed in isolation from the overall redactional context in which they are placed. Moreover, other indications of the Bavli’s attitude toward the formerly wealthy poor must also be taken into account in assessing these stories. Taken together, this evidence will show that the Bavli, even more so than the Yerushalmi, displays deep ambivalence about the ‘ani ben tovim. What immediately follows the story of the people of the Upper Galilee is the Bavli’s version of a story about R. Nehemiah, which has a Yerushalmi parallel.100 In the Yerushalmi, a poor person (called “a certain Jerusalemite”) asks Nehemiah Ish Shih.in for a chicken, which marks the Jerusalemite as a person of refined tastes. Instead, Nehemiah gives him enough money to buy a quantity of red meat—a meal inferior to what the Jerusalemite is accustomed to eat. The Jerusalemite dies after eating this unsuitable (for him) meal, and Nehemiah says— exactly to whom is unclear—“Come, eulogize the one Nehemiah has killed.” Nehemiah Ish Shih.in made a mistake in trying to accustom a refined palate to rougher culinary fare. His failure, read through the lens of the Yerushalmi sugya as a whole, was that he failed to realize that one must not simply help the poor, but help them wisely and insightfully.101 In the Yerushalmi, the dead poor

97. See Mark Cohen, Poverty and Charity, 39 (hyperbole); and Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership, 60 (surreal). 98. It is interesting that on B. Ta‘anit 21a (the story of Nah.um Ish Gam Zu), the Bavli similarly makes the facts of the parallel Yerushalmi story (Y. Pe’ah 8:9, 21b) more extreme. Aaron Panken points out another example: In M. Yoma 2:2 the story is told of two overzealous priests who rushed forward to perform a Temple service, one of whom broke his leg. In the more dramatic Bavli parallel (B. Yoma 23a), one priest took a knife and drove it into the other’s heart. See Panken, The Rhetoric of Innovation, 15–17. 99. What accounts for this phenomenon? More research is needed to answer this question; ultimately, the answer might lie in external cultural factors in Babylonia. 100. Y. Pe’ah 8:9, 21b. 101. Nehemiah Ish Shih.in’s story is adduced as an illustration of R. Yonah’s midrash on Psalms 41:1: The psalm reads ’ashrei maskil el dal (Happy is he who is thoughtful of the wretched), and not ’ashrei notein el dal (Happy is the one who gives to the wretched). R. Yonah’s point was that it is not enough to give z.edakah; one must give wisely, with due regard to the dignity and self-respect of the person being helped.

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor person is not criticized, and the unwise giver publicly announces his error. In the Bavli’s version, the poor person—identified only as “that one who came”—came before R. Nehemiah, presumably for z.edakah, and R. Nehemiah asked him about his dining habits. In neither Talmud is this person called an ‘ani ben tovim, although his rich tastes and current economic distress make it reasonable to see him as such. The person said that he dines on rich meat and old wine, whereupon R. Nehemiah asked whether he would eat lentils with him instead. The person did so and died. The similarity with the Yerushalmi is clear: In both Talmuds, the person says that he is accustomed to richer fare, but allows (R.) Nehemiah (Ish Shih.in) to convince him to eat coarser fare, which kills him. In the Bavli, R. Nehemiah said, “Woe to this one, whom Nehemiah killed.” The stam comments that R. Nehemiah should have said, “Woe to Nehemiah, who killed this one,” but explains that R. Nehemiah attributed “woe” to the dead poor person because the latter should not have pampered himself so much that eating a simple meal killed him. As in the Yerushalmi, the Bavli also concedes that R. Nehemiah made a mistake. Yet it is precisely at this point that the Bavli steps back from criticizing R. Nehemiah and criticizes the dead poor person instead. The stam turns R. Nehemiah’s lament, which on its face is a straightforward lament for the dead poor man, into a postmortem scolding for a man who had pampered himself too much—unlike R. Nehemiah himself. Yes, the poor person likely would have lived had he gotten the proper rich food to which he was accustomed, says the Bavli, yet he should not have needed such rich food in the first place. This story is followed in turn by Rava’s encounter with a man who regularly dined on fat chicken and old wine.102 As with R. Nehemiah, the man is said to have “come before” Rava, presumably in order to receive z.edakah. Rava asked him about his dining habits, and the man responded that he dined on fat chicken and old wine. At this point, Rava asks a question that is undoubtedly on the mind of anyone who has been following this sequence of stories beginning with Hillel: Aren’t you concerned about the pressure on the community? That is, shouldn’t we be concerned that providing so lavishly for the formerly wealthy poor is a drain on the community? The man responds with a midrash on Psalms 145:15: He is not eating of the community’s resources, but of God’s, who provides to each living being its proper food in that being’s own good time—not in “their,” the community’s, good time. In other words, God provides what is necessary for the individual, regardless of whether that is convenient for the community. Rava does not respond to the scriptural interpretation, but at that very moment his long-lost sister appears, bearing a fat chicken and old wine. Rava then acknowledges the strange occurrence, and he invites the poor man to eat. Unlike the deceased formerly wealthy poor person who encountered R. Nehemiah and earned explicit criticism from the anonymous Bavli editors, Rava’s poor man appears to have bested the Amora. Yet Rava is portrayed as

102. For another look at this story, see Richard Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 179.

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Alyssa M. Gray clearly and unambiguously questioning the economic pressure the formerly wealthy poor put on their communities. Taken together, the two stories make the point that notwithstanding the reasonable doubts that can be raised about a policy of providing lavishly for the ‘ani ben tovim, that is in fact the correct policy. Yet the Bavli’s willingness to air its criticisms of the ‘ani ben tovim— (1) he should be able to make do with less, as others do, and (2) he should be concerned about the pressure his needs place on the community—shows that the Bavli does not at all see the ‘ani ben tovim as an unproblematic character. These two criticisms suggest that a principal worry about the ‘ani ben tovim is his impact on communal resources. It is thus telling that Rava does not respond to the poor man’s exegesis, which supports a policy of providing lavishly for the ‘ani ben tovim from communal resources, but he is willing to concede and invite the poor man to eat richly from the private resources provided by his serendipitously appearing sister.103 Thus, this story may not be as much of an endorsement of the Hillel and Upper Galilean policy toward the ‘ani ben tovim as it first appears. The Bavli’s tight juxtaposition of these stories with the stories of Hillel and the people of the Upper Galilee suggests that it has taken up the Yerushalmi’s implicit concern with the economic impact of the ‘ani ben tovim and is making this concern clearer and more explicit. The Bavli also presents three stories involving Mar Ukba and the poor on Ketubot 67b, the second of which is of some interest in this context. Mar Ukba was said to have sent 400 zuz to a particular poor person in his neighborhood each Yom Kippur eve. One year he sent his son with the money, and the latter returned and told his father that the poor person did not need the money because the son had seen him spraying—that is, wasting—old wine. The son was clearly implying that the poor person was a fraud. Mar Ukba drew the very different conclusion that the man was particularly delicate and pampered, presumably more so than he had thought. Mar Ukba then doubled his annual gift. This story nicely illustrates a third reasonable doubt that one can have about an alleged ‘ani ben tovim: Is the person authentic or a fraud? Interpreting the same situation, Mar Ukba’s son read “fraud” and Mar Ukba read “authentic.” The Bavli here acknowledges that in some situations, the genuine ‘ani ben tovim may be indistinguishable from a fraud—an observation that further problematizes the ‘ani ben tovim. After concluding its set of Mar Ukba stories, the Bavli continues its investigation of frauds on B. Ketubot 67b with the story of R. Abba, who would tie up money in a scarf and throw it behind him so that the poor could pick it up. Although he did this so that he could not see who was picking up the money, he would nevertheless glance behind him to ensure that no frauds picked up the 103. My student David Segal perceptively observed that even though Rava himself did not respond to the poor man’s scriptural exegesis, the narrative itself criticizes it. The poor man argued that Psalms 145:15, which recognizes God as the provider of food to all “when it is due,” meant that the community must provide lavishly for him whenever he required it. The sudden appearance of Rava’s long-lost sister with the poor man’s customary meal shows, to the contrary, that “when it is due” for the formerly wealthy poor is a matter of serendipity, hardly the fixed communal obligation upon which the poor man insisted.

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor money. These frauds, of course, are not at all necessarily faux ‘aniyyim b’nei tovim, but simply anyone who would not need the money. Nevertheless, the fact that this story is sandwiched between two stories of people who might be either ‘aniyyim b’nei tovim or frauds (the Mar Ukba story before it and the R. H.anina story following it) suggests once again that the issue of fraud is not far away from the issue of the ‘ani ben tovim. The Bavli moves directly into the issue of frauds right after the R. Abba story. In a story reminiscent of Mar Ukba and his son, R. H.anina is said to have sent four zuzim to a particular poor person each Sabbath eve. One time he sent the money with his wife, who returned and reported that the “poor” man did not need the money. Upon approaching the house, she had overheard him being asked how he dines, and his response that he dines on luxury dinner service. In this case, R. H.anina did not respond as Mar Ukba had, with an assumption that the poor man was an ‘ani ben tovim who required even more luxury. Instead, R. H.anina responded by quoting R. Ele’azar’s dictum that people should be grateful to frauds, because were it not for them, any refusal of a request for z.edakah would earn the refuser immediate divine punishment. R. H.anina thus accepted his wife’s conclusion that his client was a fraud. The Bavli follows this story on B. Ketubot 68a with teachings that require the giving of z.edakah, while promising divine punishment for those poor who pretend to be physically disabled when they are not. The Bavli’s point seems to be that while one will not suffer immediate divine punishment for refusing to give alms, one should most definitely not refuse; God will deal with those “poor” who pretend to be what they are not. The Bavli has thus taken over the Yerushalmi’s concerns about the formerly wealthy poor—their high economic impact, the fact that they should have to make do with less, and the impossibility of distinguishing them at times from frauds. Whereas the Yerushalmi stam raised the issue of their high economic impact in a brief question, the Bavli puts that concern clearly into the mouth of Rava and invites consideration of that concern in Rav Ashi’s observation about the daily wastage of meat for the benefit of an ‘ani ben tovim in the Upper Galilee. The Yerushalmi suggests through R. Mana and through the anonymous physician that the formerly wealthy poor should have to make do with less, and the Bavli editors make that concern the very point of their version of the R. Nehemiah story. Both Talmuds present stories about frauds within the broad context of the formerly wealthy poor. In addition, as noted earlier, the Bavli also expresses its ambivalence about the formerly wealthy poor by erasing them: Whereas Shmuel sees the formerly wealthy poor as being dead although alive,104 the Bavli represents that tradition (in the name of Resh Lakish) as applying to all poor—not simply the formerly wealthy poor.105 This erasure of the formerly wealthy poor from a Bavli parallel to a Palestinian source appears in the context of B. Ketubot 67b–68a as well, where the Bavli presents its version of the Yerushalmi sugya about situations in which the formerly wealthy poor will have to make do with less—or not—than

104. Bereshit Rabbah 71:6 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 2:829–30). 105. B. Nedarim 64b; B. ‘Avodah Zarah 5a.

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Alyssa M. Gray that to which they were accustomed (Y. Pe’ah 8:8, 21a). To facilitate this comparison, we will examine the sugyot side by side, beginning with the Yerushalmi sugya translated earlier:106 Y. Pe’ah 8:8, 21a

1. It was taught [T. Pe’ah 4:11]: “If he used gold utensils, we give him silver utensils; silver utensils, we give him copper utensils; copper utensils, we give him glass utensils.” 2. R. Mana said: “Silver and glass utensils for [direct use] with their bodies.” 3. But wasn’t it taught [T. Pe’ah 4:10]: “If he would [wear] wool clothing, we give him wool clothing”? [The objection continues:] [T. Pe’ah 4:10] applies to [the poor’s] body [items that touch the body directly must be of high quality], [T. Pe’ah 4:11] applies to [use in ways that are] not [directly touching the poor’s] body! [Thus, R. Mana, who claims that the poor must even make do with lesser-quality items that touch his body, must be wrong].

B. Ketubot 68a107

1. It was taught there [M. Pe’ah 8:8]: “We do not obligate him to sell his house or his utensils.” 2. No? Wasn’t it taught [in a baraita’]: “If he would use gold utensils, he should use silver utensils; if silver utensils, he should use copper utensils” [compare T. Pe’ah 4:11]? 3. R. Zevid said, “There is no difficulty [between M. Pe’ah 8:8 and the baraita’]. This one [the baraita’] applies to [his] bed and table; this one [M. Pe’ah 8:8] applies to cups and plates.” 4. What is the distinction of cups and plates that [they are] not [to be traded down]? That he could say, “[Lower-quality cups and plates are] disgusting to me.” [But as to] bed and table also he could say, “This is not acceptable to me!” 5. Rava b. d’Rabbah said: “[The baraita’] refers to the silver strigil.” 6. Rav Papa said: “There is no difficulty. This one [M. Pe’ah 8:8] applies before he comes to the point of collection; this one [the baraita’] applies after he comes to the point of collection.” 106. The notes to the translation have been omitted here. 107. This translation follows the text of the printed edition. There are no significant differences in Vatican Bibliotheca Apostolica Ebr. 113 or Ebr. 130, or in Munich 95.

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor The Bavli opens its sugya with a quotation from M. Pe’ah 8:8: “We do not obligate him to sell his house and utensils.”108 An objection is raised from a baraita’ similar to the toseftan baraita’ (T. Pe’ah 4:11) we saw in the Yerushalmi: “If he used gold utensils, he should use silver; silver, he should use copper.” It should be noted at the outset that by juxtaposing its version of T. Pe’ah 4:11 with M. Pe’ah 8:8, which clearly deals with all poor, not simply the formerly wealthy poor, the Bavli signals that its version of the Yerushalmi sugya is not limited to the formerly wealthy poor. It is also notable and unsurprising that the Bavli omits the stories of the Antbila family and the member of the patriarchal house, as it tends to omit uniquely Palestinocentric sources.109 Instead, the Bavli moves directly to three Amoraim’s suggested resolutions of the M. Pe’ah 8:8/T. Pe’ah 4:11 conflict, and these resolutions—like the Bavli’s opening juxtaposition of tannaitic sources—obliterate the original “formerly wealthy poor” context of the discussion. The Bavli sugya applies to all poor; this is apparent not only from the absence of the formerly wealthy poor from the sugya itself, but also from the absence from the sugya’s surrounding context of references to formerly wealthy poor people such as the Antbila family or the member of the Patriarchal household. Whereas the Yerushalmi baraita’ spoke of what should be given to the formerly wealthy poor, the Bavli baraita’ speaks of what utensils the (undefined) poor should use. Although the Bavli’s version of T. Pe’ah 4:11 may well have predated the sugya and its erasure of the formerly wealthy poor, there is no doubt that the Bavli’s version of T. Pe’ah 4:11 also contributes to that erasure in the context of the sugya. The Bavli sugya is not defining the law as to what the formerly wealthy poor should be given; the sugya is defining what all poor are or are not permitted to retain of their own possessions as they get closer to the need for charitable assistance. Rav Zevid proposes that beds and tables should be traded down, per the baraita’, while cups and dishes should be retained, per M. Pe’ah 8:8. The explanation for this difference is dimly reminiscent of the story of the Patriarchal scion: A person may find lower-quality cups and dishes to be disgusting, although the retort is made that the same could be said of lower-quality beds and tables. Rava b. d’Rabbah mentions the silver strigil, which is a luxurious usable object. Such an object must be traded down, per the baraita’. Rav Papa’s opaque resolution is that M. Pe’ah 8:8 applies “before he [the poor] comes to the point of collection,” while the baraita’ applies “after.” While Rav Papa’s meaning is a matter of dispute, we can say that at the least (following Alfasi and like-minded scholars), he implies that when one has resort to communal resources, one must be sure to have arranged one’s personal affairs so as to have as small an impact as possible on those resources.110 108. The Bavli’s more organized approach to the issue, including the quotation of a relevant mishnah, requires more study. It seems that this is another overall literary distinction between the Talmuds. 109. See Alyssa Gray, A Talmud in Exile, 121–25; cf. “A Bavli Sugya and Its Two Yerushalmi Parallels,” 64–66. 110. For some interpretations of Rav Papa, see Rashi to B. Ketubot 68a, s.v. “kan kodem sh’yavo’ l’dei gibbuy”; Tosafot to B. Ketubot 68a, s.v. “kan” (Rabbenu Tam disagreed with Rashi);

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Alyssa M. Gray Once again, unlike the parallel Yerushalmi sugya,111 the Bavli sugya does not at all indicate that it applies (only) to the formerly wealthy poor; indeed, later halakhic readers of the sugya assumed that it applied to all poor.112 The views attributed to Rav Zevid and Rava b. d’Rabbah are, however, reminiscent of a focus on the formerly wealthy poor. Thus, we may conclude that the Bavli editors reworked a sugya that likely originally focused on the formerly wealthy poor to make it apply to all poor—that is, they erased the formerly wealthy poor from this sugya. The formerly wealthy poor are not particular subjects of special concern in the Bavli. In sum, rabbinic attitudes toward the formerly wealthy poor evolved over time. Tannaitic sources are almost uniformly generous to them, with the possible exception of two references in the Tosefta; the Yerushalmi raises doubts about them, and the Bavli elaborates on those doubts while erasing the formerly wealthy poor from some Palestinian contexts in which they earlier appeared. Caring for the formerly wealthy poor came to be seen as a possible burden on the individual—through the possibility of frauds—and on the community, through both the possibility of frauds and the expense of supporting even the authentic formerly wealthy poor in the state to which they were accustomed. A question remains as to whether this demonstrable skepticism is simply the result of the Bavli’s literary appropriation of a Yerushalmi concern or of appropriation plus historical factors that led to ambivalence in both centers. VI. T HE B AVLI ’ S A MBIVALENCE E XPLAINED Let us begin with historical factors discernible from the Bavli. One clear difference between Babylonian and Palestinian rabbis is that while the latter, as we have seen, do portray themselves as at times voluntarily choosing poverty, the former never do. Some Babylonian rabbis may be portrayed as poor, but not as voluntarily so. Examples include Rabbah (B. Mo’ed Katan 28a); Abaye, who was so poor that he suffered from jaundice at one point in his life (B. Shabbat 33a), and the hapless Rav Huna, son of Moshe b. Az.ri (B. Bava’ Batra’ 174b). The apparent nonexistence of voluntary Babylonian poverty, as well as the absence of any other valorization of rabbinic poverty (for Babylonians), suggests a possibility that poverty was not high on the Babylonian scale of values.

Rif to B. Ketubot 68a, p. 29b in the Rif’s pages; Ran on the Rif to B. Ketubot 68a, s.v. “t’nan” (siding with the Rif as against Rashi). See also ’Or Zaru‘a, Hilkhot Z.edakah, who reads Rav Papa as referring to the gabbai rather than gibbuy. Most medieval authorities appear to reject Rashi’s interpretation of Rav Papa. 111. Earlier readers of these sugyot have seen them as parallel. See the Ran on the Rif to B. Ketubot 68a, s.v. “yerushalmi” and ’Or Zaru‘a cited above in n. 110. 112. E.g., Rambam, Hilkhot Matanot Aniyyim 9:14; Arba’ah Turim, Yoreh De’ah 253; Shulh.an Arukh Yoreh De’ah 253:1. For a recent discussion of B. Ketubot 68a in the context of halakhic history, see Jill Jacobs, “Toward a Halakhic Definition of Poverty,” Conservative Judaism 57, no. 1 (2004): 3–20.

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor But there is more. One of the noticeable and interesting characteristics of the Bavli’s portrayal of some Babylonian rabbis is their rise from poverty to wealth.113 Specifically, as Moshe Beer has noted, select Babylonian rabbis who were portrayed as poor in their youth are portrayed as acquiring great wealth at the time of their ascension to rabbinic recognition.114 Notable examples include Rav Huna, who is portrayed as having worked as an irrigator (B. Ketubot 105a) and as having been too poor even to afford wine for kiddush (B. Megillah 27b). Yet he is described as having decreed before meals that “let all who are hungry come and eat” (B. Ta‘anit 20b), a degree of generosity that Rava noted was impossible in his own city of Meh.oza, in which there were so many poor.115 Other examples include Rav Ashi, who did not get rich until he saw the tops of turnips (B. Berakhot 57b);116 Rav H.isda, who notes that he was granted prosperity because of the ritual washing of the hands (B. Shabbat 62b), and gave reasons why he ate vegetables neither when he was poor nor rich (B. Shabbat 140b); and Rav Papa, whose happy circumstances were noted by Abaye (B. Pesah.im 111b). It is unclear whether these portrayals should be taken as historical fact—as most of the scholars who have previously noted them assumed—or as ideologically motivated portrayals that, regardless of whether they are historically factual, are nevertheless reliable historical guides to the worldviews of the Babylonian Amoraim.117 Beer explained these portrayals as rooted in an “Eastern” disinclination to see leaders of important social and religious institutions as poor; in his words, “it is not at all to be assumed that the Jews of Babylonia would have

113. See Saul Lieberman, Tosefta ki-Feshutah (Order Nashim, Part VIII), 762, lines 44–64; Jacob Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia (Leiden: Brill, 1969; repr., Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 3:126–30; and Moshe Beer, Amora’ei Bavel: perakim be-h.ayei ha-kalkalah (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1982), 258–71. Yaakov Elman also recently noted this phenomenon in his “The Socioeconomics of Babylonian Heresy,” in Studies in Mediaeval Halakhah in Honor of Stephen M. Passamaneck, ed. Alyssa Gray and Bernard Jackson (Jewish Law Association Studies XVII; Liverpool, UK: Deborah Charles, 2007), 81–86. 114. Beer, Amora’ei Bavel, 258. 115. Ibid., 259. 116. See Dikdukei Soferim to B. Berakhot 57b, note zayin. The printed edition reads “Rav.” 117. Although this essay is not the appropriate venue in which to explore this question, several points must be noted. First, as Beer himself noted (Amora’ei Bavel, 270) this rags-to-riches portrayal of the Amoraim fits well with the old tannaitic notion that if a candidate for the high priesthood was not wealthy, his fellow priests must enrich him (T. Yoma 1:6 [Lieberman ed., 222]). Beer hypothesizes that in Babylonia the toseftan norm had become a “sanctified norm, or nevertheless accepted and obligatory.” Yet it is also possible that the toseftan norm was seen as the basis on which to construct portrayals of leading Babylonian Amoraim, not necessarily one guiding actual social policy. The notion that these rags-to-riches portrayals are indeed ideologically motivated rather than historically factual draws further support from a point not previously noted by Beer or other scholars: the similarity of these Babylonian portrayals to the portrayal of R. Akiva in both Talmuds. R. Akiva is described as ascending from poverty to wealth (e.g., Y. Pe’ah 4:9, 18c), and it is possible that this portrayal later influenced the portrayal of the Babylonian Amoraim. Again, I emphasize that even if these portrayals are what I have termed “ideologically motivated,” this does not mean that they are devoid of historical value, simply that they may not transparently reflect that reality.

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Alyssa M. Gray looked favorably at all upon a poor rosh yeshivah. Such a thing is opposed to the mentality of the Eastern peoples, with the exception of the Christians and some sects.”118 Beer’s excepting of Christians from the “Eastern” tendency to favor wealthy leaders requires adjustment in light of Adam Becker’s recent research on the School of Nisibis. Becker notes the endowment of an entire village to the School of Nisibis for its support, and points out “[t]hat a village could be ‘bought’ and then given to the School is distinctive of the Persian feudal system, but also demonstrates the relative comfort East-Syrian institutions felt with wealth” (emphasis mine).119 Becker goes on to point out that this comfort with wealth is “striking” in light of the valorization of poverty in Syriac Christianity, but he notes that stories like that of the endowment of the School of Nisibis were common in the Eastern church, where wealthy clergy and laity were portrayed as using their wealth to play important roles in the church.120 Becker’s important findings about the role of wealth and social status in the founding and maintenance of the institutions of Syriac Christianity shed new and muchneeded light on the Bavli’s portrayal of leading Amoraim as having risen from poverty to wealth. Taking Beer and Becker together, it is safe to assume that a rabbi’s move from poverty to wealth would be seen as a positive. But the opposite move from wealth to poverty might well be viewed negatively; and, we may add, if such a decline were viewed negatively within rabbinic circles, it is unlikely that these very rabbinic circles would muster up much empathy for others who found themselves in those circumstances. We must recall the extreme caste stratification of Sasanian society, noted by Beer and later studied closely in relation to the Babylonian Amoraim by Richard Kalmin.121 Such caste stratification also suggests that circumstances causing a descent from wealth to poverty would not likely result in much empathy from the wealthy erstwhile peers of the hapless formerly wealthy. An interesting, albeit strange, example of all this comes from B. Hagigah 5b. Rava’s great wealth caused suspicion among other rabbis, who then “cast their eyes” upon him, whereupon royal retainers came and plundered his wealth. The only consolation, as it were, for Rava was that his despoiling confirmed that he was one of the Jewish people; however, particular and generous concern for his plight on the part of the other rabbis is conspicuously absent. In sum, the Bavli’s particularly “Eastern” approach to wealth and poverty may explain in part its own demonstrated ambivalence toward the formerly wealthy poor.122

118. Beer, Amora’ei Bavel, 270 (my translation). 119. Adam H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 80. 120. Ibid., 80–81. 121. See ibid., 258; and Richard Kalmin, The Sage in Jewish Society of Late Antiquity. 122. There is also evidence that middle- to late-generation Babylonian Amoraim were much more involved in social welfare provision than their early predecessors. Detailing this evidence is work for another venue; suffice it to say that, as with the Palestinian Amoraim, increased amoraic involvement in social welfare—with the concomitant recognition of the limits of social resources and the

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The Formerly Wealthy Poor VII. C ONCLUSION This essay proposed to study the portrayal of the formerly wealthy poor in rabbinic literature of late antiquity through attention to two points of method: (1) studying all relevant references to these poor, and not relying on isolated traditions, and (2) studying these references in their redactional contexts. As a result, this essay was able to show that rabbinic attitudes toward the formerly wealthy poor changed over time, from a dominant attitude of empathy in tannaitic compilations to the appearance and elaboration of ambivalence toward them in the Yerushalmi and Bavli. This rabbinic shift stands in contrast to late Roman (sixth century) empathy for the formerly wealthy remnants of the old plebs romana as well as the increasingly positive attitude toward these poor visible in medieval Islamic law. Alyssa M. Gray Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion New York, New York

need to exercise careful discretion—may have been inversely proportional to empathy for the formerly wealthy poor.

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AJS Review 33:1 (2009), 135–153 © 2009 Association for Jewish Studies doi:10.1017/S0364009409000063

T HEORY AND P RACTICE : A J EWISH P HYSICIAN IN PARIS AND AVIGNON by

Susan Einbinder1

Not otherwise known as a bright era for the Jews of Christian Europe, the late fourteenth century nonetheless counted a number of thriving Jewish medical careers. One physician who surfaced in this period was Jacob b. Solomon of Avignon (sometimes called Jacob b. Solomon haTzarfati), whose career has been documented in two cities. In northern France, the land of his ancestors, we find him in the 1370s in the orbit of the University of Paris and its prestigious medical faculty. By the early 1380s, however, Jacob was at the papal court in Avignon, where or near where he was raised. There, in his own day at least, he achieved some renown while serving as physician to Pope Clement VII’s brother, Count Pierre of Geneva. North and south, Jacob’s extant writings emphasize his French cultural loyalties and his reverence for both medical learning and his Christian patrons. This is evident in what is probably Jacob’s least-known work, a tractate on vertigo that describes a consultation in Paris for an unnamed (but dizzy) knight beloved of the French king. Indeed, Jacob’s treatise on vertigo reflects a close familiarity with the medical program at the University of Paris and a working relationship with at least one member of its senior medical faculty. While paying homage to the Paris curriculum and its masters, Jacob adapted their teachings and literary conventions in significant ways. By sensibly modifying the recommendations of his textbooks, notably Avicenna’s Canon, Jacob acknowledged the limitations of theoretical prescriptions under real-life constraints. At the same time, he produced a literary work that is a startling blend of theory and practice, a remarkable accomplishment on two counts. First is the Parisian masters’ disinclination toward

1. This paper took preliminary form as a talk at the Association for Jewish Studies conference in Toronto in December 2007. Slightly expanded, it was presented again in Jerusalem in January 2008, for a conference on “Science in Ashkenaz.” From this beginning, it has been considerably revised. I would like to express my gratitude to Leonard Kravitz of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York for his help with philosophical terminology and to the anonymous reader for the AJS Review whose comments were both relevant and helpful. Thank you also to Ruth Langer, organizer of the AJS session, and to Gad Freudenthal, organizer of the Jerusalem conference, for the opportunity to present my work.

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Susan Einbinder original theoretical writing. But Jacob’s literary production is also significant in the context of Jewish medical writing of this period, where enthusiasm for Christian (Latin) scholastic methods has been associated with the school of Jewish rationalist philosophers and physicians. In contrast, Jacob can be identified with the antirationalist, or traditionalist, camp of Jewish writers, where his literary originality may have had a special agenda. Although my subject here is Jacob’s medical activity and writing, he was a man of many talents. Some of his endeavors have merited sporadic attention over the years, but rarely, if ever, as expressions of the lively intelligence behind them all. In 1895, David Kaufmann published Jacob’s “Evel rabbati,” a moving description of the latter’s daughter’s death from the plague in 1382–83.2 Elliott Horowitz and Ron Barkai have since revisited this essay, the former for what it reveals of late medieval Jewish mourning practices and the latter for its depiction of familial ties during the great fourteenth-century epidemics.3 I have also explored this work for its evidence of Jewish medical responses to the plague.4 The “Evel rabbati” survives in a unique copy made in 1395, perhaps by the author, who appended it to a collection of his theological essays, treated by Georges Vajda in 1976.5 With the exception of Vajda’s essay, Jacob’s theological essays have not been treated at all. They comprise the author’s proof of creation ex nihilo; a discussion of the rabbinic acronym preserved in the Passover Haggadah for the ten biblical plagues visited upon the Egyptians; and an analysis of these same biblical plagues that engages medical theory to prove that the plagues were directly ordained by God and were not explicable by natural law. These writings help establish Jacob as someone who was concerned with the philosophical implications of rationalist exegesis, a concern that is equally evident in attacks in the “Evel rabbati” on the philosophical allegorists. Jacob’s scribal work has also been preserved in the famed Wolf Haggadah, first described by Kaufmann and more recently by Katrin Kogman-Appel.6

2. David Kaufmann, “Le ‘Grand-deuil’ de Jacob b. Salomon Sarfati d’Avignon,” Revue des Études Juives 30 (1895): 52–64. 3. Elliott Horowitz, “The Jews of Europe and the Moment of Death in Medieval and Modern Times,” Judaism 44 (1995): 271–81; and Ron Barkai, “‘Al mot yeladim bamagefah hasheh.orah” [On child mortality during the Black Death], in Nashim, zekenim va-taf: kovets ma’amarim li-khevodah shel Shulamit Shah.ar, ed. Miri Eliav Feldon and Yitzh.ak H.en (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2001), 67–84. 4. Susan L. Einbinder, No Place of Rest: Jewish Poetry, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France (Phicladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); idem, lecture, Hochschule für Judische Studien, Heidelberg, July 2006; and idem, paper, International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2007. 5. Georges Vajda, “Le-toldot ha-pulmus beyn hafilosofiah vehadat (shitato vedei’otav shel R’ Ya’akov ben Shelomoh haTzarfati)” [On the history of the controversy between philosophy and religion (the methods and ideas of R. Jacob b. Solomon Tzarfati)], Tarbiz. 24 (1955): 307–22; see also Einbinder, No Place of Rest, chap. 5. 6. David Kaufmann, “Une Haggada de la France Septentrionale ayant appartenu à Jacob ben Salomon,” Revue des Études Juives 25 (1892): 65–77; and Katrin Kogman-Appel, Illuminated Haggadot from Medieval Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 23, 34–39.

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A Jewish Physician in Paris and Avignon As Kogman-Appel documented, the liturgy recorded by Jacob offers an uneasy blend of northern and southern practice. In some cases, he resolutely indicates his preference for French usage; in others, a curious hybridity characterizes the liturgical formulae of the text.7 Jacob’s writings do not merely suggest an astonishing range of interests and talents. A reading of all his extant works establishes certain themes and attitudes that transcend genre conventions and suggest genuine affinities of the author. These themes and attitudes include a fervent affirmation of French identity, striking in a man descended from French exiles who presumably lost all that they owned in the expulsion of 1306. Jacob himself must have been born shortly prior to or following the pandemic of 1348 (he had a twenty-one-year-old daughter in 1382), which suggests that his parents may have been living in Provence and then were chased into the Comtat Venaissin during anti-Jewish persecutions triggered by the Black Death. Jacob bitterly denounces Jewish associates whom he refers to as mitpalsifim and allegorists whose rationalist approach to sacred texts undermines Jewish learning, memory, and life. These denunciations, like his equally fervent affirmations of his French colleagues and their learning, testify to a notable scientific and theological conservatism that pervades both his response to the plague epidemic and questions of religious faith and practice. Jacob’s theological and scientific conservatism is the hallmark not only of his northern kin but of the University of Paris and its scholars as well.8 It is frequently cited in discussions of the Paris physicians’ collaborative communiqué on the 1348 plague, a treatise that ultimately saw the hand of God in the pandemic’s devastation. It also characterizes at least two graduates of the Parisian school, Jean de Tournamire and Jacme d’Agramant, both of whom spent time at the Avignon court when Jacob was there. Certainly, during the years of the Avignon popes and throughout the years of the Great Schism, traffic between royal Paris and Avignon was continuous and heavy. From at least the mid-century, Clement VI (r. 1342–52), Innocent VI (r. 1352–62), Urban V (r. 1362–70), and Gregory XI (r. 1370–78) hailed from French-speaking lands, and they advanced the will of French kings, surrounding themselves with appointees, from notaries to physicians to cardinals, who were either themselves from French lands or sympathetic to French interests. Indeed, upon the death of Gregory XI in 1378, it was King Charles V of France who convened a meeting of bishops and clerks at the University of Paris, ostensibly in an

7. The graceful pen-and-ink drawings, until quite recently attributed to Jacob as well, occasionally depict a ritual in jarring conflict with the language of the text; they were probably added in Italy during the next century (Colum Hourihane and Katrin Kogman-Appel, private correspondence, July 2006). 8. William Courtenay, “Curers of Body and Soul: Medical Doctors as Theologians,” in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler, York Studies in Medieval Theology 3 (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 2001), 69–75.

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Susan Einbinder effort to bring an end to the Schism and its dual papacy.9 That effort failed, and Clement VII, elected to the Avignon papacy in 1378, was one of the formidably francophile counts of Geneva.10 Had Jacob been a Christian cleric or courtier, his movement between Avignon and Paris would not have been odd at all; as noted, that traffic was continuous. For a Christian physician, his career path would have seemed slightly odder, as medical careers generally traveled in the opposite direction.11 A great many of the papal physicians in Avignon had studied and taught at the University of Paris, while only a handful of southerners found prestige in the north.12 According to Pearl Kibre, the election of Clement VII precipitated a second exodus of Parisian masters in another direction entirely, when faculty who remained loyal to the Roman pope (Urban VI) relocated to Prague in 1381. Those who stayed in Paris, or resettled in the Avignon court, were by default supporters of the Avignon papacy, Clement VII, and his ties to the French king.13 Jacob’s appearance in Paris, then, is remarkable first for his direction of movement, which originated in the papal lands of the Comtat Venaissin and brought him to the north; his return journey from Paris to the papal court in Avignon was far more typical for a Paris-based physician. For a Jewish physician, however, his journey was unusual for other reasons as well. Certainly the Parisian (and Italian) saturation of the Avignon court meant that Jacob’s northern and southern sojourns were not truly at cultural extremes. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine how he arrived in Paris without an established reputation—in fact, he signed his treatise as ‫משטר’ יעקב מאויניון צרפתי‬, “Maestre Jacob of Avignon, the Frenchman,” attesting to credentials already in hand. Moreover, it is unlikely that he could have undertaken his initial studies in Paris. Although Jews were readmitted to the kingdom in 1359, and were present in the city from the mid-1360s, their numbers were small and their professional activities linked primarily to lending.14 Indeed, the University of Paris, where classes were taught in Latin

9. Pearl Kibre, Scholarly Privileges in the Middle Ages: The Rights, Privileges, and Immunities, of the Scholars and Universities at Bologna, Padua, Paris, and Oxford (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1962), 267. 10. According to one older source, Charles V’s reaction upon hearing of Clement VII’s election was to exclaim “maintenant je suis pape!” See Ludwig Pastor, Histoire des papes (Paris: Plon, 1888), 149. 11. According to Danielle Jacquart, between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, there were only eighteen cases of Paris masters who had completed part or all of their studies in Montpellier; Bologna was the great rival to Paris and its medical school. See Danielle Jacquart, La médecine médiévale dans le cadre parisien (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 156. 12. Bernard Guillemain, Le cour pontificale d’Avignon (Paris: Editions de Boccard, 1962). Guillemain documents twenty-seven of thirty-nine French physicians in Avignon between Clement V and Gregory XI (378). 13. Kibre, Scholarly Privileges in the Middle Ages, 267. This paper does not take a position on the legitimacy of the Avignon popes, as that was apparently not an issue for Jacob b. Solomon or his coreligionists employed by the papal court in Avignon. 14. Roger Kohn, Les juifs de la France du Nord dans la seconde moitié du XIVe siècle (LouvainParis: E. Peeters, 1988), 48–50, 200ff.

138

A Jewish Physician in Paris and Avignon until the end of the fifteenth century, has left behind no evidence of openness to Jewish students of the sort Joseph Shatzmiller claimed to have found—for a tiny number of cases—in Montpellier and Bologna during this period.15 However, it is also true that Charles V, France’s king through most of the 1370s, respected and enforced existing Jewish privileges, and the small Jewish community was relatively robust during these years.16 With the death of Charles V in 1380, and the accession of the young Charles VI to the French throne, the small Jewish community once again encountered a period of unrest, capped by two years of anti-Jewish riots in 1380–82. Jacob’s reverse itinerary is thus easier to plot than his journey north. His career in Avignon in the 1380s and 1390s must have been linked to his time in Paris and to his royal and university contacts. Most likely, his sojourn in Paris concluded with the election of Clement VII in 1378, when a new wave of French appointees headed south, and Jacob’s Parisian connections steered him to the papal court. As we shall see, the treatise on vertigo was a Parisian work. It vividly reveals a Jewish physician at work among Christian colleagues, treating a Christian patient who was closely connected to the court of Charles V. The treatise is equally unusual for its style, a dialectical weave of theory and practice with a conscious incorporation of narrative. Its literary qualities attest to an author who was willing to experiment with established conventions in provocative ways. Jacob b. Solomon’s treatise on vertigo is preserved in a single manuscript, MS Oxford Bodleian 4o, 174 (Neubauer 2583). A fifteenth-century copy written in Ashkenazic script (attesting to its later influence in northern lands), the manuscript is a medical miscellany containing four works: a paraphrase of Maimonides’ commentary on Galen’s commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, in Moses ibn Tibbon’s translation (fols. 1a–26a); Jacob b. Solomon’s essay on vertigo (fols. 26a–30b); Jean de St. Amand’s commentary on the Antidotarium Nicolai, in an anonymous Hebrew translation (fols. 31b–175b); and medical recipes, of anonymous authorship (fol. 175b). The combination testifies to the practical interests of the copyist, whose scrawl suggests a work that was created for personal use. The Oxford anthology also testifies to the adoption of a Parisian-style curriculum among northern Jewish physicians. Maimonides’ aphoristic commentary, the Pirke refu’ah, not only recuperated a text central to the Paris curriculum but also was, in Latin translation, recommended to his students by the Paris-trained Jean de Tournamire.17 Jean de St. Amand, who was active in and around Paris

15. Joseph Shatzmiller, “Étudiants juifs à la faculté de médecine de Montpellier, dernier quartier du XIVe siècle,” Jewish History 6, no. 1–2 (1992): 247; and idem, “On Becoming a Jewish Doctor in the High Middle Ages,” Sefarad 43 (1983): 245. 16. Kohn, Les juifs de la France du Nord, 200–201. 17. On the Paris curriculum, see Courtenay, “Curers of Body and Soul”; Cornelius O’Boyle, The Art of Medicine: Medical Teaching at the University of Paris, 1250–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); idem, “Medicine, God and Aristotle in the Early Universities: Prefatory Prayers in Late Medieval Commentaries,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66 (1992): 185–209; idem, “Learning Medieval Medicine: The Boundaries of Classroom Practice,” Dynamis 20 (2000): 17–29; Jacquart, La médecine

139

Susan Einbinder between 1261 and 1298, has been described by Danielle Jacquart as one of the “most illustrious representatives” of Parisian scholarly life.18 The Antidotarium Nicolai officially entered the required reading list for medical students at Paris in the statutes of 1274.19 By association, therefore, the copyist linked Jacob’s treatise to canonic Parisian texts. The author would doubtless have been pleased, as his Parisian association was important to him. His opening paragraph establishes that he was part of a consulting team assembled by a high-ranking lord who is later identified as the king (Charles V). Jacob claims that he is writing at the king’s command and refers to a parallel document written by his Christian colleagues (now lost to us): ‫אמ”יץ הנה להיותי מצווה מוזהר מפיות שר וגדול להודיע עונתי בחולי מה שקרה לפרש אחד‬ ‫ … ובעבו’ מאותם שאני קרוי עמהם על זה החולי רבותי נענתי‬.‫מהיותר חביב אצלו הקרוב אליו‬ ‫לו בזה היותר קצר שאוכל לחסמני להשעיני במה שכתבו בו אותם הרופאים הנכבדים על אותו‬ .…‫חולה עצמ ו‬ Said Jacob Tsarfati: Since I have been commanded and charged by a lord of high rank to make known my examination of the disease that befell a certain knight, among the most beloved and close to him. … And on behalf of my masters, those among whom I was called about this disease, I have responded to him with this, in as abridged a form as possible, supporting myself and relying on what those same respected physicians have written about this same invalid … [fol. 26b]

Other passages, including the following example, refer almost casually to the presence of a group or team of practitioners involved in this case: ‫ואחר יאכל מהעניני’ המותקנים לו סדרום לו הרופא’ מוריי הקרובים למה שאומר פה לפי‬ .…‫מחשבתי‬ And afterward, he should eat the things prepared for him, which have been ordered for him by the physicians, my teachers, and which are close to what I say here out of my own investigation. … [fol. 28b]

Jacob’s account of his collaboration with his Christian teachers and colleagues is embedded in a technically sophisticated, theoretical work. He carefully divides his

médiévale dans le cadre parisien; Gerrit Bos, “Maimonides’ Medical Aphorisms: Towards a Critical Edition and Revised English Translation,” Korot 12 (1996–97): 35–79, esp. 45; Gerrit Bos, ed., Maimonides’ Medical Aphorisms: Treatises 1–5 (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2004); and Ernest Wickersheimer, Commentaires de la Faculté de Médecine de l’Université de Paris (1395–1516) (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1915), xvii–xl. 18. Danielle Jacquart, Le milieu médical en France du XIIe au XVe siècle (Geneva: Librairie Droz; Paris: Librairie Champion, 1981), 207 n. 1; see also O’Boyle, The Art of Medicine, 124, 126. 19. O’Boyle, The Art of Medicine, 124, 126. For all these works except Maimonides, see also Wickersheimer, Commentaires de la Faculté de Médecine, xxxvii–xxxix.

140

A Jewish Physician in Paris and Avignon essay into eight sections, moving from a definition of the disease to its symptoms, substance (humoral composition), point of origin in the body (the brain with, in this case, the participation of the stomach), the prognosis, an exercise regimen, a dietary regimen, and pharmaceutical therapy. The text displays a deft facility with scholastic exposition, painstakingly developing a diagnosis and treatment by means of logical categories and deductions. These theoretical sections of the treatise demonstrate the author’s immersion in his sources and in the hermeneutics of reading them; they are deliberate attempts to convince readers of Jacob’s facility with the high theory of university medicine. Jacob’s admiration for scholastic method would not have been unique among Jewish physicians of his day. As detailed in an important article by Luis García Ballester, Lola Ferre, and Eduard Feliu, there was a conscious effort among Jewish medical men to import the model represented by the Latin curriculum and methods into Jewish learning.20 For a number of reasons, that effort met with mixed success. Over the course of the fourteenth century, however, as García Ballester, Ferre, and Feliu demonstrate, medical translators showed an increasing preference for theoretical medical writing over the practical medical works that had drawn translators in the earlier part of the century.21 Unsurprisingly, scholars have linked the production of this kind of writing with the rationalist Jewish camp and have assumed a corresponding link between opposition to scholastics and the natural sciences and the so-called traditionalists.22 Jacob’s case suggests, among other things, that this linkage is overly facile. An inherently conservative theologian, he nonetheless adopted scholastic discourse with enthusiasm, and his treatise must have been intended as an endorsement of the method as much as an illustration of its application. Typical is the introduction to section 5, on prognosis, which is defined as the process of clarifying whether the patient’s cure is “guaranteed” (fol. 28a). Because of the duration of the illness, which has allowed the buildup of superfluities that have weakened the patient’s faculties—a condition further exacerbated by age—his cure is not “guaranteed.” However, because the patient’s condition is also one that is neither healthy nor unhealthy, but sometimes one and sometimes the other, a cure is also not “impossible”:

20. Luis García Ballester, Lola Ferre, and Eduard Feliu, “Jewish Appreciation of FourteenthCentury Scholastic Medicine,” in Renaissance Medical Learning: Evolution of a Tradition, ed. Michael McVaugh and Nancy Siraisi, special issue, Osiris 6 (1990): 85–117. 21. Ibid., 91. 22. See, e.g., ibid.; Gad Freudenthal, “Science in the Medieval Jewish Culture of Southern France,” in Science in the Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Traditions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 23–58 (reprinted from History of Science 33 [1995]: 23–58); Joseph Shatzmiller, “Rationalisme et orthodoxie religieuse chez les Juifs provençaux au commencement du XIVe siècle,” Provence Historique 22 (1972): 261–85; and idem, “Z.urat ‘aryeh le-kelayot vehamah.loket ‘al limude ha-h.okhmot bereishit ha-meah hay’’d” [Lion images for kidney (disease) and the debate over the study of science in the early fourteenth century], in Sefer ha-yovel li-Shelomoh Pines bi-melot shemonim shanah, pt. 2 (Meh.kere Yerushalayim be-mah.shevet Yisra’el 9 (1990): 397–408.

141

Susan Einbinder ‫ואחר שאין אחד משני אלו הקצות מחוייבים בו הנה האמצעית שהוא האפשר מחוייב בו בלי ספק‬ ‫ובעבור כי האפשר על שלשה מינים אחד מהם הוא שמציאות הדבר יותר ראוי מהעדרו והשני‬ ‫שהעדרו יותר ראוי ממציאותו והשלישי המורכב משניהם כלומר שלא יהיה מציאותו יותר ראוי‬ [!] ‫מהעדרו ולא העדרו יותר ראוי ממציאותו כמבואר הכל בספר המליצה הנקרא אצלם פק‬ .…‫ארמנויאם אומר אני כי גם שיניח שתרופת חולי זה האדון היא מן מין האפשר‬ And since it is neither of the two extremes, it must of necessity be the middle [option], which is that it is without doubt possible to treat. And because there are three categories of the possible, one that something’s existence is more likely than its absence, the second that its absence is more likely than its existence, and the third a combination of both of these, i.e., that its existence is not more likely than its absence and its absence is not more likely than its existence, as is entirely explained in the book of rhetoric they call Peri ermoniae, therefore I say that the treatment of this disease in this man is within the realm of the possible … [fol. 28b]

Remarkably, however, amid all his theoretical display, Jacob never loses sight of the patient at the bottom of the demonstrations of learning. Woven into the technical discussions, an extraordinary portrait of his dizzy charge leaps forth—a man of mixed choleric and melancholic temperament, close to sixty years of age, “agile and intelligent, sharp-witted and a big eater and drinker.” But he is sick: ‫והנה זה ממה שספר לנו הפרש בעצמו ובכבודו שאמר שפעמ’ מה יראה לו שמוחו וגופו יסובו‬ ‫ והגיד לנו‬. … .‫ושמה שהוא רואה סביבו או לפניו יתגלגל ויהיה עולה ויורד כמו שהניח אב”ס‬ ‫החולה שאלו היה עומד אז על רגליו יפול בלי ספק ואם יקרה לו זה החולי גם כשיהיה שוכב או‬ ‫יושב או סומך על ענין מה עם כל זה צרי’ אליו לאחוז בדבר מה שיחזיקנו שאם לא כן אולי יפול‬ ‫ואז יחשכו עיניו ויעמוד משומם ונבהל ויאריך כל זה אליו כשיעור חלק אחד משלשים של שעה‬ .…‫ואחר ילך לו ומקרים אלו נקראים מקרים מחוייבים לחולי זה כמתחייב הצל לגשמים‬ This is what the knight told us himself. He said that sometimes it seemed to him that his brain and body would spin and what he saw in front of him would revolve and go up and down as Avicenna claimed … [so] that if he stood on his feet he would surely fall, and if … he was lying or sitting or leaning on something, he would have to grab something and hold it tightly or else he might fall. Then his sight would darken and he would remain dazed and confused. This would last approximately two minutes and then fade. These symptoms are called requisite symptoms for this disease, as necessary as clouds are for rain … [fol. 26b]

Jacob elaborates further: ‫עוד הגיד לנו שקודם בואו מעט יקרה לו צלילה באזניו ובפרט בשמאלית וכאילו רוח עולה אל‬ .‫ראשו יבלבלהו ואיד יעלה מן גופו אל פניו אחר שקדם לו כאב וכובד ראשר‬ He also told us that prior to an incident he would hear a ringing in his ears, especially the left one, and it was as if a wind rose to his head and confused

142

A Jewish Physician in Paris and Avignon him, and a vapor would rise from his body to his face following pain and heaviness in his head. [fol. 26b]

Sometimes, the knight continues, the attacks came after he had indulged too heavily at dinner, but sometimes they came unexpectedly, when he was anxious or afraid. His palms and nostrils would grow dry, and he had been scratchy and itchy for years (fol. 26b). These detailed descriptions of his symptoms, presumably provided in response to questioning by his physicians, are incorporated faithfully into the treatise. In the process, a vivid portrait emerges of a high-strung, hardliving, sometimes volatile man who has spent years indulging his appetites amid the luxuries and comforts of the royal court. Equally vivid is the context in which his illness has taken hold, particularly through the temptations of an opulent social setting that is now trying his learned physicians. Jacob defers frequently to his colleagues, whom, as we have seen, he calls rabbotai (my masters) and morai (my teachers). He explicitly names one of them: ‫והשנית להשעני אל כונתו חוכמתו ונפשו החשובה תבקש ההשמע אל עצת הרופאים מצד‬ ‫תשוקתו אל הבריאות ומצד מה שהוא חפץ לצאת מתחת רשותם והנה אקצר בזכירת אלו הענינים‬ ‫כפי מה שאוכל מצד חסרוני ומצד רוב מה שסדרו לו החכמי’ הגדולים הרופאים מוריי אשר אני‬ ‫בחברתם קרוי לבקרו ולהשעני כמה שיסד לו הרופא הגדול החכם מאיש’ גליברט רופא מלך‬ .…‫צרפת יחי שהיה ברשו’ ימים רבים ובפרט בראשית חליו‬ And secondly, I rely on his [i.e., the patient’s] intention and wisdom; this important man will seek to heed the advice of the physicians both because of his desire for health and because of his desire to be free of their supervision. Here I will abridge mention of these matters as I can due to my deficiencies and [also] to much of what was ordered for him by those physicians who were my teachers and in whose company I was called to visit him and consult, and what was prescribed for him by the great sage and physician, Maestre Gilbert, the physician to the king of France, may he live, who had been at his disposal for many days and particularly at the onset of his illness … [fol. 28b]

The Gilbert to whom Jacob refers can be identified. He must be Gilbert (Guibert, transcribed in the manuscript as Glibert) of Celsoy, regent master on the faculty of the University of Paris and physician to Kings Jean II, Charles V, and Charles VI.23 Guibert led an illustrious career in Paris. As was the case with his university colleagues, he was in religious orders: Unlike the scholars of Provence, Aragon, or Italy, the scholars of Paris were all clerics. Guibert was one of a small handful of faculty members over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who received ecclesiastical dispensation to teach.24 Moreover, he was one of only 23. Ernst Wickersheimer, Dictionnaire biographique des médecins en France au moyen âge (Paris: Libraire E. Droz, 1936), 1:217–18. 24. O’Boyle, The Art of Medicine, 45; and Wickersheimer, Commentaires de la Faculté de Médecine, xv. Wickersheimer notes that the clerical status of the faculty meant that “c’est au Souverain pontife que la Faculté de Médecine s’addresse comme à son protecteur naturel.”

143

Susan Einbinder three fourteenth-century faculty of noble birth (on his mother’s side); in 1374, he received letters of nobility from the king.25 Between the time he received his first degree as a maître ès arts in 1349 and his death in 1390, Guibert also amassed a long list of ecclesiastical benefices that surely left him a wealthy man.26 But Guibert was not merely a figure of considerable prestige whose prominence might have attracted Jacob’s professional interest and admiration. As a nobleman and tonsured priest, he was an embodiment of the royal and ecclesiastical hierarchies that a Jew might be expected to eye with some reserve, if not resentment—particularly a Jew whose status as an exile was hardly a matter of ancient history. But not, apparently, Jacob, whose adulation for “the great sage and physician” is explicit. And here one more fact of Guibert’s life bears mention. The Paris program, we know, was preeminently oriented toward producing men of practice over theory. To this end, every student was required to spend two years in the company of a faculty master on his rounds in Paris or, alternatively, two months in practice in the suburbs.27 In fact, even a bachelor in medicine who was as yet unlicensed as a master was forbidden to visit patients or to prescribe treatment or medications unless he was accompanied by a master of the Paris faculty.28 With its distinctive orientation toward practice, the Paris faculty cultivated the group consultation. Consultations were also popular in Italy, where documentation survives to give a sense of how these group sessions contributed to the socialization of the young physician. Nonetheless, records of Parisian consultations are not vast, and the rare survivals exhibit none of the expansive narrative or scholastic flair that Jacob so enthusiastically unfolds.29 Moreover, they rarely mention theory or theoretical concerns.30 The consultation records of Guillaume Boucher, for instance, tersely list the patients’ condition, status, and recommended 25. O’Boyle, The Art of Medicine, 42; and Wickersheimer, Dictionnaire biographique des médecins, 1:218. 26. Wickersheimer, Dictionnaire biographique des médecins, 1:218. He was a canon at Laon, Chalons, Meaux, St. Martin de Tours, and St. Germain-l’Auxerrois in Paris; he served as chaplain of St. Nicolas in the church of Tonnerre, St. Jean Baptiste in the church of St. Merri, and in the churches of St. Martin and St. Louis in Mâcon. 27. Jacquart, La médecine médiévale dans le cadre parisien; O’Boyle, The Art of Medicine; André Goddu, “The Effect of Canonical Prohibitions on the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris in the Middle Ages,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 20 (1985): 342–62, esp. 345; and Wickersheimer, Commentaires de la Faculté de Médecine, xxxiv–xl. 28. Kibre, Scholarly Privileges in the Middle Ages, 263; see also idem, “The Faculty of Medicine at Paris, Charlatanism, and Unlicensed Medical Practices in the Later Middle Ages,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 27, no. 1 (January–February 1953): 1–20, esp. 14. 29. Ernst Wickersheimer, “Les secrets et les conseils de maître Guillaume Boucher et ses confrères. Contribution à l’histoire de la médecine à Paris vers 1400,” Bulletin de la Société française d’histoire de la médecine 8 (1909): 199–305; Jacquart, La médecine médiévale dans le cadre parisien, 88–90, 287, 500–501; and O’Boyle, The Art of Medicine, 76. 30. Wickersheimer, “Les secrets,”; Jacquart, La médecine médiévale dans le cadre parisien, 287; and William Courtenay, “Parisian Theology, 1362–1377,” in Philosophie und Theologie des ausgehenden Mittelalters: Marsilius von Inghen und das Denken seiner Zeit, ed. M. J. F. M. Hoenen and P. J. J. M. Bakker (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 3–19, esp. 13. Theory was also notably absent from the fledgling German medical programs. See Vivian Nutton, “Medicine at the German Universities, 1348–1500:

144

A Jewish Physician in Paris and Avignon treatment. Among the 111 cases preserved, a case of paralysis, treated at some length, is of interest because both Galen and Avicenna included this affliction with vertigo (and epilepsy) among the kinetic disorders originating in the brain. Boucher’s recommended therapy, based also in the Canon, bears some kinship to that prescribed by Jacob.31 Nonetheless, Jacob’s treatise, as a description of a consulting team at work, including both a case narrative and a theoretical treatment of the illness in question, is unique. Guibert of Celsoy led consultation teams, and we know that he permitted Jews and other non-university practitioners to participate in them. In 1420, several decades after his death, an empiric pursued by the university for practicing without a license claimed in his defense that Guibert had included him on consultations and frequently solicited his input.32 It is not unlikely at all, then, that Guibert’s liberality toward nonuniversity practitioners, combined with his social prestige, brought Jacob admiringly within his orbit. Certainly this liberality was not an outstanding characteristic of the Paris masters, who had asserted their right to prosecute unlicensed practitioners since the early thirteenth century and who exercised this right with increasing vigor, if not success, from the later thirteenth century through the fifteenth.33 In Avignon, a similar tolerance of Jewish colleagues characterized the papal physician and Montpellier master Jean de Tournemire, whose path also probably intersected with Jacob’s over the next decade. As I argued in No Place of Rest, Jacob’s Avignon career, during which he served as physician to the pope’s brother, Count Pierre of Geneva, would likely have brought him into contact with Jean.34 Moreover, Jean, like Guibert, was another example of a Parisiantrained physician who made his way to the papal court in Avignon. He, too, extended himself to Jewish practitioners.35 Jean’s claim that his daughter Marguerite was miraculously healed of a breast tumor with relics from the robe and scourge

A Preliminary Sketch,” in Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, ed. Roger French et al. (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate: 1998), 85–109, esp. 94. 31. Wickersheimer, “Les secrets.” For the case of tinnitus, see no. 10b, p. 221 (“R grana pomi pini et ligetis cum filo et ponetus in aure con. [?] ). The paralysis case is no. 47, pp. 245–53. Avicenna’s Canon groups together diseases “of the brain” that affect bodily movement, among them vertigo, epilepsy, and paralysis. Boucher’s paralysis case takes up most of the collection and was apparently severe. The dietary and therapeutic treatment recapitulates a number of medicinal elements found in Jacob’s treatise; many have laxative or purgative qualities and are designed to eliminate excess humor from the body. Because the recommended diet for victims of paralysis is to use hot and dry items, the humor being purged is cold and moist; the knight’s vertigo is also attributed to an excess of phlegmatic humor, which has these properties. 32. See Jacquart, La médecine médiévale dans le cadre parisien, 303, on the case of Jean de Dompremi; this case is also treated in Wickersheimer, “Les secrets,” lxxv, 129–40. 33. Kibre, Scholarly Privileges in the Middle Ages, 262–64. 34. Einbinder, No Place of Rest, 115. 35. Leon de Carcassonne describes “speaking” to Jean de Tournemire in Montpellier, saying “his behavior was not like that of the other scholars of his generation, who scorned those Jews who practiced the art of medicine.” See García Ballester, Ferre, and Feliu, “Jewish Appreciation of Fourteenth-Century Scholastic Medicine,” 95.

145

Susan Einbinder of Pierre of Luxembourg may have attracted Jacob’s attention, particularly in the aftermath of his own daughter Esther’s death from the plague that swept through Avignon from late summer 1382 into the early spring of the following year.36 Jean, as we know, put his claim into writing, submitting a lengthy deposition on behalf of Pierre’s canonization in 1395. Jacob, who may have treated another patient subsequently healed by the recently deceased Pierre, edited his own writings that same year. In any event, his Parisian treatise testifies more than amply to the possibility of collaborative interaction among Jewish and Christian physicians in northern France. If Jacob’s explicit references to his colleagues and setting pay homage to the Parisian milieu, the works cited in his essay, and the format it takes, also defer to Parisian standards. Avicenna’s Canon, of course, was of primary importance in Montpellier and the Italian universities. Indeed, Benjamin Richler told us that, with more than 100 manuscript copies extant today, it was the most popular medical work among Jewish physicians in the Middle Ages.37 Natan haMeati’s translation of 1279, produced in Rome, was subsequently modified by Joshua haLorki to create the version published in Naples in 1491.38 Jacob’s citations echo closely the language of the Lorki-Meati translation, which he must have seen in manuscript. Jacob cites other authorities as well, made up of a small but select group of writers and works that were core to the university curriculum in Paris and, in one case, beyond: Galen, especially the Tegni (Ars Parva; Sefer ha-Melakhah ha-ketahnah) and On the Art of Healing (Sefer ha-Tah.bolet); Hippocrates’ Aphorisms with Galen’s commentary, as rendered loosely in Maimonides’ Pirke refu’ah; Averroes’s Colliget (Kulliyāt); Isaac Israeli’s works (untitled but most likely the Universal and Particular Diets, which were incorporated early on into the Paris curriculum), Aristotle’s Two Questions (?) and the Peri ermoniae (a rhetorical work); and, finally, a regimen falsely attributed to the Montpellier master Arnau of Villanova.39 So, too, the dizzy knight is offered a treatment that defers to that outlined in the Canon. Like Avicenna, Jacob begins by ordering his patient to exercise in the morning and evening.40 Jacob’s dietary recommendations, which are not found in the Canon, address a type of vertigo that originates in an excess of phlegmatic humor in the brain. In the knight’s case—and here the patient’s description of 36. Einbinder, No Place of Rest, chap. 5; see also Kaufmann, “Le ‘Grand-deuil’ de Jacob b. Salomon Sarfati d’Avignon”; and Barkai, “‘Al mot yeladim bamagefah hasheh.orah.” 37. Benjamin Richler, “Manuscripts of Avicenna’s Kanon in Hebrew Translation; A Revised and Up-to-Date list,” Korot 8, no. 3–4 (1982): 145*–69* (English), 136–43 (Hebrew); see also Lola Ferre, “Avicena Hebraico: La traducción del Canon de Medicina,” Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos, sec. Hebreo 52 (2003): 163–82, esp. 168, 177; Joshua Leibowitz, “Ibn Sina in Hebrew,” Korot 8 no. 1–2 (1981): 3*–8*; and Haim Rabin, “Toldot tirgum sefer ha-kanun le-‘ivrit [The history of the translation of the Canon into Hebrew], Melilah 3–4 (1950): 132–47. 38. Ferre, “Avicena Hebraico,” 163–82; and Richler, “Manuscripts of Avicenna’s Kanon.” I rely on the 1491 Naples edition, a copy of which is in the Klau Library, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati. 39. See n. 17 herein. 40. He modifies Avicenna’s more aerobic list of activities to suggest stretching in bed before rising, taking daily walks, and avoiding steep hills and unattractive scenery. See Jacob, fol. 29a; and the 1491 Naples edition of the Canon, Book 1, Fen 3, Teaching 2.

146

A Jewish Physician in Paris and Avignon evening excesses must have been helpful—the stomach plays a contributing role. Because phlegmatic humor is cold and moist, and humoral medicine tries to counteract the properties of superfluities, foods are prescribed with hot and dry properties. The concluding list of drugs emphasizes plants with laxative or purgative qualities, a number of which are also found in the Canon.41 Some, such as coloquintida, yera pigra galieni, or ginger, were known to purge phlegmatic superfluities. These were offset by drugs to calm the stomach, such as chamomile and cinnamon, or to treat headaches and ailments of the brain, such as melissa, coriander, or metridatum. Jacob demonstrates some flexibility when applying his book learning to a headstrong patient who is set in his ways. Avicenna’s primary recommendations for vertigo originating in the brain and stomach are to bleed the patient (thereby releasing excess humor) or to induce vomiting.42 In contrast, Jacob is reluctant to pursue aggressive treatment, and he sometimes defers to his patient’s age and the advanced stage of his condition, perhaps acknowledging a wily sufferer accustomed to living large. An impressive number of the patient’s vertiginous episodes are precipitated by heavy sessions of eating and drinking, as the following accounts make clear: ‫עוד הגיד לנו שזה החולי עמד עליו כמו שנתים ימים ובא לו פעמים רבות ובפרט אחר‬ ‫שנתמלא כרסו בשר ויין וממאכלים מתחלפים … או אחר שהיה ישן על רבוי לקיחת אותו‬ ‫מזון היתה באה זיעה זורמת בעלת חום והתלהבות בפניו וחום מורגש בגופו ואחר כן היה נוגע‬ .…‫אליו אותו חולי‬ He also told us that he had had this illness for about two years, and it would come upon him frequently, especially after he had sated himself with meat, wine, and a variety of foods … or after he would sleep after overeating. [Then] he would break out in a sweat with fever and burning in his face and feel hot all over, after which the illness would strike him … [fol. 26b] ‫שהוא אמר כי יום אחד אחרי אכלו ושתו לרוב בסעודת הערב ושכבר עשה שתה קודם שכבו‬ ‫פעמים שלש מיין הרקח אחר שנתחמם מיגיעה גדולה שכבר עשה והתלהבות בפנים ועלה עשן‬ ‫מכל גופו ומפניו כקיטור הכבשן ותכף זה קרה לו שנראה לו שכל מה שהיה רואה היה סובב הולך‬ . ‫ומתגלגל וכאלו הפכו שמיו על ארצו ואחר מעט שב ורפא לו ולאיתנו הראשון‬ He said that once after eating and drinking heavily at the evening meal, when he already had drunk scented wine three times before lying down, and after he had become heated from exerting himself greatly earlier, his face started burning and a smoke like a furnace rose through his entire body and face. 41. Curiously, the modern-day diagnosis of Ménière’s disease, a form of recurrent vertigo accompanied by temporary loss of hearing, also relies on diuretics as part of a standard drug treatment; see http://www.menieresinfo.com/start.html. The cause of Ménière’s is described as “idiopathic endolymphatic drops,” that is, an excess of endolymphatic fluid (in the inner ear), an etiology weirdly analogous to the medieval notion of excess phlegmatic humor in the “brain.” 42. Canon (Naples 1491 ed.), p. 31a, col. 1.

147

Susan Einbinder No sooner did this happen than all he saw started spinning and going around, as if the heavens and earth reversed. After a short while he was restored to his former strength. [fol. 27b]

Changing this behavior is not an easy process. “Due to his greatness and conduct,” we learn, the knight is used to demanding large servings of food and drink and getting what he wants (fol. 28a). This has promoted an unfortunate alteration in his complexion, and his enablers are an ever-present obstacle to change. Acknowledging these limits, Jacob’s emphasis is on moderate dietary adjustments, including smaller meals and only three small glasses of wine per night. Clearly, his diagnostic skills included a realistic assessment of the extent of his authority when temptation and habit were strong: ‫ובמשקה אשר ישתה ראוי שיהיה לפי זה החולי מי הדבש המבושלים עם מעט זנגביל או קנילא‬ ‫ אמנם מצד זקנתו ומצד שכבר יקשה לו לצאת‬.‫הנקרא מורמאיל או מים עם סוקרי לצמוקים‬ ‫?[ טובה‬. .‫ממשתה היין שכבר הרגיל בו נכון שישתה היין הממוצע בעובי ובדקות בהיר הצבע ]ש‬ ‫הרקח ערב הטעם וישן מזוג החצי טרם ישתה כשיעור שעה עם מים חמים אחרי בשולם ולא‬ ‫ישתה יתר על שלשה פעמים בסעודתו גם כי השתיה יותר נאותה אחר האכילה ושיהיו הכוסות‬ .…‫קטנים ולא ירבה לאכול מאכלים מתחלפים ולא כדי שבעו אפילו ממין אחד‬ And the drink that is fitting for him to have for this sickness is honeyed water cooked with a bit of ginger or vanilla, which is called mormiel, or water with the sugar of raisins. However, because of his age and because it would already be difficult for him to leave off drinking wine when he has already grown accustomed to it, it is proper for him to drink wine that is of medium strength and very clear in color, of a good scent[?] and taste, and it should be diluted to half-strength about an hour before he drinks it with warm water after it has been heated. He should not drink more than three times during his meal, and moreover, it is better to drink after eating, and to use small cups. He should not eat too many varied foodstuffs and not to satiation, even of one type. [fol. 29b]

Light, easily digestible foods (by medieval calculation) are optimal. Bread should be made from flour that originates in a cold, dry climate, as it stores heat that will be released when eaten. It should include barley flour and be well kneaded and baked in the oven (fol. 29a). Foods prepared with barley flour or chickpea broth (considered a digestive and appetite stimulant) are acceptable, but should be followed by a walk to improve digestion, and then a nap of “three to four hours [sic!]” (fol. 29b).43 If partridges, goose, and goat meat are undesirable during Lent, moreover, Jacob offers his patient a list of suitable fish (fol. 29b). Best are fish with fins and scales, but crustaceans are on the list as well. The physicians have apparently provided the knight with a separate regimen (presumably in the vernacular) that details these instructions more fully, and the knight is requested to follow them. 43. For the uses of chickpea broth, see Susan L. Einbinder, “A Proper Diet: Medicine and History in Crescas Caslari’s Esther,” Speculum 80 (2005): 459–60.

148

A Jewish Physician in Paris and Avignon Prior to bedtime, he can try massaging his legs with warm water, to which herbs may be added (chamomile, violets, and others). A final section recommends various drugs, also prepared by “my teachers the physicians,” which may be consumed either with liquids or in the form of pills. Laxatives and emetics should be used cautiously, and Jacob offers one of his favorite recipes for a purgative. Bleeding is less advisable because of the patient’s age, but might be considered in the spring; cupping should definitely be applied to the head and back of the neck, especially on full moons (fol. 30a). Jacob’s naptime prescription comes with an interesting caveat. He comments, ‫ואף על פי שהשינה רעה ביום כמו שאמ’ ב”ס ס”א א”ג הנה אם הרגל אותה לא יעזבנה לגמרי‬ ‫וכל שכן בבת אחת בעבור כי הענינים המנהגים ענינים יוצאים חוץ מן ההקש והנסיון ינצח ההקש‬ ‫כמו שאו’ ב”ס א”ג פרק ז וישן על צדו הימנית ויגביה מראשותי ויתכסה יותר על מה שהיה עליו‬ ‫כשהיה ער מצד כי החום הטבעי נכנס לפנים וישאיר חצונו קר ולא ישן שיעור רב לפי דעת רבים‬ .…‫ואחרים אומרים כל צרכו וזה תלוי במנהג‬ Even though it is bad to sleep during the day, as Avicenna said in Book 1, Fen 3, if he has become accustomed to it, he should not leave off entirely and especially not abruptly, because habits are not rational, and experience trumps reason, as Avicenna said in Fen 3 section 7. He should sleep on his right side and raise his headrest and cover himself more than he does when awake, for the natural heat will penetrate and leave him cool on the outside. According to many, he should not sleep for a long time, but others say as long as he needs, and it depends upon the regimen … [fol. 29b]

As Jacob’s primary authority, the Canon, contradicts his recommendation, he defensively countermands it with a general precept about the strength of habit and “experience”—ironically, taken from a later section of the passage he is citing. In fact, Book 1 of the Canon, with its disapproval of daytime sleep, is a general introduction to medical principles. Avicenna’s specific discussion of vertigo is in Book 3, the section of the Canon dedicated to pathology; indeed, Jacob has already relied heavily on this section, which treats a family of diseases moving from vertigo to epilepsy, lethargy, and paralysis. Relatively speaking, Avicenna spends little time on vertigo, the least severe of these conditions. Primarily, as noted, he advocates bleeding and purging, ointments and drugs, with a final admonition to have the patient avoid looking at spinning objects or tall towers, rivers, hills, or high rooftops.44 The Canon’s treatment of vertigo says nothing about daytime sleep. But its treatment of epilepsy, vertigo’s sister disease, also warns strongly against too much sleeping during the day, “which is very harmful, especially on a full stomach.”45 Jacob surely noted Avicenna’s disapproval in this passage, but he cites the milder and more generic warning of Book 1 instead, arguably because 44. [ ‫ וירחיק מהשקיף המגדלים והנהרות והגבעות‬,‫וראוי שירחיק בעל סבוב הראש מלהביט לכל דבר סובב מהרה‬ ‫ ]והגגות הגבוהות‬Canon (Naples 1491 ed.), p. 31a, col. 1, Book 3, Fen 1, Article 5, Section 1. 45. [‫ ]ובכלל השינה הרבה מזיקה וכל שכן על המלוי הרב‬Canon (Naples 1491 ed.), p. 33b, col. 1, Book 3, Fen 1, Article 5, Section 7.

149

Susan Einbinder of its proximity to a useful precept about the force of habit. This permits him to downplay Avicenna’s disapproval by deferring to Avicenna himself. Consequently, napping seems less pernicious, particularly if, as in the knight’s case, it has already become habitual. Jacob’s ability to shuttle between the world of his patient and the lore of his books thus reflects more than passive receptivity of the latter. He is making selective use of his texts to adapt them to real conditions, while demonstrating his sensitivity to a headstrong patient and the temptations of the knight’s way of life. This is partly because the patient and his lifestyle pose obstacles to recovery, but equally because the knight presents a dynamic, living embodiment of what is otherwise theoretical and abstract. Notably, too, Jacob mediates the gap between patient and theory, particular and general, with a remarkable tool—narrative—a point to which I will return later. In sum, Jacob’s treatise is a hybrid genre, shuttling between theory and practice in a way that may not have been unique in life but seems to be so in medical literature. True, his willingness to step away from his textbooks is a far cry from the dialectical blend of theory and practice that Gad Freudenthal wished we could find among medieval Jewish physicians.46 Nonetheless, it minimally reflects the integration of practical knowledge into what passed for medieval “experience.”47 And it raises some difficult questions for consideration as well. Why compose a treatise in this form? For whom was it intended? Although Jacob tells us that he is writing at the “command of the king,” Charles Vof France, this is a puzzling assertion. Why would Charles V have wished a treatise in Hebrew? Theoretical writing, presumably of little interest to the king for its content, was disdained by the medical faculty at the University of Paris; notably, the king also demanded an account of this case from Jacob’s Christian colleagues (the plague treatise of the Parisian masters was also written in response to a royal command). As Jacob himself notes, the knight has already received a written regimen of some sort from the consulting physicians. This is not necessarily the same document sought by the king, but it would have included, as Jacob periodically indicates, explicit instructions and recipes for the patient’s diet and drugs. Even if he could have read Hebrew, therefore, much of the practical contents of Jacob’s essay would have been irrelevant to the knight. Were Jacob’s presence and professional skills so noteworthy that they came to the king’s ear? As we know that the knight was one of Charles’s favorites, the king might have wished to preserve some record of the episode. From this perspective, Jacob’s treatise serves both as a testimony to the intellectual prestige of the Parisian medical community and as a road map for other physicians, Jewish or with access to Jewish translators, in need of its knowledge. Alternatively, Jacob’s treatise may

46. Gad Freudenthal, “Science in the Medieval Jewish Culture of Southern France,” in Science in the Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Traditions, 23–58, esp. 31 and conclusion. 47. As Freudenthal also reminds us, the medieval category of “experience” should not be confused with our own. It is a blend of trial and error with the received knowledge of books. See Gad Freudenthal, “Maimonides’ Philosophy of Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, ed. Kenneth Seeskin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 134–67, esp. 154.

150

A Jewish Physician in Paris and Avignon have been written to bolster his career in Avignon, where writing mattered more and Jewish competition was plentiful. Certainly, neither the Christian physicians in the courts of Paris and Avignon nor their rulers were literate in Hebrew. Thus, on some level, even if Jacob’s treatise was composed in response to a royal request, it was written to be read by Jewish physicians. For these readers, Jacob’s learning and exposition offer an impressive testimony to his professional success as well as his erudition. While vertigo was probably not a very common condition, the treatise demonstrates the way one should think about medical problems, providing methods for diagnosing, understanding, and treating them, and showing how one might balance theoretical learning against the realities of practice. In this context, the notations in the margins of the manuscript, some of which were clipped by later binders, testify to the fact that a vigilant reader did make use of this treatise, at times identifying or supplementing Jacob’s sources, and at times offering corrections. It is also true that while the patron commands, the writer preserves his own agenda. Concluding his treatise, Jacob suggests some of his own motives for writing. His admiration for his French “teachers” is linked explicitly to his admiration for the type of thinking they represent, and its particular embodiment of an ideal: ‫זהו מה שהגיע אליו העבד העברי יעקב כי קטון הוא בכל מדע מלאכת הרפואה במפורסם בכלל‬ ‫ובפרט מזה הקונדרס וקצר בו הדבור כדי שיהיה בו טעותו גם כי כן מן השגיאה ושקצר במה‬ ‫שיהיה ראוי להארי’ והאריך במה שהיה ראוי לקצר והשמיט במה שהיה מחוייב להזכיר האמנם‬ ‫על פשעים תכסה אהבת השלמים אשר מדרכם לעזור אל האהוב בענין מעלות או ישר כמשפט‬ ‫הרופאים החכמים מוריי גם כי האמת יותר אהוב אצלם לכף זכות במפרוסם ובנעלם” והטוב אשר‬ .‫יכספהו הכל יגיענו אל החיים והשלום מעתה ועד עולם‬ This is what came down to the Hebrew servant Jacob, for he is little in all knowledge of the art of medicine, from what is known generally and in particular in this treatise. He has abridged his speech to contain his error, even though it [still] has mistakes, since he has abridged what he should have expanded and expanded what he should have abridged, and elided what he should have mentioned. However, the love of the enlightened ones overlooks sins; it is their way to help the beloved in the matter of attributes or righteousness. That is the law of the physicians and sages, my teachers, for whom Truth is most beloved and merciful regarding the known and the hidden. May the good which all men seek bring us to life and peace now and forever. [fol. 30b]

Jacob, as we have seen, bears all the hallmarks of a conservative thinker whose later writings explicitly challenge what he decries as rationalist excess among the Jewish “would-be philosophers” in the south. Yet here it is poignantly evident that his stubbornness in matters of faith goes hand in hand with a love of learning and scientific rigor that is surely equal to that of his rationalist foes. In this context, Jacob attempts to offset the traditionalist distrust of scientific method by anchoring his theoretical discussion in real-life conditions—the dizziness of a particular knight.

151

Susan Einbinder In conclusion, Jacob asks us to refine (and complicate) the characteristics we reflexively assign to the rationalist and antirationalist debate in fourteenth-century Jewish thought. Jacob’s admiration for his Parisian “teachers” is rooted in his admiration for their learning and methods, which commit them to a search for truth that transcends the accidents of time and place, perhaps even of confessional affiliation. What this learning can offer is a route to enlightenment, not merely an abstraction honored in books but an ideal reflected in the generosity of colleagues willing to instruct and to share.48 Was it a perfect generosity and sharing? Surely not, and as Monica Green and Daniel Smail recently showed for a case of malpractice in early fifteenth-century Marseille, the veneer of medieval Christian tolerance for Jewish practitioners could prove perilously thin.49 But it was something, perhaps even something beyond what chafed some Jewish physicians about their coreligionists’ intolerance for theoretical learning, even in a field as valued as medicine. As Jacob’s near contemporary in Aragon, the Jewish physician Leon de Carcassone, would observe, ‫כי פוערים‬. … .‫שרוב כלל אומתי המתעסק]ים[ במלאכת הרפואה אין בדעתם להגיע עד תכליתה‬ ‫ אבל תחבולה וקול המולה להוציא כל איש ממנה‬,‫ חכמה כלל‬,‫ אין זאת החכמה‬,‫פיהם במאמרם‬ ‫המחיה ויהי להם למשל וילחשו בלחשם לאיזהו רופא חכם השואל ממון רב ולא בחנם ירפא‬ .…‫…זאת ועוד אחרת לא יעיינו בספרי הרפואה‬.‫והאיש ההוא רופא אומן יקרא‬ The majority of those who practice the art of medicine among my people do not intend to fathom the depths of their object. … They mutter, this science is not a true science but rather a skill; and with a “sound of tumult” everybody wishes to turn it into a means of existence. They make an ideal of it, and say that a learned physician is he who asks large amounts of money and does not heal free of charge; this man [is] called an expert physician. … For this and other reasons, they have not whiled away their time in the study of medical books. …50

In this regard, I conclude with a final thought on Jacob’s use of narrative. Citing Averroes, Jacob says early in his treatise that he includes his patient’s story because a “disease and its cause are unknowable to the physician unless through the sick man’s story or his symptoms, which are the physician’s proofs” (fol. 26b). Surely Jacob’s unique blend of theory and case history exemplifies a theory of narrative as much as a theory of vertigo. Indeed, narrative, as I have suggested, provides him with the means of mediating between theory and 48. Cf. Estori haParh.i’s insistence, at the early end of the century, that Christian physicians “respect scholarship and scholars, no matter what creed they possess.” See García Ballester, Ferre, and Feliu, “Jewish Appreciation of Fourteenth-Century Scholastic Medicine,” 98. 49. Monica H. Green and Daniel Lord Smail, “The Trial of Floreta d’Ays (1403): Jews, Christians, and Obstetrics in Later Medieval Marseille,” Journal of Medieval History 34, no. 2 (2008): 185–211. 50. García Ballester, Ferre, and Feliu, “Jewish Appreciation of Fourteenth-Century Scholastic Medicine”; the citation is taken from Appendix D, 110–13, Leon’s prologue to his translation of Gerard de Solo’s Practica super nono Almansoris. The translation is theirs.

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A Jewish Physician in Paris and Avignon practice, ideal and real, general and particular. The case of a particular knight becomes emblematic of the general condition of vertigo and its theoretical principles, and, as noted, it anchors those theoretical principles in empirical conditions. Similarly, Jacob’s other writings make clear his determination to read sacred narratives, from the biblical plagues to the plight of Job, as exemplars attesting to God’s presence in a historical world. He offers his own experience of suffering with his daughter’s death as “proof” that Job’s tale of loss and suffering must also be “real,” a claim that makes sense only if we see the world as Jacob apparently saw it—as a world of perishable signs and emblems that imperfectly signal the presence of an unalterable, enduring truth. Whether this was a position we can associate with his traditionalist, antirational peers in France and Provence, or whether this was Jacob’s original way of trying to convince them, I do not know. Certainly Jacob’s conservatism and traditionalism found a home among the elite physicians’ circles of Paris and Avignon, and we know from his other writings that he clung passionately to his beliefs in a moment of personal loss. Was his conviction shared by others like him, or was he truly unique? This, at least as much as his physician’s skills, is worth further exploration. Perhaps—time will tell. Susan Einbinder Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion Cincinnati, Ohio

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AJS Review 33:1 (2009), 155–164 © 2009 Association for Jewish Studies doi:10.1017/S0364009409000075

THE NEW SPATIAL TURN IN

REVIEW ESSAY JEWISH STUDIES by

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert Joachim Schlör. Das Ich der Stadt: Debatten über Judentum und Urbanität, 1822–1938. Jüdische Religion, Geschichte und Kultur, Vol. 1. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. 512 pp. Michal Kümper, Barbara Rösch, Ulrike Schneider, Helen Thein, eds. Makom: Orte und Räume im Judentum; Real. Abstrakt. Imaginär. Essays. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2007. 356 pp. Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke, eds. Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. 375 pp. During the past decade or so, there has been a “veritable boom … of projects that investigate questions of place and space” in Jewish studies.1 In this arena, scholars in various fields of Jewish studies have begun to engage with developments in the humanities at large. Since the 1980s, many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have become more attentive to the cultural challenges of globalization, prominent among them the effects of increased movements of migration. From these movements have arisen questions about the effect and meaning of uprooting and dislocation, the significance of belonging to a place (or to various places), the emergence of diaspora communities, and so on. The spatial dimension of human existence began to move to the forefront of scholarly considerations, and with it, new names of fields of study, such as human, critical, or cultural geography. While Jewish studies has, of course, for the longest time been aware of “diaspora” as a dimension of human existence, often perhaps with the understanding that diaspora was historically a uniquely Jewish experience, to a certain degree our field remained caught in the binarism of diaspora versus nationalism or Zionism, at least until the advance of this new impulse in

1. See Brauch, Lipphardt, and Nocke, Jewish Topographies, 10. The editors provide a long list of Jewish studies conferences the world over that have been devoted to issues of space and place since 1990, and that list is quite impressive.

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Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert the humanities, identified by some as a “spatial turn.”2 Against such binarisms, the volumes under discussion repeatedly appeal to “multidimensionality” in Jewish topographies and in our approaches to them. The three volumes listed here are part of this new trend, if there is such a thing as a trend in the making, but they also seek to shape it by insisting on the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach, as well as on the importance of collaborative practice. Further, they are intrinsically linked to each other, in that all three are, to one degree or another, the product of a collaborative research group that met over a number of years (2001–2007) in Potsdam, Germany, under the titular name of Makom.3 That research group received financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Germany’s preeminent research foundation, and facilitated forty dissertations and three habilitations.4 The programmatic statement of the group or Graduiertenkolleg,5 initiated at the University of Potsdam by one of the foregoing authors, namely Joachim Schlör, states, In the beginning, and at the center, we posit the question about the understanding of place and the perception of space of a traditional (or: ideal or abstract) Jewish community. Ha-Makom is the Hebrew term, which—beyond the immediate translation as “place”—carries further meanings: the relationship to a place, the implied treatment of a place, also the act of taking possession thereof, the settlement and development of a place, and even the absence of such “normal” form of relationship to a place.6

Hence the project in general, and the published volumes derived from it in particular, self-consciously seek to shape the “spatial turn” in Jewish studies. The 2. Following Edward Soja’s claim for the humanities in general—namely, that the privileging of time over place is attributable to the historicist tradition in Anglo-European scholarship—the editors of Jewish Topographies (1) suggest that Jewish studies was even more dominated by this approach than other fields. See Edward W. Soja, “History: Geography: Modernity,” in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 10–42. 3. A fourth volume that belongs in this group (Hiltrud Wallenborn, Michael Kümper, Anna Lipphardt, Jens Neumann, Johannes Schwarz, and Maria Vassilikou, eds., Der Ort des Judentums in der Gegenwart, 1989–2002, Sifria—Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek 7 [Berlin: Bebra Wissenschaft, 2004]) was not available for review. 4. See Kümper et al., Makom, 7. The German habilitation is roughly equivalent to a tenure book at American universities—that is, a second book beyond the dissertation. Schlör’s Das Ich der Stadt is the published version of his habilitation. Beyond the published volumes and individual research projects, the Graduiertenkolleg invited a variety of guest lecturers, including myself in 2005, and organized three conferences. 5. According to the Web site of the DGF, “Research Training Groups (Graduiertenkollegs) are university training programs established for a specific time period to support young researchers in their pursuit of a doctorate. The Research Training Groups provide these doctoral students with the opportunity to work within a coordinated research program run by a number of university teachers. Doctoral students are incorporated into the research work being done at the participating institutions. The study program aims to complement and extend the doctoral students’ individual specializations and to provide a structure for cooperation” (http://www.dfg.de/en/research_funding). 6. Cited in Schlör, Das Ich der Stadt, 41. All translations from the German are mine.

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The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies contributors to the two anthologies reviewed here, Makom and Jewish Topographies, draw on a variety of theoretical models that allow them to conceptualize their particular subjects of study, hoping for a common conversation to emerge, or to demonstrate the “connections between seemingly disparate fields of research.”7 As Schlör puts it in his introduction to the volume Makom, “The central characteristic of the Graduiertenkolleg has been the attempt to put interdisciplinarity into practice, to search for a common language and common concepts” (20). For the purposes of this review, let me begin by introducing the volumes individually. Makom assembles thirty relatively brief essays by participants in the research group at Potsdam, a mix of junior and senior scholars. The essays do not pretend to present freestanding research papers, but rather essays that introduce the projects that grew under the umbrella of the Makom research group. In what I consider an incredibly creative and therefore brilliant move, the medium of the essay is designed both to facilitate the interdisciplinary conversation and to invite a broader audience into the conversation about what a “Jewish place” ( jüdischer Ort) might be (9). While the essays are designed to draw in a broader, interdisciplinary audience, they do not do so at the cost of sophistication, as the reader is encouraged to dig further and to read the books and dissertations toward which the essays point. As to the contents, the editors of this volume mix essays on concrete places of a Jewish community (“Cemetery” by Michael Brocke; “Lehrhaus” (beit midrash) by Michael Kümper; “Medinat Israel” by Julia Brauch; “Mishkan” by Franziska Bark; and “Schtetl” by Anna-Dorothea Ludewig) with imagined places, such as “Heimat” (home) by Ulrike Schneider, and spaces of communication, such as “Sprache” (language) by Markus Winkler, “Öffentlichkeit” (public) by Johannes Valentin Schwarz, and “Gedächtnis” (memory) by Christina von Braun. In addition, a few of the essays/projects, such as “Imagination” by Stefanie Leuenberger, “Un-Ort” (non-place) by Barbara Rösch, and “Zwischen-Orte” (in-between spaces) by Anne Clara Schenderlein, are intended to point to the constructedness of the notion of place and space. There is much that is unexpected here, and therefore thought provoking— for instance, an essay under the key word “Kabbalah” by Vladek Viehmann. What might be the spatial dimension of Kabbalah, one wonders? But the reader quickly discovers that Viehmann, who is working on a dissertation on the Catholic philosopher of religion Franz Molitor, writes his essay on the renaissance of Kabbalah in the Christian–Jewish “discursive space” of Frankfurt am Main. More concretely, he demonstrates the “location” of Molitor’s engagement with Kabbalah at the Jewish educational institution of the Philantropin8 in Frankfurt, to which he

7. Kümper et al., Makom, 8. The editors of Jewish Topographies attribute to Schlör the initial concept that resulted in the Makom program, and they go as far as to call him the “father of Jewish space studies” (xi). That might be a bit of an overstatement out of deference to the teacher. 8. The Philantropin was a school for poor Jewish children that was founded by Sigismund Geisenheimer in the early nineteenth century under the Enlightenment ideals of education and humanism.

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Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert was hired and where he first encountered Jewish culture. Viehmann thus points to the local and institutional setting as an important factor in the renaissance of Kabbalah in Germany. Schwarz’s essay under the rubric of “Öffentlichkeit” (public) deals with the rise of the Jewish press (in the form of periodicals and then newspapers) in Germany during the nineteenth century and reflects on the shift from the local Kommunikationsraum (space of communication) to the translocal one of the Jewish press. He conceptualizes the establishment of the Jewish press as a shift from an “imagined” to a “real” space. Under the rubric of “Gedächtnis” (memory), the editors include the text that the cultural studies scholar Christina von Braun presented to the research group on the virtualization of the concept of home. The space allotted here does not allow me to list every single contribution. By way of summary, I would emphasize that the editors present an innovative kind of cultural lexicon, in which a number of different places and concepts of places and space are organized in alphabetical order, mixed with each other in order to avoid privileging one entry or essay above others. This lexicon successfully connects a significant variety of projects into one conversation. It invites further conversation, as a number of letters are left without entries (e.g., A to C, P to R, and X; Y describes Yam Tikhoniut or “Mediterraneity” as an ideal for Israeli culture). Further, the volume demonstrates the wealth of spatial thinking and practice in Jewish culture, the variety of ways of relating to space and place, and the diversity of media through which this can be studied (literature/texts, architecture, language, institutions). Surely this lexicon of sorts presents a successful model of collaborative work and research that so many of us strive to develop, and for which these editors ought to be applauded. The second anthology on our list, Jewish Topographies, takes a different approach in its editorial decisions. First of all, the contributions take the more traditional form of freestanding research papers, though as with the volume Makom, many of the authors have worked on (or are producing) more extensive projects, whence the papers derive. The papers are grouped under five different categories that are deliberately broad and abstract so as to allow the editors to move away from traditional conceptions of Jewish places that would have led—in their view—merely to the reproduction of “stereotypical perceptions of Jewish space” (17). What does this say about the Makom volume in their view, one wonders, as Makom at least includes reflections on such traditional conceptions as the shtetl? In what follows, I would like to list the contributors and their work, and I ask the reader for patience, as many of the authors may not be familiar to Jewish studies in the United States, and as the listing will demonstrate once again the wealth of possibilities of studies in this area, as well as the existing work already produced. The first larger rubric, “Construction Sites” (18), concentrates on the role of actual structures or buildings, although one might also conceptualize this rubric as religious architectures, based on the chosen topics. The section includes papers by Miriam Lipis on the Sukkah as a place that evokes the question of belonging; by Manuel Herz on the “Eruv” as a means to discuss the issue of “Jewish

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The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies architecture” in Germany today;9 and by Haim Yacobi on urban planning at Netivot. The section on “Jewish Quarters” presents issues ranging from “Ghetto Gardens” (on the ongoing effort to establish gardens in the shadow of death) by Kenneth Helphand to “The Mellah of Fez” by Susan Gilson Miller; on Orthodox “Religious Microspaces” in the Toronto suburb of Thornhill by Etan Diamond; and on “Jewish Subcultures in Budapest” by Eszter Brigitta Gantner and Mátyás Kovács. “Cityscapes and Landscapes” includes four papers, on Poland by Haya Bar-Itzhak, on the sea by Gilbert Herbert, on the desert in Israeli culture by Yael Zerubavel, and on the big city by Schlör. The fourth part, “Exploring and Mapping Jewish Space,” assembles three papers by Samuel Kassow on “Travel and Local History as a National Mission” of Polish Jews, by Erik Cohen on Israeli backpackers, and by Shelley Hornstein on the Internet. Finally, the last section, “Enacted Spaces,” presents papers on the importance of food to shaping a landscape, by Eve Jochnowitz; the importance of music for the same purpose; on Jewish Iraqi musicians in Israel, by Galeet Dardashti; and finally, on “Mini Israel,” by Michael Feige. The volume concludes with an epilogue on “Virtual Jewish Topography” in Second Life. Again, it is impossible to do justice to each of the individual pieces. In general, there is much to be learned in this volume, both on the banal level of gaining new knowledge and on a more sophisticated, conceptual level. As a scholar primarily of talmudic literature, but with a keen interest in cultural studies, I had, for example, never heard of “Second Life,”10 let alone Jewish topography therein, nor—perhaps more embarrassingly—of Mini Israel, a miniature reproduction of “three hundred models of well-known, mostly monumental structures from around Israel, built to a scale of 25:1” (329), at a site near Latroun. The latter apparently has become an tourist attraction since its opening in 2002, both among Israelis and among visitors from abroad, and just as the phenomenon of Disney World has engendered analysis about its cultural function, so does Mini Israel lend itself to similar speculation. And while it may be arguable whether a scholar of talmudic literature such as myself stands to gain from knowledge of these kinds of spatial practices, it does indeed contribute to her understanding of the contemporary shaping of our world, and the place of Jews therein. Ultimately, I would emphasize, the power and persuasiveness of Jewish Topographies derives from the assembly of the papers. The result is indeed impressive and a token of the editors’ commitment to the vision of the research group. In that regard, this volume, together with the previous one, establishes somewhat of a literary monument to what they—rightfully, I think—identify as “an unequalled pioneering effort to institutionalize the engagement with Jewish place and space from an interdisciplinary platform.” Indeed, aside from the Makom project in Potsdam, 9. An earlier version of this essay, “Institutionalized Experiment: The Politics of ‘Jewish Architecture’ in Germany,” appeared in the special issue of Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 3 (2005), edited by myself and Vered Shemtov, under the title “Jewish Concepts and Practices of Space.” Herz has since updated his piece by integrating reflections on the recently opened Jewish Community Center with its synagogue in Munich. 10. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world that is continuously created by its users or “residents.”

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Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert collaborations on Jewish space and place have mostly taken the form of academic conferences.11 The introductory essay, “Exploring Jewish Space: An Approach,” by the editors, all three of them young scholars, presents a remarkably mature assessment of an entire field of study. It is the assembly of these papers and their scope that raises the specter, however faint, of the possibilities of reorganizing the field of Jewish studies along spatial lines rather than the habitual temporal ones (ancient, late ancient, medieval, early modern, modern, postmodern), or at least along a combination of spatial and temporal lines. Joachim Schlör’s Habilitationsschrift, finally, Das Ich der Stadt: Debatte über Judentum und Urbanität 1822–1938 (The Persona of the City: The Debate about Judaism and Urbanism 1822–1938) presents a different model, and it is— to a certain degree—incommensurate with the previous two books, as this is a single-authored volume and the result of sustained research work by just one scholar. Nonetheless, the volume fits within this context, first of all for an obvious reason. That is, the entire Makom project at the University of Potsdam was inspired by Schlör to begin with, so much so that the editors of Jewish Topographies designate him in loving but perhaps somewhat hyperbolic terms as “the father of Jewish space studies.” His work, therefore, is certainly intricately connected with the two volumes above through Makom, the research group.12 Second, however, Schlör—as with the previous two volumes—is deeply committed to an interdisciplinary vision. With his focus on the Jew as Städter (city dweller), or as Urbantyp (urban type), he enters “the areas of folklore and anthropology, religious studies and history, geography and sociology, even philosophy and the history of art,” and—he writes—he enters there “with the faith of one who seeks to foster dialogue between the disciplines with interest in Jewish Studies” (34). Broadly speaking, Schlör identifies his approach as “cultural studies,” more precisely as “cultural studies of the city” (kulturwissenschaftliche Stadtforschung, 36). He seeks to distinguish himself from “merely” or “narrowly” literary approaches, such as have been advanced, for instance, by Murray Baumgarten’s City Scriptures (1982),13 and insists that the study of the city (as concept and fact) and the Jewish relationship to it also needs to consider “facts, movements, tendencies that can be empirically established” (44). The centerpiece of Schlör’s book surely is Moritz Goldstein’s long-lost text from 1938, “Die Sache der Juden” (roughly, Concerning the Jews).14 During the 11. An exception may be the themed fellow year on “Jews and the City” (2007–2008) at the Frankel Institute at the University of Michigan. 12. Schlör himself states that “the volume evolved in the intellectual environment of the Graduiertenkolleg ‘Space and Places in Judaism’ at the University of Potsdam” (39). 13. I am not certain that his critique of Baumgarten’s book is entirely fair. In the end, Schlör’s major issue is that the literaturwissenschafliche (literary) approaches pose as solely valid kulturwissenschaftliche (culture study) approaches, which is not what Baumgarten claims in his book. However, the point that textual studies about the city would be much enriched through grasping the phenomenon city by drawing on all kinds of visual and extratextual material is valid. 14. This text, according to the author, is being prepared for publication by Elisabeth Albanis and Till Schicketanz of Mainz, who are editing all of Goldstein’s writings for an edition of his works (54 n. 2).

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The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies golden years of the Weimar Republic, Goldstein became famous (or notorious) for his polemical article “Deutsch-Jüdischer Parnass” (1912) in one of the prominent cultural journals, which instigated a broader debate about the tension between Zionism and German Jewish patriotism. While this is a well-known and muchdebated text, Schlör’s interest lies elsewhere. The text that captures Schlör’s imagination—“Die Sache der Juden”—did not produce any significant history of reception, but then again, Goldstein wrote it in 1938, already on the run from the Nazis and no longer having the attention of a stable German Jewish audience. Schlör’s interest in the text derives from the fact that Goldstein entitles one of his central chapters “Die Stadt Israel” (The City of Israel). Goldstein apparently doubted the possibility of building a land, a country, because “a land has to grow” (61), and that, according to Goldstein, would take time—too much time, given the circumstances in Germany. To Goldstein, the urgency of the situation of Jews in Germany called for urgent action, and he envisioned that action to take the form of a city—however utopian, I cannot tell. Goldstein’s faith in the city (at least in concept) is what attracts Schlör to his text. That, and the fact that Goldstein was a Berliner, born and raised in Berlin, and one of Berlin’s more or less prominent Jewish voices until the Nazis drove him out. Indeed, I would venture to suggest that much of Schlör’s book is driven by a love for Berlin, and (implicitly, I think) by melancholia for the cultural wealth that the Nazis stole from the city and for the creative and energetic Jewish Berliners who were murdered by them. Again and again, Schlör points to the need for a yet-to-be-written monograph (however many volumes that might take) about the history of the Jews in Berlin,15 and while his book is certainly not aiming to fill that gap, it points in the direction of how he might imagine such a history. It is Berlin most concretely—although by no means exclusively—that centers the figure of the Jewish Urbantyp, or the Jewish Städter in this book. Schlör carefully works with and against the stereotype, the cliché, the antisemitic distortion of this figure, fully aware that his figure gained currency in the antisemitic propaganda of the Weimar Republic. But Schlör loves the city, writes as a Grossstadtmensch (big-city person), just as Moritz Goldstein did, especially when he was driven out of the city.16 Above all, Schlör seeks to free the figure from its antisemitic imprisonment. Thus, he produces a sensitive study, written with care and devotion and worth the read, every line of it. At the end, let me move one particular issue to the foreground, as this is one that connects all three volumes in interesting ways. That issue is the concept of the

15. See, e.g., p. 105. Existing collaborative projects, such as the anthology Juden in Berlin, ed. Hermann Simon, Julius H. Schoeps, and Andrea Nechama (Berlin: Henschel, 2001), remain inadequate, according to Schlör. One might however question whether, in an era of fundamental doubts about master narratives, such a project might be even possible, at least if it is supposed to be single authored. 16. And what a powerful line from Goldstein’s pen, emphasized by Schlör (90), describing his good-bye from the city, as he leaves by train: “My hometown threw itself into a new busy day of work, rushing and buzzing as I had always known it. The fact that the devil had possessed it, was imperceivable.”

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Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert eruv. Admittedly, I am focusing on this topic because I have been studying rabbinic literature on the eruv for several years now, as I consider it to be one of the most creative areas of rabbinic law. However, the eruv is, in fact, also the only concept discussed in all three books under review. The volume Makom lists Barbara Rösch’s essay on the ideal of the Sabbath law in the rural world in southern Germany of the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century under the rubric of Eruw (thus the German transliteration). Jewish Topographies includes Manuel Herz’s piece on Jewish architecture in Germany, drawing heavily and creatively on the eruv as a concept (rather than as a practice). And finally, Joachim Schlör frames his study with a reflection on the potential symbolic value of the eruv as a marker of Jewish space. The prelude of his book reports on a nineteenth-century East Prussian conflict about an eruv, at about the time when the walls of cities and towns were coming down (in fact, the report is reminiscent of some contemporary U.S. eruv conflicts, although the vocabulary of the East Prussian officials is quite a bit more overtly colonialist), and the conclusion presents another conceptual discussion of the eruv. All three authors thus recognize the symbolic potential of this religious practice, which entails the drawing of lines into the cityscape, or superimposing a Jewish symbolic map onto the city map, Herz and Schlör more extensively than Rösch. In Rösch’s essay, the eruv plays a fairly subordinate role, as she is more broadly interested in how Jews marked their presence in the rural environment; because the eruv was only one of those ways, I will zero in on the other two. I wish to foreground the discussions of the eruv here, as this will allows me to touch upon what I consider both the advantage and the danger of the interdisciplinarity favored by the Makom project and by others, myself included at times. Herz’s essay juxtaposes the eruv as urban strategy, one that creates a realm “accessible to all groups of society and open to all uses” (49), with what he describes as the monumental and centralized nature of so-called Jewish architecture in Germany. His point is, of course, to praise the former at the expense of the latter. In Herz’s words, “The eruv as an urban space can be described as containing a minimum of ‘Jewishness’ in a maximum of space” (49). A minimum of “Jewishness” because the establishment and maintenance of an eruv requires minimum intervention in the urban environment, while the current “official” architectural strategy of Jewish space in German cities is to visibly amass “Jewish presence onto a single spot” (52), as is the case with the Jewish community center in the city center on a small square in Munich. Herz’s piece is creative, full of insights into symbolic valences of the eruv, which resonate all the more deeply as he places it in conversation with an unexpected interlocutor: contemporary architectural criticism (he is an architect himself, rather than an academic scholar). This reflection clearly is the fruit of interdisciplinarity. The danger, however, or so it seems to me, is the degree of negligence that this interdisciplinarity may entail. As much as I agree with the political sentiment of his essay—namely, with the favoring of diffusion of Jewish life throughout the social fabric of the city, rather than concentration at the city center—it also seems that Herz’s concept of the eruv remains somewhat flat. That is, the eruv that Herz constructs has very little to do with the practice thereof, and even less so with the

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The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies people who really care about it, namely, halakhically observant Jews. These factors seem to disappear as the eruv disappears into total abstraction. Further, at the danger of appearing petty, I would insist that interdisciplinary practitioners also have to do their homework well if they are to adequately represent sources from across the “home” discipline. In Herz’s case, he claims, by referring to the Talmud, that “the eruv is understood as the Temple of Jerusalem” (46), while the talmudic discussion actually does something else altogether.17 If the establishment of eruvin were not such a contentious issue in the United States, involving the legal culture of the separation of religion and state, one might gloss over the symbolic decoding of the ritual system of the eruv, particularly because Herz’s conceptual approach has much to offer. Alas, particularly a religious practice whose symbolic value is what is at stake in the public debates requires precision. Schlör’s use of the eruv as concept to frame his book is quite different. He calls attention to archival papers that document the correspondence between a small East Prussian Jewish town and the Prussian self-identified enlightened government. The rhetoric deployed in this conflict is fascinating, especially because what is at stake is the place of Jews in the city. Therefore, in contrast to Herz, Schlör does give voice to the people for whom the eruv as a practice matters, at least insofar as they are represented in the archival material. But in Schlör’s conceptualization, we encounter another potential difficulty. Schlör draws on the eruv and the controversy in East Prussia as the symbolic borderline that differentiates tradition from modernity. On one side of the line is the traditional Jewish community, which is skeptical about the challenge of modernity; on the other side are nonJewish and Jewish reformers. The eruv boundary for Schlör marks the Innen from the Aussen, the inner world of Jewish tradition from the outer world of modernity, not just in the topographical sense. While I do not necessarily disagree with this symbolic use of the eruv, the subject does at times fall into the rhetorical trap of tradition versus modernization, and religious practice (the eruv) as in essence an antimodern tradition, rather than allowing a trajectory of religious practice to unfold that is not always already antimodern. To illustrate and therefore clarify this point, Schlör summarizes the nature of the halakhic practice of the eruv in the following way:

The perfect observance of all [Sabbath] regulations requires a life, which could transpire in an equally perfect way in the inner [world of Jewish tradition and practice], without any contact with an outer world however that might be defined. … That is impossible for a religious group that lives as a minority among others. Outer circumstances reach into the inner life of the community. With the society’s modernization and the challenges of modernity 17. The opening sugya of the talmudic tractate of`Eruvin (2a–3a) suggests the Temple gates as one possible model for the mishnaic measurements of the height of the boundary markers for the eruv community, but this is one among other structures, such as the sukkah and royal palaces, all of them extremely suggestive. But in the end, our talmudic editors opt for another, more pragmatic explanation altogether, a topic that I discuss in my book manuscript.

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Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert the observance of these regulations become more and more impossible for ever larger parts of the community. (21)

This kind of rhetoric obscures the fact that rabbinic, halakhic Judaism did manage to design a system of observance that has allowed communities to operate as minorities among others, and still does so. We might add that to many Jews committed to Sabbath observance, these regulations do not seem impossible, as they live in the contemporary economic and social world.18 And it is precisely the eruv as practice and as symbolic system that undermines the static division between the Innen of traditional life, separate from the Aussen of the non-Jewish majority world. Jewish law in general and the eruv in particular allow the religious group to engage that “outside” world, while remaining committed to its cultural script of Jewish law and practice. This issue is one that seeks to engage the book critically, rather than pointing out a problem with it. Either way, throughout the book, Schlör is actually quite sensitive with regard to these issues, and he means to undo stereotypically distortions of Jewish culture. I think, more importantly, that these engaging and creative studies of Jewish culture in the cultural studies mode demonstrate that there is a meaningful conversation to be had. In sum, the Makom project in Potsdam, in both its practices and publications, presents an exemplary way to produce scholarship, and it opens up new and imaginative ways of thinking in Jewish studies, and for that, we owe Schlör and his students a great debt. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert Stanford University Stanford, California

18. Here, Schlör seems to be overly influenced by his source from Wilhelm Nowack, whose 1926 translation of and commentary on Mishnah ` Eruvin he cites, and who much more overtly applies the typical Protestant antihalakhic (at best) rhetoric to this tractate when he writes, “In as much as the regulations of the Sabbath rest were multiplied and intensified by the leading sages of the synagogue, in order to prevent the transgression thereof, so the difficulties grew for the Jew situated in practical life, to remain on top of the Sabbath laws that grew into infinity,” cited on p. 21.

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AJS Review 33:1 (2009), 165–224 © 2009 Association for Jewish Studies

BOOK REVIEWS JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE IN LATE ANTIQUITY Marc S. Bernstein. Stories of Joseph: Narrative Migrations between Judaism and Islam. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. xviii, 315 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001019

Stories of Joseph revolves around an analysis of a Judeo-Arabic retelling of the story of Joseph titled The Story of Our Master Joseph the Righteous. It is not surprising that the story captivated the attention of both Jewish and Muslim communities, such that the Judeo-Arabic tale under investigation enjoyed wide popularity. After all, the entire final third of Genesis, Chapters 37–50, tells the tale of Joseph. And, in the Qur’an, an entire surā (chapter) bears his name. Like Abraham and Moses, Joseph exhibited an upright, resilient character that served as a model for the Prophet Muhammad, who would himself face tribulations and prevail. Rooted in the midrashic tradition, yet at the same time adapting Islamic material from qis.as. al-anbiyā‘ (Stories of the Prophets) literature, this narrative, as Marc S. Bernstein’s comprehensive examination demonstrates, is paradigmatic of crosscultural intertextuality evidenced in the Judaic and Islamic scriptural and exegetical traditions surrounding the figure of Joseph. The Joseph story interweaves elements from both Jewish and Islamic cultures. Surviving in many manuscript collections and found throughout the Arabic-speaking world, the Joseph tale, as Bernstein notes, “constitutes a broad palimpsest of literary allusions to Jewish traditions from the Bible onward, woven together in the form of a romance with Joseph cast as a hero” (27). At the same time, the story incorporates a great deal of Islamic material. Although “it exhibits a high degree of Islamic influence, so much so that it appears to be largely an adaptation of a Muslim text,” by rejecting certain motifs and using Hebrew script, Bernstein argues, it retains its independence. Bernstein’s text is divided into two major parts, the first of which consists of a translation of the story based on several nineteenth-century manuscripts. He provides ample annotations that signal important parallels to scriptural and exegetical material in both Jewish and Islamic traditions. Part 2 is devoted to a close reading of the narrative not only in light of the biblical and Qur’anic accounts of the story of Joseph, but also in view of the vast corpus of legendary literature about Joseph in both traditions that has accumulated over the centuries. For this purpose, Bernstein bases his study on a Karaite manuscript from Cairo, copied in 1836 and now housed in the Karaite Collection of the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. For purposes of clarification and comparison, he utilizes several other manuscripts and two printed editions, one published in Baghdad in 1914 and another in Tunis dating from 1910. Rarely straying from a literal rendition, and only doing so for purposes of clarity or style, Bernstein’s translation attempts to make the tale available to a modern audience, but does so in a manner that

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Book Reviews preserves the distinct voices that blend in unison. Moreover, his scrupulous, heavily annotated translation in and of itself is a praiseworthy achievement. Anyone who is familiar with both the biblical and Qur’anic accounts of the Joseph cycle will find The Story of Our Master Joseph the Righteous exceedingly engaging in the way in which it stitches together various motifs from both traditions. Bernstein highlights these motifs by introducing readers to extrascriptural sources such as midrash, the qis.as. al-anbiyā‘ (Stories of the Prophets), and tafsir or Qur’anic interpretation. The second part of the book focuses on the two major subplots of the narrative—Joseph’s relationship with his brothers and his interactions with the wife of Potiphar. Unlike in the Genesis account, there is no mention of the special tunic that Jacob gave to Joseph as a sign of his special status vis-à-vis his brothers. Its absence seems to reflect the rabbis’ sensitivity to the role that Jacob’s preference may have played in the brothers’ behavior. In our Judeo-Arabic retelling, Joseph’s two dreams appear to be the sole motive behind his brothers’ maltreatment. Their hatred stems from the transparent interpretation of the dreams and not from Jacob’s preferential treatment of their younger brother. In the Qur’an, the only indication of the brothers’ resentment of Joseph is in their own perceived treatment of him and Benjamin: “It is clear Joseph and his brother are more beloved by our father than we, even though we are a sizeable bunch” (Q: 12:8). Islamic exegetes, however, include the two dreams, and indeed one involves the tunic. Bernstein claims to draw on a wide range of fields from comparative religion, folklore, Semitic philology, and literary theory. Although the extent to which he engages these various fields is at times limited, for the most part, he integrates philological techniques within a comparative literary framework in order to call attention to, and perhaps enrich our understanding of, the mechanisms involved in the transfer of cultural artifacts. Bernstein also draws on psychoanalytic theory. For example, Joseph’s dreams in the Joseph story parallel those recorded in the Bible and in Islamic tradition. According to Bernstein, these childhood dreams of future superiority may be caused by Joseph’s insecurity and precarious state as a motherless child. The dreams of self-aggrandizement present a reversal of his position vis-à-vis his brothers, suggesting that in the future they will bow down to him. Bernstein also notes that Jacob’s denial of the dream in Genesis 37:10 “manifests a reversal of the ‘anxiety of influence’ according to which the sons must do battle with the father. Reading the enigmatic conclusion to the dreams thusly, we sense the father’s disquiet at the prospect of being surpassed by the son. This would constitute, in effect, the paternal side of the Oedipal struggle whose roots might lie in the competition between the father and son for the affection of Rachel” (175). Intriguing as this inquiry into the psychoanalytic aspect of the dreams may be, it does little to explain the rendition found in the Joseph story, which displays no indication of “Jacob’s possible Oedipal tergiversation vis-à-vis Joseph.” When Joseph tells his first dream to his brothers and father, we read, “[When] they heard his dream, all of them treated it seriously because they understood [from it] that he would rule all of them and it would be their destiny to bow down to him.” And when Jacob hears the second dream, he says to his son, “There is no doubt but that you will

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Book Reviews attain a high station and all of us will come and kiss your hands; but do not let them know, for your brothers will rely upon this. O son, do not make me have to urge you to take care of yourself” (57). At times, the second half of Bernstein’s book reads like a commentary, and at other times, it uses several motifs to highlight the interweaving of various traditions. This can sometimes present the reader with a disjointed analysis of the Joseph story. Furthermore, as has been amply stated here, and all the more so in the monograph, one of Bernstein’s objectives is to detect “the pattern of borrowing that ensued in Jewish and Islamic works” in order “to better understand the nature of the byways, or ‘the subterranean passageways,’ along which these narrative elaborations traveled” (139). That is all well and good, but more often than not, these passageways remain dimly lit and difficult to traverse. This is not meant as a criticism of Bernstein’s work, but rather as an acknowledgment of his impressive undertaking. Overall, his careful analysis of the relationship between the Joseph story and other sources yields many insights, and should be considered an important contribution among the works dealing with the intercultural intersections and possible areas of symbiosis between Judaism and Islam. Carol Bakhos University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California

• • •

Ian C. Werrett. Ritual Purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 72. Leiden: Brill, 2007. ix, 349 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001020

This monograph constitutes a revision and expansion of the author’s 2006 doctoral dissertation, which was supervised by James R. Davila at the University of St. Andrews. Following an introductory survey of the texts and issues (Chap. 1), the author proceeds through the Dead Sea material relating to ritual purity, including the Damascus Document (Chap. 2), the Temple Scroll (Chap. 3), and 4QMMT (Chap. 4). Chapter 5 covers the other sundry Cave 4 texts containing purity laws. In each of these chapters, Ian C. Werrett systematically compares the major Qumran legal texts with other Qumran documents and, especially, the legal material in the Hebrew Bible. In order to facilitate this comparison, the author breaks down the material into five major legal categories: diseases, clean/ unclean animals, corpses, bodily discharges, and sexual misdeeds. Chapter 6 then presents a cumulative comparison of the material from Qumran on each of these five topics. In the conclusion, the author summarizes the explicit agreements and disagreements on purity in the Qumran corpus and considers the implications of his analysis for understanding the Dead Sea texts and the history of the community that lived at Qumran. The back matter of the book includes three brief helpful appendices detailing the correspondences between biblical texts and the major Qumran documents (the Damascus Document, the Temple Scroll, and 4QMMT). These are followed by a bibliography, an author index, and a citation

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Book Reviews attain a high station and all of us will come and kiss your hands; but do not let them know, for your brothers will rely upon this. O son, do not make me have to urge you to take care of yourself” (57). At times, the second half of Bernstein’s book reads like a commentary, and at other times, it uses several motifs to highlight the interweaving of various traditions. This can sometimes present the reader with a disjointed analysis of the Joseph story. Furthermore, as has been amply stated here, and all the more so in the monograph, one of Bernstein’s objectives is to detect “the pattern of borrowing that ensued in Jewish and Islamic works” in order “to better understand the nature of the byways, or ‘the subterranean passageways,’ along which these narrative elaborations traveled” (139). That is all well and good, but more often than not, these passageways remain dimly lit and difficult to traverse. This is not meant as a criticism of Bernstein’s work, but rather as an acknowledgment of his impressive undertaking. Overall, his careful analysis of the relationship between the Joseph story and other sources yields many insights, and should be considered an important contribution among the works dealing with the intercultural intersections and possible areas of symbiosis between Judaism and Islam. Carol Bakhos University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California

• • •

Ian C. Werrett. Ritual Purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 72. Leiden: Brill, 2007. ix, 349 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001020

This monograph constitutes a revision and expansion of the author’s 2006 doctoral dissertation, which was supervised by James R. Davila at the University of St. Andrews. Following an introductory survey of the texts and issues (Chap. 1), the author proceeds through the Dead Sea material relating to ritual purity, including the Damascus Document (Chap. 2), the Temple Scroll (Chap. 3), and 4QMMT (Chap. 4). Chapter 5 covers the other sundry Cave 4 texts containing purity laws. In each of these chapters, Ian C. Werrett systematically compares the major Qumran legal texts with other Qumran documents and, especially, the legal material in the Hebrew Bible. In order to facilitate this comparison, the author breaks down the material into five major legal categories: diseases, clean/ unclean animals, corpses, bodily discharges, and sexual misdeeds. Chapter 6 then presents a cumulative comparison of the material from Qumran on each of these five topics. In the conclusion, the author summarizes the explicit agreements and disagreements on purity in the Qumran corpus and considers the implications of his analysis for understanding the Dead Sea texts and the history of the community that lived at Qumran. The back matter of the book includes three brief helpful appendices detailing the correspondences between biblical texts and the major Qumran documents (the Damascus Document, the Temple Scroll, and 4QMMT). These are followed by a bibliography, an author index, and a citation

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Book Reviews index. No subject index is provided, and the bibliography is broken into categories (e.g., Dead Sea Scrolls, social science, early Judaism). The important contribution of this volume can be stated simply: Werrett articulates an important and persuasive critique of the reigning paradigm in the study of purity at Qumran. According to the dominant voices in the field (especially those of Joseph M. Baumgarten and Hannah K. Harrington), the purity laws from the Temple Scroll, 4QMMT, and other Cave 4 documents can best be understood as articulating halakhot that work together in a single, coherent, stringent legal system. Against this consensus, the author isolates points of disagreement among the disparate texts. Some are outright contradictions, as when 4QTohorot Bb states that the sprinkler of purification waters must be a priest (4Q277 1 ii 5b–7a), while 4QMMT (4Q394 3–7 i 17–19a) and 4QD (4Q269 8 ii 4b–6a) ostensibly permit this rite to be performed by a “clean man,” following Numbers 19:9 (263–64, 273). Other disagreements are indicated by significant shifts in emphasis, such as the Damascus Document’s apparent lack of interest in corpse impurity (95–96) over against the Temple Scroll’s sustained interest in the matter (136–52, 171–72). Still other disagreements concern parallels that are less precise than commonly recognized, such as the Damascus Document’s prohibition of sexual relations in the city of the sanctuary (CD 12:1–2), which in truth is not fully equivalent to the Temple Scroll’s similar assertion (11QT 45: 11–12) that a man who has had sex with his wife must remain outside the city of the sanctuary for three days (89–91, 159–62, 173). Along the way through his traversal of these texts, Werrett is also willing to note instances where, contrary to common belief, one or another of the Qumran texts articulates legal positions that are more lenient than related biblical laws (e.g., 24–31, 98). Of course, a number of these general points have been noticed before. What is different here is that the author’s approach to the material is not characterized by a commitment to either the internal consistency or the general stringency of the Qumran library. While various authors have asserted that the Qumran material represents a single legal system, with similarities outweighing the differences, Werrett is the first writer I know of to present a chart in which the number of explicit agreements is roughly equal to the number of explicit disagreements (289–90; cf. 3, 18, 293). This interest in disagreement encourages the author to raise important questions regarding some of the more speculative reconstructions of the all too fragmentary 4QMMT. Because there are some disagreements between these two documents, Werrett wonders whether it is sound to reconstruct 4QMMT based on presumed legal affinity with 11QT (e.g., 206–209). As in all issues regarding Qumran, the debate is sure to continue. But from here on, those who treat Qumranic law as an internally consistent and consistently stringent corpus will have to reckon with the forceful arguments articulated in this volume. The book’s title, which is seemingly broad, reflects at least two ways in which the topic has been narrowed for the purposes of the present analysis. First, this is a book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, as opposed to Qumran. While the literary finds relating to purity are studied in detail, the archaeological remains from Qumran itself are set aside. This analysis of purity proceeds without drawing information from or conclusions about Qumran’s mikva’ot or cemeteries. Second, this is a book about ritual purity at Qumran. As indicated,

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Book Reviews laws concerning sexual misdeeds are included in Werrett’s discussions of each text, but this is because sexual misdeeds are not only morally defiling, but ritually defiling as well (60–62). Werrett accepts the hypothesis put forth in my Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism that ritual and moral defilement were, over time, integrated into a single conception, particularly in those documents (such as the Rule of the Community) widely believed to reflect sectarian tendencies (7, 104–105).1 As a result of this phenomenon—combined with the author’s interest in ritual purity per se—this volume hardly engages the central sectarian documents at all (see 18 n. 61 for the author’s admission and explanation). These moves are reasonable, especially considering that the work began as a dissertation. But now that the book has been published in a venerable series (and having already granted that its central claims are important and well argued), it is fair to point out that a treatment of ritual impurity at Qumran that skirts both the purity-related punishments of the Community Rule’s penal code and the emotive associations of defilement and sin in the Thanksgiving Hymns—to say nothing of the mikva’ot and the cemetery—may well disappoint some readers. Yet more important than disappointment is a methodological issue: Those who argue that the Qumran legal corpus is basically consistent often do so as part of a larger theory that tries to account for all the literary and archaeological evidence. To be clear, I think the present author has begun to dismantle these reconstructions. However, because his argument is circumscribed, it can only have an impact on certain pieces of the puzzle. It is to be hoped that Werrett will consider the rest of the evidence—both literary and archaeological—in future projects, and thereby demonstrate even more forcefully that the dominant way of looking at purity at Qumran needs to be fundamentally reconsidered. Jonathan Klawans Boston University Boston, Massachusetts

• • • TALMUD, MIDRASH, AND RABBINICS Shmuel Safrai ‫ז״ל‬, Zeev Safrai, Joshua Schwartz, and Peter J. Tomson, eds. The Literature of the Sages. Second Part: Midrash and Targum, Liturgy, Poetry, Mysticism, Contracts, Inscriptions, Ancient Science, and the Languages of Rabbinic Literature. Assen: Royal Van Gorcum; Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2006. xvii, 772 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001032

1. Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 90–91.

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Book Reviews laws concerning sexual misdeeds are included in Werrett’s discussions of each text, but this is because sexual misdeeds are not only morally defiling, but ritually defiling as well (60–62). Werrett accepts the hypothesis put forth in my Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism that ritual and moral defilement were, over time, integrated into a single conception, particularly in those documents (such as the Rule of the Community) widely believed to reflect sectarian tendencies (7, 104–105).1 As a result of this phenomenon—combined with the author’s interest in ritual purity per se—this volume hardly engages the central sectarian documents at all (see 18 n. 61 for the author’s admission and explanation). These moves are reasonable, especially considering that the work began as a dissertation. But now that the book has been published in a venerable series (and having already granted that its central claims are important and well argued), it is fair to point out that a treatment of ritual impurity at Qumran that skirts both the purity-related punishments of the Community Rule’s penal code and the emotive associations of defilement and sin in the Thanksgiving Hymns—to say nothing of the mikva’ot and the cemetery—may well disappoint some readers. Yet more important than disappointment is a methodological issue: Those who argue that the Qumran legal corpus is basically consistent often do so as part of a larger theory that tries to account for all the literary and archaeological evidence. To be clear, I think the present author has begun to dismantle these reconstructions. However, because his argument is circumscribed, it can only have an impact on certain pieces of the puzzle. It is to be hoped that Werrett will consider the rest of the evidence—both literary and archaeological—in future projects, and thereby demonstrate even more forcefully that the dominant way of looking at purity at Qumran needs to be fundamentally reconsidered. Jonathan Klawans Boston University Boston, Massachusetts

• • • TALMUD, MIDRASH, AND RABBINICS Shmuel Safrai ‫ז״ל‬, Zeev Safrai, Joshua Schwartz, and Peter J. Tomson, eds. The Literature of the Sages. Second Part: Midrash and Targum, Liturgy, Poetry, Mysticism, Contracts, Inscriptions, Ancient Science, and the Languages of Rabbinic Literature. Assen: Royal Van Gorcum; Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2006. xvii, 772 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001032

1. Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 90–91.

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Book Reviews This volume is the long-delayed completion of the Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum, a multivolume, multiauthored research guide to the study of what was still called, when the first volume was published in 1974, the “Second Temple (or Hellenistic) Jewish background to early Christianity.” The project as a whole is published in three sections. The titles of the sections and their incorporated volumes give a good sense of the scope of the whole. After the initial volume, by Shmuel Safrai and M. Stern (in cooperation with D. Flusser and W. C. van Unnik), titled The Jewish People in the First Century. Historical Geography, Political History, Social, Cultural and Religious Life and Institutions (1974–76), the series moves on to “Section Two: The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud.” Volumes include Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Qumran Sectarian Writings, Philo, Josephus, edited by Michael E. Stone (1984); The Literature of the Sages. First Part: Oral Tora, Halakha, Mishna, Tosefta, Talmud, External Tractates, edited by Shmuel Safrai (1987); and Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by Martin Jan Mulder (1988). The present volume rounds out this second section of the whole. The third section, apparently still open to new contributions (there should be, one thinks, a volume devoted to the liturgical collection, Constitutiones Apostolorum), is titled “Jewish Traditions in Early Christian Literature” and includes at this writing the following: Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles, by Peter J. Tomson (1990); Jewish Historiography and Iconography in Early and Medieval Christianity, edited by Heinz Schreckenberg and Kurt Schubert (1992); Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey, by David T. Runia (1993); and The Didache: Its Jewish Sources and Its Place in Early Judaism and Christianity, edited by Huburtus W. M. van de Sandt and David Flusser (2002). The long delay between the original conception of the project and the completion, at least, of the rabbinics volume was attributable, in part, to the untimely death of Shmuel Safrai in 2003. This throws into relief an issue that the editors of the present volume address at some length in their introduction: The current shape of studies on the mutual impact of early Judaism and the formative Christian traditions has shifted its contour rather dramatically in the three decades since the work was conceived. Under the influence of a variety of scholars, the so-called parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity is viewed less often as a cataclysmic break in the first or second Christian century, but rather as a slow and often unconscious disambiguation, not fully realized by those calling themselves Jews and Christians until perhaps the fifth or sixth century in some quarters.1 The result for the present volume is that relatively few of the entries show much interest in the stated agenda of the volumes of the Compendia in dealing

1. For an overview of the most recent contributions, see Stuart S. Miller, “Roman Imperialism, Jewish Self-Definition, and Rabbinic Society: Belayche’s Iudaea-Palaestina, Schwartz’s Imperialism and Jewish Society, and Boyarin’s Border Lines Reconsidered,” AJS Review 31, no. 2 (2007): 329–62.

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Book Reviews with the “literature of the Sages”—using Jewish texts of the second through the seventh century to illumine “the Palestinian Jewish background” of first-century Christianity. In this sense, the essays are entirely in the mainstream of current discourse in the field. But little in this collection notices or addresses the currently ascendant paradigm clearly enough to ask how developments in Eastern Christianity in Syria and Mesopotamia, or developments in Sasanian-Zoroastrian religious culture, may have left echoes in the rabbinic literature of the fifth and sixth centuries. Whereas the original project sought to invite scholars of Christianity to learn how rabbinic texts might illumine the first and second Christian century, it now reaches completion in an emerging climate of opinion in which Eastern Christianity and, especially, the Zoroastrian religiocultural traditions of Persia are viewed as the context for developments in contemporary Judaism.2 So, to a certain extent, the volume is a major contribution to a research paradigm whose inspirational springs have begun to dry up, at least in the way that Safrai and Flusser, major shapers of Israeli scholarship on ancient Judaism and Christianity, drew upon them for inspiration. There is a sense, then, in which the volume as a whole reminds one of a traveler who has packed for Alaska and mistakenly boarded a flight to the Bahamas. The wardrobe is excellent and well made, but not quite appropriate to the climate. This, in fact, may be the saving grace of the project. The contributions are so well done in their own right, and the volume’s supervising editors are so skilled in their work, that they have produced a volume that transcends the original editorial agenda that commissioned it. While scholars of early Christianity in the Roman Empire will certainly find much of interest here, I suspect that the volume’s most grateful audience will be found among scholars who are centrally interested in rabbinic literature primarily for what it tells us about rabbinic culture in both its elite and more popular reflections during the centuries in which Western Christian, Eastern Christian, and Zoroastrian traditions were the sages’ primary cultural interlocutors. There are no fewer than twenty contributions by as many authors. “Section One: Midrash and Targum” includes essays by Menahem Kahana (“The Halakhic Midrashim”), Marc Hirschman (“Aggadic Midrash”), Myron B. Lerner (“The Works of Aggadic Midrash and The Esther Midrashim”), Chaim Milikowsky (“Seder Olam”), and Zeev Safrai (“The Targums as Part of Rabbinic Literature”).

2. In addition to the works discussed by Miller in n. 1, see the growing body of remarkable work by Yaakov Elman, his students, and associates on reading the Talmud Bavli against the background of Sasanian legal compilations and other cultural intertexts: Yaakov Elman, “Middle Persian Culture and Babylonian Sages: Accommodation and Resistance in the Shaping of Rabbinic Legal Tradition,” in Charlotte E. Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 165–97; Geoffrey Herman, “Ahasuerus, the Former Stable-master of Belshazzar, and the Wicked Alexander of Macedon: Two Parallels between the Babylonian Talmud and Persian Sources,” AJS Review 29, no. 2 (2005): 283–97; and Reuven Kiperwasser and Dan Shapira, “Irano-Talmudica I: The Three-Legged Ass and Ridya in B. Ta’anith: Some Observations about Mythic Hydrology in the Babylonian Talmud and in Ancient Iran,” AJS Review 32, no. 1 (2008): 101–16.

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Book Reviews These essays are all classic examples of Wissenschaft des Judentums offered by some of the finest practitioners in the contemporary Israeli academy. Indeed, Kahana’s book-length essay on halakhic midrashim is perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the topic in English since Lauterbach’s monumental contribution on the topic in the 1903 Jewish Encyclopaedia. The contributions of Hirschman, Lerner, Milikowsky, and Safrai—though briefer—are equally comprehensive in their attention to the questions of the venue, compilation, and transmission history of the textual reservoirs in which rabbinic culture of antiquity stored its knowledge of the meaning of its scriptures. The setting of the second section shifts to prayer texts, religious poetry, and the esoteric practices normally labeled as “mysticism.” Broadly speaking, the shift is from rabbinic law and theology—products of the bet midrash per se—to the liturgical imagination that surfaces in and at the edges of the rabbinic synagogue. Contributors are Joseph Tabory (“Prayers and Berakhot” and “The Passover Haggada”), Vered Noam (“Megillat Taanit”), Ezra Fleischer (“Piyyut”), Joseph Yahalom (“Ancient Jewish Poetry in Aramaic and Hebrew”), and Michael D. Swartz (“Mystical Texts”). With the exception of Swartz, who has written most of his major studies in English, the other contributors are distinguished Israeli scholars who are virtually unknown to readers without Hebrew. Their welldocumented discussions here, replete with ample bibliographical references, make these essays important contributions to English-language scholarship on the texts they address. Tabory’s study of the Haggadah and Noam’s on Megillat Ta’anit provide important new perspectives on texts that last received comprehensive treatment in English many decades ago. Fleischer, Yahalom, and Swartz— each a master of the subject at hand—offer useful summaries of their views that will guide studies in these materials for the next generation. The third section is somewhat of a catchall, justified primarily by the fact that the catches are in themselves fascinating. But this section reveals most clearly the gap between the original commission of the volume and the contemporary shape of the field it enters. Contributors include Mordechai A. Friedman (“Contracts: Rabbinic Literature and Ancient Jewish Documents”), Jonathan J. Price and Haggai Misgav (“Jewish Inscriptions and Their Use”), Samuel S. Kottek (“Medical Interest in Ancient Rabbinic Literature”), Zeev Safrai (“Geography and Cosmography in Talmudic Literature”), Abraham Ofir Shemesh (“Biology in Rabbinic Literature”), and Yuval Harari (“The Sages and the Occult”). The bulk of Friedman’s essay focuses on Second Temple and early postTemple “subliterary” and “documentary” texts that illumine textual problems in the talmudic literature and are relevant as well to the shaping of early Christian traditions. Price and Misgav offer a fascinating introduction to the historical methodologies that are appropriate to the study of Jewish epigraphy and explain the value of epigraphic remains for the study of rabbinic culture. The contributions of Kottek, Ofir Shemesh, and Harari revisit and redefine the ways in which rabbinic texts preserve and transform regnant “cultural knowledge” in such areas as ancient science and demonology. Readers who may last have considered these topics in the antiquated studies of wissenschaftliche pioneers such as Löw, Preuss, Krauss, and Blau will find that much has been going on that is well worth

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Book Reviews noting. Lacking, unfortunately, is an integrative treatment that teases out the interconnections of the latter material with “mystical” material highlighted by Swartz and the “mainstream rabbinism” of the elite literary tradition of the sages. The fourth section completes the collection with sorely needed up-to-date discussions of the rabbinic linguistic environment: Moshe Bar-Asher (“Mishnaic Hebrew”), Yohanan Breuer (“Aramaic of the Talmudic Period”), and Daniel Sperber (“Rabbinic Knowledge of Greek”). A review of this compass is no place to summarize individual essays or to critique them in any detail. Suffice it to say that even those who regard the larger editorial vision of this volume as passé will benefit from virtually every essay included here. Thus, the editors are to be congratulated on gathering excellent scholarship together, organizing it coherently and intelligently, rolling with punches that could have knocked the project out, and producing a volume that fully justifies the long delay in its appearance. Graduate students and researchers in all areas of classical rabbinic Judaism (and even some primarily interested in early Jewish–Christian “dialogue”) will learn much from these essays and owe a debt of gratitude to the editors and contributors alike. Martin S. Jaffee University of Washington Seattle, Washington

• • • Devora Steinmetz. Punishment and Freedom: The Rabbinic Construction of Criminal Law. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. xviii, 206 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001044

Most of Devora Steinmetz’s Punishment and Freedom: The Rabbinic Construction of Criminal Law is devoted to the proposition that rabbinic law is an expression of a positive law—as opposed to natural law—jurisprudence. That is, the rabbis understood Torah to derive its authority from its having been commanded, and this conception determined their legal discourse and practices. Chapter 1 argues that the rabbinic assignment of h.enek as the default mode of execution is motivated by the dual convictions that this most closely approximates “death by the hand of heaven” (the loss of breath reversing the divine process of animation) and that such a death is appropriate because the transgressor has knowingly violated a divine command. In Steinmetz’s words, “intentional violation of God’s command is tantamount to relinquishing life” (17). Chapter 2 contrasts Sinaitic and Noachide laws, suggesting that the latter are anchored in a natural law jurisprudence (because they predate Sinai and are aimed at all humanity, rather than Israel alone). As a result, the rabbis do not impose the requirement of hatra’a (warning) on a Noachide as they do on a Jew, and they assign—at least in some sources—hereg (execution by sword) rather than h.enek as the mode of execution for Noachide transgressions. Chapter 3 proposes that brother–sister intercourse offers insight into rabbinic jurisprudence because it is

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Book Reviews noting. Lacking, unfortunately, is an integrative treatment that teases out the interconnections of the latter material with “mystical” material highlighted by Swartz and the “mainstream rabbinism” of the elite literary tradition of the sages. The fourth section completes the collection with sorely needed up-to-date discussions of the rabbinic linguistic environment: Moshe Bar-Asher (“Mishnaic Hebrew”), Yohanan Breuer (“Aramaic of the Talmudic Period”), and Daniel Sperber (“Rabbinic Knowledge of Greek”). A review of this compass is no place to summarize individual essays or to critique them in any detail. Suffice it to say that even those who regard the larger editorial vision of this volume as passé will benefit from virtually every essay included here. Thus, the editors are to be congratulated on gathering excellent scholarship together, organizing it coherently and intelligently, rolling with punches that could have knocked the project out, and producing a volume that fully justifies the long delay in its appearance. Graduate students and researchers in all areas of classical rabbinic Judaism (and even some primarily interested in early Jewish–Christian “dialogue”) will learn much from these essays and owe a debt of gratitude to the editors and contributors alike. Martin S. Jaffee University of Washington Seattle, Washington

• • • Devora Steinmetz. Punishment and Freedom: The Rabbinic Construction of Criminal Law. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. xviii, 206 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001044

Most of Devora Steinmetz’s Punishment and Freedom: The Rabbinic Construction of Criminal Law is devoted to the proposition that rabbinic law is an expression of a positive law—as opposed to natural law—jurisprudence. That is, the rabbis understood Torah to derive its authority from its having been commanded, and this conception determined their legal discourse and practices. Chapter 1 argues that the rabbinic assignment of h.enek as the default mode of execution is motivated by the dual convictions that this most closely approximates “death by the hand of heaven” (the loss of breath reversing the divine process of animation) and that such a death is appropriate because the transgressor has knowingly violated a divine command. In Steinmetz’s words, “intentional violation of God’s command is tantamount to relinquishing life” (17). Chapter 2 contrasts Sinaitic and Noachide laws, suggesting that the latter are anchored in a natural law jurisprudence (because they predate Sinai and are aimed at all humanity, rather than Israel alone). As a result, the rabbis do not impose the requirement of hatra’a (warning) on a Noachide as they do on a Jew, and they assign—at least in some sources—hereg (execution by sword) rather than h.enek as the mode of execution for Noachide transgressions. Chapter 3 proposes that brother–sister intercourse offers insight into rabbinic jurisprudence because it is

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Book Reviews prohibited for Jews but not for Gentiles, and can thus “serve as the source for a striking array of principles of criminal law” (40). Chapter 4 deals with the rabbinic response to murder. There is much to admire in this book. The arguments offered are, without fail, based on close readings of the rabbinic sources and give fresh and often thought-provoking interpretations of the passages. The book’s dialogue with jurisprudential theory, enlightening in its own right, is carried out in a scope and consistency that is rare in rabbinic scholarship. It is a pity so much of the theoretical engagement is relegated to the endnotes. However, there are some substantive issues that call into question Steinmetz’s claim that rabbinic jurisprudence is positivist. For one thing, a number of her readings move too quickly toward a unified jurisprudential interpretation at the expense of other considerations. How, the reader of Chapter 1 may ask, can the rabbis be concerned with “preserving the person’s dignity” and “trying to avoid disgrace” in execution (9), when the burning procedures include lowering the condemned into knee-deep feces? Further, the argument that h.enek constitutes a reversal of God’s life-giving process is at best ambiguously alluded to in rabbinic sources (it may be the meaning of “a death that leaves no mark,” though this is certainly not the only or most obvious understanding of the phrase), and it is an unlikely candidate to serve as a key article in support of any jurisprudential ideology. Moreover, it is not clear why h.enek is indicative of a positivist approach: Could one not argue that a death that undoes the natural process of creation reflects a natural law position? That the violation of Torah law is an undoing of the natural order, and so the transgressor’s place in creation is, as it were, revoked? The connection to positivist law is more evident in the rabbinic requirement of hatra’a, that a person who is about to commit an offense be warned that the act is prohibited by God—a requirement presumably unnecessary in a natural law system. But this idea, sometimes formulated as a general obligation, sometimes in strict judicial form, is widely attested in Second Temple sources, including some (1QS 6.1) whose authors do not appear to adhere to a positivist understanding of law (James Kugel’s important discussion of these sources, “On Hidden Hatred and Open Reproach: Early Exegesis of Leviticus 19:17,” is not cited).1 In the following chapters, too, suggestive insights are made to bear more weight than they can easily carry. The prohibition against brother–sister intercourse is described as an act “that is a violation of positive law but not of natural law” and thus “represents a convergence of critical substantive and procedural elements of the rabbinic conception of rabbinic law” (51). But the rabbinic sources cited are very clearly struggling with the biblical assertion that it is h.esed for a man to see the nakedness of his sister (Leviticus 20:17), and proposing that h.esed refers to the necessary act of incest that allowed Adam and Eve’s children to continue the human race. Without detracting from Steinmetz’s sharp observation

1. James Kugel, “On Hidden Hatred and Open Reproach: Early Exegesis of Leviticus 19:17,” Harvard Theological Review 80, no. 1 (1987): 43–61.

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Book Reviews concerning the special legal status of this act, its infrequent citation and evidently exegetical motivation calls into question the assertion that it plays a constitutive role in rabbinic jurisprudence. This difficulty is all the more apparent when read in conjunction with Chapter 4, which deals with the legal response to murder, a crime the rabbis understand as “fundamentally a violation of natural law … [yet] still situated squarely within the rabbinic system of criminal punishment and procedure” (65). Perhaps, then, rather than assign brother–sister incest a foundational role in rabbinic jurisprudence and then be forced to explain a presumably paradigmatic crime such as murder as an exception, it would be preferable not to claim a single rabbinic approach. Rather, different rabbinic discussions express different jurisprudential positions. In addition to the main argument concerning the positivism of the rabbis, Chapter 5 offers a largely independent discussion of the philosophies of punishment underlying the Pauline and rabbinic interpretations to Habakkuk 2:4 (“the righteous shall live by his faith[fulness])” and Leviticus 18:5 (“and you shall keep my statutes … and live by them”). At one point, Steinmetz asserts that “Paul’s solution, as I have shown, is to set up justification through faith over against justification through works” (97). This statement is incontrovertible evidence of how entrenched the “new perspective” on Paul has become, as it is only against the backdrop of the new perspective that Steinmetz’s point constitutes an argument. Most “old-perspective” Paul scholarship would consider this statement self-evident. And, indeed, it is uncontroversial that there are passages in Paul’s epistles that assert the superiority of faith to works. The controversy surrounds how best to understand these passages within the broader context of Paul’s message, whereas Punishment and Freedom suggests that they simply are Paul’s message, ignoring in the process many of the issues raised in interpreting these passages. To cite just one example, Galatians presents a polemic response to rival missionaries proclaiming “a different gospel” (Galatians 1:6)—by general consensus, a gospel that combines faith in Christ with some degree of halakhic observance. If so, it is possible that the “anti-works” passages in Galatians are rhetorically elevated attempts at countering a rival ideology, whose addressees are all pagan. (The anti-Pauline criticism by the Pharisaic members of the Jerusalem congregation suggests that Paul did not preach that Jews abandon the Torah, at least not at the time; see Acts 15). Rather than address these possibilities, Steinmetz reaches, too quickly I think, for broad conclusions in seeking “to pinpoint what I think is the fundamental difference between the Pauline and rabbinic views of human nature and human action” (99). At the very least, one should acknowledge that the rabbis’ discussion of the importance of works, that is, the commandments, are not concerned with universal “human nature” so much as with a specifically and exclusively Jewish covenantal obligation. This is a pity, because the overgeneralizations distracted me from an interesting and innovative comparison between the positions enunciated in the rabbinic and Pauline texts, respectively, and Herbert Morris’s distinction between “guilt morality” and “shame morality.” In summary, Punishment and Freedom is an interesting and stimulating work of scholarship, marred, in my opinion, by a desire to draw conclusions that are broader and more systematic than the evidence allows. None of this,

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Book Reviews however, detracts from the close and patient engagement of rabbinic sources (the Bavli first and foremost) on display throughout. The readings are consistently interesting, often innovative, and always stimulating, and to fully appreciate them, one need only read the book as a series of discrete studies rather than as chapters unfolding a single theme. Azzan Yadin Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey

• • • MEDIEVAL JEWISH CULTURE Cedric Cohen Skalli, ed. and trans. Isaac Abravanel: Letters. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. xiv, 191 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001056

The quincentenary of his birth, 1937, saw numerous commemorations of Isaac Abarbanel, a figure who has long served as a “totem” (thus JeanChristophe Attias) for Spanish Jewry’s 1492 catastrophe, as well as its transition from pre- to post-expulsion times. Especially striking in retrospect was the major Abarbanel exhibition mounted in 1937 at the Jewish Museum in Berlin against the dark backdrop of the fifth year of Nazi rule. Then, too, the quincentenary saw a profusion of academic Abarbanelia, including books in Hebrew, English, and German (the latter by a young Abraham Joshua Heschel) and articles by such leading scholars as Yitzhak Baer, M. S. Segal, Leo Strauss, and Ephraim Urbach. Turning to this century’s opening years leading up to the quincentenary of his death in 2008, one finds little evidence of a popular commemorative impulse toward Abarbanel but strong indications of a resurgence in scholarly interest. Restricting consideration to English-language entries, there have been three recent full-scale monographs (one by the current reviewer, the others by Seymour Feldman and Alfredo Borodowski) and numerous article-length treatments. To these can now be added Cedric Cohen Skalli’s superb edition of Abarbanel’s surviving letters, accompanied by English translations and an extended introduction that places these short texts in a variety of historical, intellectual-literary, and sociocultural contexts. The letters all belong to Abarbanel’s too little studied Portuguese period (1437–83), which, it is well to recall, comprised two-thirds of his life and all his formative years. Though much ink has been spilled on Abarbanel’s writings over the centuries, Cohen Skalli rightly affirms (if perhaps slightly overstates) earlier scholarly neglect of the letters. His volume, therefore, makes an important and decidedly fresh contribution to the field.

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Book Reviews however, detracts from the close and patient engagement of rabbinic sources (the Bavli first and foremost) on display throughout. The readings are consistently interesting, often innovative, and always stimulating, and to fully appreciate them, one need only read the book as a series of discrete studies rather than as chapters unfolding a single theme. Azzan Yadin Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey

• • • MEDIEVAL JEWISH CULTURE Cedric Cohen Skalli, ed. and trans. Isaac Abravanel: Letters. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. xiv, 191 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001056

The quincentenary of his birth, 1937, saw numerous commemorations of Isaac Abarbanel, a figure who has long served as a “totem” (thus JeanChristophe Attias) for Spanish Jewry’s 1492 catastrophe, as well as its transition from pre- to post-expulsion times. Especially striking in retrospect was the major Abarbanel exhibition mounted in 1937 at the Jewish Museum in Berlin against the dark backdrop of the fifth year of Nazi rule. Then, too, the quincentenary saw a profusion of academic Abarbanelia, including books in Hebrew, English, and German (the latter by a young Abraham Joshua Heschel) and articles by such leading scholars as Yitzhak Baer, M. S. Segal, Leo Strauss, and Ephraim Urbach. Turning to this century’s opening years leading up to the quincentenary of his death in 2008, one finds little evidence of a popular commemorative impulse toward Abarbanel but strong indications of a resurgence in scholarly interest. Restricting consideration to English-language entries, there have been three recent full-scale monographs (one by the current reviewer, the others by Seymour Feldman and Alfredo Borodowski) and numerous article-length treatments. To these can now be added Cedric Cohen Skalli’s superb edition of Abarbanel’s surviving letters, accompanied by English translations and an extended introduction that places these short texts in a variety of historical, intellectual-literary, and sociocultural contexts. The letters all belong to Abarbanel’s too little studied Portuguese period (1437–83), which, it is well to recall, comprised two-thirds of his life and all his formative years. Though much ink has been spilled on Abarbanel’s writings over the centuries, Cohen Skalli rightly affirms (if perhaps slightly overstates) earlier scholarly neglect of the letters. His volume, therefore, makes an important and decidedly fresh contribution to the field.

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Book Reviews The first of the four epistles, written in Portuguese in the early 1470s, is especially interesting, standing as it does as a lone surviving witness to Abarbanel’s literary production in one of several vernacular languages that he must have learned (and, in the case of Portuguese, certainly mastered) during his lifetime. The letter’s addressee was Dom Afonso Count of Faro, a member of the house of Bragança, the most influential noble family during the thirty-year reign of Portugal’s Afonso V. Abarbanel sent the letter to the count upon the death of the count’s father-in-law. As part of his efforts to console this Christian noble, to whom he was clearly quite close, Abarbanel found occasion to, among other things, juxtapose biblical sources with a number of classical ones rarely if ever cited by earlier Jewish writers (Seneca, Cicero), creating what Cohen Skalli deems “the first humanistic vernacular epistle written by a Jew” (ix). Apart from its substance, the manner in which the letter to the Count of Faro has been preserved tells a tale. The upshot of Cohen Skalli’s astute discussion is that the letter’s appearance in two sixteenth-century Portuguese humanistic codices that include letters of kings and popes, as well as other epistles meant to serve as models of rhetoric, attests to ongoing recollection of Abarbanel as one who contributed to Portuguese humanism and politics (5). On the plane of intellectual biography, Cohen Skalli convincingly links Abarbanel’s vernacular letter with incipient Portuguese humanism, thereby filling out recent efforts to expose Abarbanel’s Renaissance profile as it emerges not only from his post-1492 Italian sojourn but also from his much longer pre-1492 Iberian period. Unfortunately, Cohen Skalli’s tight focus on the epistolary genre prevents him from drawing points of contact with Abarbanel’s larger corpus on this score. Still, study of this letter advances understanding not only of Abarbanel’s Portuguese phase but also of the nascent field of Jewish Renaissance studies beyond Italy. The other epistles that the volume presents are vestiges of an ongoing Hebrew correspondence between Abarbanel and Italian Jewry’s leading banker and patron of culture, Yehiel da Pisa. These illumine such things as Abarbanel’s role in redeeming Jewish captives taken during Portugal’s capture of the city of Arzilla (Asilah) on the northern coast of Morocco; his savvy intervention on behalf of Lusitano-Jewish interests in a mission sent by Afonso V to express the king’s obedience to Pope Sixtus IV; and Abarbanel’s and Yehiel’s regular exchanges of learned writings, including Abarbanel’s own earliest works of biblical commentary. While making it clear that the letters are not simply Hebrew adaptations of the humanist epistle, Cohen Skalli casts them as something of a cultural equivalent that cultivated “a new self-image of Jewish leadership informed by humanistic trends” (xi–xii). At the same time, he identifies a significant similarity between the Portuguese letter and its Hebrew counterparts, as parts of the latter echo the humanistic consolatory genre. As with his handling of the Portuguese letter, Cohen Skalli’s treatment of the Hebrew epistles gives evidence of painstaking research and deep immersion in the epistolary genre. Obscure Portuguese figures whom Abarbanel mentions are identified (41–42, 58), the fate of a black slave girl sent by Abarbanel’s wife as a gift to Da Pisa is tracked (51–52), and so forth. Integration of Cohen Skalli’s own current work

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Book Reviews on other correspondence emanating from Da Pisa lends the analysis added interpretive depth (26–30). Only somebody fully conversant with the relevant primary and secondary Portuguese and Italian sources could unpack these sides of the correspondence so impeccably. (By contrast, one can quibble with the odd comment regarding Jewish intellectual context, such as the overstated observation that Abarbanel mentions Profiat Duran “often” [57 n. 355].) A few words are in order about the critical editions of the letters, their translations, and the overall presentation. The original texts are set forth with admirable fastidiousness, far surpassing earlier published versions (see 74–78 for the editor’s discussion). It is certainly welcome to have all four letters appear between the same covers. If the English version of the Portuguese letter flows more than its Hebrew counterparts, the latter remain accurate and commendably readable given the challenge that Cohen Skalli faced in seeking to render Abarbanel’s highly stylized epistolary Hebrew, chock-full of biblicisms, into mellifluous English. White space dominates on pages containing the Hebrew letters and even on most of the facing pages with their English translations. A different format, especially for notes, which are mostly unadorned scriptural references, would have yielded a more compact volume, though this outcome would have made the book’s already prohibitive price (above $100) harder to abide. Price aside, Abarbanel scholars, Iberianists, and students of medieval and Renaissance epistolary culture should all be grateful for this well-executed tome that illumines several poorly understood areas while bringing others into view for the first time. In terms of the letters’ author, readers can gain from the volume a new or enhanced awareness of Abarbanel’s place in the world of Iberian humanism, deployment of the consolatory epistolary genre, use of a “dual discourse” (xiii) directed at Christian and Jewish aristocrats at home and abroad, involvement in the “multilingual writing of the Jewish economic elite” (73), and more. True, such insight only increases the considerable air of complexity that hangs over Abarbanel’s multifaceted aspirations and activities, which embraced intense cultivation of scholarship and literary activity on one hand and ongoing engagement in an amazing range of fiscal, communal, and political enterprises on the other. Still, appreciation of the letters, properly integrated into a larger tableau, should move us toward a more holistic understanding of the astonishing and in many ways perplexing man who stands behind these remarkable epistolary remains. Eric Lawee York University Toronto, Canada

• • • Ephraim Shoham-Steiner. H.arigim be‘al korh.am: Meshuga‘im u-metsora‘im ba-h.evrah ha-Yehudit be-Eropah bi-Yeme ha-benayim. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2008. 299 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001068

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Book Reviews on other correspondence emanating from Da Pisa lends the analysis added interpretive depth (26–30). Only somebody fully conversant with the relevant primary and secondary Portuguese and Italian sources could unpack these sides of the correspondence so impeccably. (By contrast, one can quibble with the odd comment regarding Jewish intellectual context, such as the overstated observation that Abarbanel mentions Profiat Duran “often” [57 n. 355].) A few words are in order about the critical editions of the letters, their translations, and the overall presentation. The original texts are set forth with admirable fastidiousness, far surpassing earlier published versions (see 74–78 for the editor’s discussion). It is certainly welcome to have all four letters appear between the same covers. If the English version of the Portuguese letter flows more than its Hebrew counterparts, the latter remain accurate and commendably readable given the challenge that Cohen Skalli faced in seeking to render Abarbanel’s highly stylized epistolary Hebrew, chock-full of biblicisms, into mellifluous English. White space dominates on pages containing the Hebrew letters and even on most of the facing pages with their English translations. A different format, especially for notes, which are mostly unadorned scriptural references, would have yielded a more compact volume, though this outcome would have made the book’s already prohibitive price (above $100) harder to abide. Price aside, Abarbanel scholars, Iberianists, and students of medieval and Renaissance epistolary culture should all be grateful for this well-executed tome that illumines several poorly understood areas while bringing others into view for the first time. In terms of the letters’ author, readers can gain from the volume a new or enhanced awareness of Abarbanel’s place in the world of Iberian humanism, deployment of the consolatory epistolary genre, use of a “dual discourse” (xiii) directed at Christian and Jewish aristocrats at home and abroad, involvement in the “multilingual writing of the Jewish economic elite” (73), and more. True, such insight only increases the considerable air of complexity that hangs over Abarbanel’s multifaceted aspirations and activities, which embraced intense cultivation of scholarship and literary activity on one hand and ongoing engagement in an amazing range of fiscal, communal, and political enterprises on the other. Still, appreciation of the letters, properly integrated into a larger tableau, should move us toward a more holistic understanding of the astonishing and in many ways perplexing man who stands behind these remarkable epistolary remains. Eric Lawee York University Toronto, Canada

• • • Ephraim Shoham-Steiner. H.arigim be‘al korh.am: Meshuga‘im u-metsora‘im ba-h.evrah ha-Yehudit be-Eropah bi-Yeme ha-benayim. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2008. 299 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001068

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Book Reviews Jews were the main “Other” against which medieval Christian society defined itself, but that society recognized many other groups as marginal— women, children, the elderly, criminals, and so on. Each of these groups has been studied recently by historians, with impressive results. H.arigim be’al korh.am (Involuntary Marginals) suggests that a minority within a minority could elicit attitudes differing from those that the majority society directed toward its own minorities. To test this assumption, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner studies the attitudes of Ashkenazic Jewish society in the Middle Ages toward marginal individuals in its midst—lepers, the insane, and the physically handicapped. Medieval Christians suffering from physical disabilities such as these often found themselves forced out of their communities. What about Jewish lepers? Were they treated by their fellow Jews as pariahs, or did the Jewish community, feeling itself already marginalized, avoid expelling its own “others”? This is the central question of the book, and the author proposes to find the answer in halakhic and moralistic literature from medieval Franco-Germany. Following a methodological introduction, the book contains a section devoted to each of these categories. Leprosy and insanity are each studied in a lengthy chapter defining the condition medically; the author reviews a variety of Jewish and Christian theological positions on these diseases. In Chapter 1, Shoham-Steiner emphasizes that Jewish and Christian thinkers closely shared assumptions about the conditions. Jews and Christians alike blurred the distinction between biblical leprosy (the described symptoms of which do not point to any identifiable medical condition) and the contagious disease known today as Hansen’s disease. Both communities perceived leprosy as an affliction stemming from immorality and consequent divine punishment. An innovative interpretation is offered in Chapter 2, on social attitudes toward lepers. Here it emerges that lepers were never expelled from Jewish society, nor were they branded as sinners. In contrast, some Christian jurists imposed measures to exclude victims of this disease from mainstream society. Most of the responsa that Shoham-Steiner discusses deal with issues related to marriages to lepers, usually cases in which the healthy spouse has tried to dissolve the marriage. These marital disputes were resolved on a case-by-case basis, and the community never considered imposing a blanket ruling in the matter. In fact, it seems that rabbinic lawyers (poskim) tended to favor the position of the woman, regardless of whether it was she or her husband who suffered from the disease. In Chapters 3 and 4, Shoham-Steiner emphasizes the role of insanity in a wide spectrum of conditions. Most of the responsa discussed in the latter chapter deal with marital situations. Jewish law requires that both parties to a divorce be of sound mind. Often, the incipient signs of insanity in a husband or wife caused the other spouse to initiate divorce proceedings quickly, with the hope that the process would be completed before it was too late. The situation was further complicated (for men) by the famous ordinance of Rabbenu Gershom ben Yehudah forbidding polygyny. The advice of Maimonides, that the husband of a woman who was mentally ill should continue to provide for

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Book Reviews her needs while finding himself another wife, was inapplicable for Ashkenazic men. Thus, the pressure to find a way of undoing a marriage was great. A short intervening chapter, Chapter 5, discusses the factors that could have caused insanity. The author includes a subsection on suicide (180–90) that discusses the famous story of Rabbi Yom Tov of London, who was tormented by the temptations of the cross and hanged himself on Shavuot eve. The sources also suggest, according to the author in Chapter 6, that the responsibility of care for the mentally handicapped fell primarily upon the family unit. Christian documents describe madmen wandering the streets, but it would seem that the Jewish community was wary of choosing this option in its quarter. Women, especially, were perceived as being in need of protection and confinement, a responsibility placed squarely upon the shoulders of their families. This is perhaps one reason why rabbis often resisted pressure to dissolve the marriages of insane women, lest the wife might end up lacking a family home. Chapter 7 considers the problems caused by insanity within the family, especially with regard to financial responsibility. Chapters 8–10 deal with physical disabilities, including leg injuries, blindness, and fertility problems. Chapter 9 contains an illuminating discussion on whether handicapped people might play active roles in performing public rituals such as the Priestly Blessing. Chapter 10 approaches interpersonal problems stemming from physical handicaps. The range of sources supporting this study is impressive. Shoham-Steiner utilizes the work of social historians, as well as psychologists, sociologists, art historians, historians of religion, historians of medicine, and others. His Jewish sources are also varied, including responsa both published and in manuscript, biblical exegesis, magical recipes, and moralistic literature, including but not limited to Sefer H.asidim. This is a major step forward, as so much Jewish social history has been based almost exclusively on Sefer H.asidim, an idiosyncratic work that refracts popular beliefs through its own peculiar lens. The heart of this book is a close reading of halakhic texts from the perspective of the social historian. Two major challenges are apparent. The first is the paucity of relevant sources, especially in comparison to the vast range of materials at the disposal of historians studying general European history. Shoham-Steiner believes the data he accumulated amounts to a “critical mass” sufficient to sustain such a discussion (19). In some sections, I believe he has succeeded, but in others (such as the descriptions of madness in Chapter 5), his material seems rather thin. The second challenge is methodological, as the historical use of responsa literature is fraught with pitfalls (discussed best by Haim Soloveitchik in his various publications). The author has clearly made an effort to avoid these pitfalls. He consulted medieval manuscripts for his main sources and provided a careful report of textual variants and historical background on the books and their authors. Some errors, of course, remain (31 n. 43—read Sefer ha-Terumah instead of Mah.zor Vitry; 204, quoting Abudarham—not Raabad but his father-in-law). On the whole, the author has succeeded, but at the expense of the flow of his narrative.

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Book Reviews The primary contribution of this book is its collection and organization of the source material. Some of the sources are obscure and will be new even to scholars. And even for certain well-known sources, Shoham-Steiner’s comments suggest new and exciting readings (see especially 81–94 and 211–17). His lucid summary of international scholarship will be of great value to students of Jewish history, who are often sheltered within the confines of their own discipline, and his presentation of Jewish sources is certainly of great value to social historians who are unfamiliar with halakhic literature. Shoham-Steiner has a rare ability to read halakhic texts in a nuanced manner, and I, for one, am eager to anticipate the results of his future research. Pinchas Roth Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel

• • • Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. The Censor, the Editor, and the Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century. Trans. Jackie Feldman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. viii, 314 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400940900107X

This is an important book, one that makes us reflect on past conclusions. It inspires us to ask what constitutes modernization, and what are the antecedents of Jewish–Christian reciprocity in a post-emancipation world. Its specific theme is whether censorship is an indicator of cultural transformation, if not also a generating force; the author himself is ambivalent about the latter interpretation. The book opens with a discussion of the thirteenth-century burning of the Talmud and subsequent censorship. It presses on to the problems of censors and consistency from the late fifteenth century onward, and it describes the roles of printers, editors, and (principally convert) censors as they worked together in the print shop, identifying some of the most important censors. It notes the hurdles that censorship is said to have sought to overcome, talks of humanism and Hebraism as factors in censorial work, and measures the input of Jews in the act of censorship. There is a long chapter on the Sefer ha-zikkuk and the standards it set, and an attempt to link censorship with overall cultural change among Jews, even with respect to present-day Jewish historical writing. Theoretical observations about reading and its effects introduce the whole and accompany every argument. The question is whether the book’s central thesis holds. Did censors create an “autonomous Jewish space” based on a body of “permitted” Hebrew literature, which, in turn, became the grist of modern Jewish reading, shaping a “modern Jewish consciousness” more tolerant of Christianity, which Jewish historians have also projected back onto the Jewish medieval past? (197). Did the censored products of the printing press in Italy’s limited arena affect Jewish thinkers outside the peninsula, in Western Europe and beyond? (The book refers directly, and fleetingly, to echoes only in the Ottoman Empire.) The answers are not always easy to

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Book Reviews The primary contribution of this book is its collection and organization of the source material. Some of the sources are obscure and will be new even to scholars. And even for certain well-known sources, Shoham-Steiner’s comments suggest new and exciting readings (see especially 81–94 and 211–17). His lucid summary of international scholarship will be of great value to students of Jewish history, who are often sheltered within the confines of their own discipline, and his presentation of Jewish sources is certainly of great value to social historians who are unfamiliar with halakhic literature. Shoham-Steiner has a rare ability to read halakhic texts in a nuanced manner, and I, for one, am eager to anticipate the results of his future research. Pinchas Roth Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel

• • • Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. The Censor, the Editor, and the Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century. Trans. Jackie Feldman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. viii, 314 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400940900107X

This is an important book, one that makes us reflect on past conclusions. It inspires us to ask what constitutes modernization, and what are the antecedents of Jewish–Christian reciprocity in a post-emancipation world. Its specific theme is whether censorship is an indicator of cultural transformation, if not also a generating force; the author himself is ambivalent about the latter interpretation. The book opens with a discussion of the thirteenth-century burning of the Talmud and subsequent censorship. It presses on to the problems of censors and consistency from the late fifteenth century onward, and it describes the roles of printers, editors, and (principally convert) censors as they worked together in the print shop, identifying some of the most important censors. It notes the hurdles that censorship is said to have sought to overcome, talks of humanism and Hebraism as factors in censorial work, and measures the input of Jews in the act of censorship. There is a long chapter on the Sefer ha-zikkuk and the standards it set, and an attempt to link censorship with overall cultural change among Jews, even with respect to present-day Jewish historical writing. Theoretical observations about reading and its effects introduce the whole and accompany every argument. The question is whether the book’s central thesis holds. Did censors create an “autonomous Jewish space” based on a body of “permitted” Hebrew literature, which, in turn, became the grist of modern Jewish reading, shaping a “modern Jewish consciousness” more tolerant of Christianity, which Jewish historians have also projected back onto the Jewish medieval past? (197). Did the censored products of the printing press in Italy’s limited arena affect Jewish thinkers outside the peninsula, in Western Europe and beyond? (The book refers directly, and fleetingly, to echoes only in the Ottoman Empire.) The answers are not always easy to

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Book Reviews find; this is a book full of interjected reflections and ruminations, which interrupt even the lengthy discussion of Domenico Gerosolomitano’s Sefer ha-zikkuk, where detail and narrative are so needed. The fundamental difficulty in determining its impact, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin—who is scrupulously forthright—admits openly, is that censorship was inconsistent. There may have been rules, but violations and inconsistencies were constant, and the censors were unqualified, as I myself have chronicled in an essay that Raz-Krakotzkin generously cites. Yet it is not clear whether this confusion disappeared. A full answer would have required a lifetime of comparisons and would have made for an unending book. Nonetheless, more extensive particulars and direct citation from the sources would have helped undergird the primary argument that censorship fashioned works fit for Hebraists while also creating what is called “autonomous [Jewish] space.” The same applies to the author’s statement that censorship reflects a newer ethnographic view of Jews, no longer a purely theological one from the Christian side. However, Buxtorf’s claim—he is adduced as a prime example of “demystified” (181) ethnography—that Jewish children would “pollute [inquinare]” meat that Jews sold to Christians by urinating on it reveals that newer thinking blended with the theologically rooted old more than canceling it out. Conversely, when the Franciscan Fortunato Coppoli said that Jews, with their lending, “have sucked our [town’s] blood,” he meant that Jews—as a distinct cultural group—were attacking the societas fidei, the corpus Christi; the theological image overlies a charge of ethnic competition. Ultimately, it is Coppoli whom Giovanni D’Arco echoes in his late eighteenth-century portrait of the ghetto as a place where Jews hatched unsavory business plots in order to undermine Christian stability—read: subverted the societas fidei. Where does theology end and ethnic stereotyping begin? Not to mention that Raz-Krakotzkin himself candidly admits that what we see on paper is not necessarily what people thought. What the book calls new was not necessarily so. The later sixteenth century may have produced lists of permitted books. Nonetheless, the first to say that Jews were entitled to literature essential for their continuity—specifically, the Talmud— was Innocent IV, in 1247: “suis libris nolumus injuste privare.”1 From the time of Innocent IV, moreover, attacks on Jewish literature were centered on blasphemy, not the nova lex charge of the late 1230s that made the popes uneasy, whose canonical collection, the Decretals, of 1234, was also a nonscriptural nova lex. If, alongside accusations of blasphemy, the idea of nova lex did, as claimed, resurface in the sixteenth century, it was exclusively within the context of “rabbinic deliramenta” that were said to block conversion; contemporaries are clear. To be sure, Tommaso Campanella argued that the Talmud’s conception of God was faulty by philosophical standards (this is not noted in the book), but this does not mean, as is said many times (e.g., 38), but not supported with hard evidence, that the Talmud was treated as heretical or magical. Campanella, moreover, balanced calls for expurgation with others to exploit the alleged

1. Cited in Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century (New York: Hermon Press, 1966–89), 1:280.

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Book Reviews Christological content in rabbinic writings intuited by Christian savants. If censorship “cleansed,” for people like Campanella, the purpose was to attack Judaism “with its own sword.” And he was seconded—preceded would be more correct—by a large and influential chorus whose voice went unheeded: The Talmud was forever proscribed. Regardless, therefore, of the Talmud’s likely (full or partial) underground circulation, how can it be asserted that the censors created an enabling body of legitimate Jewish literature, when that legitimacy excluded the most central of Jewish books, for whose reinstatement censors apparently did not plead and for whose absence, codes (themselves actually proscribed, at least originally, and once again as late as Clement VIII) and books of prayer or reflection could not compensate. As for linking censorship to “disciplining,” the term that Italian historians of the Papal Roman Inquisition employ to describe this body’s activities, leading historians of this institution such as Gigliola Fragnito see disciplining not as refining, as does Raz-Krakotzkin, but as draconian and destructive, terms that seem better suited to describe the attack on the Talmud. Likewise, to assimilate the actual censorship of Hebrew works with the Catholic reaction to Protestantism and the internal Catholic attempt “to clean house” sweeps too far to the side those thirteenth- and fifteenth-century precedents in Spain, which, though (partially) surveyed in an early chapter, are subsequently neglected. Besides, fears (not mentioned), such as those of one Cardinal Scaglia, that the Talmud was fomenting Protestant schism in Germany led to a call for a total ban, not expurgation. This call does gibe with Raz-Krakotzkin’s claim that one reason for burning the Talmud was to prevent Judaization among a wider Christian population. Yet how might persons other than members of a very small Hebrew-reading elite be seduced by reading an unexpurgated text, readers who would not have been fooled by the censors’ codes and for whom euphemisms such as aku”m for goi had to have been transparent? Similarly, there seems to be some haste in drawing conclusions with respect to the treatment of sixteenth-century methods of classification and indexing. It greatly facilitates the claim about creating a body of enabling Jewish literature to say, “We cannot distinguish between the confiscation and burning of Hebrew books and the confiscation and burning of books in other languages,” because the Talmud “was classified under the category of Incertorum Auctorum libri prohibiti” (37). Yet one look at the randomness that characterizes sixteenthcentury indices cautions against building on this categorization. As all too often elsewhere, the canons and ius commune are not addressed head on. It was they—not a prooftext adduced by Augustine and first cited by Innocent III—that for 1,500 years formally justified a Jewish space in Christian society and that even the Roman ghetto’s founder, Pope Paul IV, explicitly sustained. Censorship perhaps helped refine long-standing legal definition and practice. That it actually created a novel sphere of Jewish legitimacy, I doubt. Indeed, to attribute so critical a role to censorship requires firm textual evidence. The same applies to making a convincing argument that censors were—as this book portrays them—enabling mediators. This portrayal implies that, either consciously or unconsciously, censors were bent on doing the opposite of what so many contemporaries said the censor should be doing, namely, forwarding conversion. In fact, it implies that censors were running a quasi-conspiratorial operation to undermine

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Book Reviews papal conversionist and restrictionist goals. These include convert censors—for so many censors were converts—who, like Andrea del Monte, otherwise wrote and preached virulently about Judaism’s perniciousness; and whose activities, Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, in his I nomi degli altri: Conversioni a Venezia e nel Friuli Veneto in etá moderna (Florence, 2008)—using archival material as his source— finds overwhelmingly pernicious in both intention and fact. What we are asked, then, is to accept on faith, not particulars, that the admittedly abrasive atmosphere of the print shop, in which Jews, Christians, and converts worked together to produce expurgated yet accurately edited books, ended on a positive note that favored both Jews and Christian Hebraists. Yet, the ambivalences noted in Neofiti-Jewish relations aside, it is hard to believe the idea was to make life easier for Jews. To me, it seems that if convert censors sought accuracy, their motive was neither the benefit of Jewish readers nor the good of the publisher. Rather, it was to produce better texts to forward conversion, for which a bowdlerized version would never do. Censors, as the book says, may have been facilitating Christian Hebraism, creating a text that Christians could use without fear of the Inquisition. But the goal of even this Hebraism was principally conversionary or, at least, deprecatory. Likewise, even should we stipulate that the involvement of Jews in censorship mirrored the transition to a more accepting Jewish attitude toward Christianity, the argument seems overstated. Change came earlier. The famous tosafist discussion of the talmudic passage ‘Avodah Zarah 2a already asks whether Christianity is idolatry, paralleling the Meiri’s well-known doubt of Christian idolatry hundreds of years before the sixteenth century. Clearer definitions, such as that of Leon Modena, thus suggest a culmination, not sharp innovation. Nonetheless, Modena’s admission that Christianity was monotheistic went hand in hand with the assertion that it was also structured from a chain of errors. And when the scientist, encyclopedist, and university graduate, the eighteenthcentury Isaac Lampronti, differentiates goi from aku”m, he has strong reservations: A goi is said not to practice idolatry—when it comes to allowing Christians to give testimony—yet a Jew is not to dine with a goi, even if the Jew consumes his own food.2 The more popular (so-called) autograph diary of Anna del Monte, published in 1793, has a convert-preacher (and potential censor) tell her in the Casa dei catecumeni, “E Voi ci andate descrivendo per Idolatri” (You go around calling us idolaters). Christian attitudes changed even more slowly. The same preacher tells Anna, “I Talmudisti, e … loro libri … causa della flagellazione delle vostre Anime” (The Talmudists and their books, the cause of the perdition of your souls). Censorship may have introduced clarity, but it did not, as Raz-Krakotzkin feels, bespeak a revolution. To say as well that censorship removed “vengeance” from the Jewish mentality means to assume, not just assert, that a vengeful posture once existed, rather than what I myself would call pervasive derision. Moreover, should we accept Raz-Krakotzkin’s thesis that censorship’s intent was to justify a continuing Jewish space in Christian society, then we must also appreciate this justification’s potential treachery. Reemphasizing the Jews’ 2. Pahad yiz.hak, s.v., “goi.”

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Book Reviews canonical and civil (ius commune) rights (including the right to books, however expurgated) also meant, as the eighteenth-century priest, legist, and firm supporter of the Roman Casa dei catecumeni Antonio Ricciulo said, condoning the effectively legal kidnapping of Jewish children whose converted (ex-Jewish) relatives had “offered” them for baptism; the legal excuse was that the state that guaranteed legal observance also saw itself as empowered to determine the welfare of children, including their souls. Whatever is asserted about its theoretical potential for Jewish continuity, in practice, censorship was a tool in the hands of a regime determined to end Jewish existence. As for the so-called autonomous Jewish space—whether that of the ghetto itself or some amorphous intellectual sphere—it would have been liberating only if we accept that in the ghetto, as Bonfil has argued and Raz-Krakotzkin seconds, Jews were freer to maintain their Judaism and acculturate. Evidence says acculturation preceded the ghetto: The syntax (not just interjected words) of the Hebrew found in notarial acts and entries in the record books of various communities is purely Italian, and from well before the ghetto period; rentals were recorded in Italian directly. The Jewish and Christian diet was essentially the same, as were dress and modes of popular expression. Not every ghetto was identical, but it is hard to argue that ghetto space itself and a set of approved books were the engine of modernizing changes. Nonetheless, and to return to the positive note on which I began, this book is worth the read. Raz-Krakotzkin writes history by emphasizing the nuances and inconsistencies intrinsic to cultural change and acculturation, a method that is not to be superciliously dismissed, as at least one writer did, by calling it “hedging.” It is through pointing out gradations and distinction that we are led to wonder what converts and censors really intended and whether true change in Jewish–Christian mutuality was taking place. This book thus challenges us, and regardless of how we regard its conclusions, it should not be put aside. Raz-Krakotzkin himself is aware of the limits, which he often spells out. If readers follow the author’s own careful lead, they will be well rewarded. Kenneth Stow University of Haifa Haifa, Israel

• • • MODERN JEWISH THOUGHT AND THEOLOGY Steven E. Aschheim. Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. xi, 194 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001081

Steven Aschheim’s three essays, which this volume presents, pose some intriguing questions, and not just historical ones about the past but also ones

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Book Reviews canonical and civil (ius commune) rights (including the right to books, however expurgated) also meant, as the eighteenth-century priest, legist, and firm supporter of the Roman Casa dei catecumeni Antonio Ricciulo said, condoning the effectively legal kidnapping of Jewish children whose converted (ex-Jewish) relatives had “offered” them for baptism; the legal excuse was that the state that guaranteed legal observance also saw itself as empowered to determine the welfare of children, including their souls. Whatever is asserted about its theoretical potential for Jewish continuity, in practice, censorship was a tool in the hands of a regime determined to end Jewish existence. As for the so-called autonomous Jewish space—whether that of the ghetto itself or some amorphous intellectual sphere—it would have been liberating only if we accept that in the ghetto, as Bonfil has argued and Raz-Krakotzkin seconds, Jews were freer to maintain their Judaism and acculturate. Evidence says acculturation preceded the ghetto: The syntax (not just interjected words) of the Hebrew found in notarial acts and entries in the record books of various communities is purely Italian, and from well before the ghetto period; rentals were recorded in Italian directly. The Jewish and Christian diet was essentially the same, as were dress and modes of popular expression. Not every ghetto was identical, but it is hard to argue that ghetto space itself and a set of approved books were the engine of modernizing changes. Nonetheless, and to return to the positive note on which I began, this book is worth the read. Raz-Krakotzkin writes history by emphasizing the nuances and inconsistencies intrinsic to cultural change and acculturation, a method that is not to be superciliously dismissed, as at least one writer did, by calling it “hedging.” It is through pointing out gradations and distinction that we are led to wonder what converts and censors really intended and whether true change in Jewish–Christian mutuality was taking place. This book thus challenges us, and regardless of how we regard its conclusions, it should not be put aside. Raz-Krakotzkin himself is aware of the limits, which he often spells out. If readers follow the author’s own careful lead, they will be well rewarded. Kenneth Stow University of Haifa Haifa, Israel

• • • MODERN JEWISH THOUGHT AND THEOLOGY Steven E. Aschheim. Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. xi, 194 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001081

Steven Aschheim’s three essays, which this volume presents, pose some intriguing questions, and not just historical ones about the past but also ones

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Book Reviews about the curiously enduring challenge of German Jewish intellectuals for contemporary critical thought. Aschheim’s examination of the persistence of the intellectual legacy of German Jewish emigrants abroad is a critically suggestive reminder that the auratic reception of Weimar intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor W. Adorno, as well as Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss, warrants a reflection that does not ignore the complicated but formative historical filiations that tie the present to an imaginary past that it relives as its future. Aschheim’s approach becomes especially illuminating where it regains critical access to a historical past that had been so successfully erased that attempts to reinvent a new future were oblivious of the legacy on which it rested. In his first essay, “Bildung in Palestine,” Aschheim demonstrates that if the modern reconstruction of Palestine was in many ways a very German project whose cultural vision owed its significance to the German Jewish experience out of which it sprang, then a critical evaluation of the Zionism it advanced hinges on the recognition of the profound humanist concerns that inform the binationalism that defines it. Defined by the Jewish experience that the early German Zionist had worked through, the history of Palestine and later Israel, Aschheim suggests, can only be comprehended if the moment of critical humanism and its alternative approach to reinventing a “Jewish” state come into view as a creative response not just to the geopolitical predicament in Palestine under Ottoman rule but also to the impasse of nationalist constructions that had come to a head in Europe as well. Simultaneously, Aschheim’s attention to the genealogical ties of Zionism forces us to reconsider the claim of a monolithic construction that both Zionists and their critics have so fiercely maintained and to begin to see the rich and complicated filiations that ran between the German and the Jewish experience that provided grounds for constructing identity no longer in naive embrace of a monolithic vision of its origins. As a consequence, long underestimated if not forgotten figures such as Hans Kohn, Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, Robert Weltsch, and the celebrated but at the same time strangely iconized Martin Buber emerge as more than haplessly anachronistic champions of Yeckishkeit. Unless the critical link between Israeli Zionism and its German Jewish origin is recovered and its alternatively binational moment appreciated, Aschheim’s study suggests, a historical understanding of Israel’s complicated position remains illusory. If the German Jewish legacy might have only gained its momentum abroad, the existence “beyond borders” became a central aspect of the life and thought of German Jews pushed from what for centuries had been considered their “homeland.” Just as figures such as Hans Kohn and Martin Buber challenged notions of national identity but presented a transborder identity open enough to span the worlds of Israel as well as the United States as its new home, historians such as Walter Laqueur, George Mosse, Fritz Stern, and Peter Gay saw themselves in a world whose cold war politics called for a vision whose resolute postnational awareness pointed beyond traditional border constructions. The second essay, “Tension of Historical Wissenschaft: The Émigré Historians and the Making of German Cultural History,” examines the distinctly different if not at times complementary approaches that distinguish German

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Book Reviews historiography from the particular vision of German cultural history examined by German Jewish historians in exile. If the first and the concluding essay on the Jewish Weimar intellectuals highlight the profound impact on the German Jewish experience and the way it inspired modern critical thought, the essay on the curious disconnect between the German and German Jewish historians and the principled disregard of the latter’s work by the former group demonstrates how historiography can at times become, oddly enough, the continuation if not repetition of history with other means. As Aschheim laconically concludes, “The regrettable nondialogue continues.” However, and critically important, the creative force of the attempts of German Jewish historians at rewriting history in a way that would no longer exclude their own experience would become one more time a creative realization of their German Jewish legacy—abroad. The concluding essay examines the peculiar phenomenon of how a bunch of “Weimar” Jews such as Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Scholem, and Strauss could ascend to such prominence and assume the status of “icons.” Aschheim’s study reminds us that the unquestionable theoretical significance of their thought does not suffice to account for the stunning presence they have reclaimed in the current situation. If Aschheim poses the question of this rise to iconic importance in a critical manner that highlights the peculiarly paradoxical trajectory of their reception history, his presentation remains suggestive but abstains from dispensing final answers. But perhaps the sheer fact that the current conjunction of theoretical debates is addressed with regard to its historically formative context provides the critically illuminating change of perspective—or historiographic paradigm—these essays suggest. The German Jewish legacy that Hermann Levin Goldschmidt described in his seminal study of 1957, whose English translation appeared half a century later in the fall of 2007 as The Legacy of German Jewry1—a project that Scholem so categorically criticized while he emerged as one of its most formidable representatives—has now finally received with Aschheim’s Beyond the Border a first and long-awaited study of that legacy’s enduring importance. Highlighting the genealogical filiations of this contribution, Beyond the Borders traces the reasons for the postcontemporary significance of that legacy, the reasons why it was overshadowed, and the reasons why the German Jewish contribution of such figures as Goldschmidt bear a crucial message for our postmodern world. As Aschheim reminds us, the full critical force of these thinkers can only be recovered if we attend to the particular specificity of their thought and the context in which it arose, for its universal aspirations ground in a very particular and “real” history that we yet need fully to understand. Willi Goetschel University of Toronto Toronto, Canada

• • • 1. Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, The Legacy of German Jewry, trans. David Suchoff (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

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Book Reviews Christian Wiese. The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007. 292 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001093

To be posthumously considered a Jewish philosopher may not have been desirable for Hans Jonas (1903–93), a student of Martin Heidegger and the Protestant theologian Rudolph Bultmann. His first major published work, Gnosis und Spätantike (1934), appearing in English as The Gnostic Religion (1958), however, clearly places him in line with the scholarship and thinking of a host of German Jewish intellectuals in the last years of the Weimar Republic. His early work is akin in some respects to that of Gershom Scholem, with whom he shared a lasting friendship. With Martin Buber and even Ernst Bloch, whom he would later oppose, he shares a theological impulse that informs his historical research. Yet Jonas was neither a historian nor a theologian. In his later years, his attention turned to practical philosophy, and he was concerned in particular with a philosophy of nature. A philosophy without preconditions would be his aim. In contrast to theological speculation, Jonas would later prize thinking that was grounded in intellectual neutrality. He sought to develop an ethics that could not be denied its universal meaning on account of its author being a Jew. “Thinking,” he once remarked, “the true occupation of the philosopher, must be entirely free of such binds and hereditary preconditions in orientation.” Even faith in the existence of God tainted its absolute autonomy: “[T]he method of philosophy demands a clear commitment to atheism,” he stated. And yet, “as both philosopher and Jew, there is an obvious tension.” Jonas’s biography follows the trajectory of others in his generation. His study of Gnosticism appeared in print one year after his flight to England (1933) and, in retrospect, can be read as one more signpost at the end of the Jewish Enlightenment, which reached its pinnacle in the German-speaking world. Britain served as a medium and a transit point for Jonas twice: once en route to Palestine and again when he was a victorious soldier returning to Germany. He undertook the voyage to Jerusalem with a great spiritual longing that was shared with other German Jews of his time, his Zionism bearing strong religious hues. Upon his arrival in Jerusalem, he joined up with Gershom Scholem and the Pilagesh circle, laying the groundwork for an academic career. His intellectual pursuits were mitigated by the outbreak of war, and he joined the Jewish Brigade as part of the British forces. At the end of the war, he proceeded to Canada and then on to New York, where in the 1950s he was appointed professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research. The Jewish dimensions of The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas bring Jonas’s bifurcated role as “philosopher and Jew” into focus. The intellectual harmony of these two worlds is the key question. Are there two Hans Jonases, and if so, which is the Doppelgänger? Christian Wiese renders a large cache of unpublished material accessible and offers the English reader a wide variety of untranslated letters, lectures, and interviews. This is an addition to the tremendous effort that he has undertaken to make Jonas’s work available in German. Most notable is the annotation of extensive interviews with Jonas published in 2003

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Book Reviews under the title Erinnerungen, which has now also appeared in English with Brandeis University Press. Yet the Jewish dimensions of what was clearly a central figure in modern Jewish thought still remain rather ambiguous. It is not clear whether we should understand Jonas’s Judaism as a necessary precondition or as a hindrance that would mitigate the neutrality of his philosophy (as an absolute absence of preconditions would seem rather implausible). This problem becomes apparent in Chapter 3, which begins with Jonas’s opposition to Heidegger and Bloch and concludes with a discussion of his address on “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice.” Jonas’s belief in the existence of God is a recurring question throughout the book. It is here that we come to understand his belief as qualified. Jonas is resolved to uphold the absolute benevolence and omniscience of God, while jettisoning omnipotence. In his defense, he may have reserved enough to constitute the basis of reasonable belief. But whether God’s all-goodness can be preserved with a corresponding notion of divine incapacity is a question that requires further investigation. An identifiable Judaic motif here is the z.imz.um (self-contraction) of God, which he borrows from Lurianic Kabbalah. Just as the earthly world had revealed itself to be governed by exile, abandonment, failure, and powerlessness, so was the divine world equally in crisis in Luria. The unmoved mover was jolted into motion: powerless to stop evil, he must retreat from active engagement in the world. In Wiese’s reading, the difference between the idea of z.imz.um and Jonas’s notion of divine impotence is that while the z.imz.um is a temporary condition, the absence of power is permanent for Jonas. Wiese understands this as an antimessianic trope, which distinguishes Jonas from the Kabbalah and possibly also a modern form of Gnosticism. In Luria, the current state of failure is predicated on an earlier disaster—the collapse of Creation—while in Jonas, it is uncertain as to where causation begins or ends. In avoidance of a Gnostic nihilism, Jonas cannot envision a reversal of the z.imz.um and therefore accepts the permanent state of divine impotence. The precise moment of divine retreat, however, also remains unclear and equally therefore the origins of evil. There are some editorial problems, such as typographical errors and Germanisms, which could have been avoided by the publisher. The letter from Hans Jonas to Hannah Arendt on Eichmann (181), which is dated 1963, could not have been written before May 1964 by its own reference. However, these errors do not detract from the contribution that The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas has made to our understanding of the man and his place within German Jewish thought as a whole. Eric Jacobson Roehampton University London, England

• • • 189

Book Reviews Ken Koltun-Fromm. Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. ix, 180 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400940900110X

Abraham Geiger, as Ken Koltun-Fromm observes, devoted a good deal of his intellectual energy to the elucidation of “‘highest-order meanings’ such as ‘ethical monotheism,’ the ‘mission of Israel,’ and the Jewish ‘spirit’” (11). Judaism was, for Geiger, at bottom “a set of moral universal truths that continually reappear in Jewish history” (25). Forgoing any attempt to provide a comprehensive account of Geiger’s understanding of these truths, Koltun-Fromm focuses his attention on Geiger’s “penetrating analysis of religious authority that still resonates today for contemporary Jewry.” Koltun-Fromm is less concerned with clarifying Geiger’s overall intellectual orientation than with reading him in a way that “can help us read ourselves, and enable us to uncover, and thus recognize those personal sources that motivate and inspire” (9). He has written a book about Geiger not so much to enable us to understand him better as to help us understand ourselves better, and thereby to assist us in building better Jewish communities. What Koltun-Fromm appears to admire most in Geiger is his approach to the Bible in “his most prodigious work, The Original Text and Translations of the Bible in Its Dependence on the Inner Development of Judaism,” known in short as the Urschrift (41). For Geiger, as he skillfully shows, the biblical text was not so much a repository of vital truths as a record of their ongoing reformulation by generation after generation of Jews. Far from being a monolithic enterprise, it reflected innumerable, half-buried historical conflicts. It “is and was for all time an eternal living word, and not a dead book” (47). Once the text had finally solidified, “more creative hermeneutical efforts were enlisted” by postbiblical translators and exegetes “to produce a sacred text infused with religious authority.” Geiger’s greatest contribution, according to Koltun-Fromm, was to stress the never-ending character of this process of reinterpretation, one in which modern Jews could themselves participate as individuals “through creatively rereading texts and their translations” (62). While he clearly regarded this process as an inherently progressive one, he did not envision it as culminating in a universally authoritative reconstruction of the Jewish tradition but in something much more multifaceted. As an exponent of pluralism, he often found himself at odds not only with the Orthodox but also with other contemporary reformers. At the rabbinical conferences of the 1840s, for instance, he stood opposed to the general tendency to enact broad resolutions for the entire German Jewish community and defended the role of “the rabbinic scholar who passionately addresses local concerns through a committed engagement with the Jewish past” (88). The proper training and the activities of such people were matters of the utmost importance to Geiger. Only if they were the recipients of an education that united Wissenschaft with the rabbinic calling could they guide local communities in ways that would challenge and improve them and bring about a creative revitalization of their religious practice.

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Book Reviews The preparation of the men who would perform these tasks would ideally take place through training and studying with Jewish studies faculties at German universities. Rabbis would emerge from this environment with “inner sensibilities and personal meanings” grounded “upon the bedrock of Jewish Wissenschaft” (118). In turning to the communities they were destined to serve, they would not provide stale and lifeless reiterations of theological dogmas but would serve as inspiring exemplars of their individual commitments. Like Geiger himself, they would not teach through catechisms but with what his own son called his “living freshness.” In Koltun-Fromm’s words, the “authority of personal meaning determines the nature and scope of Geiger’s educational philosophy and practice” (126). Apart from his patient but unyielding criticism of Geiger’s retrograde gender politics, Koltun-Fromm portrays Geiger in an almost entirely positive light. He does not, however, make any grand claims on his behalf or present him as a thinker from whom we can derive indispensable, otherwise unavailable insights. But he does indicate an important way in which Geiger’s Jewish philosophy can serve as a corrective to one current trend. Citing Steven Cohen and Arnold Eisen’s The Jew Within, Koltun-Fromm notes the tendency of modern Jews, particularly in America, to “abandon organizational life within the public sphere” and “to turn instead to more intimate concerns of family, synagogue, and the ‘sovereign self’” (134). Koltun-Fromm does not explicitly deplore this tendency. He does not reiterate the concerns about the debilitating effects of narrow individualism found in some of the works that he cites, such as the important and influential volume edited by Robert Bellah in 1985, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Nevertheless, it seems safe to assume that he shares some of Bellah’s and other like-minded social critics’ apprehensions and appreciates Geiger’s thought largely for the way in which it provides a potential response to them. Geiger can speak to our contemporaries, Koltun-Fromm believes, because he both shared and endorsed their taste for individualism and outlined a path that leads beyond it. His “liberal Judaism appeals to the authority of personal meaning in order to recenter those meanings within communal practices.” He showed “how religious authority should be lived—in historical memories and reading practices, in the embodied rituals and local communities that provoke and obligate in their own right, and in the education of social actors who flourish within strong communal attachments” (134). It may indeed be the case that Geiger’s outlook is just as much in tune with contemporary sensibilities and as capable of elevating them as Koltun-Fromm claims. But it is nevertheless hard to believe that a better acquaintance with Geiger’s own thought will do much by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that he apparently wishes to see. What would be needed to accomplish that would be rabbis and teachers capable of playing the role that Geiger had in mind. They would have to be people both immersed in Wissenschaft and blessed with the ability to transmit their knowledge in a spiritually exciting fashion to the general public. They would need to be people in possession of the kind of “living freshness” that Ludwig Geiger ascribed to his father and is today, I am afraid, in rather

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Book Reviews short supply in the synagogues in which Abraham Geiger is still regarded as a respected forbear or could possibly be seen as such. Allan Arkush Binghamton University Binghamton, New York

• • • Abraham P. Socher. The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. xiii, 248 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001111

Shlomo ben Yehoshua (1753–1800), an Ashkenazic Jew better known as Solomon Maimon, has been of great interest to modern Jews and to the historians who study them. He has also played an important role in the history of modern philosophy as an early critic and commentator on Kantian philosophy. His famous Lebensgeschichte has been reprinted and translated into Hebrew and into English (although incompletely); his commentary on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed has been reprinted a number of times, and his entire corpus is readily available in most university libraries. A quick search on RAMBI and in the Philosopher’s Index will yield dozens of articles and a number of monographs in a number of modern scholarly languages. But much of this thicket of material consists of specialized studies that look at one aspect of Maimon’s life and career: his autobiographical self-presentation, his Maimonidean commentary, his reading of Kant, his portrait of an early hasidic court, his role in the Berlin Haskalah (or perhaps lack thereof), and so on. The best-known aspects of Maimon’s career—his commentary on the Guide, his critique of Kantian philosophy, and his autobiography—are usually presented separately. Some of this is no doubt attributable to distinctive intended audiences and different reception histories. The Hebrew commentary on the Guide, Givat ha-Moreh, was certainly aimed at a Jewish audience and had most of its reception among the Jews of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. Maimon’s work on Kant was presented in German to a largely non-Jewish philosophical audience. His German autobiography reached many audiences. While aimed at non-Jews, it was translated into Hebrew and Yiddish and became a blueprint for later maskilic autobiographies. A fourth major aspect of Maimon’s work, his interest in Kabbalah, while noticed by some scholars and treated in a recent monograph by Meir Buzaglo, has by and large not been integrated into the study of Maimon.1 By tackling all these aspects of Maimon’s career and by

1. Meir Buzaglo, Solomon Maimon: Monism, Skepticism, and Mathematics (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).

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Book Reviews short supply in the synagogues in which Abraham Geiger is still regarded as a respected forbear or could possibly be seen as such. Allan Arkush Binghamton University Binghamton, New York

• • • Abraham P. Socher. The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. xiii, 248 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001111

Shlomo ben Yehoshua (1753–1800), an Ashkenazic Jew better known as Solomon Maimon, has been of great interest to modern Jews and to the historians who study them. He has also played an important role in the history of modern philosophy as an early critic and commentator on Kantian philosophy. His famous Lebensgeschichte has been reprinted and translated into Hebrew and into English (although incompletely); his commentary on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed has been reprinted a number of times, and his entire corpus is readily available in most university libraries. A quick search on RAMBI and in the Philosopher’s Index will yield dozens of articles and a number of monographs in a number of modern scholarly languages. But much of this thicket of material consists of specialized studies that look at one aspect of Maimon’s life and career: his autobiographical self-presentation, his Maimonidean commentary, his reading of Kant, his portrait of an early hasidic court, his role in the Berlin Haskalah (or perhaps lack thereof), and so on. The best-known aspects of Maimon’s career—his commentary on the Guide, his critique of Kantian philosophy, and his autobiography—are usually presented separately. Some of this is no doubt attributable to distinctive intended audiences and different reception histories. The Hebrew commentary on the Guide, Givat ha-Moreh, was certainly aimed at a Jewish audience and had most of its reception among the Jews of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. Maimon’s work on Kant was presented in German to a largely non-Jewish philosophical audience. His German autobiography reached many audiences. While aimed at non-Jews, it was translated into Hebrew and Yiddish and became a blueprint for later maskilic autobiographies. A fourth major aspect of Maimon’s work, his interest in Kabbalah, while noticed by some scholars and treated in a recent monograph by Meir Buzaglo, has by and large not been integrated into the study of Maimon.1 By tackling all these aspects of Maimon’s career and by

1. Meir Buzaglo, Solomon Maimon: Monism, Skepticism, and Mathematics (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).

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Book Reviews showing the ways in which they relate to each other, Abraham Socher’s work makes an especially valuable contribution. Most crucially, Socher argues that Maimon’s commentary on the Guide represents a revival of the radically rationalist interpretation of Maimonides. Socher suggests that “Maimon’s commentary promised to help remotivate not merely a canonical work of Jewish philosophy but also the world and vocabulary of medieval Jewish philosophical discourse” (81). Indeed, according to Socher, Maimon’s commentary effectively represented a proposal that “Haskalah” be understood as an adoption of the radical interpretation of Maimonides. Socher’s presentation of Maimon as a reviver of a medieval tradition offers an important contribution to an ongoing discussion in the historiography of the Jewish Enlightenment movement that seeks to historicize the Haskalah’s vision of itself as novel. Like his mentor, the late Amos Funkenstein, Socher emphasizes the importance of medieval Jewish philosophy in the Haskalah and asks how to interpret the presence of medieval philosophical discourse in a modernist movement. But, in contrast to the portrait offered by other scholars, Socher points to Maimon as an example of the ways in which a deep engagement with medieval Jewish thought can lead not to conservatism or moderation but to radicalism. But how much does the presence of some “radical voices” (including such an interesting one as Maimon’s) require us to change the overall portrait? Socher is undoubtedly correct that the moderates and the radicals among the Jewish thinkers of the eighteenth century “shared a set of distinctive texts, arguments, and concepts—in short, a world of discourse—at the center of which stood Maimonides’ medieval Aristotelianism” (57). But the Maimonideanism transmitted in the early modern period seems to have been largely of the moderate variety that assumed a synthesis of Torah and philosophy. In this sense, Maimon’s revival of a radical Maimonides constitutes a countercultural move. Yes, Maimon serves as a reminder that not all maskilim were Halevian fideists—a reminder that many readers (including this one) should heed. Yet, as Socher acknowledges, Maimon was “idiosyncratic” and not typical, despite the success of the Givat ha-Moreh in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, Socher has deepened our understanding of the Haskalah and its relation to previous intellectual traditions by showing that even the most radical figure in the Haskalah was intimately connected to the “world of discourse” of medieval Jewish philosophy. In fact, Socher’s treatment of Maimon’s life (or at least his self-presentation of it) offers an argument for why Haskalah philosophy is more closely tied to medieval philosophical traditions than other Enlightenment movements. According to Socher, the language of medieval Jewish philosophy was the lingua franca of intellectual debate in eighteenth-century Eastern European Judaism—the world from which Maimon emerged. By focusing on some of Maimon’s writings from the period of his earlier career as a yeshiva student and then (briefly) a hasid before his famous arrival at the gates of Berlin, Socher offers us the suggestion that other eighteenth-century Jewish intellectual movements were also informed by the questions and even the vocabulary of the medieval philosophers. Socher’s intriguing proposal is that we should understand divisions between Hasidism,

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Book Reviews mitnagdism, and Haskalah (in part) as an argument over a medieval question of how best to attain perfection (shlemut) and happiness (‘osher). While Maimon may have been recognized as an important critic of Kant in his own day, in fact, his German writings were largely ignored until the middle of the nineteenth century. It was at this point that Maimon was revived as one of the “founders of German idealism” (107). While Socher offers a brief reception history of Maimon the Kantian interpreter, his major interest here lies in linking Maimon’s Kantian critique to his “Jewish” writings as a kind of “German Idealism in a Maimonidean Key,” the title of the third chapter of the book. Not only does Maimon write commentaries on Kant in the style of traditional Jewish commentaries, but also, according to Socher, he offers a version of idealism that is best read in light of medieval theories of the active intellect. While some may quibble over aspects of Socher’s reconstruction, the question posed here is an important one: How did medieval Aristotelian discourse, refracted through medieval Jewish and Islamic thinkers, penetrate the (Jewish) debate over Kantianism? Through Socher’s reading of Maimon, we have a fresh perspective on how modern Jewish philosophy remains intricately linked to premodern discussions. Reading Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte as a self-conscious attempt to shape philosophical opinion, Socher successfully navigates the thorny interpretive and methodological issues involved in using autobiographies as historical sources and moves us beyond tired debates over whether this or that scene is “accurate.” Among other contributions, Socher is able to show us why Maimon’s presentation of himself as a rube needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Socher’s major interest in the autobiography is the way in which it constitutes a master text for interpreting not only Maimon’s life but his philosophical accomplishments as well. A close reading of the attitude toward books in the autobiography allows Socher to demonstrate the ways in which Maimon’s move toward Enlightenment constitutes only a partial break with the traditional textuality of early modern Ashkenazic culture. And Socher argues for reading the last chapter of the autobiography—usually excluded from modern editions—as a carefully crafted conclusion that links Maimon’s pursuit of modern metaphysical philosophy to the language and conceptual world of medieval philosophy and Kabbalah. That chapter consists of an allegorical story of a masked ball at which men seek to dance with the beautiful masked mistress of the house, “Madame M[etaphysics].” Here, Socher convincingly argues, Maimon rewrites the allegory of the king in his palace at the end of the Guide of the Perplexed and the story of the beautiful maiden in the Zohar to present an allegory of the history of philosophy: While previous philosophers tried various dances to win the favors of the masked lady, and some ignored the lady and went after her chambermaid (Physics), Maimon will not make such mistakes. While a fuller reception history of Maimon’s works could be written, Socher’s last chapter serves us well as a preliminary report taking us through Maimon’s “Literary Afterlife” from the German republic of letters to the Eastern European Haskalah and into twentieth-century scholarship. Socher also surveys some of Maimon’s appearances in novels, from Daniel Deronda to The

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Book Reviews Chosen—where undoubtedly more learned about him than from the doctoral dissertation on Maimon completed by Chaim Potok a few years earlier. Socher offers his monograph as a contribution to intellectual and cultural history and not as a chapter in the history of philosophy. That there really is a difference between the two disciplines can be seen by comparing this book to works that offer reconstructions of Maimon’s thought as a coherent system of philosophy2 or that focus on his contribution to the “Copernican revolution in philosophy” brought about by Kant.3 Some recent work does treat the historical context of Maimon’s philosophical work and points out the importance of his knowledge of premodern Jewish philosophy.4 But these works mainly suggest heuristic devices toward better understanding of Maimon’s thought. For Socher, a better understanding of Maimon’s thought is a heuristic for broader understanding of the modern Jewish experience. Adam Shear University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

• • • MODERN JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY Naomi Seidman. Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. viii, 333 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001123

In this fascinating intellectual history of the political situations in which translations arise, Naomi Seidman shows how translation reveals aspects of Jewish–Christian relations that have been occluded or otherwise forgotten. For Seidman, translation becomes a site for theorizing doubleness and difference, equivalence and transmutation with regard to Judeo-Christianity. Moving nimbly between the first Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible to translations by Aquila, Jerome, Luther, Mendelssohn, Buber, and Rosenzweig before ending with a discussion of contemporary translations of the Holocaust and Yiddish modernism in the work of Wiesel and Singer, respectively, Seidman carefully unpacks the theological subtexts and ideological contexts in which translations were produced. The triple-entendre contained in the title of her book betrays the 2. See, e.g., Samuel Hugo Bergman, The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), or Buzaglo’s monograph, Solomon Maimon. 3. See, e.g., Samuel Atlas, From Critical to Speculative Idealism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964). 4. See, e.g., the contributions of Gideon Freudenthal and Yossef Schwartz to the volume edited by Freudenthal, Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003).

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Book Reviews Chosen—where undoubtedly more learned about him than from the doctoral dissertation on Maimon completed by Chaim Potok a few years earlier. Socher offers his monograph as a contribution to intellectual and cultural history and not as a chapter in the history of philosophy. That there really is a difference between the two disciplines can be seen by comparing this book to works that offer reconstructions of Maimon’s thought as a coherent system of philosophy2 or that focus on his contribution to the “Copernican revolution in philosophy” brought about by Kant.3 Some recent work does treat the historical context of Maimon’s philosophical work and points out the importance of his knowledge of premodern Jewish philosophy.4 But these works mainly suggest heuristic devices toward better understanding of Maimon’s thought. For Socher, a better understanding of Maimon’s thought is a heuristic for broader understanding of the modern Jewish experience. Adam Shear University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

• • • MODERN JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY Naomi Seidman. Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. viii, 333 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001123

In this fascinating intellectual history of the political situations in which translations arise, Naomi Seidman shows how translation reveals aspects of Jewish–Christian relations that have been occluded or otherwise forgotten. For Seidman, translation becomes a site for theorizing doubleness and difference, equivalence and transmutation with regard to Judeo-Christianity. Moving nimbly between the first Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible to translations by Aquila, Jerome, Luther, Mendelssohn, Buber, and Rosenzweig before ending with a discussion of contemporary translations of the Holocaust and Yiddish modernism in the work of Wiesel and Singer, respectively, Seidman carefully unpacks the theological subtexts and ideological contexts in which translations were produced. The triple-entendre contained in the title of her book betrays the 2. See, e.g., Samuel Hugo Bergman, The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), or Buzaglo’s monograph, Solomon Maimon. 3. See, e.g., Samuel Atlas, From Critical to Speculative Idealism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964). 4. See, e.g., the contributions of Gideon Freudenthal and Yossef Schwartz to the volume edited by Freudenthal, Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003).

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Book Reviews significance and stakes of her project: First, “faithful renderings” are supposedly ones that are characterized by fidelity, accuracy, and loyalty. But, as Seidman shows, these characteristics are marked by sexual undertones that reflect certain ideologies, such as the transparency of meaning or the purity of the original. Second, “faithful renderings” refer to translations between faiths, particularly between Judaism and Christianity, the Hebrew Bible, and its various incarnations in national languages. And finally, “faithful renderings” conjure up the leap of faith of the translator, the contingencies involved in any “border-crossing” or encounter in which two differences—linguistic, cultural, national, religious— meet each other. Beginning with a theoretical introduction that is framed by her own family history of displacement, encounter, and linguistic exchange, Seidman rejects all “essentialist” understandings of translation that seek, on the one hand, to universalize translation or, on the other, to reduce translation to a transparent practice of conveying inhering meanings. Instead, she looks for sites of erasure, occlusion, and difference, which, in her words, express “how the translators saw themselves vis-à-vis various ‘others’” (30). What emerges is a kind of mapping of sites of encounter between Jew and Christian, Judaism and Christianity, that evidences complex religious histories and political ideologies. Seidman makes no attempt to write a “comprehensive” history of translation or Jewish–Christian relations; rather, she is interested in specific themes and topoi that open up the field of translation studies in new ways. The first two chapters focus on Hebrew Bible translations in late antiquity. Showing how theological rhetoric becomes imbricated in sexual rhetoric, Seidman argues that the Septuagint, “the first great translation project in the West” (38), is a preeminent site for studying the religious and sexual dimensions of “faithful” translations. Reading a single passage from Matthew that cites the Septuagint version of Isaiah, she shows how the translation of ha’almah (young woman) as parthenos (virgin) threw “religious authority, textual reliability, and the paternal line into anxious question” (39) by destabilizing the legitimacy of Jesus and the virginity of Mary. In the second chapter, Seidman turns to the case of Aquila, who is often considered “the worst” translator of all time for his literalist renderings of the Hebrew Bible into an unreadable Greek (76). But rather than resuscitating the stale debates between word-for-word translation and sense-for-sense translation, Seidman argues that a theological subtext haunts this debate, namely, one in which the translator’s body is transfigured through the processes of translation. For Aquila, translating Hebrew into Greek also meant transforming his body from uncircumcised to circumcised, and it is here—on the body—that Seidman locates the mirroring of the “Hebraized Greek text he produced” (93). She casts Aquila as a “liminal figure” (109) and even “a rebel hero” (114) who moved between multiple communities, languages, and systems of power to produce a decidedly defiant text. The next two chapters turn to German translations of the Hebrew Bible, beginning with Luther’s “sense-for-sense” translation before discussing practices of translation by Mendelssohn, Buber, Rosenzweig, and, finally, Benjamin. But rather than debating the merits of Luther’s rendering of the Bible into idiomatic

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Book Reviews German, Seidman examines the theological assumptions built into Luther’s ambition: He wanted, she argues, to neutralize the experience of the foreign by rendering Judaism and the Jewish exegetical tradition absent from the German Bible. While Jews, Luther believed, could not be converted, Hebrew texts could be “converted” into German texts, something that resulted in the dangerous and precarious “figure of the untranslatable Jew” (133). In the fourth chapter, Seidman moves to Mendelssohn’s ambition of rendering the Hebrew Bible into proper, elevated German that signified Bildung and refinement (169) in order to open up the question of what is occluded in the myth of German–Jewish symbiosis. Turning to the debates over the heritage of Buber and Rosenzweig’s Bible translation, Seidman sees German–Jewish translation as both a polemic and a record of “the selfpresentation of a divided individual or group” (159). This, she concludes, is the “double bind” of German–Jewish translation, a paradox of national belonging and estrangement, cultural hybridity and linguistic doubling. The final two chapters turn to post-Holocaust translations, primarily focusing on the transformations of Elie Wiesel’s seminal memoir, Night, and the work and reception of Isaac Bashevis Singer in America. Seidman foregrounds and proceeds to deconstruct a claim made by Levinas that the Holocaust “can only be told in the language of the victim” and cannot, in essence, be translated through “interchangeable” signs (199). She argues that what we understand today as “the Holocaust” emerged through a long “process of semantic consolidation” (200) in which Holocaust narratives were produced, translated, and received in a wide variety of cultural contexts. The Holocaust has, in fact, been written and rewritten, translated and retranslated for different audiences, and it is precisely through these strategic translations that the Holocaust has acquired the shape and recognition that it has today. But what Seidman is particularly interested in unpacking are the “censorial moments that have shaped Holocaust narrative,” the obfuscations and covert translations that have also contributed to its translational and transnational character. Here, her case study is arguably the most famous Holocaust memoir ever published, Wiesel’s Night. Far from being an “unmediated autobiographical account” of what happened—the fantasy of channeling the thing itself, the experience of Auschwitz in all its singularity—Seidman argues that Wiesel strategically positioned, rewrote, and edited the Yiddish, French, and English versions of his memoir to convey different things to different audiences. Whereas the Yiddish version ends with the rhetoric of revenge—his ambition “to rape German girls” (221)—the French and English versions end with the depiction of the survivor as martyr. In a deconstructive vein, her point is not that Wiesel’s original is “more accurate” than its translational transformations, but rather that the text itself is “unstable” (234), evidencing more than one origin and a multiplicity of self-presentations. The final chapter, on translation and assimilation, examines several of the short stories by Singer and the roots of his success in America. Using Cynthia Ozick’s famous novella “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” as her jumping-off point, Seidman argues that Singer’s oeuvre, particularly after 1943, can be considered to be all “about translation” (254). For Singer, there is no pure, originary space for an authentic Yiddish language; rather, there are only spaces of

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Book Reviews contamination and play between the Yiddish and English versions of his works, ones that place Jewish–Christian differences after the Holocaust into strong relief. In sum, Seidman has written a thought-provoking, persuasive, and rich account of the importance of examining the theological and political practices of translation in Jewish–Christian relations. Translation becomes, in effect, the very model for understanding this relationship and its fraught, entangled history. Todd Samuel Presner University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California

• • • Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese, eds. Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives. Leiden: Brill, 2007. xxii, 658 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001135

The editors open this ambitious volume with the observation, by now commonplace, that modernity has seen the rise of a new way of understanding Jewish history. While earlier biblical and rabbinic approaches to the past understood events of the past and present in archetypal terms, Wissenschaft des Judentums and Haskalah scholars brought a historical-critical lens to Jewish texts and sought to transform the history of the Jews both into a respected contributor to the academy as well as a tool for political change. While this development transformed Jewish life, the editors write, the development of Jewish studies has since stalled. Not only does Jewish studies lack the sort of methodological critique that has characterized the broader academy since the 1970s, but also the continuing dominance of history has relegated other approaches within the field of Jewish studies to a distinctly secondary status. With this collection, which grew out of a 2003 conference in Berlin, Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese aim to jump-start a process of reflection on and development of the current state of Jewish studies. As they see it, this process must begin with a greater awareness of the development of modern Jewish historiography and its methodologies, and it must include a deeper appreciation of historiography’s influence on Judaism and Jewish identity; they also hope to bring the insights of poststructuralism and cultural studies that have so affected the broader study of the humanities into the study of Jewish history, Jewish text, and Judaism. The book’s twenty-one essays approach this task from a variety of angles, which the editors have grouped into five separate sections. The book’s first section addresses the development of modern Jewish historiography. Most of the essays in this section describe sweeping trends in Jewish historiography (e.g., David Myers’s “Glaube and Geschichte: A Vexed Relationship in GermanJewish Culture”), but Jonathan Hess’s “Moses Mendelssohn and the Polemics of History” offers an incisive analysis of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem that complicates

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Book Reviews contamination and play between the Yiddish and English versions of his works, ones that place Jewish–Christian differences after the Holocaust into strong relief. In sum, Seidman has written a thought-provoking, persuasive, and rich account of the importance of examining the theological and political practices of translation in Jewish–Christian relations. Translation becomes, in effect, the very model for understanding this relationship and its fraught, entangled history. Todd Samuel Presner University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California

• • • Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese, eds. Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives. Leiden: Brill, 2007. xxii, 658 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001135

The editors open this ambitious volume with the observation, by now commonplace, that modernity has seen the rise of a new way of understanding Jewish history. While earlier biblical and rabbinic approaches to the past understood events of the past and present in archetypal terms, Wissenschaft des Judentums and Haskalah scholars brought a historical-critical lens to Jewish texts and sought to transform the history of the Jews both into a respected contributor to the academy as well as a tool for political change. While this development transformed Jewish life, the editors write, the development of Jewish studies has since stalled. Not only does Jewish studies lack the sort of methodological critique that has characterized the broader academy since the 1970s, but also the continuing dominance of history has relegated other approaches within the field of Jewish studies to a distinctly secondary status. With this collection, which grew out of a 2003 conference in Berlin, Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese aim to jump-start a process of reflection on and development of the current state of Jewish studies. As they see it, this process must begin with a greater awareness of the development of modern Jewish historiography and its methodologies, and it must include a deeper appreciation of historiography’s influence on Judaism and Jewish identity; they also hope to bring the insights of poststructuralism and cultural studies that have so affected the broader study of the humanities into the study of Jewish history, Jewish text, and Judaism. The book’s twenty-one essays approach this task from a variety of angles, which the editors have grouped into five separate sections. The book’s first section addresses the development of modern Jewish historiography. Most of the essays in this section describe sweeping trends in Jewish historiography (e.g., David Myers’s “Glaube and Geschichte: A Vexed Relationship in GermanJewish Culture”), but Jonathan Hess’s “Moses Mendelssohn and the Polemics of History” offers an incisive analysis of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem that complicates

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Book Reviews the traditional scholarly view of Mendelssohn’s opinion of the study of history. While it is certainly clear from his letters and other writings that Mendelssohn found little value in the study of history, Hess demonstrates that Mendelssohn was nevertheless well aware of the ways in which history could be used for political or ideological purposes. This essay stands on its own as an important contribution to our understanding of Mendelssohn’s thinking and, within the larger context of the book, suggests that we view Mendelssohn’s as a significant transition in the development of modern Jewish historiography and, by extension, Jewish studies. The book’s next section is both the largest and the strongest. The section has a definitive title—“Jewish Historiography and Its Encounter with Other Disciplines”—but the essays cover a wider territory than the title suggests, with essays addressing topics as varied as the development of Religionswissenschaft in the nineteenth-century German university (Gershon Greenberg, “Religionswissenschaft and early Reform Jewish Thought: Samuel Hirsch and David Einhorn”), Protestant biblical scholarship (by Christian Wiese), post-Holocaust philosophy (Michael Morgan, “Jewish Thought, Philosophy, and the Holocaust”), socialism (Marc A. Krell, “Fashioning a Neutral Zone: Jewish and Protestant Socialists Challenge Religionswissenschaft in Weimar Germany”), and the concept of world literature (“‘Jewish Literature’ and ‘World Literature’: Wissenschaft des Judentums and Its Concept of Literature”). This variety accomplishes what should be a chief goal of any edited collection: In their overlapping and diverse topics, the essays together present a far richer picture of the development of Religionswissenschaft, Geisteswissenschaft, and Wissenschaft des Judentums throughout the modern period than any one of them could do alone. Wiese’s own contribution to this section, “‘The Best Antidote to AntiSemitism? Wissenschaft des Judentums, Protestant Biblical Scholarship and Anti-Semitism in Germany Before 1933,” touches upon a significant moment of disciplinary encounter. The title is taken from Hermann Cohen’s 1907 statement in “Religion und Wissenschaft” that Protestant biblical scholarship should be considered a scholarly tool in the fight against antisemitism. Wiese now asks whether Cohen was correct by examining how a variety of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Protestant biblical scholars, including Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel, evaluated the Hebrew Bible and how Jewish scholars of the time understood that scholarship and its aims. This was a scholarly encounter with deep political significance, as Jewish scholars hoped to see Judaism and the Jewish people gain recognition for their contribution to culture and society. Ultimately, Wiese argues, Cohen’s view was proved wrong, and “the Wissenschaft des Judentums started an intellectual revolt against the way Protestant historiography constructed Judaism and tried to impose its own narrative and its own system of meaning values” (166). This revolt, he writes, can be understood as an attempt by a minority group (Jews) to challenge the power of the majority (Protestant Germans) through a dispute over knowledge or, in other words, as an attempt to resist the “master discourse” by offering a “counter-history.” By bringing in these concepts borrowed from postcolonial theory, Wiese’s article itself becomes the site of an encounter among multiple disciplines.

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Book Reviews The third section looks at the effect of ideology on historiography, with essays on the understanding of the German process of civic emancipation in the early twentieth century and Jewish history writing in Nazi Germany. In each case, the author demonstrates how the writing of history was deeply affected by the hopes and political commitments of the writers. The last essay in this section, on the production of collections of folktales in the style of the Grimm brothers, is enlightening, though the reasons for its placement in this section are less clear. Is a Wissenschaft approach itself an ideology? Or is it too complex— and too affected by other ideologies—to be given this title? The fourth section looks at the effect of Wissenschaft on Jewish identity. Again, the first two essays fit clearly into the stated theme—an examination of forms of Jewish religious Orthodoxy (Aviezer Ravitzky, “Dimensions and Varieties of Orthodox Judaism”) and a look at Reconstructionism’s appropriation of sociology for religious meaning (Robert M. Seltzer, “Which Wissenschaft?” Reconstructionism’s Theological Appropriation of Sociology and Religious Naturalism”). The third essay, on postmodernism’s challenge to Jewish studies (Laurence J. Silberstein, “Postzionism and Postmodern Theory: The Challenge to Jewish Studies”), seems to this reader to be more appropriate for the book’s fifth section, “New Concepts and Perspectives.” What the fifth section does contain is four essays, each addressing a different way in which the field of Jewish studies might be challenged by theoretical approaches developed elsewhere in the academy. These approaches include cultural studies and feminist theory, as well as an essay on the analysis of power in Jewish historiography (Anthony D. Kauders, “What Power for Which Jews? (Post)modern Reflections on the Idea of Power in Jewish Historiography”) and an essay that imagines how Jewish history might be understood beyond the paradigmatic confines of being a national history (Andreas Gotzmann, “Historiography as Cultural Identity: Toward a Jewish History Beyond National History”). Far more than the other three, Susannah Heschel’s essay on feminism (“The Impact of Feminist Theory on Jewish Studies”) describes ways in which Jewish studies as a field has already been affected by feminist theory, but in her insightful and powerful analysis, she issues significant further challenges. Jonathan Boyarin’s piece on cultural studies (“Responsive Thinking: Cultural Studies and Jewish Historiography”) includes his reflections on attempting to teach students to connect to a culture other than their own and the implications of his experience for our ability to understand the past, ultimately condemning the notion of pure objectivity in historical research. His essay makes overt an important point that runs throughout the book’s many essays: The process of writing Jewish history has never been divorced from the experiences, beliefs, and hopes of the writer. Boyarin asks what would happen if this connection between one’s self and one’s work were recognized. The essays in this book address not only modern Jewish historiography but also the broader project of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and the still broader concept of historicism and history writing itself. The scope can make the subject matter at times seem unwieldy, but that perhaps is the point. Modern Jewish studies emerged from within a nexus of intellectual and political concerns

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Book Reviews and projects; the editors argue that as these concerns and projects have changed, so, too, should Jewish studies. Claire E. Sufrin Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts

• • • Margit Schad. Rabbiner Michael Sachs: Judentum als höhere Lebensanschauung. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2007. 463 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001147

Recent scholarship has given renewed attention to the leading non-Orthodox rabbis of nineteenth-century Germany. In 2000, Andreas Brämer published a book-length biography of Zacharias Frankel;1 in 2007, we saw the appearance of a volume of essays centering upon Samuel Holdheim;2 and not long ago, both Susannah Heschel and Ken Koltun-Fromm published books on Abraham Geiger.3 Although Simon Bernfeld wrote a Hebrew biography of Michael Sachs as early as 1900, and more recently Franz D. Lucas and Heike Frank published their relatively brief, highly complimentary Michael Sachs: Der konservative Mittelweg, until now, Sachs had not received the extensive treatment offered by this ambitious, thoroughly researched, and copiously contextualized volume.4 Born in Glogau in 1808, Rabbi Michael Sachs served as a preacher first in a moderately reformed congregation in Prague and then as the community preacher in Berlin for twenty years, from 1844 until his early death in 1864. Margit Schad has divided this study of Sachs, based on her doctoral dissertation at the University of Duisburg, into four parts: a biography, Sachs’s rabbinical functions, his preaching, and his work as translator and scholar. This mode of organization has the disadvantage that we do not see our subject’s development and multifarious activities within a single chronological framework, as we do, for example, in Alexander Altmann’s comprehensive biography of Moses Mendelssohn.5 But the approach 1. Andreas Brämer, Rabbiner Zacharias Frankel: Wissenschaft des Judentums und konservative Reform im 19. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 2000). 2. Christian Wiese, ed., Redefining Judaism in an Age of Emancipation: Comparative Perspectives on Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860) (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 3. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Ken Koltun-Fromm, Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). See also Allan Arkush’s review of Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism in this issue. 4. Simon Bernfeld, Mikha’el Zaks: Me’ora’ot, hayav u-fe’ulato ha-sifrutit (Berlin: Ahi’asaf, 1900); Franz D. Lucas and Heike Frank, Michael Sachs—der konservative Mittelweg: Leben und Werk des Berliner Rabbiners zur Zeit der Emanzipation (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1992); see also my review of Michael Sachs—der konservative Mittelweg in AJS Review 19, no. 2 (1994): 271–73. 5. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University: University of Alabama Press, 1973).

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Book Reviews and projects; the editors argue that as these concerns and projects have changed, so, too, should Jewish studies. Claire E. Sufrin Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts

• • • Margit Schad. Rabbiner Michael Sachs: Judentum als höhere Lebensanschauung. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2007. 463 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001147

Recent scholarship has given renewed attention to the leading non-Orthodox rabbis of nineteenth-century Germany. In 2000, Andreas Brämer published a book-length biography of Zacharias Frankel;1 in 2007, we saw the appearance of a volume of essays centering upon Samuel Holdheim;2 and not long ago, both Susannah Heschel and Ken Koltun-Fromm published books on Abraham Geiger.3 Although Simon Bernfeld wrote a Hebrew biography of Michael Sachs as early as 1900, and more recently Franz D. Lucas and Heike Frank published their relatively brief, highly complimentary Michael Sachs: Der konservative Mittelweg, until now, Sachs had not received the extensive treatment offered by this ambitious, thoroughly researched, and copiously contextualized volume.4 Born in Glogau in 1808, Rabbi Michael Sachs served as a preacher first in a moderately reformed congregation in Prague and then as the community preacher in Berlin for twenty years, from 1844 until his early death in 1864. Margit Schad has divided this study of Sachs, based on her doctoral dissertation at the University of Duisburg, into four parts: a biography, Sachs’s rabbinical functions, his preaching, and his work as translator and scholar. This mode of organization has the disadvantage that we do not see our subject’s development and multifarious activities within a single chronological framework, as we do, for example, in Alexander Altmann’s comprehensive biography of Moses Mendelssohn.5 But the approach 1. Andreas Brämer, Rabbiner Zacharias Frankel: Wissenschaft des Judentums und konservative Reform im 19. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 2000). 2. Christian Wiese, ed., Redefining Judaism in an Age of Emancipation: Comparative Perspectives on Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860) (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 3. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Ken Koltun-Fromm, Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). See also Allan Arkush’s review of Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism in this issue. 4. Simon Bernfeld, Mikha’el Zaks: Me’ora’ot, hayav u-fe’ulato ha-sifrutit (Berlin: Ahi’asaf, 1900); Franz D. Lucas and Heike Frank, Michael Sachs—der konservative Mittelweg: Leben und Werk des Berliner Rabbiners zur Zeit der Emanzipation (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1992); see also my review of Michael Sachs—der konservative Mittelweg in AJS Review 19, no. 2 (1994): 271–73. 5. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University: University of Alabama Press, 1973).

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Book Reviews does enable Schad to discuss each of the areas of Sachs’s activity with detailed attention to both content and context. Although Lucas and Frank made some use of the extensive Sachs papers at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, Schad has exploited them far more thoroughly. A large portion of the many citations in her volume comes from unpublished letters and notes found in Sachs’s Nachlass, thus considerably enriching the biographical portion. Schad describes Sachs as occupying a middle position on the German–Jewish religious spectrum but is reluctant to place him fully within one of the existing streams. Although sometimes called Orthodox (in 1850, he was the first choice of the Orthodox separatist group in Frankfurt that finally chose Samson Raphael Hirsch) and certainly orthoprax in his personal life, both in philosophy and in favoring certain synagogue reforms, he does not belong in the Orthodox camp. At the same time clearly not a part of the Reform movement in any but the broadest and vaguest sense, he is best categorized as standing within the moderate center, identified by Zacharias Frankel’s epithet as “Positive-Historical Judaism”—though Schad notes his lack of consistent involvement with Frankel’s Breslau conservative seminary and his greater closeness to S. J. Rapoport and I. N. Mannheimer than to Frankel. Although Sachs is not significantly different from these other middle-ofthe-roaders, Schad would like to see him as sui generis. She also rejects classifying Sachs as a romantic, although this term has been applied to him both by contemporaries (Geiger, Graetz) and by modern scholars (e.g., Altmann, Jay Harris, Ismar Schorsch), and she herself cites typically romantic passages from his writings (e.g., “my lively organic sentiment”). Schad seems to believe that romantic is a term of opprobrium, and she would like to rescue Sachs from that charge. In addition to his duties as preacher in the Berlin community synagogue, Sachs also served as second Rabbinatsassessor, a lesser position than that of rabbi, but one that brought him into a variety of ritual controversies. Schad explicates the rabbinical opinions that he was called upon to render, even though, as she notes, he was not deeply versed in halakhah. She gives a great deal of attention to the two reform controversies that roiled Berlin’s Jewish community after Sachs’s appointment precipitated the establishment of a radical independent Reform congregation. They occurred in 1844–45 and again ten years later and, as Schad notes, have until now not received the detailed treatment that she offers. Sachs’s reform proposals were exceedingly moderate, almost totally nonideological, and were in no way a violation of halakhah. They consisted mainly of externals: decorum, a male choir, abolition of the auction of honors, plus the elimination of some piyyutim; a few prayers could be said in German. Throughout his life, Sachs remained a sworn opponent of placing an organ in the synagogue, which he believed would set the aesthetic element above the religious. However, his proposals aroused the ire of the traditionalists, who regarded any tampering with existing minhag as impermissible. Despite additional duties as educator and pastor, Sachs was popularly known especially as a preacher—and generally regarded as one of the best: charismatic, eloquent, and, upon occasion, polemical. Schad devotes about one-quarter

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Book Reviews of her study to his sermons, some of them published in two volumes after his death, many only to be found in some form among his papers. The long-neglected sermonic literature of German Jewry has received recent attention in books by Simone Lässig and Benjamin Maria Baader.6 Schad uses the Sachs sermons to elucidate his sources of intellectual influence and inspiration as well as his mode of thought. She argues persuasively, though in stated opposition to Altmann, that Sachs’s sermons are based less on the Protestant aim of edification (Erbauung) than on the Hegelian notion of elevation (Erhebung). Less convincing is her argument for a neo-Platonic influence, upon which she insists repeatedly despite the fact that Sachs never makes any reference to the works of classical neo-Platonism. As for the subject matter of the sermons, Schad argues that they focus upon the Jewish individual as human being. The more polemical ones attack Orthodoxy and, more commonly, Reform, uncharitably reducing the one to soulless observance and the other to political aspiration. Surprisingly, neither in Schad’s analysis of German Jewish homiletics nor anywhere else in the volume, does gender become a consideration. As he was not a halakhist, neither was Sachs a critical scholar of the caliber of a Zunz, a Geiger, or a Frankel. However, he gained considerable repute as a translator, first of Psalms and then, more prominently, of medieval Hebrew poetry. Sachs was less interested in origins than in the spirit and the possible contemporary impact of the sources that he studied, especially the midrash, to which he gave central importance. Although his Psalms translation sought to be entirely faithful to the text, his translations of medieval poetry were intended to be creative works that sought to retain the rhyme and meter of the originals, though often at the cost of a transmutation of meaning. Not surprisingly, he was especially drawn to Jehuda Halevi, though his own Jewish national sentiment is better understood as a spiritual peoplehood than an active messianic hope for the establishment of a Third Commonwealth. Schad not only cites examples of Sachs’s translations but also helpfully provides the Hebrew originals for them. Sachs was also a liturgist. His prayer books for the Sabbath and holidays enjoyed a wide and lasting acceptance in traditional religious settings. They contain almost no changes or omissions in the Hebrew text and only a few revisions in the German. (He has no problem retaining unchanged, both in Hebrew and in German, the Jewish man’s blessing God for not having made him a woman.) The prayer books’ appeal lay principally in the elevating style of Sachs’s translations, in what Schad calls Sachs’s “humanizing” of the texts. In the German tradition, this is an exceedingly comprehensive, detailed, and deeply researched study. Its understanding of Sachs is suggestive and challenging. Even if not all of Schad’s interpretations are entirely persuasive, she has delivered

6. Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004); and Benjamin Maria Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

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Book Reviews a notable contribution to the understanding of a significant figure in the history of German Jewry. Michael A. Meyer Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion Cincinnati, Ohio

• • • Todd Presner. Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration. New York: Routledge, 2007. xxiv, 279 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001159

“Like all our brethren of the second Aliya, the bearers of our Salvation, Isaac Kumer left his country and his homeland and his city and ascended to the Land of Israel to build it from its destruction and to be rebuilt by it.” Todd Presner quotes this famous first sentence of S. Y. Agnon’s novel Tmol Shilshom (1945) in a chapter titled “The Land of Regeneration.” Here, and throughout this fascinating book, Presner examines how early Zionist discourse focused not only on the regeneration of land, but also on rebuilding the body in order to build a Jewish state. Presner’s study presents a cultural and intellectual history of the concept and figure of the “regenerated” Jewish body as it appeared within German Jewish media, art, and Zionist imagery from the 1890s to the Weimar Republic. Central to this history is the figure of the Muskeljude, the “muscle Jew,” a term coined by Max Nordau at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898. As Presner points out, this complex discourse on the regenerated body needs to be understood within its cultural and historical contexts. Taking Michel Foucault’s notion of “bio-power” as a point of departure, Presner considers the focus on masculinity and discipline in relation to the Jewish body as a response to three concurrent processes: increasing orientations toward racialization and eugenics within European cultures near the end of the nineteenth century, the entanglement of nationalism and the gymnastics movement in nineteenth-century Germany, and, in the larger picture, the dialectic of modernity. The underlying idea that shaped this discussion was the possibility of change: Education and reform, discipline and the vitalization of the body, offered new possibilities for imagining the collective’s regeneration and rehabilitation as a nation among others. From Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s political treatise On the Civic Improvement of the Jews (1781), which called for Jewish emancipation in Prussia, to the writings of Zionists such as Moses Hess and Theodor Herzl, the Jewish condition had been depicted as a state of social, moral, and physical degeneration caused by oppression, persecution, ghettoization, and professional restrictions. If Jews were only treated as citizens with equal rights, Dohm and his French contemporaries Grégoire and Villeneuve declared, they would also be reformed and regenerated individually, and hence their social status and their usefulness as civil subjects would “improve.” In a careful analysis, Presner discusses the ideological and political purpose of their arguments while showing

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Book Reviews a notable contribution to the understanding of a significant figure in the history of German Jewry. Michael A. Meyer Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion Cincinnati, Ohio

• • • Todd Presner. Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration. New York: Routledge, 2007. xxiv, 279 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001159

“Like all our brethren of the second Aliya, the bearers of our Salvation, Isaac Kumer left his country and his homeland and his city and ascended to the Land of Israel to build it from its destruction and to be rebuilt by it.” Todd Presner quotes this famous first sentence of S. Y. Agnon’s novel Tmol Shilshom (1945) in a chapter titled “The Land of Regeneration.” Here, and throughout this fascinating book, Presner examines how early Zionist discourse focused not only on the regeneration of land, but also on rebuilding the body in order to build a Jewish state. Presner’s study presents a cultural and intellectual history of the concept and figure of the “regenerated” Jewish body as it appeared within German Jewish media, art, and Zionist imagery from the 1890s to the Weimar Republic. Central to this history is the figure of the Muskeljude, the “muscle Jew,” a term coined by Max Nordau at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898. As Presner points out, this complex discourse on the regenerated body needs to be understood within its cultural and historical contexts. Taking Michel Foucault’s notion of “bio-power” as a point of departure, Presner considers the focus on masculinity and discipline in relation to the Jewish body as a response to three concurrent processes: increasing orientations toward racialization and eugenics within European cultures near the end of the nineteenth century, the entanglement of nationalism and the gymnastics movement in nineteenth-century Germany, and, in the larger picture, the dialectic of modernity. The underlying idea that shaped this discussion was the possibility of change: Education and reform, discipline and the vitalization of the body, offered new possibilities for imagining the collective’s regeneration and rehabilitation as a nation among others. From Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s political treatise On the Civic Improvement of the Jews (1781), which called for Jewish emancipation in Prussia, to the writings of Zionists such as Moses Hess and Theodor Herzl, the Jewish condition had been depicted as a state of social, moral, and physical degeneration caused by oppression, persecution, ghettoization, and professional restrictions. If Jews were only treated as citizens with equal rights, Dohm and his French contemporaries Grégoire and Villeneuve declared, they would also be reformed and regenerated individually, and hence their social status and their usefulness as civil subjects would “improve.” In a careful analysis, Presner discusses the ideological and political purpose of their arguments while showing

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Book Reviews simultaneously how the idea of integration and regeneration is built upon an antisemitic image of the degenerate Jew. Presner sees a related rhetoric of degeneration and regeneration reflected in fin-de-siècle writing and early Zionist discourse. Julius Langbehn’s Rembrandt as Educator (1890) and Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) serve Presner as examples of the kind of cultural critique that takes the crisis and ostensible demise of Western culture as a decisive moment from which a renewal of the nation—a völkisch Germany in Langbehn’s case and a Jewish state in Nordau’s—could emerge. Rather than claiming ideological equivalence, Presner is interested in the discursive parallels in the project of a renewal or regeneration brought about through reform and education, in this case through physical education and discipline. In this scenario, regenerated and steeled individuals were meant to serve as the motor for a national renaissance that was to arise from Europe’s civilizational exhaustion. While Zionism emerged as a reaction to antisemitism, much of early Zionist rhetoric also used antisemitic images to decry its Jewish opponents. One need only think, for example, of Herzl’s notorious defamation of Zionism’s antagonists as morally and physically degenerate in his 1897 article titled “Mauschel.” The insistence on the muscle Jew entails both a reference to a heroic past in Jewish antiquity, mainly the Maccabees, and a “founding violence” directed against what is considered at odds with the goal of an equally heroic future; it “enacts regeneration by cutting off or stamping out its degenerate other” (64). With compelling arguments, Presner shows the degree to which this rhetoric of education and regeneration rests on aesthetic underpinnings. Langbehn’s and Nordau’s cultural critiques were both written as scathing responses to the artistic movements of their time, and their calls for regeneration were profoundly shaped by an aesthetic, albeit revisionist, agenda. Presner is also to be commended for pointing to an often overlooked aspect of Martin Buber’s work: his call for a Jewish national art. A trained art historian and one of the founders of cultural Zionism, Buber issued his call at the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901. Together with Jugendstil artist Ephraim Moshe Lilien, Buber curated an exhibit of Jewish artists at the congress and edited a volume titled Jewish Art and Jewish Artists. As Presner shows, not only did Buber challenge the antisemitic claim—propagated most infamously by Wagner—of the innate artlessness of Jews, but also he also accepted the idea of Jewish traditional aniconism, which he explained as a result of historical conditions and religious restrictions and proclaimed a need to overcome. Drawing on Kalman Bland’s important study on this topic, Presner mentions that the notion of Jewish aniconism is a modern invention, yet he takes Buber and his agenda seriously in their own right. Discussing this agenda in the context of muscular Judaism, Presner’s approach is illuminating: He links Buber’s programmatic plea for the arts’ importance in the rejuvenation of the Jewish people and its state-building prospect to Friedrich Schiller’s tractate On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. In this work, Schiller maps out the educational impact of the arts on the political sphere, their correlation, and the aesthetic dimension of governance. Here again, we find reform and education as the basis of an aesthetic state in which all parts operate in

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Book Reviews unison, but we also see the dangers of a radically aesthetic regime that aims to eradicate what it considers degenerate. Presner’s insightful conclusion is that for Schiller and Buber, “art restores a lost harmony by helping the fragmented people become complete and vital beings once again. This is the essence of the ‘aestheticized politics’ of regeneration” (86). Responding to the work of Sander Gilman and Daniel Boyarin, among others, Presner examines how the male Jewish body became the arena and battlefield of population politics, eugenics, and militarist fantasies, both in the context of Zionism and within European societies writ large. Presner offers an insightful discussion of the Jewish section at the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition at Dresden and the correspondence between the curator of the Jewish section, the Viennese rabbi and historian Max Grunwald, and the exhibition’s chief curator, Karl Lingner. In contrast to this exhibition, which focused on traditional Jewish practices and lifeworlds in antiquity and the Middle Ages, journals of Jewish sports clubs and publications documenting Jews fighting in World War I provide representations of the renewed Muskeljuden, the reformed and regenerated modern Jewish body. In this context, Presner also looks at the figure that reflects perhaps most vividly the modern technological extension of the human body: the aviator. Presner’s claim that the European fin de siècle, with the birth of the muscle Jew, marked the “invention” of the modern Jewish male is well supported by his substantive study. Presner demonstrates the connection between the discourse of the muscle Jew and colonial discourse by pointing to a photo documentary, Pictures from Palestine, and analyzing materials from the journals Altneuland and Palästina. It is here that he explores the colonial aspects of early Zionism and its complex linkage to European imperialism. This is the historical trajectory to Presner’s assessment of contemporary Israeli society with which the book begins. Looking at photographs by the Israeli artist Adi Nes, Presner describes Nes’s deconstruction of precisely the ideological figurations whose foundations were laid in the German Jewish discourse on muscular Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century. Overall, Muscular Judaism provides a fascinating study of the discursive formation of the muscle Jew and its complex relationship to other European discourses on the body, race, sexuality, aesthetics, nationalism, and militarism, as well as its importance in the project of the creation of a Jewish state. Not only is the book essential reading for anyone who is interested in the cultural history of Zionism, representations of the Jewish body in modernity, and German Jewish history, but also it is fundamental to understanding the ideological history of contemporary Israeli ideals of masculinity and muscularity. Sebastian Wogenstein University of Connecticut Storrs, Connecticut

• • • 206

Book Reviews Katherine Elizabeth Fleming. Greece: A Jewish History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. xii, 271 pp. Annette B. Fromm. We Are Few: Folklore and Ethnic Identity of the Jewish Community of Ioannina, Greece. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. xx, 199 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001160

Who or what is Greek? Who is a Greek Jew? The answer is as amorphous as the terms Arab and Arab Jew in modern parlance. This ambiguity also applies to the term Yevani in Hebrew and its Yiddish antecedents. The real question is, who defines whom in political and historical terms? That question leads us to modern inquiries into memory and nationalism or ethnicity as defined by political scientists and folklorists. The two volumes reviewed here examine these questions of identity from a modern perspective. Each challenges the lack of a serious history of the Jews in Greece that includes its complexity and multivalent analysis of the terms Romaniot and Sephardi and the more modern Greek Jew. For our purposes, we may use the following definitions of the first two terms before we examine the two authors’ treatment of the last. Romaniot is the lesser known and perhaps the most difficult of the terms. The word is a Jewish version of the sobriquet Roman that was used by the Greek Orthodox (Romaioi) from late antiquity to the nineteenth century. Both Jews and Christians were, after all, citizens or heirs of the Roman Empire, albeit now Greek speaking and Orthodox by faith; the Jews, too, were citizens, albeit second class, of that empire, for convenience called Byzantine by modern scholars. Until the sixteenth century, the majority of Jews in Greece were Romaniot, and alongside them were Jews who had a separate political identity subject to the Italian city-states and the emerging Ottoman Empire. Even the Karaites could possibly be designated as Romaniot as they contributed to the Greek-speaking Jewish majority in Istanbul. When Sephardic Jews came to the Ottoman sultanate in the sixteenth century after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula, they began to call the native Romaniot Jews gregos. Thus the term Greek Jew can be traced back to the sixteenth century. As the nineteenth century progressed and Greek became the general Western term to describe the new kingdom of the Hellenes, the use of “Greek” Jew came to designate all those who designated themselves as Romaniot. By the nineteenth century, however, there had been for centuries a series of immigrations into the Balkans of primarily Italians and some North African and Near Eastern Jews, among them, Arabic-speaking Jews known as Mustariba in the sixteenth century. The problem with the term Sephardic is that in the twentieth century, the prayer books for Salonika began to be printed in Israel according to the nusah. Sepharad; all those who used them came to be identified as Sephardim, even if their ethnic origin was not ultimately from the Iberian Peninsula. Although the term Yevani appears in ancient and medieval texts to differentiate Greeks from Macedonians, by the sixteenth century, it came to distinguish the

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Book Reviews Greek Orthodox Cossacks from the Polish Catholics. In modern Hebrew, the word preserves both meanings of the Greek state and the Orthodox (Greek and Russian) religion. The term Yevanic has even entered the field of Hebrew manuscript study to refer to the Romaniot hand in the Balkans and its diaspora. Fortunately, the latter term does not enter either of the two books under review. Into this morass of ambiguity, these two new contributions add some nuanced shades of meaning. Katherine Elizabeth Fleming offers a Jewish history of Greece that includes both Romaniot and Sephardic Jews under the emerging rubric of Greek Jew. She restricts her treatment to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greece and its variegated Jewish communities. The book begins with the gem of a Romaniot synagogue on the Lower East Side of New York City, the only Romaniot synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. Founded in 1908, it celebrated its centenary in 2008. While a small percentage of the congregation was born in Greece or is descended from Ioannina “Romaniots,” intermarriage has diluted the original Romaniot founding members. Nonetheless, the entire congregation that extends to New Jersey and the boroughs of New York proudly identifies itself as Romaniot. Who would gainsay that identity? Surely not traditional rabbis who allow one to self-identify until a successful challenge obviates that identity. It parallels the movement in Greece (somewhat in the minority) among some Greek-speaking Jews of varied ethnic origins to identify themselves as Romaniot. Fleming deals with variegated communities of ancient and modern origins in the southern Balkans that came to be called Greek. Indeed, as she notes, the term Greek was enforced on these different communities by conquest and assimilation into a kingdom expanding under the impetus of the megali idea that drove Greek history until the disastrous adventure in Asia Minor after World War I and had a brief resurrection during the jingoism of the victories against Italy in 1940–41 when Greek armies occupied southern Albania, claimed by Athens as Northern Epirus. All of the Greek-speaking and Judeo-Spanish-speaking Jews from the kingdom of Greece who were deported to Auschwitz were identified by Ashkenazim as Greeks. Hence Fleming argues that this latest external designation of these Jews is the one they have now accepted in Greece, Israel, and the United States, even as the descendants of Iberian Jews proudly continue to call themselves Sephardim. Unfortunately, the state of Israel has subsumed Sephardim within a broader rubric of Mizrahim that includes basically all Jews who are not Ashkenazim, even those who are Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Indian, Chinese, Ethiopian, and others who do not fit into the politically (but not demographically) dominant Ashkenazim. Needless to say, Greek is “in” in Israel, and as Fleming points out, Greek music, food, dance, and visiting stars attract many to identify with them, especially if their ancestry can be traced to an area within the boundaries of modern Greece. The text is most interesting in Fleming’s attempt to define Greek Jews. It is weakest in its analysis of Jewish history during the various periods of the expanding kingdom of Greece; it tells us less about the history of Greece and its problems than Greek and Hebrew sources would indicate. The strongest section is based on Fleming’s research in the British Archives on the Pacifico affair of the midnineteenth century; that event coincided with the beginnings of Britain’s bully treatment of and aggressive assistance to Greece, an attitude that endured for

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Book Reviews nearly a century.1 Fleming has attempted to write the first history in English of Greece from a Jewish perspective and has succeeded to some extent, giving us a very readable and useful book that points up the difficulties of such a task. Bernard Pierron’s summary of his vast and unmined dissertation (“Juifs et Chrétiens de la Grèce Moderne,” 1996) is still to be surpassed. The reader should be cautious of the Hebrew references and texts, and must be informed that many of the memoirs cited in their Greek editions are available in English, with full references available in the Bulletin of Judeo-Greek Studies. Annette B. Fromm has more cautiously restricted her viewpoint to the Jewish community of Ioannina. She writes less from a historical perspective than from that of a folklorist, reflecting the discipline that guided her dissertation research. Fromm presented her dissertation in 1992 and its belated publication in 2008 is a welcome addition to the literature. Regrettably, a comparison of the two publications shows that there were only minor revisions of style. Moreover, the inadequate bibliography of the dissertation was not updated for the published volume. One might compare with profit Joshua Plaut’s Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913–1983; the latter’s field research overlapped Fromm’s.2 She records superb and moving memories of Greek Orthodox–Jewish relations and the fullness of shared culture. Fromm’s careful research observes the shift from a community in transition before the war and the bare survival of memories after the war among the decimated community. She notes that continuity of symbiotic secular pilgrimages to the locus of historical memory sustains the symbols in an aging Ioannina community of prewar ancestral memories. Her central point, however, is worth emphasizing: namely, that pilgrimage to Ioannina is a major factor in maintaining identity among her far-flung diaspora and the continued cohesion of the local community. The question remains, how many generations will such continuity last without new immigrant blood? These two volumes, each informative despite limitations, complement each other and provide general data on the complexities of Greece and its populations, an endemic problem that confronts various contemporary interpretations of Greek nationalism. Steven Bowman University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, Ohio

• • •

1. See Derek Taylor, Don Pacifico: The Acceptable Face of Gunboat Diplomacy (London: Vallentine-Mitchell, 2008). 2. Joshua Eli Plaut, Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913–1983:Patterns of Jewish Survival in the Greek Provinces before and after the Holocaust (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996).

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Book Reviews Jack Kugelmass, ed. Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. viii, 232 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001172

Within the Jewish popular imagination, Jews and sports have long remained the domain of a particular brand of apologetic narratives. What began as an activity that was taken, at least in part, as a defense against antisemitism, has become, in some contemporary Jewish contexts, a space for articulating a paradigm of Jewish heroism and physical prowess purposefully posed to undercut popular narratives of Jewish feebleness and an excessive devotion to intellectual pursuits. Though constituting both an important sphere of Jewish social activity and a rich body of collective memories and interpretations of the meanings of those activities, accounts of a shifting Jewish relationship to sports and athleticism have not yet received the kind of cultural and social historical analysis and attention they deserve. More than simply filling this gap in Jewish studies, Jack Kugelmass’s volume Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship significantly advances a variety of debates about the social and cultural significance of sports. This volume of essays breaks new and important ground in bringing together fresh and insightful analyses about the relationships between Jewish history, culture, sports, and the body. In representing one of the first academic volumes to take up Jewish sports from an international perspective (Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni edited a volume on Jews and sports in Europe, published one year earlier1), this interdisciplinary collection focuses on sports as a lens for observing the process of Jewish modernization. In the broadest sense, as Kugelmass explains, a cultural analysis of Jews and sports serves as a means of examining the “observation, establishment, maintenance, transgression, dismantling and redefining of boundaries between Jews and the coterritorial populations among whom they reside” (6). The topic of citizenship serves as a central organizing theme, allowing individual contributors to explore the shifting strategies by which Jews as a group have aligned themselves politically and defined themselves within the nation while simultaneously retaining a distinct sense of themselves as a separate ethnic group. Probing the relationship of citizenship and sports leads to an examination of how the nation and ethnos are constituted and how collective memories are constructed. If the modern nation is defined through “the embodiment of ideal specimens of male and … female bodies,” as Kugelmass writes (11), this collection of essays elaborates on the ways in which the bodies of those deemed marginal or subordinate have participated in the representation of the nation. With their focus on sports and culture, the essays in this volume parallel, and in many ways extend, the project begun by David Biale in his Cultures of the Jews, by focusing on sports as a realm of Jewish cultural production that both shapes and, in turn, is shaped by interactions with surrounding cultures.2

1. Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni, eds., Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 2. David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York: Schocken, 2002).

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Book Reviews The individual contributions to the volume pursue some already welldeveloped themes in an emerging literature on Jews, sports, and the body and take them in some compelling new directions. In both American and European contexts, interest in Jews and sports has been rooted in the strength and persistence of the image of the weak, unfit, and unathletic Jew, and Stephen Whitfield’s essay poignantly and often humorously evokes these resonances in American literature. Jeffrey Gurock’s essay on Orthodox Jewish adaptations to the American cult of sports traces how, despite their initial stance, different Orthodox groups began to incorporate secular sports into religious lifestyles, and in the case of Yeshiva University in the 1940s, even used sports as a marketing tool to compete with liberal Jewish denominations to attract young men to study. John Hoberman traces European and American narratives about Jewish lack of physical prowess, focusing on equestrian pursuits. While Jews’ reputed inability to ride horses had historically been put forward as a sign of the male Jew’s lack of manliness, dignity, and military prowess, Hoberman documents how this phenomenon shaped Jewish self-perception in such a way that Jews came to see their lack of equestrian pursuits as a reflection of their separate and diminished social status. Hoberman adds a nice twist to this internal Jewish narration of identity when he notes how the equestrian affinities of Michael Bloomberg’s children were discussed during his 2001 New York mayoral run by a prominent Jewish newspaper in a way that was ostensibly illustrative of the fact that Bloomberg was “at the assimilated end of the spectrum.” Where a certain lack of proclivity once suggested Jewish difference, Jews on horseback can now be read as a sign of excess assimilation. One of the significant Jewish responses to views of Jews’ social and physical inferiority in the increasingly nationalist contexts of Central and Eastern Europe was the formation of sports movements and organizations that often allied themselves with specific political orientations. Jack Jacobs demonstrates how the differing ideologies of Jewish workers’ sports movements in interwar Poland led them to promote specific kinds of sports, while Joshua Shanes examines the Jewish nationalist gymnastics movement in Galicia, a phenomenon much less documented than, and quite distinct from, its counterpart in Germany. With reference to Palestine, Anat Helman reconstructs collectivism and hedonism in Zionist attitudes toward sport in Tel Aviv, while in reference to the United States, Edward Shapiro explores why a famous basketball and gambling scandal at the City College of New York that involved numerous Jews did not provoke antisemitic reactions. If sports was often used as a means of promoting individual mobility and collective integration in democratic societies, how did it function in societies where citizenship did not offer the possibility of equality? One of the volume’s great strengths is in its inclusion of North Africa and Israel as sites for analysis. Harvey Goldberg traces the tradition of Sabbath games in nineteenth-century Tripoli and shows how individual Jews took part in games neither to defend Jews against antisemitism nor to achieve benefits of social mobility as in the American context. Instead, he argues, Jews took part in sports not as individuals who were formally equal but in a clearly defined system in which Jews occupied a

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Book Reviews subordinate status in relation to the dominant Muslim group. Much in the same way, André Levy’s ethnographic account of Jewish and Arab soccer games in Casablanca during the 1990s suggests the complexity of a subordinate (and numerically small) Jewish group engaging in competitive games with the dominant Muslim group. Finally, Tamir Sorek’s essay on Arab soccer teams in Israel brings the nineteenth-century history of Jews and sports seemingly full circle. In his contribution, we see a clear reversal of the dynamic of the social domination of Jews to social domination by Jews. Arab soccer fans in Israel face a tension between supporting a team in a manner that offers an opportunity for collective integration within Israeli Jewish society or gives expression to Palestinian national pride and grievance. Sorek finds that the soccer stadium serves as an “integrative enclave.” In the stands, Arabs in Israel seek to blur national and ethnic tensions, emphasizing the common denominator with the Jewish majority. He sees this in the use of Hebrew, rather than Arabic, as symbolic of attempts toward integration, even within intra-Arab interactions. Thus, just as sports served as a means of expressing a diverse array of attitudes and relationships toward the dominant group and nation within the Jewish Diaspora, Sorek finds that Arab soccer fans maintained “a diversified arsenal of meanings concerning their status in the state and their relations with the Jewish majority” (170). Ultimately, it is the surprising range of the volume’s essays, which cover a breathtaking variety of locations, periods, and social contexts, that is one of the most impressive features of the book. Kugelmass’s collection provides a notable contribution to a field of study that is only beginning to take shape and suggests a model for future work that will not be limited by the constraints of national context or period. In that regard, Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship provides an excellent example for conceptualizations of interdisciplinary work in Jewish studies that may have applications for a variety of topics beyond those immediately concerned with sports and conceptualizations of the Jewish body. Sharon Gillerman Hebrew Union College Los Angeles, California

• • • Julian Levinson. Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Literature and American Literary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. x, 239 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001184

In appropriating the title of the 1972 Rolling Stones album for his scholarly book, Julian Levinson makes a funny allusion and a serious point: In America, voices interact and blend—the voices of various media, the voices of high and low culture, and the voices of different languages and traditions. Joining the growing number of scholars who study in particular how Jewishness and Americanness have interacted, Levinson argues in this superb study that Jewish

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Book Reviews subordinate status in relation to the dominant Muslim group. Much in the same way, André Levy’s ethnographic account of Jewish and Arab soccer games in Casablanca during the 1990s suggests the complexity of a subordinate (and numerically small) Jewish group engaging in competitive games with the dominant Muslim group. Finally, Tamir Sorek’s essay on Arab soccer teams in Israel brings the nineteenth-century history of Jews and sports seemingly full circle. In his contribution, we see a clear reversal of the dynamic of the social domination of Jews to social domination by Jews. Arab soccer fans in Israel face a tension between supporting a team in a manner that offers an opportunity for collective integration within Israeli Jewish society or gives expression to Palestinian national pride and grievance. Sorek finds that the soccer stadium serves as an “integrative enclave.” In the stands, Arabs in Israel seek to blur national and ethnic tensions, emphasizing the common denominator with the Jewish majority. He sees this in the use of Hebrew, rather than Arabic, as symbolic of attempts toward integration, even within intra-Arab interactions. Thus, just as sports served as a means of expressing a diverse array of attitudes and relationships toward the dominant group and nation within the Jewish Diaspora, Sorek finds that Arab soccer fans maintained “a diversified arsenal of meanings concerning their status in the state and their relations with the Jewish majority” (170). Ultimately, it is the surprising range of the volume’s essays, which cover a breathtaking variety of locations, periods, and social contexts, that is one of the most impressive features of the book. Kugelmass’s collection provides a notable contribution to a field of study that is only beginning to take shape and suggests a model for future work that will not be limited by the constraints of national context or period. In that regard, Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship provides an excellent example for conceptualizations of interdisciplinary work in Jewish studies that may have applications for a variety of topics beyond those immediately concerned with sports and conceptualizations of the Jewish body. Sharon Gillerman Hebrew Union College Los Angeles, California

• • • Julian Levinson. Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Literature and American Literary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. x, 239 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001184

In appropriating the title of the 1972 Rolling Stones album for his scholarly book, Julian Levinson makes a funny allusion and a serious point: In America, voices interact and blend—the voices of various media, the voices of high and low culture, and the voices of different languages and traditions. Joining the growing number of scholars who study in particular how Jewishness and Americanness have interacted, Levinson argues in this superb study that Jewish

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Book Reviews American writers and American literary culture have often met advantageously, resulting in new understandings of Jewish identity and, in turn, aesthetic and political innovation. Levinson has been crafting and refining his argument since 2000, when he completed his Columbia dissertation on postwar Jewish American literature. The book’s riches and wisdom reflect its long development, while its language reads with the clarity and wit of a fresh take. Levinson traces the encounters of self-identified American Jews with American literary culture from Emma Lazarus to Irving Howe, a range that embraces Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, and Alfred Kazin. The book is divided into four chronological sections. Part 1 focuses on Emma Lazarus and Mary Antin, two founding mothers of Jewish American literature. Both were influenced by transcendentalism, whose emphasis on the private self corresponded with Victorian associations with femininity and, for women, did not compete, as it did for Jewish men, with rabbinic culture. Lazarus’s early writing, encouraged by Ralph Waldo Emerson, emphasizes inspiration and nature and matures to an engagement with Jewish history, Hebrew, and the Jewish Bible. Levinson shows that Lazarus’s work begins in the Emersonian mode and ends in the Hawthornian—locating a deity not in the present and nature, but in history and religion. In his study of Antin, Levinson shows that this poster child for assimilation, whose writing was influenced by Emerson and Walt Whitman, in fact gained a deeper Jewish sensibility as she wrote her spiritual autobiography, The Promised Land (1912). And Antin sought in her fiction to express her ambiguous feelings about the shtetl life of her past. Part 2 concerns Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, and Anzia Yezierska, all of whom spoke out politically and creatively in the interwar period. As a teenager, Lewisohn considered himself a Southern gentleman and a believing Christian. He transformed into a Jewish New Yorker after facing antisemitism at Columbia University and subsequently befriending the “Young American” writers of Greenwich Village, among them Waldo Frank. Lewisohn publicized his own Jewishness in the somber autobiography Up Stream (1922) and became a culture critic and novelist, urging Zionism and praising the unassimilated foreigner as exemplifying American idealism. Similarly, Waldo Frank entered college as a self-described “Jew without Judaism,” and he found in Greenwich Village and American literature—especially in the work of Whitman—a prompt to embrace and merge Judaism with cultural criticism. Though Frank’s published writings on Judaism are few, Levinson mines them and Frank’s private notebooks for strong evidence that Frank saw the Jew as a mystical prophet, one whose mission overlapped with that of the model American, “the spiritually awakened believer in democracy and human solidarity.” Frank sought in his novels—for instance, Rahab (1922)—to convey Jewish mysticism in a lyrical, modernist form similar to that of Virginia Woolf. Anzia Yezierska’s writing shares the political subversion and experimental aesthetics of Lewisohn and Frank, though her life paralleled the immigration experience of her contemporary Mary Antin. Levinson explores Yezierska’s relationship with John Dewey, and he shows that she associated Judaism with striving, intensity, and prophecy. The chapters in Part 2 on Frank and Lewisohn

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Book Reviews are especially strong, and they go some way toward giving these writers the attention they merit. Part 3 presents a brief history of Yiddish poetry in America, concentrating on the translations of Walt Whitman into Yiddish and of abundant Yiddish literature into English. Levinson demonstrates that Yiddish poets, lacking a long literary ancestry, redeemed the situation by drawing on other literary traditions to forge a unique voice. For example, I. J. Schwartz drew on his familiarity with Whitman and the Bible to write a Yiddish epic called Kentucky (1925), about a Jewish pioneer in the American wilderness. Levinson’s sensitive translation and close reading of certain passages illuminate this striking work. In Part 4, Levinson assesses postwar Jewish literature by deemphasizing the sociological context and instead studying the deliberate creative processes of Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe. In so doing, Levinson follows the method of Kazin himself, who argued in On Native Grounds (1942) that literature should be read on its own terms, independent of any critical orthodoxy, and that American literature has always been one of revolt against any limitation. Levinson traces Kazin’s voice of protest from the latter’s literary criticism to his 1943 appeals in The New Republic on behalf of Eastern European Jewry, to his 1951 lyrical memoir, A Walker in the City. Levinson identifies Kazin’s spirituality as one of “Romantic Judaism,” shared by Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Lionel Trilling, and Irving Howe, and based on “inwardness, spiritual agon, emotional intensity, and striving” (168). Levinson’s language, always elegant, in this chapter ascends to the poetic. In one moving passage, he celebrates “Romantic Judaism” as a counter to T. S. Eliot’s concern with cultural breakdown and crisis. Levinson writes, “Romanticism, with its secularized language of transcendence, offers … a way to reaffirm the relevance of Jewish tradition even for contemporary Jews for whom conventional forms of belief and practice have become untenable. And with this reaffirmation, they gain a purchase on some kind of permanence, a stay against apocalypse” (170). While Kazin’s romanticism emphasizes transcendence, Howe’s emphasizes the Jewish past. After World War II, Howe turned from writing about Southern regionalism to promulgating the literature of Yiddishkayt, in which he saw themes common to Southern American literature: the dignity of failure and the aesthetic fertility of a dying culture. He also found in Yiddishkayt the humanity and fraternity he had sought in the socialist movement. With Eliezer Greenberg, Howe published A Treasury of Yiddish Stories and several subsequent anthologies. Levinson explains that Howe believed that “when the shtetl begins to break apart … this period of breakdown is a uniquely productive and dynamic period in Jewish history, in a which a secular literary culture began to take shape” (181). Kazin’s emphasis on the “productive,” the fruits of a culture clash rather than the losses, coincides with Levinson’s own emphasis. “Productive” is a word that recurs in the chapter and book, as, for instance, when Levinson writes that the burst of fiction resulting from Jewish American writers’ involvement with Howe and Greenberg’s work indicates “the productive role of translation in the unfolding of Jewish literary culture in America after the war” (188). Other affirmative words abound, including reclaim, recover, reaffirm, transform, and their noun equivalents. As the re- prefixes

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Book Reviews of many of these words suggest, what Jewish writers often found productive in the American experience was a prompt to return to Judaism—to remember the Jewish past and its literature and to draw on it for aesthetic inspiration and political guidance. Although the writers in this book understand Jewishness with differing regards for spirituality, morality, race, and Zionism, all understand Jewishness as involving a sense of history and continuity. And while some of Levinson’s subjects occupy the role of Emersonian visionary (Lazarus, Antin, Frank, Schwartz), and some occupy the role of “Jewish Romantic” (Howe, Kazin), all occupy the biblical role of prophet—in other words, an exile calling to the crowd on Main Street. These writers “triumph over amnesia,” writes Levinson, “to instill a sense of hope” (198). This book is a welcome celebration of the relationship between America and Jewish American writers. Each reader will think of writers whom Levinson might have addressed (I think of Arthur A. Cohen, a theologian and novelist on whom Levinson has written elsewhere). But this proves the book’s strength, not its weakness: the thesis is so strong as to inspire extension. And extension there will surely be, for Exiles on Main Street provides an absorbing education that will endure. Emily Kopley Stanford University Stanford, California

• • • YIDDISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE Benjamin Harshav. The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. xiii, 199 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001196

“If we peel off the agitprop banalities,” writes Benjamin Harshav in the prelude to his new, fascinating study on the Moscow Yiddish Theater (better known by its later name, the GOSET), we may find a “lasting contribution to an anti-Broadway Jewish theatrical myth” (x). In many ways, this statement serves to describe the book’s own contribution to the scholarship of Jewish theater, as well as to the wider academic discourse dealing with Jewish culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. For Harshav’s exploration of the Moscow Yiddish Theater opens up for the English reader in a lucid manner an avant-garde, groundbreaking, radical theatrical endeavor that should doubtlessly establish itself more prominently in the historiography of twentieth-century Jewish theater. It presents a highly fertile alternative to the more commonly discussed Yiddish-speaking theatrical performances (many times realistic or melodramatic) that took place in New York at the time, as well as to the Hebrew-speaking theater emerging in Moscow during the same years (and later immigrating to Palestine).

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Book Reviews of many of these words suggest, what Jewish writers often found productive in the American experience was a prompt to return to Judaism—to remember the Jewish past and its literature and to draw on it for aesthetic inspiration and political guidance. Although the writers in this book understand Jewishness with differing regards for spirituality, morality, race, and Zionism, all understand Jewishness as involving a sense of history and continuity. And while some of Levinson’s subjects occupy the role of Emersonian visionary (Lazarus, Antin, Frank, Schwartz), and some occupy the role of “Jewish Romantic” (Howe, Kazin), all occupy the biblical role of prophet—in other words, an exile calling to the crowd on Main Street. These writers “triumph over amnesia,” writes Levinson, “to instill a sense of hope” (198). This book is a welcome celebration of the relationship between America and Jewish American writers. Each reader will think of writers whom Levinson might have addressed (I think of Arthur A. Cohen, a theologian and novelist on whom Levinson has written elsewhere). But this proves the book’s strength, not its weakness: the thesis is so strong as to inspire extension. And extension there will surely be, for Exiles on Main Street provides an absorbing education that will endure. Emily Kopley Stanford University Stanford, California

• • • YIDDISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE Benjamin Harshav. The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. xiii, 199 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001196

“If we peel off the agitprop banalities,” writes Benjamin Harshav in the prelude to his new, fascinating study on the Moscow Yiddish Theater (better known by its later name, the GOSET), we may find a “lasting contribution to an anti-Broadway Jewish theatrical myth” (x). In many ways, this statement serves to describe the book’s own contribution to the scholarship of Jewish theater, as well as to the wider academic discourse dealing with Jewish culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. For Harshav’s exploration of the Moscow Yiddish Theater opens up for the English reader in a lucid manner an avant-garde, groundbreaking, radical theatrical endeavor that should doubtlessly establish itself more prominently in the historiography of twentieth-century Jewish theater. It presents a highly fertile alternative to the more commonly discussed Yiddish-speaking theatrical performances (many times realistic or melodramatic) that took place in New York at the time, as well as to the Hebrew-speaking theater emerging in Moscow during the same years (and later immigrating to Palestine).

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Book Reviews The book’s structure allows for an unusually enriching and multilayered reading experience. Its first chapter consists of Harshav’s succinct and compelling narrative of the first decade of the theater (the 1920s), prior to its deterioration and subsequent brutal liquidation by Stalin. The second chapter conducts an in-depth analysis of Marc Chagall’s involvement with and contribution to the theater’s intertwined aesthetics and politics (including some beautiful artwork and sketches by Chagall and others, never published before). The remaining seven chapters, however, are in fact a selection of translated documents relating to the theater’s activity: memoirs, essays, reviews, manifestoes, short plays, invitations, and letters. The effect of these texts—beautifully translated together with Barbara Harshav—is quite striking, as they amount to a dazzling polyphony of voices and viewpoints, wrestling with each other (and sometimes even with Harshav’s own narrative, as it is laid out in the first chapters) vis-à-vis the cultural, artistic, and political meaning of the new Yiddish theater in times of social revolution. True, almost all of these voices hail the Moscow Yiddish Theater and praise its innovative performative language. While there are hints in the texts themselves that this theater has also evoked controversy and debate in Russia (152), these opposing voices are hardly represented to speak for themselves. Still, the documents assembled by Harshav are highly varied, and what they have to say is at times extremely eye-opening with regard to the dynamics of Jewish Russian (and European) theatrical culture in the period (especially the essays by Abram Efros, Moyshe Litvakov, and Joseph Roth), and sometimes simply moving (mainly Chagall’s amusing memoirs and the lyrical observations of Osip Mandelshtam). While the book is naturally an invaluable contribution for theater scholars, I believe it might well be of interest to those who are involved in studying the wider, and now highly developed, discourse regarding the Jewish body that took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For theater is first and foremost an art of the body, and the Moscow Yiddish Theater as well as its critics and cultural milieu were acutely aware that their involvement with performance had to do precisely with a renegotiation of the body, its presence and meaning in Jewish culture and revolutionary politics. Harshav describes how, under the guidance of Solomon Mikhoels (the theater’s leading actor, and later its director, who was murdered on Stalin’s orders in 1948), the actors, “all of whom came from towns in the Pale of Settlement—recovered the gestures, movements, intonations, and sensibilities of the Jewish shtetl world from their childhood memories … . This was knowledge no teacher could provide” (22). Indeed, it is the transmission of this kind of “embodied knowledge,” to use Diana Taylor’s term, that performance allows for and which is central for the theater’s multifaceted dialogic involvement with the Jewish past.1 The picture that emerges from the pages of Harshav’s book is that the Moscow Yiddish Theater reused the stereotypical “Old Jew” body, played with it, and transformed it into a modernist, revolutionary image (this is where

1. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 16–33.

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Book Reviews Harshav finds one of Chagall’s most profound contributions to the theater’s artistic-political path). Thus, while moving away from the traditional Jewish body, as it was perceived by modern Jews, the theater did not necessarily participate in the celebration of the “New Jew” physical type either. Litvakov’s essay appearing in the book is specifically illuminating on the matter: “The Jewish grimace … the Jewish gesture, which was supposed to remain forever godly pious—here they have become new, free, sharp gestures of an epoch of ‘iron and concrete’” (151). Litvakov later writes, “[T]he Yiddish Chamber Theater is always revolutionary, regardless of its repertoire, because technique alone can also serve, did serve, and still serves the bourgeoisie, but living flesh and blood serves only itself” (156). And while post-Foucauldian readers might find Litvakov’s notion of the body’s inherent subversive quality to be more than a little optimistic, if not downright naive, it is precisely this optimism regarding the revolutionary body that is crucial for understanding the Moscow Yiddish Theater’s undertaking. The Moscow Yiddish Theater foregrounded the genre of tragicomedy, not just a genre that structures dramatic narrative, and through it the cultural imaginaire regarding Jewish experience of history, but also a style of acting, and therefore an embodied practice, a way of working with the body. Harshav juxtaposes this choice of tragicomedy by the Moscow Yiddish Theater (25–27) with HaBima’s choice of Hebrew tragedy as their main genre: The solemn language of the still-far-from-colloquial and biblical Hebrew influenced the pathos and the elevated, heroic national style of HaBima; it did not have the humor, irony, or flexibility of moods typical of popular Yiddish. Though emanating from the same national milieu, HaBima fostered the Hebrew genre of high tragedy, oriented toward a utopian dream, while GOSET showcased the Yiddish genre of comedy and looked the tragic end of culture straight in the eye. (32)

The difference in language and genre is also a difference, as Harshav remarks, in acting style—and therefore in a discipline of the body. And yet, the dichotomy delineated by Harshav between GOSET and HaBima (following views expressed by Efros and Chagall, among others; see 65, 73) might be slightly too clear-cut— for HaBima’s choice of plays served not only to establish utopian dreams onstage, but also to question these dreams and allow the anxieties and tensions accompanying them to resurface. After all, neither The Dybbuk nor The Golem, two of HaBima’s key performances during the time, offer a reassuring image of Jewish history or of the body. Harshav’s compelling narrative is indeed stirring—yet, as the foregoing example might show, its strong claims might be a bit too strong. The book’s focus on the first impressive decade of the theater’s activity contributes much to its detailed analysis of the theater’s cultural politics. At the same time, what is inadvertently obscured by this focus is the fact that much of the theater’s later activity and repertoire somewhat complicates Harshav’s narrative. Other recent studies that have covered the GOSET’s later days, including Jeffrey Veidlinger’s The

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Book Reviews Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, discuss at length plays performed later by the GOSET that surely had more prominent heroic, mythical, and national tones, such as Shmuel Halkin’s Bar Kokhba, as well as the theater troupe’s involvement with both Zionist and rabbinic figures.2 In contrast, for earlier sources appearing in Harshav’s book, Zionism and rabbinic Jewry are both associated mainly with HaBima.3 As Harshav barely refers to other contemporary studies of the GOSET, besides some very general comments (xi), his position vis-à-vis these studies and the stories they tell is left unclear to some degree. These refinements notwithstanding, Harshav’s discussion is of utmost importance for our understanding of the bodily discourse that took place in Jewish culture during the first decades of the twentieth century—and, in my view, is perhaps one of the book’s most substantial contributions to contemporary academic discussions. For what it exposes, it would seem, is a “third option” explored by the Moscow Yiddish Theater about the Jewish body—an option that neither fully rejects the “Old” Jewish body nor embraces it, but finds within that body new modernist and radical potentials, an option through which the artists of the Moscow Yiddish Theater, committed to the revolution, found a path toward that past, in order to turn it onstage into one that is, to use the German critic Alfons Goldschmidt’s words regarding the Moscow Yiddish Theater’s masks, “unspeakably urgent” (119). Yair Lipshitz Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv, Israel

• • • MODERN HEBREW LITERATURE Michael Gluzman. Ha-Guf ha-Z.iyoni: le’umiyut, migdar u-miniyut ba-sifrut ha-Ivrit ha-h.adashah. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2007. 281 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001202

Yosef Haim Brenner’s Breakdown and Bereavement begins with an accident: The year was a leap year. Rainy and warm, and on that summery spring day in the commune he had already been given the job of getting in the hay. He and Menahem, the hired hand, were at work in the field … . Suddenly the man 2. Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 150–84. 3. Ibid., 97–98.

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Book Reviews Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, discuss at length plays performed later by the GOSET that surely had more prominent heroic, mythical, and national tones, such as Shmuel Halkin’s Bar Kokhba, as well as the theater troupe’s involvement with both Zionist and rabbinic figures.2 In contrast, for earlier sources appearing in Harshav’s book, Zionism and rabbinic Jewry are both associated mainly with HaBima.3 As Harshav barely refers to other contemporary studies of the GOSET, besides some very general comments (xi), his position vis-à-vis these studies and the stories they tell is left unclear to some degree. These refinements notwithstanding, Harshav’s discussion is of utmost importance for our understanding of the bodily discourse that took place in Jewish culture during the first decades of the twentieth century—and, in my view, is perhaps one of the book’s most substantial contributions to contemporary academic discussions. For what it exposes, it would seem, is a “third option” explored by the Moscow Yiddish Theater about the Jewish body—an option that neither fully rejects the “Old” Jewish body nor embraces it, but finds within that body new modernist and radical potentials, an option through which the artists of the Moscow Yiddish Theater, committed to the revolution, found a path toward that past, in order to turn it onstage into one that is, to use the German critic Alfons Goldschmidt’s words regarding the Moscow Yiddish Theater’s masks, “unspeakably urgent” (119). Yair Lipshitz Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv, Israel

• • • MODERN HEBREW LITERATURE Michael Gluzman. Ha-Guf ha-Z.iyoni: le’umiyut, migdar u-miniyut ba-sifrut ha-Ivrit ha-h.adashah. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2007. 281 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001202

Yosef Haim Brenner’s Breakdown and Bereavement begins with an accident: The year was a leap year. Rainy and warm, and on that summery spring day in the commune he had already been given the job of getting in the hay. He and Menahem, the hired hand, were at work in the field … . Suddenly the man 2. Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 150–84. 3. Ibid., 97–98.

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Book Reviews below uttered a soft groan and staggered slightly with the load on his pitchfork. Menahem looked down to see a large bale of hay, the heaviest yet, overturned on the ground and Hefetz squirming beside it. “The devil!” he cried, slipping down from the above. What could be the matter? Sunstroke? Malaria? Chills?—No, a sharp pain … a pain below the waist … ach, what an ass!1

In an ironic tone, the narrator reports on the “disaster”: Hefetz, who came from Europe to Eretz-Israel to work the land, collapses under the strain. His body’s betrayal prevents him from completing his mission. Similar accidents stand at the center of Michael Gluzman’s Ha-Guf ha-Z.iyoni: le’umiyut, migdar u-miniyut ba-sifrut ha-Ivrit ha-h.adashah (The Zionist Body: Nationalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Hebrew Literature). This book demonstrates the complexities inherent in the narration and representation of the Jewish body. It focuses on moments of irony and self-reflection of Jewish and Israeli male writers who dealt with the betrayals of a body that failed to do what was assigned to it. Gluzman intends to show that rather than being marginal, these poetic moments have constituted an integral part of modern Hebrew literature since its emergence. Arguing for a new historiography of Hebrew literature from the late nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth, The Zionist Body offers an alternative model of reading that goes beyond the evolution of the literary forms, styles, and relationships between Hebrew literature and the “Zionist masternarrative.” Working within the field of cultural studies, Gluzman employs queer as well as feminist theories, psychoanalytic approaches, and poststructural thought. In following Michel Foucault’s seminal work on the history of sexuality as well as Roland Barthes’s insights on desire in writing, he presents a fascinating reading of works of Hebrew literature that have been part of a national discourse within which the Jewish body and Jewish masculinity have been reshaped and reformed. The political discourses on the Jewish body and the Jewish male in particular can be traced to nineteenth-century Europe, and they are the subject of a broad field of research.2 Gluzman mentions the influence of scientific innovations on the formation of an antisemitic medical discourse that emphasized the negative physical character of the Jew and regarded his body as feminine. The defeminization of the Jew, however, revealed a psychocultural mechanism—hatred and selfhatred—that urgently called for repair and correction.3 This evocation of the 1. Yosef Haim Brenner, Breakdown and Bereavement, trans. Hillel Halkin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 5–6. 2. See, e.g., Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Sexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and recently, Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (New York: Routledge, 2007). 3. Baruch Kurzweil, “Self-Hatred in the Literature of the Jews: Kraus, Kafka, Brenner, and Judaism” [in Hebrew], Molad 16 (1958): 112–28.

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Book Reviews new body emerged in different forms, as well as in Zionist discourses that were marked by antisemitic arguments and stereotypes, such as Max Nordau’s call for the reshaping and progressive formation of the Jewish body (“muscular Judaism”) at the Second Zionist Congress. The remedy for the Jewish deformation in exile—a victim of pogroms, fear, and suffering—was the state. In this sense, the “return to history” was perceived as a return to the body: the only way the Jew could finally become a real man, which also meant—on the collective level—to become a nation. The longing for sovereignty found poetic expression in works of Jewish and Hebrew writers who experimented with the ideological call for revival and improvement of the Jewish “physicality.” The Zionist Body is dedicated to their work. Gluzman explores the figurations of this physicality—its emergence and collapse, reconstruction and fragmentation, and what it should have been and what it failed to be. This failure was imprinted from the very beginning, for, as this book impressively shows, while Hebrew literature embodied the possibility of the negation of Diaspora and the ideological commitment to the project of the new Jewish body on the one hand, it also embodied self-criticism, irony, and an ambiguous perspective on the other. The first chapter deals with Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (1902). Written in German, this novel that resonates with the Dreyfus Affair depicts the private exodus of an Austrian Jew from Vienna to Palestine. According to Gluzman’s reading, the Jewish state—an Old New land—is a sexual and gender utopia, a colonial site of redemption in which the feminine Jewish male becomes sovereign and is finally cured of his neuroses, such as melancholy, death wishes, and homoerotic desires. The cure, however, is selective, as shown in the contradiction between the suffrage ideal and the patriarchal politics, as well as in the altruistic relationship to the Arab population. Another example of “exile negation” that is translated into gender and sexual complexities is found in Chapter 2. Inquiring into questions of fiction and faction, poetry and historiography, Gluzman retells the story of the national poet, who in 1903 was sent to Kishinev in order to write a report on the pogrom. Chaim Nachman Bialik stayed in Kishinev for a few weeks, heard survivors’ testimonies, and witnessed the destruction. Yet instead of a documentary report, he returned with a poem, “In the City of Slaughter,” that demonstrated an ambivalent relationship to the victims. Gluzman reads the collective story in light of a private one that took place some years earlier. According to this reading, the repression of an early traumatic experience—the poet as a subject of violation and humiliation—returns through the meeting with the female victims, this time, however, in the form of the violator, an over-identification that generates poetic distance and aggressive protest. The revealing of a hidden gender narrative that associates helplessness with femininity indicates the processes of identity within which the consolidation of a masculine subject demands the rejection of the feminine. A poetic imagery that interferes with the model of the new masculine body is explored in Chapter 3, on The Wanderings of Benjamin III (1878), a work that was first written in Yiddish. Deterritorialization, gender reversals,

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Book Reviews and role transitions that characterize the two travelers (the novel’s protagonists) manifest criticism of and identification with traditional Jewish society. Gluzman shows how in the Carnival of Abramovich, where a Jewish Don Quixote dispatches his unfulfilled desire ahead of him, not only the stereotypes of the exilic body but also its new national incarnations are called into question. The return of Diaspora as pathology is discussed Chapter 4, which deals with Brenner’s Breakdown and Bereavement (1914). Once again, sexuality is associated with territory; however, the remedy becomes a disease in the form of an oppressive mechanism that submerges its subjects. Brenner’s criticism of the Zionist body is not nostalgic, for indeed, the exilic experience imprinted in distorted bodies requires repair. Yet the promised correction through the reshaping of a new masculinity appears to be no less destructive. Manifestations of the “new” are embodied in different figurations of the Sabras. This Israeli native, who had not been contaminated by the life experience of the Diaspora and was shaped as a militarist body, appears in Moshe Shamir’s novel He Walked through the Fields (1947). By opposing scholars who argued for an affirmative narrative, Gluzman tends rather to expose its fractures and to claim the existence of contradictory stories. According to his reading, the novel’s protagonist is haunted by anxiety and fear, insecurity and a death wish. Instead of demonstrating a new masculinity, heroism, and self-sacrifice, his characteristics contradict and subvert the image of the “living-dead,” a celebrated national allegory. The protagonist’s feminine body cannot be redeemed or repaired, not even on the battlefield. The battlefield or army service—itself a formative experience of the “melting pot” ideology—is also called into question by Yehoshua Kenaz. Reading Infiltration (1986), Gluzman shows how femininity associated with “illness” is relegated to the margins of the national discourse dominated by “healthy” masculinity. The homogeneous national narrative imprinted in the male body imposes restrictions and regulations on the subject until its destruction. Some of Kenaz’s literary bodies, such as the artists, refuse to be written into this narrative. They pose an alternative that cannot, however, be fulfilled. In the same way, the narrator himself, a witness of sexual and identity processes, documents moments of distortion in the birth of Zionist bodies. The last chapter is dedicated to The Book of Intimate Grammar (1991) by David Grossman, a work, according to Gluzman, that already demonstrates the post-Zionist body. The novel’s protagonist is another dissenter, one whose body rejects the masculine poetics, and his intimate language interferes with the collective discourse dominated and manipulated by national agendas and hegemonic politics. And yet the concept of “post-Zionism” seems rather questionable in light of the claim for a new historiography—one that attempts “not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation.”4 After all, the

4. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 15.

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Book Reviews power of this book lies precisely in the way it captures contradictory aspects and desires of literary creation that respond to both the marvelous and the dreadful moments of Zionism. The Zionist Body brings together a detailed engagement with texts, a theoretical framework, and a wide scope of interdisciplinary scholarship. Gluzman’s insightful findings on the fascinating role of gender and sexuality in the construction and destruction of national narratives indicate that the Zionist enterprise with its physical embodiments and cultural ramifications encompasses not only the ideal but also its deformed, failed implementations. Michal Ben-Horin University of Florida Gainesville, Florida

• • • GENDER STUDIES

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. xvii, 296 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001214

In The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, Melanie Kaye/ Kantrowitz addresses the question of who or what is the Jewish people. An activist, feminist scholar, and poet, she boldly challenges and seeks to overturn pervasive yet relatively new assumptions, such as the notion that all authentic Jews are from Eastern Europe, that all Jews are born Jewish, and that all Jews are white. Her main intentions are to strengthen the identity and practice of Jewish antiracism, including economic justice, to make Jews from diverse backgrounds understand that they need each other because of their differences, and to help Jews of all persuasions know that multiculturality is an enormous asset in the struggle against racism and antisemitism and in building social justice coalitions. The book is organized into six parts. In the first part, “Are Jews White?” from her vantage point as a secularist and cultural Jew, the author questions the historical racial assumptions about Jews by examining the ideology of whiteness and how it implicates Jews. She looks at the marginalization of Jews of color and discusses where Jews fit within the black–white binary that typifies the way that most white Americans think about race. In the most poignant section of the book, the second part, “Black/Jewish Imaginary and Real,” she examines the “special relationship” between African Americans and Jews. Here she addresses the assumption that most African Americans are antisemitic, and she provides background on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville

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Book Reviews power of this book lies precisely in the way it captures contradictory aspects and desires of literary creation that respond to both the marvelous and the dreadful moments of Zionism. The Zionist Body brings together a detailed engagement with texts, a theoretical framework, and a wide scope of interdisciplinary scholarship. Gluzman’s insightful findings on the fascinating role of gender and sexuality in the construction and destruction of national narratives indicate that the Zionist enterprise with its physical embodiments and cultural ramifications encompasses not only the ideal but also its deformed, failed implementations. Michal Ben-Horin University of Florida Gainesville, Florida

• • • GENDER STUDIES

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. xvii, 296 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009409001214

In The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, Melanie Kaye/ Kantrowitz addresses the question of who or what is the Jewish people. An activist, feminist scholar, and poet, she boldly challenges and seeks to overturn pervasive yet relatively new assumptions, such as the notion that all authentic Jews are from Eastern Europe, that all Jews are born Jewish, and that all Jews are white. Her main intentions are to strengthen the identity and practice of Jewish antiracism, including economic justice, to make Jews from diverse backgrounds understand that they need each other because of their differences, and to help Jews of all persuasions know that multiculturality is an enormous asset in the struggle against racism and antisemitism and in building social justice coalitions. The book is organized into six parts. In the first part, “Are Jews White?” from her vantage point as a secularist and cultural Jew, the author questions the historical racial assumptions about Jews by examining the ideology of whiteness and how it implicates Jews. She looks at the marginalization of Jews of color and discusses where Jews fit within the black–white binary that typifies the way that most white Americans think about race. In the most poignant section of the book, the second part, “Black/Jewish Imaginary and Real,” she examines the “special relationship” between African Americans and Jews. Here she addresses the assumption that most African Americans are antisemitic, and she provides background on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville

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Book Reviews and Crown Heights conflicts, Jewish participation in the African American civil rights movement, nationalism and feminism, and the possibilities for black– Jewish coalitions. Excerpts from her interviews with African American Jews, such as author Rebecca Walker, Rabbi Capers Funnye, and others, reveal the pain, humiliation, and rejection from the Ashkenazic standard that Jews of color have experienced, such that one African American Jew wonders whether she “is even possible.” The author attributes much of what stands between Jews of color and white Jews to a masculine gender dynamic that inspires conflict. This part of the book is extremely compelling because her analysis lays bare the nationalist arguments and mythology that have provided the backdrop for much of the current dissension and disaffection between African Americans and Jews. Kaye/Kantrowitz argues that the only hope for the challenging conflict between Jews and African Americans is in opening the discussion to include women. The author maintains that “turning up the volume on Jewish women’s voices” would be useful in shifting the priorities, agenda, and weight of the Jewish community to challenge black–Jewish opposition. She asserts that the agendas of Jewish women of all races in the United States and the African American community correspond on many critical issues, including affirmative action, reproductive rights, public entitlements, housing, education, employment, health care, and violence against women and children. She admonishes Jewish women of all races and African American women not to stand apart from these struggles because “women as women are in struggles connected to the struggles of other women. Women recognize their common oppression by gender” (64). In the third part of the book, “Who Is This Stranger?” Kaye/Kantrowitz maintains that “the Jewish people” comprises many peoples, most of whom are Jews of color. The author cites Lewis Gordon, director of the Center of AfroJewish Studies at Temple University, who explains this phenomenon by noting that it is a myth that people migrate and their descendants remain the same. For example, Gordon mentions the Abayudaya of Uganda and the Lemba Jewish community of Southern Africa. Kaye/Kantrowitz discusses the histories of Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, Sephardim from the Iberian Peninsula, and Ashkenazim from Western and Eastern Europe; she maintains that these represent centuries-old diasporas whose descendants live all over the globe. She writes that because of migration, “these terms may suggest but cannot predict color or appearance” (69). Kaye/Kantrowitz posits that Jews who are cultural and ethnic minorities in the Ashkenazic-dominant context or who span more than one culture can help the Jewish world enter “a multicultural arena girded appropriately for the struggle against racism and anti-semitism” (91). She contends that “the only thing that can prevent the loss and distortion that is racism is respect for the full range of Jewish experience” (97). Her main point is that the number of Jews of color is large enough that Jewish whiteness should never be assumed. She explains the “sparsity of color in the organized Jewish community” (102) as partially attributable to racism and cites the case of Beta Israel’s experience in Israel. Decisions that the Ethiopian Jews were not “authentic” and that white Russian émigrés were, even if they were not Jewish and could not prove Jewish ancestry, were a slap in the face to Jews of color worldwide.

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Book Reviews The author attributes this rejection to the problem white Jews have: if Jews are white, then are nonwhites really Jews? Parts 4 (“Praying with Our Legs”) and Part 5 (“Judaism is the Color of this Room”) present Jewish activists—both whites and those of color—who are working to dismantle racism. The author stresses that while she is not arguing that Jews are the chosen people in antiracist struggles, or that all Jews must participate in explicitly Jewish contexts, what is essential is “the desire to dismantle whiteness as we know it, and the courage to move forward to create the world we live in” (192). Finally, in Part 6, Kaye/Kantrowitz advocates changes in the leadership of Jewish communities as well as in larger societies. These changes will come only after the excluded are included and the marginalized are centered—that is, with democracy. Kaye/Kantrowitz maintains that this is the way “we strengthen our best Jewish selves” (192). The Colors of Jews is a lucid, well-documented analysis of the racial, ethnic, and cultural distinctions that separate Jews of the twenty-first century. The author proposes an entirely new understanding of “the Jewish people.” By encouraging Jews who are not Ashkenazic to tell their stories and share their wisdom, as well as helping nonactivists to understand that the chasm that divides us cannot be permanent if Jews are to survive as a people, Kaye/Kantrowitz makes a powerful argument for inclusion. Her interviews with activists show that inclusion is a realistic goal for those who have watched the numbers of white Jews decline and become a cause of great concern. As all of the people she interviews reveal, there is more that unites Jews of all colors than divides them. Carol Conaway University of New Hampshire Durham, New Hampshire

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AJS Review THE JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES INSTRUCTIONS FOR CONTRIBUTORS AJS Review publishes scholarly articles and book reviews covering the field of Jewish Studies. From biblical and rabbinic textual and historical studies to modern history, social sciences, the arts, and literature, the journal welcomes articles of interest to both academic and lay audiences around the world. A substantial portion of each volume is devoted to reviews of the latest Judaic scholarship and review essays on current trends in the field. MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION Manuscripts for consideration should be e-mailed as a MS Word or rich text file to the AJS Review managing editor at [email protected]. Articles will be put through a process of blind refereeing. Authors should avoid any identifying references in their submissions and provide a separate title page with their name, contact information, and institutional affiliation along with a short abstract (ca. 200 words). Manuscripts should conform to Chicago Manual of Style, ed. 15. Authors of accepted articles will be asked to prepare a final version in the journal’s style, which is available online at: www.ajsnet.org/ajsreview.htm COPYRIGHT Submission of an article is taken to imply that it has not been previously published and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. Authors must obtain written permission for material for which they do not own the copyright. A Copyright Transfer Agreement, with certain specified rights reserved by the author, must be signed and returned to the Editors by senior authors of accepted manuscripts, prior to publication. This is necessary for the protection of both author and the Association under copyright law. HEBREW TRANSCRIPTION CHART HEBREW ENGLISH ‫ א‬- aleph ’ ‫ בּ‬- bet b ‫ ב‬- vet v ‫ ג‬- gimmel g ‫ ד‬- dalet d ‫ ה‬- heh h ‫ ו‬- vav-consonant v ‫ ו‬- vav-vowel o, u ‫ ז‬- zayin z ‫ ח‬- hִet hִ ‫ ט‬- tet t ‫ י‬- yod-consonant y ‫ י‬- yod-vowel i ‫ כּ‬- kaf k ‫ כ‬- khaf kh ‫ ל‬- lamed l ‫ מ‬- mem m ‫ נ‬- nun n ‫ ס‬- samekh s ‫ ע‬- ayin ‘ ‫ פּ‬- peh p ‫ פ‬- feh f ‫ צ‬- tsadi zִ ‫ ק‬- kuf k ‫ ר‬- resh r ‫ ש‬- shin sh ‫ שׂ‬- sin s ‫ ת‬- tav t Vocalizations may be represented by the English vowel sounds a, ai, e, ei, i, o, u.

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