Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures (Studies in Contemporary Jewry) 9780197516485, 0197516483

Citation preview

ST U DI E S IN C ON T E M P ORA R Y JEWRY

The publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry has been made possible through the generous assistance of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Philanthropic Fund Seattle, Washington

THE AVRAHAM HARMAN INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY JEWRY THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

TEXTUAL TRANSMISSION IN CONTEMPORARY JEWISH CULTURES STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY AN ANNUAL XXXI

2020 Guest editor: Avriel Bar-​Levav Editor: Uzi Rebhun

Published for the Institute by

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​751648–​5 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY Founding Editors Jonathan Frankel (1935-​2008) Peter Y. Medding Ezra Mendelsohn (1940-​2015) Editors Richard I. Cohen Anat Helman Eli Lederhendler Uzi Rebhun Institute Editorial Board Michel Abitbol, Haim Avni, Yehuda Bauer, Daniel Blatman, Jonathan Dekel-​Chen, Sergio DellaPergola, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Amos Goldberg, Hagit Lavsky, Pnina Morag-​Talmon, Dalia Ofer, Gideon Shimoni, Dimitry Shumsky, Yfaat Weiss Managing Editors Laurie E. Fialkoff Robin L. Zalben

Preface: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Culture

Textual transmission has been a central feature of Jewish culture since its inception. The Bible is interested in memory and commands its followers to remember its laws, yet within it there is only limited mention of books and written texts.1 Subsequently, the vast literature of the Sages, while reserving a deep engagement with the biblical text, transformed and translated Jewish culture from the Mesopotamian context in which it was created into Babylonian and Hellenistic contexts, in this way enabling the survival and continuance of Jewish culture.2 The Sages put enormous emphasis on teaching, learning, transmitting, and remembering texts: “The study of Torah is equal to all” (Mishnah, Peah 1:1). An essential theme in the verses of the “Shem’a yisrael,” a pivotal text of Jewish liturgy, is the imperative both to occupy oneself with divine lore and to transmit it to future generations. The Sages created their vast literature orally, and it was memorized until it was put into writing at the time of the Gaonites. Other cultural translations followed.3 In medieval Muslim and Christian contexts, Jewish philosophy and mysticism infused new meanings into the canonical texts, with new Jewish languages (mainly Judeo-​Arabic) enhancing this process. Each phase of Jewish translation carried with it a certain amount of selection from previous phases. In a vibrant and changing world in which Jews were often forced to move, the Bible became a “portable homeland,” as Heinrich Heine observed.4 Jewish culture embraced new media technologies without totally abandoning the old ones. The scroll was kept for the Pentateuch, while the codex flourished. Since the literature of the Sages was created orally, there was no period of competition between the two modes of preserving written texts. Print was accepted with enthusiasm, whereas ritualistic textual objects continued to be written by hand, as Jewish law prescribed.5 Digital media was absorbed immediately for Jewish texts, though Sabbath-​ observant Jews do not make use of such media on Saturdays and holidays. The technology of printing facilitated a different stage of cultural translation, widening the circle of learners and of those who participated in Jewish religious life. Various kinds of new books, such as books that combined text and exegesis, translations into Yiddish and into Ladino, popular religious literature, and practical liturgy, enabled a larger Jewish public to be part of religious life. The book, to use Zeev Gries’ definition, was an agent of change.6 Jews created and preserved what can be termed a “bond of reading”—​a common literary denominator that connected Jewish learners and practitioners.7 At a later stage, despite the severe criticism against it, “Wissenschaft des Judentums” proved to be another vehicle in the transformation and preservation of

viii 

Preface: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Culture

Jewish texts, bringing philological study into the academic world. This was one of the ways secular Judaism kept an interest in the old writings. Indeed, secularization and nationalization posed new challenges for the Jewish bond of reading. Jewish culture was criticized for being “paper territory” rather than dealing with reality.8 Moreover, as Jewish writing diversified and was published in various national languages, the bond of reading gradually changed. Jewish national movements endeavored to provide the Jews with one national language—​Yiddish for the Bund, Hebrew for the Zionists. Judaism was depicted as a culture, not a religion, and the literary product was a central axis of this cultural renewal. The essays in this volume examine various aspects of contemporary Jewish textual transmission. They deal with old and new kinds of media and their meanings (Lehnardt; Marienberg-​Milikowsky; Bracha), new modes of transmission in Jewish music (Seroussi; Ramati), and the struggle to continue transmitting texts under difficult political circumstances (Estraikh). Two essays analyze textual transmission in the works of giants of modern Jewish literature: S.Y. Agnon, in Hebrew (Hagbi) and Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Yiddish (Schwarz). There are discussions of paratexts in the East (Nizri) and of print in the West (Engelhardt), whereas other essays deal with the organization of knowledge in libraries (Bar-​Levav) and encyclopedias (Tsahor). An edited symposium can hardly escape some measure of arbitrariness. The field of contemporary Jewish textual transmission, still in its infancy, is by no means fully covered in these pages. However, they offer a contribution to its future development. We cherish the close exchange of ideas and constructive suggestions of the members of the editorial board of this annual: Richard I. Cohen, Eli Lederhendler, and Anat Helman. We are grateful to our managing editors, Laurie E. Fialkoff and Robin Leah Zalben, for their patience and diligent editing of the volume. This publication was made possible through support from the Samuel and Althea Stroum Fund. In addition, for more than a decade, the ongoing support of the Nachum Ben-​Eli Honig Fund, under the committed inspiration and leadership of Eliyahu Honig, has been a mainstay for the annual—​indeed, to a major extent, it has made it possible to further the existence of Studies in Contemporary Jewry into the foreseeable future. For this, we express our deep gratitude A.B. U.R.

Notes 1. Aaron Demsky, Yedi’at sefer beyisrael be’et ha’atikah (Jerusalem: 2012); Jean-​Pierre Sonnet, The Book within the Book:  Writing in Deuteronomy (Leiden:  1997); David Stern, Jewish Bible:  A Material History (Seattle:  2017); cf. Nadav Na’aman, He’avar hamekhonen et hahoveh: ’itzuvah shel hahistoriyografyah hamikrait besof yemei habeinayim uleaḥar haḥorban (Jerusalem: 2002), 73. 2.  Guy G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: 2009). 3.  Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Philadelphia: 2011).

Preface: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Culture

ix

4.  Avriel Bar-​Levav, “Hamerḥav hakadosh shel hamoledet hamitaltelet: arkhiologiyah shel hasifriyot hasemuyot min ha’ayin betarbut hayehudit mimei habeinayim ve’ad yameinu,” in Lirot ulega’at: ’aliyah laregel umekomot kedoshim beyahadut, benatzrut uveislam: meḥkarim likhvod Ora Limor, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Iris Shagrir (Raanana: 2011), 297–​320. 5.  At the time of the print revolution, a number of scholars ruled that the text of ritualistic objects such as tefillin and Torah scrolls could be printed. This opinion, however, was rejected. See Yitzhak Zeev Kahana, “Hadefus bahalakhah,” in idem, Meḥkarim besifrut hateshuvot (Jerusalem: 1973), 272–​305. 6.  Zeev Gries, The Book in the Jewish World 1700-​1900 (Oxford: 2007); see also the review of this book by Arthur Kiron in Jewish Librarianship 14 (2008), 80-​87. 7.  Avriel Bar-​Levav, “Intimiyut textualit uvrit hakeryiah bein geirush sefarad leAmsterdam,” in Baderekh el hamodernah: shai leYosef Kaplan ed. Avriel Bar-​Levav, Claude B. Stuczynski, and Michael Heyd (Jerusalem: 2018), 145–​168. 8. Oren Soffer, “Paper Territory:  Early Hebrew Journalism and Its Political Roles,” Journalism History 30, no. 1 (2004), 31–​39.

Contents

Symposium Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures Avriel Bar-​Levav, Library Awareness and Textual Intimacy in Contemporary Jewish Culture

3

Itay Marienberg-​Milikowsky, Digital Research of Jewish Texts: Challenges and Opportunities

15

Yaniv Hagbi, Textual Transmission as Textual Participation: The Case of Materialism in S.Y. Agnon’s Perception of Language

26

Jan Schwarz, The Lost Souls of Meshugah: Textual Transmission of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s World Literature

49

Gennady Estraikh, Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–​1991

70

Andreas Lehnardt, The Discovery and Recovery of Hebrew Manuscripts: The Case of Germany

87

Edwin Seroussi, The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

100

Ido Ramati, Media in the Dissemination of Land of Israel Songs

137

Guy Bracha, Digitization of Jewish Nahdah Texts: “Knowing the Enemy” or Preserving a Heritage?

152

Yigal S. Nizri, “Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”: Approbation Letters and the Printing of 19th-​Century Moroccan Halakhic Books

165

Arndt Engelhardt, Transferring Jewish Knowledge: F.A. Brockhaus as a Publisher of Judaica and Orientalia

191

Dan Tsahor, Knowledge and the Making of a Jewish Nation: Encyclopedia, Historical Narrative, and the Epistemic Origins of Zionism

210

xi

xii 

Contents

Essay Adi Livny, Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus: The Pragmatic Binationalism of D.W. Senator (1930–​1949)

225

Book Reviews (arranged by subject) Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen (eds.), Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-​Holocaust Decades, Sean Martin

249

Eugene M. Avrutin, Jonathan Dekel-​Chen, and Robert Weinberg (eds.), Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond, David Biale

251

Batya Brutin, Hayerushah: hashoah biytzirotehem shel omanim yisreelim benei hador hasheni (The Inheritance: The Holocaust in the Artworks of Second Generation Israeli Artists), Tamara Abramovitch

253

Diana Dumitru, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union, Samuel Barnai

256

Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann (eds.), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, Zvi Gitelman 258 Amir Goldstein, Derekh rabat panim: tziyonuto shel Zeev Jabotinsky lenokhaḥ haantishemiyut (Zionism and Anti-​Semitism in the Thought and Action of Ze’ev Jabotinsky), Avi Shilon

261

Patrizia Guarnieri, Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism: From Florence to Jerusalem and New York, Sergio DellaPergola

263

Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion Ken Frieden, Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction, Nancy Sinkoff

266

Sarah Hammerschlag, Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion, Michael Roubach

269

Vivian Liska, German-​Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy, Paul Mendes-​Flohr

271

Edna Nahshon (ed.), New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway, Vassili Schedrin 274 Karen E.H. Skinazi, Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture, Naomi Mandel

278

Contents

xiii

Jeffrey Summit, Singing God’s Word: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism, Sonja K. Pilz

280

History, Biography, and Social Science Matthew Baigell, The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877–​1935, Diana L. Linden

282

Matthew Baigell, Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art, 1880-​1940, Diana L. Linden

282

Ido Bassok, Teḥiyat hane’urim: mishpaḥah veḥinukh beyahadut polin bein milḥamot ha’olam (Revival of Youth: Family and Education among Interwar Polish Jewry), Samuel D. Kassow

285

́ Kamil Kijek, Dzieci Modernizmu: S wiadomo sć́ , kultura i socjalizacja polityczna młodzieży żydowskiej w II Rzeczpospolitej (Children of Modernism: The Consciousness Culture and Political Socialization of Jewish Youth in the Second Polish Republic), Samuel D. Kassow

285

Shannon L. Fogg, Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942–​1947, Renée Poznanski

290

Zvi Gitelman (ed.), The New Jewish Diaspora: Russian-​Speaking Immigrants in the United States, Israel, and Germany, Larissa Remennick

292

Maxine Jacobson, Modern Orthodoxy in American Judaism: The Era of Rabbi Leo Jung, Samuel Heilman

294

Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran (eds.), Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography, Harvey E. Goldberg

296

Ber Kotlerman, Broken Heart/​Broken Wholeness: The Post-​Holocaust Plea for Jewish Reconstruction of the Soviet Yiddish Writer Der Nister, Mikhail Krutikov

298

Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (eds.), Space and Spatiality in Modern German-​Jewish History, Shulamit Volkov

301

Eli Lederhendler, American Jewry: A New History, Jeffrey S. Gurock

303

Vladimir Levin, Mimahpekhah lemilḥamah: hapolitikah hayehudit berusiyah, 1907–​1914 (From Revolution to War: Jewish Politics in Russia, 1907–​1914), Brian Horowitz

304

Jacob Jay Lindenthal, Abi Gezunt: Explorations into the Role of Health and the American Jewish Dream, together with The Lindex: A Companion to Abi Gezunt, Gil Ribak

307

Sean Martin, For the Good of the Nation: Institutions for Jewish Children in Interwar Poland: A Documentary History, Shaul Stampfer

309

Uzi Rebhun, Jews and the American Religious Landscape, Yaakov Ariel

311

xiv 

Contents

Jacques Roumani, David Meghnagi, and Judith Roumani (eds.), Jewish Libya: Memory and Identity in Text and Image, Emanuela Trevisan Semi 312 Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews, Michael R. Marrus

314

Mel Scult (ed.), Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, vol. 2, 1934–​1941, Noam Pianko

316

Jeffrey Veidlinger (ed.), Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse, Dani Schrire

318

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East Tal Dekel, Transnational Identities: Women, Art, and Migration in Contemporary Israel, Lynne Swarts

321

Michael Feige, ’Al da’at hamakom: meḥozot zikaron yisreelim (Al Da’at Ha’makom: Israeli Realms of Memory), ed. David Ohana, Edna Lomsky-​Feder

323

Yaron Harel, Damesek nikhbeshah zemanit: hatziyonut beDamesek 1908–​1923, Norman (Noam) A. Stillman 325 Yaron Harel, Zionism in Damascus: Ideology and Activity in the Jewish Community at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, trans. D. Gershon Lewental, Norman (Noam) A. Stillman

325

Dana Hercbergs, Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalem, Menachem Klein

328

Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor, Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, Yair Wallach

330

Michal Kravel-​Tovi, When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel, Harvey E. Goldberg

332

Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-​Wing Zionism, Joseph Heller

334

Colin Shindler, The Rise of the Israeli Right: From Odessa to Hebron, Joseph Heller

334

Tamar Wolf-​Monzon, Bahir vegavohah kezemer:Ya’akov Orland: poetikah, historiyah, tarbut (Ya’acov Orland: Poetics, History, Culture), Jehoash Hirshberg

339

Studies in Contemporary Jewry XXXII

343

Note on Editorial Policy

345

Symposium Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures

Library Awareness and Textual Intimacy in Contemporary Jewish Culture Avriel Bar-​Levav (THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF ISRAEL)

By the term “library awareness,” I refer to the way in which the library is understood in a given text and, extrapolating from the text, in a given period or place.1 It can also signify the various answers to a question about the meaning of a library: in other words, the awareness of the principal and practical meanings of libraries, the perception of them as an aggregate, and the understanding that an aggregate of books is equivalent to an aggregate of knowledge and is even connected to other perceptions of holism. This awareness is connected, naturally, to the real-​world existence of libraries and collections of books, but the two are not identical. In Jewish culture (as well as in other cultures), library awareness is a diverse and fluid concept that changes with time and place. Differentiating stages or types of library awareness can contribute to an understanding of the historical, cultural, and intellectual trends of various periods. In this essay I will concentrate on the last two centuries, while touching as well on previous stages of Jewish culture. Notwithstanding the strong textual element in Jewish culture since late antiquity, the library—​in the sense of a physical space containing books—​did not hold a central place in Jewish culture and had almost no influence or discernable presence until the modern era.2 As far as I know, the concept of a central library existing in the intellectual center of the Jewish people was invented in the context of the Zionist movement. By this, I do not mean to minimize the significance of previous private Jewish libraries,3 small public libraries of batei midrash (study centers), or institutional Jewish libraries of the 19th century such as the Strashun library in Vilna, the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, or that of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, but rather to emphasize the uniqueness of what was once called (from 1925 to 2007) the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, and which became the National Library of Israel (NLI). Moreover, the Hebrew word sifriyah is a fairly modern term, apparently dating from the beginning of the 20th century. Before then, the more common terms in use were midrash (not to be confused with beit midrash),4 beit ’eked sefarim, beit sefarim, and non-​Hebrew words such as bibliyotekah. Such shifting terminology may hint at the amorphousness of the concept of a library, or at least, a Jewish library, until relatively recently. Avriel Bar-Levav, Library Awareness and Textual Intimacy in Contemporary Jewish Culture In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0001

4

Avriel Bar-Levav

Hence, the reverence for books and learning in Jewish culture was not coupled with a similar reverence for libraries. Perhaps this is another manifestation of a particularly Jewish ambivalence with regard to physical space, whether by choice or because of coercion. As Isaiah Berlin put it, Jews have had “too much history and too little geography.”5 Thus, the “Jewish library” is often imaginary, and its image is dynamic and changing.

Sacred Texts, Holy Books From a relatively early stage in the development of Jewish culture—​from the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud, if not earlier—​pride of place was given to the study of sacred texts. In the course of centuries of exile, in connection with the increasing cultural value of the texts, there developed as well as a special relationship with books:  Jews became “the people of the book,” according to the apt epithet of the Koran (which, however, referred to the relationship of Jews and Christians with one specific book, the Bible). Here it is important to distinguish between books and texts. Books can include texts, whereas texts have an independent existence of their own, without a necessary connection to books. This is the meaning of the concept of the oral Torah (torah sheba’al peh)—​a text that is not written in a book but is rather learned, relearned, and built upon. In the words of Heinrich Heine, the “book of books” was a “portable homeland” for the Jews: this was true not only of the Bible but of all Jewish books.6 If so, just as the synagogue and the cemetery can be seen as the holy places of the temporary homelands,7 so the Jewish land in the diaspora is a “paper territory,”8 and its holy places are its collections of books or its libraries. The Torah scroll is referred to in the Mishnah as a “book,” but it must be emphasized that there were not many other books at that time, and such was the case until the period of the Geonim (7th–​11th centuries). The first to write a book in Hebrew with a preplanned format was the 10th-​century scholar R. Sa’adyah Gaon, who in fact wrote many books (some of them in Judeo-​Arabic) and opened the floodgates to the torrent of Jewish books in Hebrew and other languages.9 In the course of time, as texts began to be written, a link developed between the text and the book. The Western monotheistic religions are textual in the sense that they are based on a sacred text—​the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Koran.10 Jewish culture also has a very high level of intertextuality, which developed almost immediately after the final redaction of the Scriptures.11 The Mishnah, the Talmud, and the midrashic literature created a model of increasingly complex, concentrated intertextuality, a literary tapestry woven within the texts and of them.12 It is further necessary to distinguish between sacred texts and other texts, in the way that Yiddish, for example, distinguishes between sefer (a sacred book) and bukh (a profane one). In the manuscript era there was no correlation between a work and the volume in which it was included. Scribes copied according to their own wishes or those of their clients, putting together compilations and booklets that could consist of a single work, several works, several fragments of works, or an entire work(s) plus fragments. Moreover, Jewish collections of books in the Middle Ages were almost all personal collections.13 The few possible exceptions are the synagogue libraries in the East

Library Awareness and Textual Intimacy in Contemporary Jewish Culture

5

(apparently mainly of the Karaites)14 and the Sephardi midrash, which, according to Joseph Hacker, was a public library even though it originally was to be found in the houses of rich intellectuals.15 According to Malachi Beit-​Arié, in the medieval Ashkenazi Jewish world, there were no public libraries.16 In any case, the medieval personal library was fragmented or missing, in the sense of its comprising a limited and often random selection of manuscripts. And although private library owners were often called to lend out volumes to colleagues or friends, in this way contributing to the dissemination of textual knowledge within the Jewish community, there was little in the way of library awareness: one borrowed a book from an individual, not a library. It was only centuries later that the notion of a professional library—​namely, a collection of books centered around a specific practical body of knowledge—​began to emerge. One of the first conceptualizations of professional library awareness was offered by a Sephardi scholar, R. Isaac Canpanton, at the end of the 16th century. In a methodological work titled Darkhei hagemarah (Mantua, 1593), R. Isaac exhibits a more developed understanding of the value of groups of books on certain subjects, concluding his work with these words: The wisdom of a man reaches only as far as his books. Therefore a man should sell whatever he has and buy books because, by way of example, he who has no books of gemarah cannot be learned. One who has no medical books cannot be proficient in medicine just as one who has no books of philosophy or wisdom will not be knowledgeable in these subjects. Therefore the Sages said that he who has many books has much wisdom. Although Rashi interpreted the verse “acquire for yourself a friend” literally, others explained it to refer to books, because a book is a good friend. One who reads borrowed books falls under the category of one whose “life hangs in doubt before him” [cf. Deut. 28:66].

Thus, in R. Isaac’s view, accessibility of knowledge is contingent upon the possession of manuscripts, a limited commodity at the time (R. Isaac may also have been acquainted with the first printed books). This situation changed in the early modern period when, as a result of improved printing technologies, the number of available books increased significantly. The new abundance of books created a need for new organizational and conceptual frameworks.17 In addition, a number of means were adopted to enhance the accessibility of books for readers—​in particular, paratexts (front pages, tables of contents, page numbers, indexes, and so forth).18 These innovations, which gradually became common features of books in general, also found a place in the Jewish world of books.19 If professional library awareness entails making a connection between an aggregate of books and a specific body of knowledge, the next evolutionary step is comprehensive library awareness—​that is, an awareness that there exists a complete collective of books that an ideal library must include. Such awareness, in turn, is contingent on there being an inventory of works; without such a list, it is impossible to know if the collection is complete. In 1680, the first Hebrew printed bibliographic book, Siftei yishenim, by R. Shabtai Meshorer Bass, was published in Amsterdam. This work reflected a transition from the book as a physical object to the book as a title. Until Siftei yishenim, almost all lists of books pertained to those existing in a specific place, or which were authored by the same individual or in connection with a specific author

6

Avriel Bar-Levav

(for instance, commentaries on an author’s book). In contrast, in Siftei yishenim there appears for the first time a list of all books—​not all the books existing in one place but rather a “universal” list of all books of Jewish scholarship that were known to the author. This, in brief, was “a library without borders,” as Roger Chartier called the catalogues of the 17th century.20 Another example of the awareness of the comprehensive library can be found in the writing of Shimon Frankfurt, a 17th-​century rabbi of the Burial Society of the Ashkenazim in Amsterdam. In the introduction to his manuscript Sefer yitenu (the work never appeared in printed form), he argued that it is forbidden to make halakhic decisions without first examining all of the books on the relevant subject in order to ascertain the majority and minority opinions: We should not rely upon only one book when rendering a legal decision even if its author was the leading legal authority of his generation, because we must follow the majority opinion. Therefore every posek [halakhic adjudicator] must have enough books to be able to rely upon the majority opinion in all laws that are practiced now in this area.

Indeed, according to R.  Shimon’s son, R.  Moshe Frankfurt (who was a rabbinical judge in the Ashkenazi community in Amsterdam in the 17th century, and also a printer), his father possessed “all the works of the poskim . . . with nothing lacking.”21 The library awareness demonstrated by R. Shimon Frankfurt is that of the library as a collective in which there are contradictions, controversies, and flaws. Precisely because there are so many books, there is a need to accurately map the field of books to ascertain the majority opinion. Moreover, books are a product of their time. They do not express eternal truth but rather what was true at the time that they were written. Put somewhat differently, the library is a polyphonic and complex collective, and one must know how to utilize it both fully and correctly. A later example of this concept can be found in the writings of R. Yosef Hayim (Ben Ish Hai), a 19th-​century Iraqi Jewish scholar who, in his introduction to his book of responsa, Rav pe’alim, writes that a halakhic adjudicator must be: eager and willing to knock on the doors of all the books of all the rabbinic authorities—​ both the early and later scholars, and more recent scholars, great and small, until his own time, including books whose authors are still alive. His aim must be to search diligently in order to discover and understand the opinion of each scholar who has discussed the subject he has been asked about. And this method is good and pleasant.22

Although R. Shimon Frankfurt and R. Yosef Haim stress the necessity of accessing each and every relevant book, they do not assume the existence of a center where all of these books are to be found; on the contrary, R. Yosef Haim calls on readers to carry out an extensive search for the books they need (significantly, however, both Baghdad and Amsterdam had rich and vibrant Jewish communities at the time these two scholars lived).23 I suggest that it was only with the rise of the Jewish national movement that the notion of a “Jewish library” as a Jewish spiritual center began to develop.

Library Awareness and Textual Intimacy in Contemporary Jewish Culture

7

The National Library In 1942, Joseph Klausner, the first professor of Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University,24 described a meeting in Bialystok with Joseph Chazanowicz, the individual who, perhaps more than any other, was responsible for establishing a national library in Jerusalem: At the Third [Zionist] Congress. . . (1899) I met Dr. Chazanowicz for the first time. It was an odd meeting. One of our mutual acquaintances said to him: “This is the young writer Joseph Klausner.” I tried to shake hands with him but he did not hold out his hand to meet mine, such that my hand remained hanging in the air, and he said, “It is questionable if you are worthy of shaking my hand.” I was aghast. What sin had I committed that was so great that I should be publicly humiliated? I was one big question mark. Dr. Chazanowicz saw my consternation and addressed me in a pleasant tone: “Until now, you have published three books: ‘In memory of a Poet,’ ‘Hebrew—​A Living Language,’ and ‘Blowing Winds,’ and you have not seen fit to send a copy of any of them to the library in Jerusalem! Should I extend my hand in peace to a lover of Zion and a Zionist who behaves so?” I stood before him in shame and humiliation. I admitted my sin but found an excuse for myself: “It did not occur to me that such thin booklets would have any significance for a great and important library.” “Every book is important! Each and every one!” Dr.  Chazanowicz roared at me. “There is no book, no pamphlet, no ‘flying scroll,’ no page printed or written for the sake of literature, that is not needed by some writer or scholar. Our Sages said: ‘there is no man who does not have his hour,’ and so I say: ‘There is no book that does not have its hour.’ Promise that you will send me your books and we will be friends.” I promised to send him my first three collections, and his face lit up and he became kind and pleasant and friendly, and treated me, a young student, with affection and honor, which could not have been expected from a man who was so crass and impolite as to refuse to shake another man’s hand. I then understood the immense strength of Dr. Chazanowicz. Only with such zeal is it possible to initiate a major project. Only a man with such singleness of purpose, whose whole soul is dedicated to his mission, will achieve his goals.25

Chazanowicz’s complete mastery of information concerning which recently published “booklets” had been sent (or not sent) to Jerusalem is not surprising to anyone who has read his brief writings on the National Library, in which he displays astonishing erudition with regard to Hebrew literature and Jewish literature, both of his own time and of previous eras. An old Zionist joke defines a Zionist as a Jew who gives money to another Jew so that a third Jew can immigrate to Israel. When he visited the land of Israel in 1890, Chazanowicz came upon a modest library established by B’nai B’rith in Jerusalem, and as he later wrote, this fired his imagination: Owing to my limited capabilities, I could not actively participate in the idea of [national] revival in all of its worthy fields of endeavor in practice, so I chose for myself one forgotten niche: the idea of the redemption of the Hebrew book and the ingathering of its exiles. To this I dedicated the best years of my life and sacrificed my personal home and family life and almost all the money I earned from my profession.26

8

Avriel Bar-Levav

For Chazanowicz, the “immigrants” to Israel were books, and the library was a mirror image of the Zionist enterprise. From 1895 until his death in 1919, Chazanowicz sent thousands of volumes of books and journals to the library in Jerusalem, and encouraged others to do the same. As a result of his efforts and those of other visionaries, among them Heinrich Loewe, Hugo Bergman, and Gershom Scholem, Jewish books received a permanent space of their own, and the “portable homeland” found sanctuary in the physical homeland. Even though the texts documenting the growth of the library describe the aspiration for a national library as a goal typical of nations and peoples, the development of the National Library in the framework of the Zionist movement is unique.27 Nationalist movements do not always grant priority to the establishment of a central library, and I am not aware of any other national movement in which the national library preceded the establishment of basic national institutions.28 The World Zionist Organization took over administration of the B’nai B’rith library in 1918. Seven years later, with the founding of the Hebrew University, the core of the B’nai B’rith collection was transferred to the university. Bergman, who became head of the library in 1920, invited Scholem to be in charge of the Judaica department; among the latter’s accomplishments was his classification system for works of Judaica, which is still used in the Judaica reading room at the NLI.29 The library retained its significance as a national symbol following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. In the midst of numerous existential challenges to their young state, Israeli leaders continued to promote the library’s development. For instance, on March 5, 1950, Prime Minister David Ben-​Gurion dispatched a lengthy letter from the hotel in Tiberias in which he was vacationing. Making reference to the new technology of microfilm (using the Hebrew term for photographing or filming), he wrote the following: For the new fiscal year, I suggest budgeting the sum of 50,000 Israeli pounds for photocopying Hebrew manuscripts of all generations that are scattered in libraries and museums in all the corners of the world, and which have not yet been published in print form, and to assemble them in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This, is in my opinion, is [both] an honor [and an] obligation on the part of the state of Israel. The work will not be finished in one year, but will demand considerable financial expenses during the next few years as well. The state of Israel does not represent all the Jews who wish or who are forced to remain wherever they are in exile. Yet the state of Israel is not solely the land of its citizens. It is the successor of the Hebrew nation in all its generations and all its diasporas, and it is the emissary of Jewish history for [Israel’s future]. The state of Israel cannot be a mere state like the Philippines or Belorussia, with all the respect I have for these countries and for all the different things they are able to do for themselves and for the world. As with the Hebrew nation, so too the state of Israel has a national and universal mission. The narrow physical dimensions of its existence—​dimensions of territory and population, do not determine the range of its acts or its level of grandeur. . . . . History and geography have bounded our material capability . . . yet there is almost no limit to our spiritual capability, when this is not dependent on number, territory or capital. And thus we must be faithful to our mission. . . . .

Library Awareness and Textual Intimacy in Contemporary Jewish Culture

9

It was the state of Israel, our national sovereignty, that made us citizens of the word. All the while we were enslaved and dispersed—​we were aberrant subjects (netinim ḥorgim) in every land. Now that we are standing in our own right—​we have become citizens with equal rights throughout the world. . . . Citizenship in the world is a clear mark of national independence. But it is incumbent upon us not only to be political citizens—​but also, and mainly, spiritual citizens in the kingdom of creative man . . . and every ancient and modern book containing something innovative, or which has somehow enriched man’s thinking, poetry, scholarship, or philosophical thought should not be absent from Hebrew literature. . . . . Nonetheless, before [translating world literature to Hebrew], we have the urgent obligation to redeem and rescue Hebrew literature. There are thousands of Hebrew manuscripts in various libraries,30 and these are being left unattended. Only a small section of these manuscripts have been printed, and [these are] not always free of corruptions of text or missing material, whether from fear of hostile censorship or because of negligence and ignorance on the part of editors and printers. The great majority of these manuscripts have not been published. Many have been lost because of troubles and persecutions.31 Who knows how many Hebrew manuscripts were destroyed during the Second World War, whether intentionally or by mistake. The state of Israel has to collect and assemble these outcasts—​the spiritual outcasts of Israel in exile. While I do not see any possibility of obtaining a mass of original manuscripts in Israel, advanced photographic copies, using the new technique, are nearly as good with regard to their practical use. . . . . . . . We must photocopy and assemble Hebrew manuscripts in all branches of literature, without exception: whether in midrash and scholarship, exegetics and science, agadah and halakhah, poetry and literature, both original and translated texts. The state of Israel and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem will be aided—​so I hope—​by all the [relevant] institutions, by the libraries, archives, and museums, as well as by bibliographical experts from Israel and from the non-​Jewish nations whose assistance we will need. I do not know how much all of this work will cost, but it seems to me that fifty thousand Israeli pounds as the first yearly contribution—​which will not unduly burden the national budget—​will be an important beginning.32

Subsequently, Ben-​Gurion suggested two ministers who were known for their scholarly activities to be members of the project’s steering committee: Yehudah Leib [Fishman] Maimon, the minister of religious affairs; and Zalman Shazar, then serving as minister of education.33 The first director of the Institute for Filmed Hebrew Manuscripts, Nehemya Allony, traveled among the world’s libraries in order to obtain photocopies or (mainly) microfilms for the library in Jerusalem, which in turn greatly expanded the options for research in the realm of Jewish studies. The institute was first located at the ministry of education, and in 1965 became part of the Jewish National and University library. Ben-​Gurion’s national library awareness, as manifested in this letter, may be regarded as a form of comprehensive library awareness. In his view, a Jewish state was obliged to be in possession of all Jewish books and manuscripts, or at least have copies of works not in its physical possession, since the state was meant to be a center not only for the Jewish people, but also for Jewish culture. Several decades later, the

10 

Avriel Bar-Levav

concept of a physical center for texts began to collapse when advances in technology led to a new stage of library awareness—​that of the omnipresent virtual library, in which the connection between book and text is weakened or even eliminated.34

The Virtual Library, De​centralization and Textual Intimacy Today, texts themselves are increasingly accessible online.35 To name just a few specific initiatives, there is the Responsa Project of Bar-​Ilan University; Hebrewbooks. org, which currently contains almost 52,000 scanned volumes; the digitalized Otzar hatorah and Otzar haḥokhmah, with 100,000 volumes; two projects affiliated with the NLI: Ktiv—​The International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts, and JPRESS—​The Historical Jewish Press Project; the Friedberg Geniza Project; and the Sefaria online digital library. In addition, various libraries throughout the world have scanned their Hebrew books, manuscripts, and journals as a means of making these more available to researchers and the general public. The accessibility of virtual texts in the computerized world fundamentally changes and perhaps even eliminates the question concerning the order and placement of books, which was part and parcel of the previous libraries.36 Moreover, the notion of the library as a center (whether national or local) has changed as well, since digital texts are found almost everywhere. We might compare this to the change in relationship between reader and textual “container.” In the case of a physical book, there is one reader and one text; with an electronic device, a single reader encounters numerous texts. Interestingly, this process of decentralization (by means of creating and maintaining digital collections) is often carried out by those national libraries that, in the past, aspired to become (physical) centers.37 Indeed, they have become digital and digitization centers, with the result of their efforts far exceeding the physical boundaries of their walls. An evocative memoir of childhood written by Zalman Shazar illustrates the magnitude of change in libraries, especially with regard to the issue of order and placement of books: How far back can I trace my love of books and libraries? To the time, I believe, when at the age of eight or nine I was first permitted on the eve of Passover to help Father air his books and dust them to make sure that they were absolutely free of leaven. .... Why was it that I was chosen to assist in airing the books? I had sisters who were older than I but on whom Father clearly felt he could not rely. The main point was knowing how to put the books back in their proper place and order. How could the girls possibly know that? They were, to be sure, involved in the process of taking the books out of the cases into the yard where long boards had been placed on the backs of benches and chairs. On these boards the books, large and small, were laid one by one, all of them open for the wind to leaf through, like some keen-​minded scholar glancing through them repeatedly in the course of several hours. In the meantime Mother went over all of them with a goose feather, cleaning the sides and backs carefully so as to remove any suspicion of leaven. When dusk came it was time to take the books off the boards and return them to the shelves. And then it was only to me that Father could look for help.

Library Awareness and Textual Intimacy in Contemporary Jewish Culture

11

.... For me this library of Father’s was more precious than anything else in our household. Though I did not then know what was in the books, I knew their savor, their fragrance; even in the dark I could guess the exact place of each book—​in the bookcase and in my heart. So when on the eve of Passover I was asked to help air the library, I felt as if I had been invited to participate in some sacred rite. Like a skillful artisan taking a large complicated machine apart down to its smallest screws in order to reassemble it, I would move book by book down from the shelves, only to return them eventually to their places—​reuniting the limbs into a single, whole, and beloved organism.38

As described by Shazar, the organization of the library was an act of gender-​based partnership and solidarity between father and son, from which the women of the family were excluded. In Shazar’s childhood, only men could participate in the task of reassembling the magical world of traditional Jewish literature. The women could assist in its disassembly and cleaning, but only the younger brother, even before he had read the books and knew their contents, was regarded as being able to internalize both their existence as objects and their proper order on the shelves. What we have here is both intimacy between father and son regarding the books in the personal library and a manifestation of what I term textual intimacy—​the notion that, in traditional Jewish culture (as well as in other textual cultures), there is a reciprocal relationship between Jews and their books. That is to say, book owners cherish and look after their books, while the books, for their part, “protect” all those who learn and make use of them.39 The main components of textual intimacy are as follows: • A vivid, conspicuous, and active presence of texts in the lives of readers, in the sense that readers internalize them, quote them, and regard events in their lives as reflecting material to be found in them. • A notion that the book or text protects those who study it. • A  holistic approach in which no clear distinction is made between older and newer voices participating in discussion or debate. This approach begins with the Talmud and continues in the rabbinic literature, where members of later generations freely quote from (and often argue with) their predecessors. • An attempt to involve a broader segment of community members (apart from those for whom learning texts is a vocation or an ongoing activity) by means of making texts more accessible to them, as, for instance, via translations, commentaries, and study sessions. This contrasts with the missionary approach, which focuses on a distant group of people outside the community. • Prolonged, continuous, or cyclical learning of texts, as with the weekly Torah portion or, in more recent decades, the daily page of Talmud (daf yomi). • Enjoyment of the texts and of the learning process. • A sensual appreciation of the material and visual aspects of books, alongside intellectual appreciation of the texts. • An awareness of the musical aspects of texts, as with the cantillation of ritual Torah readings, the chanting quality of Talmud study, and the rhythm of the Hebrew language.40

12 

Avriel Bar-Levav

Digitization has both enhanced and impaired textual intimacy. On the one hand, it has made texts more accessible; on the other, it has separated texts from books. To a growing extent, the material aspects of a book have given way to an electronic device—​computer, tablet, or phone—​that stores a collection of texts. Moreover, the cultural socialization that was once necessary in order to obtain texts and read them is no longer demanded. It is not clear what the consequences will be. In a famous treatise titled “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin describes the relationship between a book collector and his books. The experience of the collector, he explains, “is tied to many other things as well: to a very mysterious relationship to ownership . . . also a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional utilitarian value—​that is, their usefulness—​but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.”41 Jewish texts exist today on new stages. How will this affect their fate?

Notes I would like to thank Richard I. Cohen for his encouragement, and Zef Segal, Aviad Stollman, and Gadi Sagiv for their most useful comments on an earlier draft. This essay is based in part on two previous works of mine:  “Hamerḥav hakadosh shel hamoledet hamitaltelet:  arkhi­ yologiyah shel hasifriyot hasemuyot min ha’ayin mimei habeinayim ve’ad yameinu,” in Lirot velaga’at: ’aliyah laregel umekomot kedoshim beyahadut, benatzrut uveislam, meḥkarim likhvod Ora Limor, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Iris Shagrir (Ra’anana: 2011), 297–​320, and “Maḥshavot ’al negishut shel textim usfarim be’ikvot Talmud Steinsaltz,” Akdamot 26 (2011), 105–​115. 1.  Avriel Bar-​Levav, “Amsterdam and the Inception of the Jewish Republic of Letters,” in The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Leiden:  2008), 225–​237. For a general work (not dealing with Jewish culture), see Alice Crawford (ed.), The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History (Princeton: 2015). 2.  Eliakim Gotthold Weil, “Mekoman shel hasifriyot betarbut umot ha’olam uve’am yisrael,” in Sefer Yeshurun: bimlot shiv’im veḥamesh shanim lehistadrut Yeshurun, ed. Michael Shashar (Jerusalem:  1999), 273–​284 (this essay was originally published in 1942). On the libraries of the beit midrash [study hall] of the modern period, see Simha Assaf, “Sifriyot batei hamidrash,” Yad lakore 7–​8 (1946–​1947), 170–​172; Zeev Gries, Sefer, sofer vesipur bereshit haḥasidut: min haBesht ve’ad Menahem Mendl miKotzk (Tel Aviv: 1992), 60–​63; idem, The Book in the Jewish World, 1700–​1900 (Oxford:  2007); Arthur Kiron, “Studying the Jewish Book:  A Review Essay” (review of Gries, The Book in the Jewish World); Hagit Cohen, Baḥanuto shel mokher hasefarim:  ḥanuyot sefarim yehudiyot bemizraḥ eiropah bamaḥatzit harishonah shel hameah hatesh’a ’esreh (Jerusalem: 2006), 15–​22; Avraham Naftali Zvi Roth, “ ‘Ḥerem hakadmonim shelo lehotzi sefer mibeit hamidrash,’ ” in Mazkeret Emanuel likhvod Avraham Hayim Löw, ed. Alexander Scheiber (Budapest: 1947), 114–​124. 3.  Joshua Teplitsky, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History’s Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library (New Haven: 2019). 4. Joseph Hacker, “Ha‘midrash’ hasefaradi:  sifriyah tziburit yehudit,” in Rishonim veaḥaronim:  meḥkarim betoledot yisrael mugashim leAvraham Grossman, ed. Joseph R. Hacker, B[inyamin] Z[eev] Kedar, and Yosef Kaplan (Jerusalem: 2010), 263–​292. 5. Isaiah Berlin, “The Origins of Israel,” in The Middle East in Transition:  Studies in Contemporary History, ed. Walter Laqueur (London: 1958), 204. 6.  Zeev Gries, “Hasefer kesokhen tarbut mireshit hadefus ’ad le’et haḥadashah,” in Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, ed. Howard Kreisel (Beersheba: 2006), 140–​141, n. 58.

Library Awareness and Textual Intimacy in Contemporary Jewish Culture

13

7.  Avriel Bar-​Levav, “We Are Where We Are Not: The Cemetery in Jewish Culture,” Jewish Studies 41 (2002), 15–​46. 8.  It was Nahum Sokolow who coined the very apt expression “paper territory.” See Oren Soffer, “Paper Territory: Early Hebrew Journalism and Its Political Roles,” Journalism History 30, no. 1 (2004), 31–​39. On the aspirations of Jewish intellectuals to move from paper to the world, see idem, Ein lefalpel! ’Iton “Hatzefirah” vehamodernizatziyah shel hasiaḥ haḥevrati hapoliti (Jerusalem: 2007). 9.  See Yerahmiel [Robert] Brody, Rav Sa’adyah Gaon (Jerusalem: 2006) and the review article by Haggai Ben-​Shammai, “Monografiyah ḥashuvah ’al Rav Sa’adyah, hamahapekhan–​ hashamran,” Pe’amim 117 (2009), 177–​186; Rina Drory, Reshit hamaga’im shel hasifrut hayehudit ’im hasifrut ha’aravit bameah ha’asirit (Tel Aviv: 1988). 10.  Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? A  Comparative Approach (Minneapolis:  1993); Guy G.  Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice:  Transformations in Late Antiquity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: 2009); Zeev Elitzur, “Heketav vehakadosh: perakim betoledot musag hasefer bein bayit sheni le’et ha’atikah hameuḥeret” (Ph.D. diss., Ben-​Gurion University, 2011). 11.  Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority, (Cambridge, Mass:  1997). This essay deals exclusively with intertextuality in Jewish culture, though it appears, of course, in other cultures. 12.  Simha Assaf, “’Am hasefer vehasefer,” in idem, Beohalei Ya’akov: perakim meḥayei hatarbut shel hayehudim bimei habeinayim (Jerusalem: 1965). 13.  Nehemya Allony, Hasifriyah hayehudit biymei habeinayim: reshimot sefarim mignizat Kahir, ed. Miriam Frenkel and Haggai Ben-​Shammai, with the participation of Moshe Sokolow (Jerusalem: 2006). 14.  Haggai Ben-​Shammai, “He’arot legilgulav shel Keter aram tzovah,” in Ere”tz umeloah: meḥkarim betoledot kehilat Aram Tzova (Ḥaleb) vetarbutah, vol. 1, ed. Yaron Harel, Yom Tov Assis, and Miriam Frenkel (Jerusalem: 2009), 139–​154. 15.  Hacker, “Ha‘midrash’ hasefaradi.” 16.  Malachi Beit-​Arié, “Ha’im hayu sifriyot ‘tziburiyot’ yehudiyot biymei habeinayim? Hatzivyon haindividuali shel hafakat hasefer ha’ivri utzrikhato,” in Sifriyot veosfei sefarim, ed. Moshe Sluhovsky and Yosef Kaplan (Jerusalem: 2006), 91–​103. 17.  Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: 2010). 18. Gérard Genette, Paratexts:  Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E.  Lewin, (Cambridge: 1997). 19. Avriel Bar-​ Levav, “The Religious Order of Jewish Books:  Structuring Hebrew Knowledge in Amsterdam,” Studia Rosenthaliana 44 (2012), 1–​27. 20.  Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: 1994). 21.  R. Moshe’s remark appears at the end of the second edition of another work written by his father; see R. Shimon Frankfurt, Sefer haḥayim (Amsterdam: 1716); see also Avriel Bar-​ Levav, “Intimiyut textualit uvrit hakeryiah bein geirush sefarad leAmsterdam,” in Baderekh el hamodernah: shai leYosef Kaplan ed. Avriel Bar-​Levav, Claude B. Stuczynski, and Michael Heyd (Jerusalem: 2018), 145–​168. 22. R.  Yosef Hayim, Sefer rav pe’alim:  sheelot utshuvot be’inyan halakhah (Jerusalem:  1901), 1.  Cited by Zvi Zohar, Heiru penei hamizraḥ:  halakhah vehagut etzel ḥakhmei yisrael bamizraḥ hatikhon (Bnei Brak: 2001), 56. 23.  R. Shimon probably made use of the Etz Hayim library of the Sefardi beit midrash. See David Sclar, “Books in the Ets Haim Yeshivah: Acquisition, Publishing, and a Community of Scholarship in Eighteenth-​century Amsterdam,” Jewish History 30 (2016), 207–​232. 24.  On Klausner, see Shmuel Werses, “Yosef Klauzner vereshit hahoraah vehameḥkar shel hasifrut ha’ivrit haḥadashah bauniversitah ha’ivrit,” in Toledot hauniversitah ha’ivrit birushalayim: shorashim vehatḥalot, ed. Shaul Katz and Michael Heyd (Jerusalem: 1997), 487–​515.

14 

Avriel Bar-Levav

25.  Klausner’s reminiscences appear in Haboker, no. 2057 (31 July1942) and, in a condensed format, in his autobiographical work, Darki likrat hateḥiyah vehageulah, 2nd ed. (Tel Aviv: 1955), 202. On Chazanowicz, see Dov Schidorsky, Sifriyah vesefer beeretz yisrael beshalhei hatekufah ha’othmanit (Jerusalem: 1990), 183–​209. 26.  Joseph Chazanowicz, Davar el ha’am ha’ivri (Warsaw: 1913), 17. 27.  Yehoshua Ben Hanania, “Hasifriyot ha’ivriyot baaretz,” Yad lekore 3–​4 (1946), 68–​71; for a far more critical view of the Zionist national library enterprise, see Gish Amit, Ex libris: historiyah shel gezel, shimur venikus basifriyah haleumit birushalayim (Jerusalem: 2014); also see reviews of this work by Zeev Gries, Moreshet yisrael 12 (2015), 123–​140, and by Arie M. Dubnov, Judaica Librarianship 19 (2016), 93–​102. 28. Arundell James Kennedy Esdaile, National Libraries of the World:  Their History, Administration and Public Services (London: 1957). 29.  Gershom Scholem, Seder hamiktzo’ot bemada’ei haruaḥ (Jerusalem: 1927; rpt. 1968). 30. For an overview, see Benjamin Richler, Guide to Hebrew Manuscript Collections (Jerusalem: 2014). 31.  Avriel Bar-​Levav, “Al habezut shel textim usfarim ’ivriyim,” in Avnei derekh: masot umeḥkarim bahistoriyah shel ’am yisrael: shai leZvi (Kuti) Yekutiel, ed. Immanuel Etkes, David Assaf, and Yosef Kaplan (Jerusalem: 2016), 207–​218. 32.  Excerpts of Ben-​Gurion’s letter of 5 March 1950, located in the Ben-​Gurion Archives, Ben-​Gurion University. Also see Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, David Ben-​ Gurion vehitpatḥut hamad’a beyisrael: yom ’iyun bimlot meah shanah leholadat David Ben-​ Gurion (Jerusalem: 2013), 68, 90. 33.  Maimon was also the founder of Mossad Harav Kook; Shazar was the first minister of education in Israel, and later became Israel’s third president. 34.  This can be seen as a return to a pre-​modern situation. On such connections see Oren Soffer and Yoram Eshet-​Alkalai, “Back to the Future:  An Historical Perspective on the Pendulum-​Like Changes in Literacy,” Minds and Machines 19 (2009), 47–​59. 35.  For a more detailed overview, see the essay by Itay Marienberg-​Milikowsky in this volume, esp. 17–19. 36.  Avi Warshavsky, “From a Packed Storehouse to a Heap of Pebbles: The New Jewish Literacy,” Hayedion: The Prizmah Journal, online at https://​prizmah.org/​packed-​storehouse-​ heap-​pebbles-​new-​jewish-​literacy (accessed 10 June  2019). 37. See, for example, Marija Dalbello, “Cultural Dimensions of Digital Library Development, Part II:  The Cultures of Innovation in Five European National Libraries (Narratives of Development),” The Library Quarterly:  Information, Community, Policy 79, no. 1 (2009), 1–​72; Martin Harris, “Digital Technology and Governance in Transition: The Case of the British Library,” Human Relations 61, no. 5 (May 2008), 741–​758; Ari Muhonen, Jarmo Saarti, and Pentti Vattulainen, “From the Centralized National Collection Policy towards a Decentralized Collection Management and Resource Sharing Co-​operation—​Finnish experiences,” Library Management 35, nos. 1–​2 (2014), 111–​122. I am grateful to Zef Segal for his help. 38.  Zalman Shazar, Morning Stars, trans. Sulamith Schwartz Nardi (Philadelphia: 1967), 47–​49, 59; in Hebrew: Kokhvei-​voker: siporei-​zikhronot ufirkei-​masah (Tel Aviv: 1952), 9–​10. 39. Avriel Bar-​ Levav, “Intimiyut textualit uvrit hakeryiah bein geirush sefarad leAmsterdam.” 40.  Aharon Mirsky, Hapisuk shel hasignon ha’ivri (Jerusalem: 1978). 41. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library:  A Talk about Book Collecting,” in idem, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York: 1969), 60.

Digital Research of Jewish Texts: Challenges and Opportunities Itay Marienberg-​Milikowsky (BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY)

In his introduction to a volume titled Companion to the Digital Humanities (2004), a pioneering figure in the field, Roberto Busa, looked at the challenges posed by globalization to digital humanities.1 Busa was mainly referring to the narrow linguistic aspect of the problem when he sketched a vision for a virtual project he called antiBabel, which was meant to augment new technologies in overcoming the differences between various languages without taking anything away from the uniqueness of each language. Indeed, it is sometimes the case that the digital humanities—​a general term for a global intellectual movement bringing together a variety of attempts for placing the computer at the service of the humanities—​tackles local concerns, among them the interaction among different languages and cultures, each with its own independent intellectual tradition. The challenge of cultural uniqueness is especially pertinent when the subject at hand is what might be called “Jewish digital humanities” or, more precisely, researching Jewish texts in the digital age. In the following overview, I outline a number of central activities in the field, placing them in a wider global and theoretical context and indicating several possible directions for future development. First, though, “digital humanities” requires a brief explanation. As befits a field whose virtual space also happens to be its habitat, and given the problems inherent in defining a collective dynamic effort that is still very much in its infancy,2 it would appear that—​contrary to other fields—​a satisfactory and up-​to-​date definition is precisely that which is based on the wisdom of the masses, as set out in Wikipedia: Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the reflection on their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution. By producing and using new applications and techniques, DH makes new kinds of teaching and research possible, while at the same time studying and critiquing how these Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky, Digital Research of Jewish Texts In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0002

16 

Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky

impact cultural heritage and digital culture. Thus, a distinctive feature of DH is its cultivation of a two-​way relationship between the humanities and the digital: the field both employs technology in the pursuit of humanities research and subjects technology to humanistic questioning and interrogation, often simultaneously.3

This definition reflects, if only partially, the variety of activities existing under the broad umbrella of the field (which, in 2004, replaced another conceptual umbrella, “humanities computing”).4 At the time of writing in early 2019, it would be stretching matters to apply it to Jewish studies. This, because of two fundamental differences in the way Jewish studies deal with the reciprocal relations between the various activities described above. First, instead of a two-​way channel in which the humanities provoke questions regarding the digital age and vice versa, in Jewish studies, at present, the channel is mostly one-​way, with the technological effort mainly serving the humanities researcher. Second, in Jewish studies, the place of digital sources tends to precede that of analytical tools and computational methods. Thus, if the general field of digital humanities may be considered to be in its infancy, the more specific field of Jewish digital humanities is little more than a newborn, and it is also rather narrow in scope. It is therefore quite possible that the situation described here will soon undergo transformation. A number of recent events point to a dramatic awakening of involvement with regard to Jewish digital humanities. For instance, the World Congress of Jewish Studies held in Jerusalem in the summer of 2017 featured an exhibition that included approximately 20 projects at various stages of development. More recently, the spring 2018 issue of AJS Perspectives offered reflective discussion of a number of fundamental questions deriving from the character of the new media in their Jewish context. In Israel, a highly significant decision was made by the Council for Higher Education to allocate funds, over a number of years, to promote the digital humanities; to date, new programs of study have been established at the University of Haifa and at the Open University. All of these events indicate that Jewish digital humanities is no mere passing trend but rather an historic moment, and possibly even a turning point, in the annals of research. In his essay, Busa considered the special challenge latent in non-​Latinate languages, among them those written from right to left and existing in a morphological, grammatical, and semantic system entirely different from that of the European languages. Until fairly recently, the uncontested assumption was that one of the first obstacles in digitization and computational research of original Jewish texts was the language (usually Hebrew) in which they were written. Thus, for example, disparities in the application of optical character recognition (OCR) technologies and the absence of tools for the lemmatization of Hebrew words in accordance with their roots were (and continue to be) sources of frustration for those researching Hebrew texts. Lately, however, there have been signs of progress as a growing number of “universal” tools for text analysis are in fact adapting themselves to a range of languages. In addition, Hebrew-​specific tools are being developed; these are based on state-​of-​ the-​art machine-​learning technologies and advanced linguistic knowledge in the field of natural language processing (NLP)—​as witness, for example, the highly promising bundle of software programs originating in the Dicta project, which offer, among

Digital Research of Jewish Texts

17

other things, new means for searching the Bible, adding vocalization to Hebrew texts, finding biblical allusions in any given text, and comparing different versions of the same text.5

Digital Jewish Archiving (and More): An Overview Over the years, research taking place in the boundaries between the digital world and that of Jewish studies has most often focused on preserving sources (in particular, those connected in one way or another with rabbinic tradition) and making them more accessible. In this regard, the two most ambitious and significant projects to date have been the global Jewish database commonly referred to as the Responsa Project (proyekt hashu”t) and the Friedberg Genizah Project. The initial concept behind the Responsa Project was developed back in 1963 by Aviezri Fraenkel of the Weizmann Institute of Science.6 Fraenkel, asked by an American acquaintance how the computer might assist in Jewish studies, came up with the idea of computerizing the responsa literature,7 as this would enable speedy and efficient searches within this enormous collection. The idea was, methodologically, quite revolutionary: rather than relying on a subject key, it would instead feed the entire corpus of responsa literature into the computer and then work out new ways to retrieve and analyze the various texts (a concept with which every user of Google is familiar, but which was very unusual in the early days of computer science). The idea, which Fraenkel described as having been met at first with fierce skepticism, has succeeded to such a degree that it is now an indispensable tool for any kind of research in the field of rabbinic literature. Eventually, the Responsa Project moved from the Weizmann Institute to Bar-​Ilan University and became identified with that institution (over time, it became more of a commercial as opposed to a purely academic project). The number of texts included in the Responsa Project has grown exponentially; the search engines and retrieval devices have considerably improved; and an online version has been added to the original versions based on local storage (CDs and USB storage devices). In 2007, the Responsa Project won the Israel Prize for Torah literature. Fraenkel’s main partner in the creation of the Responsa Project, Yaacov Choueka, later became identified with a second revolutionary project in digitization:  the Friedberg Genizah Project. This project, which came into being in the late 1990s with the aim of advancing research on the Cairo Genizah—​not necessarily by means of computerization—​took on the task in 2004 of digitizing the entire trove of material. Over time, the groundbreaking technologies utilized by this project (such as those enabling a reconnecting of detached pieces of handwritten manuscripts) have transformed the study not only of the Cairo Genizah, but of Hebrew manuscripts in general. Among other recent projects are the following: • The Historical Dictionary Project. This computerized historical dictionary of the Hebrew language (inspired, to some extent, by the work of Roberto Busa), was set up by the Academy of the Hebrew Language with the aim of providing etymologies of Hebrew words—​namely, the meanings of any given word and its various forms throughout history, its first recorded usage and (in some cases) when

18 















Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky

it ceased to be used. The dictionary is based on a very large database of texts from various historical periods. As opposed to historical dictionaries of European languages that make use of a selection of representative texts, the Academy decided to base certain parts of the dictionary on all the texts in its database, or at least on those originating from the end of the biblical period and up to the 11th century (other periods are represented by a more limited selection of chosen texts). • Index of Bibliographic References to Talmudic Literature. This project, sponsored by the Saul Liberman Institute of Talmudic Research at the Jewish Theological Seminary, provides bibliographic references for discussions in secondary sources devoted to rabbinic literature in all its related disciplines (for instance, philology, literature, history, language, and gender studies), as well as references to parallel discussions in the talmudic-​midrashic literature and talmudic interpretative literature of the Middle Ages. The site also allows scholars to input material from their own research. • Ktiv—​The International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts. Designed to be the most comprehensive and advanced digital collection of Hebrew manuscripts stored in the National Library of Israel (NLI) and in other libraries around the world, Ktiv has so far uploaded more than 65,000 manuscripts. It features a search engine based not only on the content of a manuscript and its catalog description but also on its physical characteristics and its historical and artistic context. • Sefaria. This online digital library was launched by a non-​profit organization with the aim of furthering the study of Jewish texts. Emphasizing rabbinic literature in its various forms, it is based in the main on public domain sources and includes a wide range of rabbinic texts that have been translated into English. • Piyut Archive (An Invitation to Piyut). This project was financed in its early stages (2004–​2005) by the Avi Chai Foundation and more recently mainly by the NLI and Snunit (affiliated with the Hebrew University). Each text of liturgical poetry or prayer appears alongside a short explanation, accompanied by numerous recordings and academic articles. • Tikkoun Sofrim. A French-​Israeli project developed by École Pratique des Hautes Études at Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (EPHE, PSL), the eLijah-​Lab at the University of Haifa, and the NLI. The aim of this project is to make medieval Hebrew manuscripts available as digitial texts, using automatic handwritten text-​ recognition and human reading (which helps to train the algorithmic procedure). • Judaism and Rome: Rethinking Judaism’s Encounter with the Roman Empire. Sponsored by the European Research Council in partnership with several other academic and cultural organizations, this multidisciplinary project looks at points of encounter between the Roman world and Jewish culture, based on Jewish, Greek, Christian, and other sources. The emphasis is on small elements taken from larger texts—​thus, for example, it does not feature the entire Mishnah, but rather individual texts from the Mishnah that have a bearing on Judaism and Rome. • The Ben-​Yehuda Project. This is an outgrowth of Project Gutenberg (the oldest free e-book collection); its main contribution is the digitization of modern Hebrew literature no longer subject to copyright (70 years, under Israeli law).

Digital Research of Jewish Texts

19

The Ben-​Yehuda Project is also noteworthy for its being an entirely voluntary, non-​academic venture carried out by lovers of Hebrew literature. • Key Documents of German-​Jewish History. Sponsored by the Hamburg-​based Institute for the History of German Jews, this database highlights central aspects of Hamburg’s Jewish history from the early modern age to the present. As with the Judaism and Rome project, the emphasis is on short documents organized by theme. Among the main topics are antisemitism and persecution; arts and culture; leisure and sports; and organizations and institutions. All sources are offered in English and German. • JPRESS—​The Historical Jewish Press Project. Set up by the NLI and Tel Aviv University, this project makes use of a database of Jewish newspapers published in various countries, languages, and time periods. It displays digital versions of each newspaper, making it possible to view the publications in their original layout. A full-​text search is available for all content published over the course of each newspaper’s publication. It is also possible to conduct a “segmented” scan of specific elements such as texts, pictures, and advertisements. Projects such as those described above offer the researcher a wide range of analytical tools for finding relevant sources, classifying and sorting them, and even beginning an initial analysis and processing of the texts. An outstanding example in this regard is the possibility of producing, at the touch of a button, highly developed synopses of each page of the Babylonian Talmud with the Hachi Garsinan project, under the umbrella of the Friedberg Genizah Project. Overall, it appears that the main effort at present is directed toward the archiving act itself and its essential offshoots—​namely, preserving sources (in other words, a new type of genizah) in a way to make them accessible (a new kind of library), and in a way whereby one is able to locate texts intelligently (a new kind of index). An increasing amount of attention is also being given to the creation of platforms that enable new questions to be asked about archived material (as will shortly be discussed more fully), although this process is still in its infancy. Not surprisingly, a significant number of these projects are dedicated to aspects of a pre-​modern heritage (for instance, ancient manuscripts) that are likely to be lost in the sands of history if not properly taken care of. This, in turn, accounts for the fact that the preponderance of sources and fields of knowledge may be generally classified as religious in nature. The two phenomena together present a certain challenge to researchers of various sub-​fields of Jewish studies who make use of different kinds of sources (for instance, secular and/​or printed texts).

The New Jewish Library It is difficult to exaggerate the cumulative contribution of these projects to the radical change taking place in the Jewish library: not many generations after the establishment of both public and private Jewish libraries (a significant innovation, given the

20 

Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky

absence of Jewish libraries in the Middle Ages),8 the virtual library is redesigning the fundamental practices of the trade. Researchers in Jewish studies in its various branches are presented today with a library of original sources of a scope and quality without precedent. The vast majority of this source material is easily available to them via their personal computers, and even via their mobile phones, at any time and almost anywhere. Avriel Bar-​Levav has coined the term “library awareness” to describe the following: awareness of both the practical and symbolic significance of libraries, understanding them as a whole, and appreciating that a totality of books is connected to a totality of knowledge, and is even connected to other notions of totalities. This awareness is connected in the real world to books and book collections, but the two are not the same; the awareness belongs on a different plane, whose relation to the real world is complex. Nor is the awareness fixed and uniform, but instead changes and develops in different times and places.9

Consciousness of the virtual library, it would appear, in both its general and Jewish aspects, is significantly different from consciousness of the physical library. Its concept of totality is different. In its ideal form, for better or worse, it is less hierarchical; it seeks to undermine various forms of canonization; it reduces our dependence on intermediaries (librarians and experts) in the interface between the reader and the thing read; and it is also more democratic—​old obstacles that once stood in the way of a person thirsty for knowledge but untrained in any academic discipline are disappearing. The institution of the physical library, especially the academic library, the entry into whose portals would be like some kind of ceremonial ritual for the initiated members of the hegemony of the library republic, is losing its power to distinguish between those on the inside and those on the outside. Similar in effect to other forms of social political barriers deriving from the habitus (as Pierre Bourdieu would call it) of the academic world;10 the republic of the Jewish library is changing accordingly. In addition, the consciousness of the Jewish virtual library reflects a change in understanding of the forms of organizing and processing knowledge. Changes and additions to the traditional layout of compendiums with rabbinic commentary of the Bible (mikraot gedolot), or to the layout of a page of the Talmud, with its commentaries set around the main text, reflect a certain approach to the interrelation between the text and its commentary, or between one text and another, or between the text and the person reading it. In the same way, the virtual library, with its various link mechanisms, both reflects and formulates a new approach toward texts and readers alike.

Beyond Infrastructures: Distant Readings of Jewish Texts A library, at the end of the day, is merely a piece of infrastructure. It reflects, perforce, not only a concept of knowledge but also the boundaries of that knowledge: the totality of knowledge is that which is to be found on its shelves (whether real or virtual),

Digital Research of Jewish Texts

21

together with the links it may be able to provide to real or virtual shelves in other libraries. In and of itself, the library does not create new knowledge—​it produces no books out of thin air. If the sum total of the contribution of the digital humanities to Jewish studies comes down to the creation of a new library, this would not be insignificant; however, the accumulated experience from other fields makes it difficult to assume that the matter will stop there. At this point in time, when creative research activity is dependent on libraries but also goes beyond them, it would appear that the Jewish digital humanities are still finding their way. Occasionally, one comes across path​breaking studies that make use of advanced technologies to answer classic questions of Jewish studies. For example, in an interdisciplinary study that combined both archaeology and computer science, scholars examined 18 separate pieces of handwritten texts that had been discovered at Tel Arad, seeking to determine the extent of literacy during the period of the kingdom of Judea. Their conclusion was that no fewer than six separate people had produced these pieces of writing, a far higher number than had previously been thought.11 According to the researchers, this finding attests not merely to the nature of the bureaucracy during this period, but also to the general level of literacy among the population. From a methodological point of view, this study is typical of the field of digital humanities. That is, a salient problem in the field of the humanities (the extent of literacy among inhabitants of the land of Israel during the biblical period) was examined in the context of an archaeological finding (administrative writings from Tel Arad), then “translated” into a computational problem (how many people wrote these handwritten texts?) that was resolved by means of cutting-​edge technologies (computational image analysis and machine learning), and then “translated” back into an historical determination that at least some people, apart from professional scribes, were competent in the art of writing. In the wider field of digital humanities, much use is made of a hermeneutical paradigm known as “distant reading.”12 The term originated in 2000, in a provocative essay written by the literary scholar Franco Moretti (long before he began incorporating computational methods into his research work; eventually, he became a key figure in the community of the digital humanities).13 The term was designed to describe a reading strategy that recognizes the limitations of close reading of literary texts. As initially conceived, distant reading involves taking a very large number of texts—​for instance, all works of American fiction written over the course of a century—​and analyzing them by means of limited, well-​defined, and quantifiable units such as figures of speech. It is noteworthy that the distant reading paradigm was born out of a critique of the traditional forms of reading and was adopted only ex post facto as an appropriate description of computational textual interpretation.14 Notwithstanding, it blended in very naturally with an academic discipline that was in any case continually struggling with the dilemma of looking “beyond the canon,” and whose tools, perforce, were more methodical and consistent than any human-​based research could ever be. Thus, paradoxically, distant reading provided the sanction required for the digital humanities to become a legitimate branch within the study of literature and culture, at the same time as it was posing a significant challenge to the study of literature and to some of the fundamental theoretical and practical assumptions that underlay it.

22 

Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky

This somewhat paradoxical context sharpens the question relating to the possibilities inherent in the new (Jewish) library. So long as the digital analytical tools serving researchers are merely new variations on old tools, their inclusion in the traditional channels of the humanities does not represent a significant innovation: the change inherent in them is quantitative, rather than qualitative. Researchers of the Talmud who make use of the automatic synopses of the Hachi Garsinan project; researchers of the Cairo Genizah who take advantage of the excellent digitization of the Friedberg project; scholars researching Jewish journalism who access JPRESS—​all of them benefit from systems that are far more efficient, and frequently more congenial (in that they can be accessed from the comfort of home or office), than traditional libraries and archives. The same is probably true of computational stylometric tools that can more accurately identify authors of anonymous texts. But what of more daring tools, those that fully realize Moretti’s vision by shaping or redefining the activity we call “reading”? How might counting the words in a given text, or manipulating it by statistical and graphic means, become part of the discussion regarding its poetics, the ideological positions entrenched in it, or its place in intellectual history? What will be the place of “algorithmic” reading of texts, which identifies phenomena and recurring features that the human eye of the researcher does not (and never will) see? And, above all, will it really be possible for the new, computer-​based reading to convincingly bridge the semantic gap between the measurable elements on the surface of the text and the meanings hidden within it? These questions have not as yet been tested in the field of Jewish studies, though they are being explored in other fields. If the experience of others is to be relied upon, it would appear that, under certain conditions, such questions are likely to be answered in a way that is satisfactory, but also challenging. Evidence of this are the articles published in the past few years on the website of the Stanford Literary Lab (founded by Moretti), in journals such as Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ), Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH), and the Journal of Cultural Analytics (CA), and even articles that make their way into more traditional publications.15 At their best, such articles succeed in creating lasting bridges between the intellectual tradition of the pre-​computational humanities and the possibilities presented by the new computational age. In order for such connecting and bridge-​building to be made possible, computational methods will need to become far more accessible. In truth, Jewish studies research has already experienced the advantages of an accessible and relevant digital tool in the Responsa Project, whose use has become so transparent and natural that scholars take it for granted, often forgetting how different research used to be.16 The Responsa Project has become an organic part of very different types of research, as in philological-​historical studies, on the one hand, and speculative literary and creative readings of the texts, on the other. At the same time, an enormous disparity has arisen between researchers of rabbinic literature of all kinds, who are dependent on such technology, and their academic counterparts in modern Hebrew/​Jewish literature, who barely make use of it. In the community of the digital humanities, there is a commonly held belief that the challenge of bridging the gap between the digital perspective and that of the traditional

Digital Research of Jewish Texts

23

humanities is only temporary. The assumption is not only that better technologies will continue to be developed, but that there will be continued growth among the “born-​ digital” generation of researchers—​those who from the outset were equipped with laptops, smartphones, and other tools of the digital age. This generation of researchers, it is believed, does not need “introductions” to the digital humanities, or even to bridging technologies. Those in its cohort can easily master the mysteries of the software; they are quite capable of harnessing computational tools for their own purposes, without particular effort.17 And yet this assumption is worth reconsidering, for at least two reasons. First, even if the computational skills of humanists improve wondrously, this does not guarantee widespread, up-​to-​date proficiency in the entire range of the relevant possibilities. There is no surety that researchers born into the digital age are, by definition, more mathematically savvy than others.18 Indeed, differing levels of mathematical training continue to be one of the factors distinguishing between the various research communities in the modern university.19 Second, and more important, one should not take lightly the importance of holding fast to traditional humanistic values, paradigms, principles, and methods that do not necessarily align with computational paradigms. The goal of protecting humanistic traditions should not be dismissed as some kind of conservative collective fight to be put aside in the name of progress. Consider, for instance, the virtues of an open and creative interpretation that does not always go hand in hand with algorithmic reading. Or the illusion that is characteristic of the virtual library consciousness, namely, that boundaries of knowledge are equated with the boundaries of virtual space. Those falling prey to this illusion are apt to assume that search engines are so powerful, and the amount of scanned material is already so vast, that nothing of significance is left to be found. This, of course, is far from being the case—​now and almost certainly for the foreseeable future as well. There is a need for critical and constructive dialogue between the humanities and the computerized world in order to ensure that the latter is not recruited merely to provide aid to the former. In addition, it is important not to succumb to the temptation of assuming that the preferred research object is that which focuses on size, quantity, and an unimaginable scope of material. To be sure, working with extremely large data sets (“big data”) allows us to examine large cultural processes and to analyze phenomena on a broad scale. There is a real danger, however, that the unifying, schematic framework for “making order” of such material may overlook or push to the side precisely those small but important details or exceptions that patient, slow reading is apt to uncover.20 This is not to say that traditional, close reading can never be integrated with readings directed by measurable findings, quantitative analysis, or big data. However, the effort at bridging the gap between the two will require no small amount of maneuvering with the internal systems of each, as they continue dividing the humanities into separate groups that struggle to converse with one another. This is true of the digital humanities in general, and for Jewish digital humanities, which are still at the very beginning of the road. The potential of Jewish digital humanities—​as witness the current Jewish virtual library—​is enormous. Yet the challenges involved in fully realizing their potential are considerable, and they require more than mere technological advances.

24 

Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky

Notes 1.  Roberto A. Busa, “Foreword: Perspectives on the Digital Humanities,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Oxford: 2004), xvi–​xxi. Busa, a Jesuit priest, was considered by many to be one of the founders of the field of digital humanities; as early as 1949, he began the practical work for creating a computerized index of the works of Thomas Aquinas. 2. Matthew K.  Gold, “The Digital Humanities Moment,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K.  Gold (Minneapolis:  2012), ix–xvi; see also Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” in ibid., 3–​11. 3.  Wikipedia entry for “Digital Humanities” (accessed 14 January 2019). 4.  With regard to the name change, see the introductory article in Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth (eds.), A Companion to Digital Humanities, xxiii–xxvii. For a general historical survey, see Susan Hockey, “The History of Humanities Computing,” in ibid., 3–​19. 5.  For more information, see the online site at: dicta.org.il. 6.  Aviezri Fraenkel, “Proyekt hash”ut: ’avar, hoveh—​vegam ’atid?” Dinei yisrael 19 (1997–​ 1998), 253–​270. 7.  The responsa literature comprises responses of halakhic sages from the early Middle Ages onwards to questions that were directed to them. 8. Malachi Beit-​Arié, “Ha’im hayu sifriyot ‘tziburiyot’ yehudiyot biymei habeinayim? Hatzivyon haindividuali shel hafakat hasefer ha’ivri utzrikhato,” in Sifriyot veosfei sefarim, ed. Moshe Sluhovsky and Yosef Kaplan (Jerusalem: 2006), 91–​103. 9. Avriel Bar Levav, “Bein toda’at hasifriyah lerepublikah hasifrutit hayehudit,” in ibid., 201. 10.  For a history of the digital library, see Howard Besser, “The Past, Present and Future of Digital Libraries,” in Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth (eds.), A Companion to Digital Humanities, 557–​575; on the physical aspects of the present-​day library, see Graham Matthews and Graham Walton, University Libraries and Space in the Digital World (New York: 2016). 11.  Eli Piasetzky, Israel Finkelstein et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of Judah’s Military Correspondence Sheds Light on Composition of Biblical Texts,” PNAS 113, no. 17 (26 April 2016), 4664–​4669. 12. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January-​ February 2000), 54. Lev Manovich has suggested a different term, “cultural analytics,” which has lately become extremely common; see his article “The Science of Culture? Social Computing, Digital Humanities and Cultural Analytics,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (May 2016), online at: www.culturalanalytics.org. Yet another term, “culturomics,” appears in an article by Jean-​Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman-​Aiden et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331 (January 2011), 176–​182. This last article nicely illustrates the meeting between the humanities and “big data.” 13.  Moretti’s article is considered provocative for at least two reasons: its program and its methodology. His theory regarding the development of the novel in Europe and beyond contradicted previously held conceptions in the research of world literature. In addition, Moretti explicitly embraced the methodology of secondhand reading—​that is, the reading of numerous studies regarding literatures that were beyond the bounds of the writer’s own knowledge—​and thus reaching conclusions about works of literature he had not actually read. In time, this claim (which had not been phrased originally in connection with the use of computers) came to be read anew as an appropriate manifesto for the humanities during the era of big data, when scholars seek to say something significant about materials that have not been read but rather have been summarized in some manner by means of statistical and graphical models. See, for example, Jale Parla, “The Object of Comparison,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 1 (2004), 116–​125; Ted Underwood, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11:2 (2017), online at:  digitalhumanities.org/​dhq/​vol/​11/​2/​000317/​000317.html (accessed 24 March 2019).

Digital Research of Jewish Texts

25

14.  The new interpretations of the term, as well as its possible effects on the theory of literature in the 21st century, are worthy of a separate discussion. For the present, see Underwood, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading.” 15.  See, for example, Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us,” New Literary History 45, no. 3 (2014), 359–​384. 16.  Thus, even though the Responsa Project’s rules of use (which echo those of academic probity) require that it be cited in publications that have made use of it, it is rare to find it mentioned in the opening or closing remarks of such publications. 17. Stephen Ramsay, “Programming with Humanists:  Reflections on Raising an Army of Hacker-​Scholars in the Digital Humanities,” in Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, ed. Brett D. Hirsch (Cambridge: 2012), 227–​239. 18. The classic formulation of this problem appears in Charles Percy Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge 1998). 19.  And indeed, attempts at making up the mathematical gaps in the field of the humanities—​and not merely with regard to software—​appear to be another significant development in the field. See, for example, Patrick Juola and Stephen Ramsay, Six Septembers: Mathematics for the Humanist (Lincoln: 2017). 20.  One can illustrate this problem, in brief, by using the phenomenon of the “long tail” of word distribution lists in any literary text. If we feed a novel into an appropriate piece of computer software and ask the computer to provide a graphic display of a list of the words that have gone into the novel, we will get a curve showing a relatively tiny group of words that appear very frequently, whereas most of the other words appear only once or twice (this well-​known statistical phenomenon occurs in many contexts; it is sometimes known as the power law distribution or the “80–​20 rule”). While it is no doubt true that a list of the most common words might well teach us a great deal about the linguistic raw materials of the novel, from a literary standpoint, what is often more important is a rare word appearing in an unexpected place. Although an experienced human reader will be attuned to such a word, in the word-​distribution model, it is apt to get “swallowed up” in the multitude of other “rare” words, and thus overlooked.

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation: The Case of Materialism in S.Y. Agnon’s Perception of Language Yaniv Hagbi (UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM)

One of the most fundamental notions of rabbinic Judaism is that concerning textual transmission. The Jewish text is always on the move—​sometimes back and forth—​ from God to humanity, from generation to generation, from teacher to students. Textual transmission encompasses and even necessitates another idea, that of textual participation. A text does not simply change hands; it is always transformed in the process, and the agents of this process, by the very act of transmission, are those who reshape the text. This essay seeks to show the ways in which such notions are incorporated in the belletristic work of Shmuel Yosef Agnon. Textual transmission, in the context of the present essay, is part and parcel of the broader notion of “linguistic materialism.” The material aspect of language is everything that reveals language to our senses. Linguistic materialism is perceived here as the idea that meaning is to be found, not only in words, but also in the concrete material of which language is made. Thus, in order for a text to be transmitted, one or more objects need to be exchanged. Sounds, ink, paper, parchment, letters, books: all are materialistic manifestations of language that enable the act of textual transmission. Agnon was a conscious agent in the process of textual transmission. This is apparent, for instance, in his work as an anthologist. The anthologies compiled by Agnon are not merely a summing up of Jewish discourse on language and its derivatives. They are also doors, textual stations, as it were, through which one can traverse and evaluate the whole of his oeuvre. They serve, as will be seen, as a depository for relevant sources in the analysis of Agnon’s work. In addition, they are the very embodiment of his notion of textual transmission. Agnon was born in 1887 in Buczacz, Polish Galicia (now Buchach, Ukraine). When he was only 16, he published poems and short prose in various Jewish journals, in both Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1908, he emigrated to Ottoman Palestine, where he published several short stories in Hebrew; for his livelihood, he worked alongside Arthur Ruppin at the Palestinian office of the Zionist Organization. In 1912, both Agnon and Ruppin went to Germany. Although Ruppin returned after a while to Palestine, Agnon remained in Germany for 12 years. In the first years of his stay, he Yaniv Hagbi, Textual Transmission as Textual Participation In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0003

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

27

worked as an editor at the Jüdischer Verlag.1 He was not particularly interested in the “special occasion” anthologies produced by this publishing house.2 However, once he turned to subjects close to his heart, such as the High Holy Days, language (Hebrew) and books (Torah and everything emanating from it), he became a dedicated compiler of anthologies—​as Gershon Scholem noted, anthology compilation was “much more than a mere sideline in his creative work as a writer.”3 According to Baruch Kurzweil, Agnon felt obliged to persevere in what he regarded as a sacred endeavor even though this necessitated a substantial amount of time and effort on his part; Kurzweil himself was “astounded by the enormous compromise and sacrifice evident in Agnon’s self-​abnegation.”4 Following his return to Mandate Palestine, Agnon published three anthologies, Yamim noraim (Days of Awe; 1938, 1947)  Sefer sofer vesipur (Book, Writer, and Story; 1938) and Atem reitem (You Yourselves Have Seen; 1959).5 In a remark that was perhaps intended to assuage his own conscience or else to respond to a critic who might accuse him of wasting his artistic energy,6 Agnon told David Kena’ani: “There is power in the act of dissemination, as in the making of encyclopedias [and the anthologies].”7 Whereas Days of Awe is an anthology of sources concerning Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the other two tell the story of Jewish textual transmission: they are texts about texts. Agnon continued working on the latter two anthologies over the course of his career; after his death, updated versions of Sefer sofer vesipur and Atem reitem were published (in 1978 and in 1995, respectively). The new editions of the books encompassed a substantially greater number of sources and themes. Nevertheless, language remained the meta-​subject of each. Concerning Sefer sofer vesipur, Agnon noted that it was “an assemblage of legends about books and authors,”8 whereas Atem reitem concerned itself with the gathering and Revelation at Sinai.9 One of the dominant themes in these anthologies is a materialistic notion of the Hebrew language, as described above. Indeed, this notion permeates not only the anthologies but Agnon’s work as a whole; it is so inherent in his worldview and literary practices that one cannot imagine the Agnonian universe without it. And yet, like gravity, its very omnipresence may cause it to go unnoticed, such that readers are likely to overlook the force it exerts on Agnon’s literary mechanisms.

The Notion of Natural Language in Agnon’s Creative Mind In the “secular” (or conventional) perspective regarding language, there is no necessary link between the form of language (whether written or oral) and the content it seeks to denote. In contrast, the “religious” or “mystical” perspective holds that there is an inherent, natural connection between words and the things they describe. The “table,” for example, as an object in all its meanings (shape, possible uses, and so on) can be described only through the word “table”; that is, the actual sound of the word, and its orthography, are indispensable parts of the object’s “tableness.”10 This primitive, or natural, linguistic perception of language has many variations. Thus (to choose a paradigm far removed from Jewish thought), many Japanese, even today, believe in kotodama, which “literally refers to the mysterious power dwelling in words. In ancient times, it was believed that what words represented would be

28 

Yaniv Hagbi

realized by kotodama’s supernatural power.”11 According to J.M.Y. Simpson, this “primitive” linguistic perception of language is marked by three dominant assumptions: namely, the (sacred) origin of language, the natural connection between words and things, and the perceived power of language to shape reality.12 In this regard, consider the following opening of Agnon’s short story “The Sense of Smell”: The holy tongue [Hebrew] is a language like no other. All other tongues exist only by agreement, each nation having agreed upon its language. But the holy tongue is the one in which the Torah was given, the one through which the blessed Holy One created His world.13

Given the perceived sacred origin of Hebrew, one of the more astonishing ideas expressed in rabbinical Judaism is that the “holy tongue” existed before the creation of the world.14 The Torah, which according to traditional Jewish belief was authored by God, is regarded as always having existed, even prior to the world of phenomena: Nine hundred and seventy-​four generations before the world was created, the Torah was already written and nestling in the bosom of the Holy One, blessed be He, reciting song with the ministering angels. For it is said [Prov. 8:30], “Then I was with Him as a nursling, and I was daily all delight.”15

Agnon chose this midrash for the opening of Sefer sofer vesipur.16 In similar fashion, the first chapter of Atem reitem is titled “Before Creation,” and in it Agnon raises the subject of the Torah’s preexistence in relation to the world, as discussed in numerous sources. According to traditional belief, not only did the Torah exist before the world, it helped God create the world: it was the blueprint, as it were, that God, like an architect, consulted before he made the world the way it is. The second characteristic of the primitive, natural perception of language concerns the intimate relationship between words and things. Reality, as it emanates from language, blurs the border between words and things. The narrator in ’Ad henah (To This Day),17 for instance, bears Agnon’s own first two names, Shmuel Yosef, and in addition, the two share many biographical characteristics. In consequence, the traditional dichotomy between author/​character is effaced. At one point, Shmuel Yosef offers a lament: “There are words for every occasion. What a pity there aren’t occasions [devarim] for every word.”18 Shmuel Yosef’s proclamation subverts the common Western notion of some occasions being “beyond words” or the Romantic poet’s cry:  “Oh! If only I  had words for the things I  feel!” According to Shmuel Yosef/​ Agnon, there are sufficient words; one must merely have the proper occasion to use them. Put somewhat differently, language is limited not by the world itself, but by the poverty of occasions in the world. In Hebrew, there is a manifest connection between word and thing: the word davar means both. Moreover, the biblical story of creation tells us that creation was carried out through language, as in the famous formula of “God said, let there be X, and there was X.” Agnon gives the following citation from the Zohar’s version of the creation story:

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

29

When God decided to create the world, He looked at the Torah, at each and every word, and fashioned the world accordingly. . . . [I]‌t is written, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Looking at this word [i.e., “heavens”], God created the heavens. . . . And so it went, with each and every word in the Torah: the Holy One, blessed be He, looked at the word and created the thing to which it referred.19

If the origin of the Torah (language, Hebrew) is transcendent to reality, if the Torah is “radically ontologized”20 and language is what constructs the world, it seems obvious that it also has the power to shape reality. This powerful tool of language, used by God himself to create the world, is now in the hands of humans, enabling them—​ indeed, demanding of them—​to use it, and to use it wisely. In the Talmud, R. Meir offers the following advice he received from R. Yishmael with regard to his work as a scribe: “My son, be careful in your vocation, for your vocation is heavenly service, and care must be taken [when working on a new Torah scroll] lest you omit a single letter or add a single letter out of place, and you end up destroying the whole world in its entirety.”21 In philosophical terms, the dichotomy between natural and conventional language was first formulated in Plato’s dialogue Cratylus. Aristotle, Plato’s student, follows the conventional path when he writes: “A name is a spoken sound significant by convention. . . . I say ‘by convention’ because no name is a name naturally but only when it has become a symbol.”22 The connection between words and things, according to him, is arbitrary, and written signs are of no ontological significance. In his short story “The Sign,” Agnon summarizes how Aristotle’s model of language operates: Every word he said was carved into the forms of letters, and the letters joined together into words, and the words formed what he had to say. These are the things as I remember them, word for word.23

Agnon, at least declaratively, belongs to those who perceive language (Hebrew) as a natural entity. Reading “The Sign,” one may have the impression that Agnon is negating, even mocking, Aristotle’s model. Instead of a linear flow from things (reality) to thought, spoken words, and written signs, we have an endless loop. In the beginning was language. The words, already existing—​neither created nor shaped through reality—​are “carved into the forms of letters.” Then they join to create words, and to shape “what he had to say.” Just in case the reader does not understand the irony, Agnon adds: “These are the things as I remember them, word for word.” Remembering is what happens when time and language come together. In Agnon’s model as described here, language is what begets things and not vice versa. From there the process of remembering occurs, the remembering of things only to dissolve them again into words, into the idiom “word for word.” Remembering, by the very utterance of a given event, also reshapes it. The remembering of a text is a re-​textualization of that text, and thus connects transmission of the text (that is, remembering) with participation in it. In this vein, Agnon was not only an agent of textual transmission—​that is, someone who receives and passes on a given corpus of texts—​but also a textual participator. A famous distinction between two kinds of students, one who is like “a cistern sealed

30 

Yaniv Hagbi

with lime that does not lose a drop” versus one who is like “a wellspring” (Avot 2:8), appears in many other classic rabbinical texts (for example, Horayot 14a; Berakhot 64a). The Torah, embodied as water, is retained by the scholar who remembers it (who “does not lose a drop”) and continually renewed by the scholar who is like a wellspring. Indeed, Jewish textual transmission includes, by definition, the component of participation. There are many famous sources demanding from the Jewish believer not merely to learn the Torah but also to renew it.24 Textual participation is an intrinsic part of textual transmission in Agnon’s work even in the case of the anthologies he compiled, which, on the surface, may appear to be pure textual transmission. In fact, Agnon succeeds in turning them into an exercise in active textual participation. In a collection of Agnon’s extra-​literary texts, Me’atzmi el ’atzmi, he relates how he once abandoned a book project “because of people who pile up books” by means of claiming authorship of others’ works: “After my book Days of Awe was published, along came parasites . . . who took what I had labored on and made books for themselves. Among these false authors were those who acquired [my book] by making changes in it . . . and those who copied from my book without understanding what they were copying.”25 If an anthology is a collection of sources, how can one plagiarize it? More intriguing, how can one know that a given anthology is a plagiarism of another, given that the sources within are available to all? In his interview with David Kena’ani, Agnon clarified the matter, explaining that he had “added” a source to the anthology, a book titled Kol dodi. Yet this book does not really exist. Rather, Agnon claimed, it is “the voice I hear in time of inspiration or epiphany.”26 This explanation (which substantiates Agnon’s claim that others plagiarized his work, as they presumably quoted from Kol dodi) attests to the fact that he conceived of his anthologies as true creations, in a manner reminiscent of Borges’ famous story about Pierre Menard, the (imaginary) author who rewrote Don Quixote.27

Golden Letters in To This Day The smallest units of written language are letters. Agnon’s anthologies contain many references to letters; in Sefer sofer vesipur, he devotes an entire section to the subject.28 The texts he cites cover various aspects of the topic, among them, the importance and origin of the individual letters as well as the Hebrew alphabet in its totality (22 letters, or 27, if one counts five letters occurring only at the end of words). “Our holy letters,” writes Agnon, quoting from the 17th-​century ethical treatise Shenei luḥot habrit, “are not conventional like the letters of the [other] nations, which are only signs; [our letters] are holy substances carved from above.”29 This positive attitude toward letters and their power was expressed by Agnon on various occasions. The most well-​known example is his use of the letters ’ayin and gimel, which play a prominent role in works such as “Edo and Enam” and “Forever.”30 In these stories all the characters’ names start with an ’ayin or gimel, the first two letters of Agnon’s name as spelled in Hebrew. Elsewhere, however, Agnon shows how the power of letters can be abused. In what follows, we shall examine one of the

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

31

many themes appearing in To This Day, Agnon’s last novel to be published during his lifetime. As noted, the hero-​narrator Shmuel Yosef (his last name is not given) shares a number of biographical characteristics with Agnon the author. Like Agnon, Shmuel Yosef has traveled from Palestine to Germany sometime prior to the outbreak of the First World War, and in the course of the story, he goes from place to place, trying to find a place to stay. What prompts one of his journeys (to a town called Grimma) is a request made by the widow of a certain Dr. Levi to come to her house and advise her on the library she has been left with: two rooms full of rare books. Two of the many characters appearing in To This Day are Isaac König and Dr. Mittel.31 The former wants to create new Hebrew fonts, while the latter is a renowned bibliographer of Jewish books. Both deal with the materialistic aspect of language—​its form, rather than its content. Herr König, who casts his new letters in the workshop of Kaiser & Co., wishes to get the approval of Dr. Mittel, who tells him: You can see how unfairly I’ve been treated. I’ve been accused of being ungenerous towards the younger generation of bibliographers—​but not only can they have their share of the books you print, they can have my share too, because I don’t even want to look at them.32

In a bizarre twist, it turns out that Kaiser & Co. is linked with none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–​1941), who ruled Germany during the First World War: Above them rose the Reform temple with its gilded tiles [in the original Hebrew text, the word is levenim, or bricks] made by the Wilhelm Kaiser Royal Tile Works. Once, the joke went, the Jews made bricks for the Pharaoh and now the Kaiser made tiles for the Jews. Moreover, he made them of gold while Pharaoh’s bricks were made of clay and straw.33

Agnon here is drawing a connection between Kaiser Wilhelm and Pharaoh—​both of them mighty kings of empires in which Israel was in exile. In another place, he draws a different set of parallels, between the Hebrew letters and stone (bricks). In order to fully appreciate the link, one must be aware of the fact that To This Day contains numerous allusions to Sefer yetzirah (Book of Creation).34 This work, traditionally attributed to the Patriarch Abraham though it was actually written sometime between the second and sixth century, is the earliest known kabbalistic book. It describes three dimensions of being: the world (cosmology), the year (time) and the human body. One of the most notable characteristics of Sefer yetzirah’s terminology is its use of even (stone) for letter and bayit (house) for word, as in the following segment: Two stones build 2 houses. Three stones build 6 houses. Four stones build 24 houses. Five stones build 120 houses. Six stones build 720 houses. Seven stones build 5040 houses. From here on go out and calculate that which the mouth cannot speak and the ear cannot hear (4:16).35

In order to exhaust the permutational potential in a given word, one must use the factorial. Two letters can create two words—​as with ‫( אב‬father) and ‫( בא‬come). By

32 

Yaniv Hagbi

applying the factorial to a three-​letter word, we obtain 6 different possibilities, and a seven-​letter word can create as many as 5,040 different words. What seems at first to be a whimsical connection between Pharaoh and Kaiser Wilhelm, becomes more understandable once we see how Sefer yetzirah formulates the analogies between letters and stones (bricks) and words and houses. This, however, is by no means the last of Agnon’s linkages. Later on, Shmuel Yosef makes reference to a tale recounted in a story titled “The Outcast,” which was written by Agnon. This occurs in a scene where, after parting from his non-​Jewish lover, Shmuel Yosef runs into an acquaintance—​a Reform Jew—​who chides him by making reference to the biblical story of the Israelites’ whoring after Moabite women (Num. 25:1–​9). In response, Shmuel Yosef recalls a tale about a rabbi: You may have heard of the consternation of the great Rabbi Gershom when, confronted by a man who had sinned, he recognized the same evil impulse in himself. And this happened as he was coming from a synagogue, a holy place! Imagine then how someone like me, having just parted from a German woman, felt to be reminded of the Moabites that Israel had whored after—​and by a Reform Jew, of all people, the kind we scoffed at for being more German than the Germans.36

With this allusion to “The Outcast,” Agnon creates a participating textual transmission of his own work.37 It is entirely plausible that when the narrator of To This Day, Shmuel Yosef, characterizes Reform Jews as “the kind we scoffed at for being more German than the Germans,” he speaks in the name of Agnon the author. The synagogue appearing in To This Day is both a concrete and a metaphorical space. It is a new building, a gilded-​tiled house of worship that offers its congregants what is essentially a new set of prayers, even if these are based on the traditional Jewish liturgy. And as Agnon reminds us, it is no longer a synagogue, but rather a Reform temple. If one still doubts Agnon’s poetical attitude toward such a temple, the following source from Sefer sofer vesipur dispels such doubts: “The story goes that someone once brought to the Sages the Torah of Alexandros, and all the Divine Names in it were written in gold. And the Sages said: It must be put away [tiganez].”38 Like German Reform Jewry, the intentions of the scribe who wrote the Torah of Alexandros were apparently innocent: in order to differentiate between God and his creatures, he wrote God’s sacred name in gold. The Sages, however, found this “golden” Torah unsuitable for reading—​yet at the same time holy enough to be stored alongside other out-​of-​use sacred Jewish texts. In To This Day, golden letters are linked with Herr König, the creator of fonts. Agnon—​or at least his narrator, Shmuel Yosef—​expresses mixed feelings toward this character. On the one hand, König is a “likable, good-​natured man with hands of gold. Everything he did had an artist’s flair. Even his Hebrew characters, though not in favor with Isaac Mittel, were popular with the printers.”39 On the other hand, König is the one who was once consulted about a certain gift given to Nachum Berish, a dayan (rabbinical judge), by one of the more important members of his flock. Berish, telling the story, comments that the gift-​giver “brought it to me pleased as punch, as if he were giving me, ay, ay, ay, who knows what treasure.”40 What was the gift? A biblical cyclopedia—​a concordance, a compendium of all the words of the Bible—​“bound in

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

33

leather with gold letters.”41 This gold-​plated present, expensive though it was, was an unwanted gift, and the giver’s good intentions were for naught. Elsewhere in To This Day, Agnon draws a different set of negative connections between language (again, Hebrew), stone, and gold. These connections involve a certain bibliographer named Steinschneider. Though Steinschneider’s first name is not given in To This Day, one cannot help but think of Moritz Steinschneider, the famous German Jewish bibliographer who was one of the most important figures of Wissenschaft des Judentums; he died in 1907, which fits the timeframe of Agnon’s book. In To This Day, Steinschneider is mourned, so to speak, by his rival, Dr. Mittel (the latter was once “mentioned in a footnote with an exclamation point as if to say, ‘So says Mittel, and you can believe him if you care to’ ”).42 The name “Steinschneider” translates as a lapidary, or stonecutter. In addition, “Schneider” means tailor (in both German and Yiddish), and this suggests another interesting onomastic interpretation: Steinschneider as a “a tailor of stones,” or, by analogy, a tailor of letters.43 According to literary critic Dan Miron, Agnon’s representation of Steinschneider embodies a critique of Wissenschaft des Judentums.44 The letter/​stone analogy reinforces this thesis. First, the narrator-​author’s unhidden affection for Dr. Mittel, Steinschneider’s adversary, causes the reader to perceive the latter in a negative light. Then, recalling the biblical prohibition not to build altars with hewn stones (see, for example, Ex. 20:21), Steinschneider’s figure (or, at least, his name) becomes imbued with an additional negative dimension. Both the historical figure Moritz Steinschneider and his character in To This Day work in the sphere of Jewish and Hebrew books. His name hints that, like the gilded tiles of the Reform temple, and like the golden concordance presented to Nachum Berish, Steinschneider’s well-​intended bibliographic work in the name of Jewish studies, while seemingly authentic, is somehow lacking. Seeking to create a new form of textual transmission, Steinschneider does violence to Jewish tradition. Thus, like the well-​meaning Cain standing in front of his altar, Steinschneider’s offerings are unwanted in God’s/​Agnon’s eyes.

“As Is the Effort, So Is the Reward”: Textual Transmission as Textual Participation In “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar” (As Is the Effort, So Is the Reward), the opening story of Agnon’s last collection, Haesh veha’etzim (The Fire and the Wood), the central character is a payetan, a composer of religious poems, whose very name, Mar Ribi Tzidkiyah (God’s righteousness), emblemizes his moral rectitude.45 Like Agnon, R. Tzidkiyah creates his works during a period of national post-​trauma; although not stated explicitly, it appears that the story takes place around the time of the early Crusades.46 Following an introductory section in which the reader learns of R. Tzidkiyah’s great piety and high standing in his community, Agnon turns to the tale proper: Let us turn our eyes from the Shechinah, which not every eye can look upon, and let us observe the deeds of those beloved by God, poets of His righteousness such as Mar Ribi Tzidkiyah and his colleagues.47

34 

Yaniv Hagbi

This brief and apparently straightforward paragraph expresses a profound idea: since we cannot understand God’s deeds, we cannot understand creation, or—​to put it differently—​we cannot understand anything that is beyond language. Let us, therefore, concern ourselves with language itself, that is, with what we share with the Creator. Let us observe how a human being, one of us, is participating in the divine creation. The connection between R. Tzidkiyah and Agnon is made stronger through the use of the plural first person in this paragraph. Agnon undoubtedly considered himself to be one of R. Tzidkiyah’s “colleagues,” one of those who write by and for the grace of the Lord.48 Indeed, Agnon, who came from a Levite family, regarded himself as being akin to the Levites at the Temple, “standing [ . . . ] on the platform with [his] singing brothers, reciting each day the song that the Levites sang in the Temple.”49 For R.  Tzidkiyah, writing is a religious act. Not only does he write only after praying to God, he also looks into his heart to see if his intentions are good, lest he be like those wicked ones who are scorned by God: “What right have you to recite my laws?” (Ps. 50:16).50 While writing, he painstakingly examines “every word to see if it has its origin in the Torah or the words of the Sages.”51 One cannot but be reminded of Agnon’s “The Sense of Smell,” which is nothing less than a score-​settling with a critic who had dared to question his use of language.52 Agnon here uses R. Tzidkiyah’s work methods to explain his own, to dispel any possible suspicion concerning his own use of Hebrew. In addition to writing poetic texts, R. Tzidkiyah sets them to music, “guiding the words according to the subject.” In this way, even “those who were ignorant and uneducated, lacking understanding of the words, had their hearts filled with the melody.”53 The body of the religious song —​its matter, words, spirit, and melody—​thus becomes one. One of R. Tzidkiyah’s unique writing rituals is to set aside a copper coin for each day he dedicates to writing, to be used as alms. He ties the fate of each piyut to the person who is given the coin: if the recipient is both learned and of good character (ba‘al midot), R. Tzidkiyah takes this to mean that his poem is both well-​written and religiously worthy. If not, he either sets it aside or—​in the case of the beggar being neither well-​mannered nor learned—​burns it.54 R. Tzidkiyah is not the only one to think that alms influence the spiritual quality of discourse; as recounted by Agnon (in the name of R. Nahman of Breslev) in Sefer sofer vesipur, by “giving alms for its own sake you’ll receive Torah for its own sake.”55 The outer world, the world of matter and deeds, thus determines the spiritual world, the world of aesthetics and religion. The traditional tension between intellectual merit (Torah) and good deeds (mitzvot, derekh eretz) is erased, because they are mutually dependent. Indeed, R. Tzidkiyah sets aside coins for charity even on days he is not writing but rather working on behalf of the community, whether at home or in the rabbinical court. R. Tzidkiyah’s poems have a moral and social dimension. Reciting them at the synagogue, he can “attend to the hearts of the despondent and strengthen them with the commandments of the great and holy God . . . for in these generations the hand of Edom was on the neck of Israel, decreeing that they not occupy themselves with the learning of Torah.”56 Clearly, language influences reality; words make things happen. But Agnon does not stop here. From the outset, words for R. Tzidkiyah are not merely tools to better understand, convey, or change reality. Rather, reality and language are

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

35

intertwined. R. Tzidkiyah, like Agnon in his own eyes, is one of the chosen few, one of “the holy poets” whom “God chose to sing His might” and, because he was righteous, his “quill was overflowing with alphabetical acrostics and holy and magnificent rhymes.”57 At the same time, this fountain of inspiration does not overflow in a manner devoid of order or system, but rather is cast in the molds of literary constraints, rhymes, and acrostics—​another material aspect of the poetic use of language. Moreover, through the use of coins, R. Tzidkiyah creates sacred time within the secular time one may call human life. He counts the time consecrated for the work of God through writing, learning, or working on behalf of others. His life has been given to him by God, but his existential duty is to create his own life, his own time—​to write it with the coins he gives, like vanishing ink, to the next beggar knocking on his door. At its core, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar” is the tale of one specific piyut composed by R. Tzidkiyah as a means of consoling the people of Israel. Why is it, he wonders, that “every day we are murdered, and every day we are slaughtered, and every day we are being bound [ne’ekadim] . . . and we accept everything with love.”58 Pondering the biblical story of ’akedat Yitzḥak, the binding of Isaac, he writes a poem that he regards as worthy; in fact, he plans to make use of it that year on Yom Kippur, the day on which, according to tradition, the binding of Isaac occurred. Because he believes his poem to be exceptionally good, he decides to test it by means of a golden rather than a copper coin. Yet the poor man who arrives at his home is not at all righteous or learned. Agnon describes him as a kind of negative Job. Like Job he suffers—​“the sufferings are crying out from his body”—​but unlike Job, he does not keep silent. When R. Tzidkiyah tries to console him, saying, “God will help you,” the pauper only gets angrier. He is angry not only with R. Tzidkiyah, but, even worse, with God, saying, “God is rich, and I am poor, God has everything, and I have nothing.”59 An inherent part of the negative moral characterization of the poor man is the way he treats language: “And furthermore, the pauper said things one could not understand, because moving his tongue caused him pain, and he was chopping off the beginnings of words and swallowing the ends of words, and prefacing each matter with . . . ‘what shall I tell you,’ and he was angry because, in the meanwhile, he forgot what he wanted to say.”60 To add insult to injury, the pauper is suspicious. One does not give a whole golden coin as alms, he thinks to himself—​this must be a plot to get him arrested by the city authorities. Once the poor man has left, R. Tzidkiyah is faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, he feels that his poem is worthy to be recited in synagogues on Yom Kippur. On the other, he has to follow his rule that the quality of the beggar receiving the alms determines the quality of the poem. Other considerations also come to mind. Perhaps one cannot blame the poor man, because he was truly suffering—​if so, perhaps he is not so reprehensible, and thus the poem is worth keeping? In the end, R. Tzidkiyah chastises himself: “I, who cannot appease the mind of one poor man of Israel, have made myself an emissary on behalf of Israel? . . . And if that were not sufficient, I am turning a sacrifice made for God into a poem.”61 Like many honest artists trying to depict human catastrophe, R. Tzidkiyah struggles with the moral issue of translating horror into art. He voices Agnon’s own predicament after the Holocaust: it is as if Agnon, through R. Tzidkiyah, wants to explain to his readers, and perhaps to himself, why it was so difficult for him to address the Holocaust directly in his work.62

36 

Yaniv Hagbi

R. Tzidkiyah decides to burn his poem, now dubbed by Agnon “his ’akedah.” Full of remorse, he scolds himself: “For this speck of ashes I neglected the study of Torah, I turned aside from my wife and daughters.” His soul tries to give him solace, saying, “Tzidkiyahu, do you think you create poems on your own?”63 When R. Tzidkiyahu understands that his poem might have been acceptable to God, that he might have destroyed it for no good reason, his sorrow only grows. Apart from one exception, he ceases altogether from writing after burning his ’akedah. Before we move on, we must note a very important detail. After R. Tzidkiyah burns his poem, his name becomes Tzidkiyahu. In case some readers fail to notice this shift, Agnon makes the matter explicit at the end of the story, informing us that the poet’s soul “added [the letter] vav of the Name of Four to the two letters already in his name.”64 Of three letters (yud, vav, and hei) that form the Tetragrammaton, the letter hei appears twice. When Agnon changes the name Tzidkiyah into Tzidkiyahu, he adds the missing third letter. Something similar happens in the Bible when Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah (Gen. 17:5; 17:15). The letter hei is not only the most prominent letter of the Tetragrammaton. It is also the sole letter in the Hebrew alphabet that can, by itself, represent the name of God. In the case of Tzidkiyah/​Tzidkiyahu, it is as if Agnon renders divine the poet’s poetico-​theological doubts, and even more, so his decision to sacrifice his poem, to “bind” his ’akedah. As in the case of Abram-​Abraham (the original binder) and Sarai-​ Sarah, names are not merely letters and sounds, but rather determine the quality of those bearing them. To be sure, it appears at a certain point in the story that deeds may be more important than language. As noted, after R. Tzidkiyahu burns his poem, he ceases writing altogether. Nevertheless, he continues giving alms, “and since his hands are giving alms of their own accord, why should he be involved in the making of poems?”65 It seems that Agnon here is going back to the traditional, commonsensical notion of regarding language as a contingent tool to deeds, objects, and reality. Immediately thereafter, in the next sentence he writes:  “And now go see how God rewards the faithful.” Years have passed; R. Tzidkiyahu is old and bedridden. On Yom Kippur, his grandson dresses him and brings him, in his bed, to the synagogue. R. Tzidkiyahu is in a terrible state of mind. When he hears the cantor singing his poems, he is in great agony, remembering his burnt ’akedah. In fact, he never really gave up his poems for the “real world,” for “real deeds.” While other worshippers leave the synagogue for a brief pause between the musaf and minḥah prayers, R. Tzidkiyahu remains in his bed, mourning his physical and spiritual condition. Then, all of the sudden, he starts to pray to God, saying the words of a famous liturgical poem, “Ayaleni veamtzeni mirifyon veḥil” (Strengthen and Sustain My Heart from Weakness and Fear). This poem—​as Agnon informs us—​was written a few generations after R. Tzidkiyahu’s lifetime. Agnon, however, explains that everything written by “our holy poets” is first conceived in a realm beyond the human world. Until such time as these words are needed, they remain in the heavenly realm, but at times, “the chosen ones in each generation feel them and use them between themselves and their Father in Heaven.”66 Unless we understand the general context of “eternal language” (poetry, Hebrew) preceding the world, it would seem that Agnon went to needless pains to explain how it was possible for Tzidkiyahu to know a poem written in the future. And yet, as shown

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

37

elsewhere, one of Agnon’s most important themes is the connection between writing and catastrophe.67 Not only is (Hebrew, Jewish) discourse a-​temporal and a-​local, but Jewish (and by extension, human) suffering is as well. It is as if in every generation the chosen few are tapping the reservoirs of historical disasters and writing. Hence, textual transmission and participation has a historic dimension. History—​biblical history—​is evoked in the climactic scene at the synagogue. Because the binding of Isaac is traditionally assumed to have occurred on Yom Kippur, it is customary to read the story of the ’akedah on that day. R. Tzidkiyahu has just poured out his soul in the words of a piyut that has not yet become known in the earthly realm; the author is about to show how God shows his favor. But first, Agnon pauses to summarize the biblical account of Isaac’s binding—​like R. Tzidkiyahu, he references not only the Bible, but also midrashim. From here, Agnon moves from midrash to the “reality” of his own tale: “The angels of mercy brought Mar Ribi Tzidkiyahu’s tear before the throne of glory and enhanced his strength from above.” Miraculously recovering his vigor, R. Tzidkiyahu stands and leads the congregation in prayer, as he had done so many times in the past. The greatest wonder of all is that after he has recited all the standard prayers preceding the minḥah prayer: A melody started to caress his throat, and he produced solemn and magnificent rhymes. And even though he had burnt his ’akedah, it came back again and soared out from his throat.  . .  .Six wings spread above his head, six wings above his head from here and six wings above his head from there, and they began to clap in a great voice, and in the voice was the sound of words . . . . [T]‌he ears, which are not in one’s control, heard the words . . . in rhymes and in acrostics, those [words] he had burnt after the poor man had come by after the making of the ’akedah.”68

We now understand why it was important for Agnon to tell us about the eternity of true poetry. R. Tzidkiyahu, as one of the chosen poets, once had access to his own poem, which he then destroyed. Nonetheless, the poem, a true work of art, remains in the heavenly realm. There it waits to be discovered—​or, in R. Tzidkiyahu’s case, rediscovered. At the conclusion of Yom Kippur, R. Tzidkiyahu tries to understand the revelation that has taken place. He uses a mystical method known as a “dream query” (sheelat ḥalom) and merits a response from heaven, in Aramaic, “lefum tza’ara agra” (“As is the effort, so is the reward”). With this, he understands that his ’akedah had in fact been accepted by God from the outset. Why was this understanding revealed to him in Aramaic rather than Hebrew? Because, Agnon explains, “he was not wholehearted with regard to the pauper . . . for when one is wholehearted, the Holy One, Blessed be He, takes pleasure with him in the Holy Tongue; if he is not wholehearted, they answer him in Aramaic.”69 In fact, the famous phrase, “as is the effort, so is the reward,” appears in Pirkei Avot (5:23) in Aramaic. Agnon actively translates it into Hebrew, and uses the act of translation in the story’s poetical and moral framework. Again, we see Agnon’s notion of the essential quality of language. God, according to Agnon’s professed conviction, created the world using Hebrew, not Aramaic. Hebrew therefore has a higher spiritual standing.

38 

Yaniv Hagbi

One of the manifestations of the materialistic aspect of language in Jewish tradition is the connection between the human body and the Hebrew language. Brit milah (circumcision), for example means literarily the “covenant of the word’ (milah means both “circumcision” and “word”).70 Sefer yetzirah —​which, as noted, is often referenced by Agnon—​investigates the relationship between body, language, and the cosmos. There is also a connection of this sort in “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar.” After the incident at the synagogue and after “he heard what he had heard,” R. Tzidkiyahu takes quill in hand, wanting “to put in writing the words that were placed on his mouth, like the ashes of Isaac that are placed on the altar.”71 Agnon goes into no details, but he is here referring to the well-​known exegesis of a biblical verse: “Then will I remember My covenant with Jacob, and also My covenant with Isaac, and also My covenant with Abraham will I remember . . . ” (Lev. 26:42). In this promise to remember his covenant with the Patriarchs, God uses the word “remember” with regard to Jacob and Abraham, but not with Isaac. Why is this so? According to Rashi, it is because God sees “Isaac’s ashes . . . heaped on the altar.” This, of course, raises a difficulty, since in the end it is a ram, and not Isaac, who is sacrificed (Gen. 22:13). In his supercommentary on Rashi, R. Judah Loew ben Bezalel (the Maharal) explains that, because Isaac was ready and willing to be sacrificed, it is as if he was sacrificed and therefore it was as if his ashes were spread on the altar; thus, it is the act of ’akedah that is remembered by God.72 By definition, the act of remembrance involves words—​a language of remembering, as in liturgical poetry or literature. In Sefer sofer vesipur, Agnon cites one of his favorite sources of influence, R. Nahman of Breslov, who claimed that one who is able to write a book and does not, is like someone who has lost a son.73 R. Tzidkiyahu, and by extension Agnon himself, experienced no less than Abraham’s own experience when he was standing before the altar ready to slaughter his son, his dearest poetical creation, for the sake of an unknown, incomprehensible higher being. As Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son, so does R. Tzidkiyahu sacrifice his own ’akedah.74 Abraham’s faith is thus intermingled with R. Tzidkiyahu’s “faithful” art.75 “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar” is one of Agnon’s ars-​poetic works. In it, Agnon, a Hebrew author, writes about the ’akedah by means of another Hebrew-​language author, the fictional R. Tzidkiyahu. Both make use of a variety of existing traditional knowledge, “as it was written in the Torah and as it was related in the midrash.”76 And here we hearken back to To This Day, in which the protagonist, Shmuel Yosef, is made, as we have seen, in Agnon’s own image. As it happens, Shmuel Yosef has a friend, and “[t]‌his friend had the same first and middle names that I did, which was uncommon, since they don’t as a rule go together.”77 Moreover, this friend, Yosef Shmuel, is also an author. He is writing a book titled Phenomenological Taxonomy, or On the Repetition of Things, in which he seeks to explore how events such as the ’akedah (that is, unreasoned sacrifice), reoccur throughout history. In “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,” the biblical story of the ’akedah is textually transmitted throughout the ages through commentaries, poetical works, and religious works. The textual whole thus created is not diachronic, but synchronic. If we remember how R. Tzidkiyahu plucked both his own poem and a poem that was to be composed only generations later out of the air, and how his ’akedah then returned to this eternal textual realm, we understand that textual transmission is more of a textual participation. Imagine a linguistic universe beyond

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

39

time and space to which any (Jewish, Hebrew-​speaking) human being can gain access at any given moment. Not only do all human generations participate in this realm, but God as well. They all take part in both the creative process and its ultimate tool, namely the language by which everything is created, Hebrew. It is no wonder that the material aspects of this language are very present in “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar.” For this story’s title, Agnon uses the Hebrew translation of lefum tza’ara agra, and makes a point of informing his readers: “I haven’t changed a thing [of the story] and haven’t added a thing, besides giving a name to [it]. And, out of love for the Holy Language, I have named it in the Holy Language, which is holiest of all languages, to praise the names of our God.”78 It is as if Agnon here detaches himself from R. Tzidkiyahu. Agnon, unlike R. Tzidkiyahu, is entitled to use Hebrew for the title of his story, since he always had faith in it.

Time and Text in “Tehilla” Apart from language, remembrance requires the notion of time. In Agnon’s “Tehilla,” we can see how these are intertwined in the life of the protagonist. Tehilla is an old woman in Jerusalem whom the (unnamed) narrator meets by chance. After the two have had several encounters, Tehilla asks the narrator to write a letter to her first fiancé, Shraga. Her father had annulled the marriage contract between them, she explains, and Shraga had taken great offense; she seeks finally to appease him. To readers, it seems clear that Shraga is no longer alive. If one takes Tehilla at her word and conceives that she wants to carry the letter with her to her grave, one might ask: Why not simply ask for Shraga’s forgiveness in the hereafter? The answer is that, for Agnon, the act of writing is not a mere means: it makes things happen in this world and even in the hereafter. Let us start with the protagonist’s name. Tehilla (tehilah) means a psalm, the singular form of tehilim (Psalms).79 Tehilla believes that “all a man’s deeds from his birth to his death are portioned out to him; and even the number of times that a man should recite Psalms.” Agnon could have chosen any act to mark the allotted amount of times one is predetermined to do something; he chose the reciting of Psalms. Tehilla continues: “I have made it my practice to recite a day’s portion each day. Today I went on and completed two daily portions.” If Tehilla (like every human being) has a given amount of times to recite Psalms, and she recites a double portion in the course of a single day, it means that she has shortened her life. (A hard determinist might claim that this day as well is part of Tehilla’s predestined life.) And, indeed, Tehilla says: “When I thought this over I felt sad, for maybe I am no longer necessary in the world and they want to be done with me and are urging me on to finish my share and complete my portion.” And yet, she adds, “it is good to give thanks to the Lord” (Ps. 92:2). As far as Tehilla is concerned, life has value only if one can use it to praise the Lord. In death, one cannot recite Psalms, one cannot utter “so much as a single word” to sing God’s glory.80 Language is both a motif and the plot’s catalyst. As Tehilla tells it, the notion of measuring one’s life by language has accompanied her since her childhood.81 As

40 

Yaniv Hagbi

a “chatterbox,” she was always at the center of attention, until “an old man living nearby . . . told those who were happy at my chatter, ‘What a pity about this child who wastes all her words in infancy, for what will be left over for her old age?’ ”82 Ever since, she explains, she has been “weighing every word,” making “practice of speaking little.”83 Language is also central for the narrator; as in some of Agnon’s other stories, he is “a man of the pen.” Tehilla links the connection between a scribe and a writer (both denoted in Hebrew by the word sofer) when she eventually makes her request: I have heard that you are a man of the pen, that you are a modern-​day scribe. Maybe you can loan me your pen for a little letter. ... Here is a sheet of paper, first-​grade paper . . . from the times when they used to make good paper. . . . One thing more I ask of you, write in the square letters of the prayer book, or in the Torah script.84

For Tehilla, writing is nothing less than a holy occupation. Moreover, as with the work of traditional Jewish scribes, the quality of the material meant for writing—​the paper (or parchment), the pen (the quill) and the shape of the letters (“square letters” or “Torah script”)—​are important because they determine the quality of the words and their meaning. Tehilla’s request that the narrator write the letter is actually a request to write her own life, to transcribe the events of her life, or, better formulated, to consciously connect between time and language. The connection between language and time, words and events, already exists in the prewritten version of Tehilla’s story, that is, her actual life. All the major events in her life are intimately connected with texts, some strictly halakhic, some based on custom. For instance, we know the year of her birth because, following a custom found among both Christians and Jews, her father had written the date, along with those of her other siblings, in his Bible. Another instance is that of Shraga’s father placing an order for the writing of a pair of tefillin (phylacteries) for his son, which hints that Shraga is old enough to take upon himself all the decrees of the Torah, including marriage. Many of the halakhic texts marking the stages of Tehilla’s life are annulled contracts. Most significant is the marriage contract betrothing her to Shraga, which is torn to shreds by her father, the head of the local Jewish community, when he discovers that Shraga and his family are hasidim; for the father, this is tantamount to their having renounced Judaism altogether. In response: “Shraga leaped up and swore that he would never forgive us the insult. And father never bothered to ask Shraga’s forgiveness, although he knew that if you annul a match you have to ask forgiveness of the humiliated party.” In addition, Tehilla’s father excommunicates Shraga’s family, barring the men from being called up in the synagogue to read the Torah. As Tehilla tells it: “If they had not gone to another town where they were called up to the Torah, they would never have lived out their year.”85 That is to say, without actively participating in the social transmitting of the text, participating in the cycle of reading the Torah, they would have no reason to exist. This perception of language and world is not unique to Tehilla. As we have seen, it is part of the intimate relationship between the Jewish people and the text. It is thus

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

41

no wonder that the narrator shares the same notion. For instance, he writes that, every time he visits Jerusalem, it seems to him that the city is renewing itself: He Who by His goodness renews the work of Creation every day makes His city anew every hour. New buildings are not built, new plants are not planted, yet Jerusalem herself keeps on becoming new. Whenever I enter the City she seems new to me. I do not know in what this novelty consists. Let the great clarifiers [that is, commentators] come and clarify it for us.86

Jerusalem is not a city and Tehilla is not an old woman; they are both texts. The multiple use of the word “new” is also deeply connected with the text and with the basic Jewish intellectual activity not only of transmitting the text but also—​and no less important—​of participating in it by means of “renewing” it. Thus, Jerusalem is like the written Torah in that “new buildings are not built, new plants are not planted,” but the city nonetheless miraculously “keeps on becoming new.” The stress here is on “becoming,” including both the idea of transmitting and participating. As with Tehilla, the narrator uses texts to measure time. So that, in wondering whether Shraga is still alive, he notes the passage of time “since the day your father tore up the betrothal agreement”; Tehilla acknowledges that Shraga has been dead for thirty years.87 All of the tragedies in Tehilla’s life can be traced back to this broken engagement, for which she never received a “writ of forgiveness.”88 She marries another man and has two sons with him, but loses both of them in events that are connected to tefillin. Her firstborn, a sickly child, suffers a shock shortly before his bar mitzvah when he sees a “man dressed in shrouds like a corpse.” Although this is not a corpse but rather “a madman who used to do crazy things,” her son does not recover from the shock but “went on flickering like a memorial candle during the closing prayer on Yom Kippur. And before he ever had a chance to put on his phylacteries he gave up his soul and died.”89 Two years later, her other son, approaching his own bar mitzvah, disappears on the way to the sofer who is writing his tefillin. Sometime later, her husband dies. Tehilla is left with an only daughter, whom she hopes one day to marry to a Torah scholar. In the end, however, her daughter becomes an apostate, or as Tehilla puts it, “an evil spirit entered into my daughter and she became crazy.”90 It appears that Agnon doesn’t quite trust his readers, and perhaps Tehilla doesn’t trust the narrator, her listener, to make the proper connection between these events. Thus, the author, through Tehilla (speaking of her elder son’s death), makes the matter explicit: During the seven days of mourning I sat thinking to myself, My son died at the close of the Sabbath, after the Havdala ceremony, thirty days before his time for putting on phylacteries, and it was at the close of the Sabbath after the Havdala ceremony thirty days before I was to go under the bridal canopy with Shraga that father tore up the betrothal agreement.91

Once Tehilla has finished recounting her story, she dictates her letter. When it is done, she seals it in a jar and, accompanied by the narrator, goes to the Burial Society. Here we learn of another textual ritual of hers. Each year she goes to the Burial Society to renew the contract for her grave on the Mount of Olives. Like a Japanese death poet,

42 

Yaniv Hagbi

Tehilla knows exactly when she will die, and, as with these poets, the event itself is intimately connected with language and text. Indeed, Tehilla has already invited the “the purifiers and washers to come” and prepare her body for burial.92 Tehilla concludes both her spiritual and earthly affairs on the same day by the writing and sealing of two texts, the writ of forgiveness addressed to Shraga and the deed on her grave. The narrator and the clerk at the Burial Society end Tehilla’s life by writing the last words of both texts. Though she has resigned from life she needs the writ to be signed, as she tells the clerk: “If I still have years to live . . . I gladly give them to you and to all who wish for life. Here is the contract. Sign it.”93 The narrator, like Agnon himself by the very act of writing Tehilla’s life, is also the author of her death. Tehilla is using preformulated texts (Psalms, contracts) not only to define the major events in her life but also to fill everything in between. Tehilla’s and Shraga’s lives constitute a crossroad on the boundless linguistic space, as his textual curse is transmitted into Tehilla’s life. Language is both the disease and its antidote, a cure made of the very substance of the poison.

Transmitting Nothingness: From the Whiteness between the Letters to the Absent Library Let us briefly observe another important aspect of the materialistic aspect of language, namely, the materialistic notion of absence.94 One would expect the materialistic aspect of language to be a celebration of presence. The promethean fire given to humanity is language, Hebrew according to Jewish tradition, and with language one can gain direct access to the essence of things. From this it follows that the materiality of language—​its words, letters, and shapes, and the surface upon which they are written—​all have meaning. We may add here that one of the manifestations of this approach, seemingly breaking the biblical prohibition against idol worship, is the phenomenon of textual amulets, the fetish of written language. However, if we explore the consequences of the perception of language as depicted above, and especially its materialistic aspect, we might reach one of the conclusions arrived at by rabbinical Judaism. In the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple, the Sages were left with language and its material aspects as the only means of accessing the divine. Hence, they took the exploration of learning and language (Hebrew especially) to an extreme, according more significance to the process of learning than to the moment of achieving knowledge. Intellectual discourse is crucial even in kabbalistic texts: Agnon cites the Zohar and tells us: “Once the world was created it could not have been sustained had it not occurred to the Divine Will to create human beings, who would engage in the study of Torah, for the sake of which the world would be sustained. Now, those who delve into the Torah and engage in its study are as if they sustained the whole world.”95 Man participates and sustains creation through textual transmission. The world of things and deeds does not exist independently of the Torah, of language. One might say that the Jewish “linguistic turn” was an historical outcome. Since the destruction

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

43

of the Second Temple, the symbolic connection between the people of Israel, the land of Israel, and the God of Israel is no longer a place (the Temple) but rather a function of discourse and language.96 And yet, if we are left only with language, our only option is an endless play of meaning; there is never any resting on a point of absolute, transcendental meaning. Thus the materiality of language is deeply connected with its opposite phenomenon: the materiality of absence. In the art of Jewish scribes, the whiteness between the letters (the absence, if you will), has an important positive function. As one of Agnon’s characters in a story titled “Sefer takhlit hama’asim” (The Book on the Purpose of Deeds) tells us: The Sages of his generation said that R. Meir the scribe was worthy of being paid a sela’ for each word he wrote and a sela’ for the whiteness in the scroll between each letter and each word, for just as he was punctilious in his writing, so was he punctilious in keeping the spaces between the letters and between each word, until the whiteness in the scroll illuminated the writing and itself. I have heard it said in the name of R. Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, may his soul rest in heaven, that even in the whiteness of the scroll there is holiness and light, but that one shall perceive this light in the whiteness only when our Messiah is come.97

In other work by Agnon, we are offered a negative dimension of materialistic linguistic absence. In Sefer sofer vesipur he mentions one of the most famous hasidic stories about R. Nahman of Breslov, that concerning a burnt book. After many misfortunes in his life, R. Nahman concludes that the cause for his misery is a book he had written. He demands that his students burn all copies of this book, now known famously as “the Burnt Book.” According to Agnon, R. Natan (R. Nahman’s most important disciple), wrote the following: When I was writing the holy book in front of our Rebbe, which was burned under his command, our Rebbe told me, “If you only knew what you are writing, etc.” I answered him humbly, “But of course, I know nothing at all.” He replied, ‘You do not know how much you do not know.”98

Another book attesting to R. Nahman’s presence by way of absence is “the hidden book.” R. Natan quotes R. Nahman as saying that this book was regarded as “the secret of secrets . . . and [he] said that only the Messiah will give commentary on this book.”99 Agnon had his own personal burnt book. In 1924, while he was living in Germany, someone set fire to the building he was living in. The fire devoured his collection of rare books, manuscripts, and even a completed novel, Bitzror haḥayim (In Eternal Life).100 Agnon never ceased mourning the loss of this book, mentioning it even in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.101 The notion of missing texts appears in many of Agnon’s works. In “Fable of the Goat,” a son, at his father’s request, follows a she-​goat through a hidden path that leads to the land of Israel. He writes a note to his father and places it in the goat’s ear, but the father fails to find it. Thinking his son has been killed, he has the goat slaughtered; it is only then that the un-​transmitted text falls from the goat’s ear, bearing the son’s message on how to follow the animal to the Promised Land.102 Other stories in the same vein include “Haderashah” (The Sermon) “Sefer sheaved” (A Book That

44 

Yaniv Hagbi

Was Lost) and “’Al even aḥat” (On One Stone), all of which focus on the loss of books or manuscripts.103 In To This Day, the existence of an entire library is in question. The narrator is asked by the widow of Dr. Levi (= Moses?) to advise her about two rooms filled with books (= the written Torah and the oral Torah?) her husband had left to her.104 A reader who follows the narrator’s descriptions of their meetings might well be reminded of Paradise and the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai: The house stood . . . in the middle of a garden . . . I remember strolling through it with Dr. Levi, picking fruit and marveling at his knowledge while the birds, loathe to interrupt his displays of erudition, soared in silence overhead.105

Indeed, following this line of interpretation, the death of Dr. Levi signals an expulsion from a paradise of text, of knowledge. When the narrator returns to Dr. Levi’s garden “it was desolate, its flowers gone, its trees cut down, crows cawing from their stumps.”106 At the end of To This Day, the narrator has his own house, big enough for all of Dr. Levi’s books. The rooms reserved for them, however, remain empty.

Conclusion One can compare the moments of text transmission to what Jacques Lacan called “points de capiton,” moments in which we have the (necessary) illusion of fixed meaning.107 In order to create these moments of fixed meaning from the amorphic textual nebula (in our case, the Jewish corpus), one must make them apparent. The text (in our case, a Jewish text) becomes material, like a drop of water falling from an intangible linguistic cloud. One cannot transmit a text without materialization in spoken or written language. And by the very transmission of a given text, one perforce participates in it. If words and things are submerged one inside the other, the concrete matter of which language is made bears meaning as well. The paper, the parchment, the “whiteness” of the text on which the letters are written; the black or gold (or other color) ink they are written in; the book the letters create; the library—​all of these bear meaning. Rabbinical Judaism was well aware of that notion, and Agnon, for his part, consciously took part in one of the most original ideas of rabbinical Judaism—​indeed, the idea that defined it as such, namely, the notion of receiving on Mount Sinai both the oral and the written Torah. The creation of the oral Torah is eternal; it is a human project that will last until the end of time. Students, commentators, authors like Agnon himself, and readers are all tapping into this textual reservoir during the course of their lifetimes. For Agnon, with his anthologies and his continuous references to Jewish sources, text belongs not to the epistemological realm but rather to the ontological. Language, learning, text, and Torah are an indispensable part of his work and art. Agnon’s own work, as with Jerusalem in “Tehilla,” “keeps on becoming new,” as it is part of a larger scheme of words that in itself is always becoming new. Agnon is a paradigm of human agency in Jewish textual intimacy,108 part of a weighty tradition that

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

45

consciously demands of its adherents not only to transmit what they have received from the generations before, but to actively participate in its creation.

Notes 1.  Gershom Scholem, “Yemei Agnon begermanyah,” Davar (9 December 1966); Dan Laor, Ḥayei ’Agnon: Biografyah (Jerusalem: 1998), 92. 2. Among the “special occasion” anthologies published by Jüdischer Verlag were Chad Gadja:  ein Pessachbuch (1914) and Moaus Zur:  Chanukkahbuch (1916); see Laor, Ḥayei Agnon, 101, 116. 3.  Gershom Scholem, “Reflections on S.Y. Agnon,” Commentary 44, no. 6 (1967), 59. 4.  Baruch Kurzweil, Masot ’al sipurei Sh.Y. ’Agnon (Jerusalem: 1976), 287. 5.  When possible, this essay will cite and refer to published English versions of Agnon’s works. In the case of these three anthologies, only the first (Yamim noraim) was translated in full as Days of Awe (New York: 1948), trans. Maurice T. Galpert and Jacob Sloan, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (see also the introduction by Judah Goldin to the 1965 edition, in which he indicates several instances in which the original translation was changed). Sefer sofer vesipur has not been translated to date; Atem reitem (Jerusalem: 1959) was translated in part as Present at Sinai, trans. Michael Swirsky (Philadelphia: 1994). 6.  Dov Sadan wrote to Agnon after the publication of Days of Awe in 1938, commenting that, as fine a work as it was, it was a waste of time and unworthy of Agnon’s talent (Laor, Ḥayei ’Agnon, 288). 7.  Shmuel Yosef Agnon and David Kena’ani, Sh.Y. ’Agnon be’al peh (Tel Aviv: 1972),  96–​97. 8.  Letter from Agnon to his wife, Esther (dated August 1938), quoted in Laor, Ḥayei Agnon, 296. See also Agnon, Atem reitem, 25 and his interview with Galia Yardeni, “Sh.Y. Agnon,” in Tet-​zayin siḥot ’im sofrim (Tel Aviv: 1995), 54. 9. Agnon, Atem reitem, 19. 10.  For a recent elaborated discussion of this issue, see Tzahi Weiss, Otiyot shenivreu bahen shamayim vaaretz:  hamekorot vehamashma’uyot shel ha’isuk beotiyot haalefbet keyeḥidot ’atzmayot basifrut hayehudit (Jerusalem: 2015). 11. Kazuya Hara, “The Word “Is” the Thing:  The ‘Kotodama’ Belief in Japanese Communication,” ETC.: A Review of General Semantics 58, no. 3 (Fall 2001), 280. 12.  J.M.Y. Simpson, A First Course in Linguistics (Edinburgh: 1979), 3. 13.  Shmuel Yosef Agnon, “The Sense of Smell,” in idem, A Book That Was Lost: Thirty-​Five Stories, ed. Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman, additional stories ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New Milford: 2008), 149. For Hebrew see “Ḥush hareaḥ” in Kol sipurav shel Shmuel Yosef ’Agnon, vol. 2, Elu veelu (Jerusalem: 1966), 296–​302. 14.  There are other entities said to exist before the creation of the world; see, for example, Agnon, Sefer sofer vesipur, 19; Midrash rabah 1:4. 15.  Avot deRabi Natan 31:2. After Sigmund Katznelson, the director of Jüdischer Verlag (Agnon’s publisher before Schocken), suspended the publication of Agnon’s books, he wrote to Schocken that “the Holy One, Blessed be He was playing with the Torah for nine hundred and seventy-​four generations until he delivered it. And now, I shall amuse myself with my exemplar and you, Sir, with your exemplar, until our generation is worthy of receiving our Torah.” See Shmuel Yosef Agnon and Shlomo Zalman Schocken, Ḥilufei igrot 1936–​1959 (Jerusalem: 1991), 275–​277. For more on the number 974, see Agnon, Sefer sofer vesipur, 18; idem, Present at Sinai, 15, 18 (for Hebrew, Atem reitem, 31, 34). 16. Agnon, Sefer sofer vesipur, 17. 17.  Shmuel Yosef Agnon, To This Day, trans. Hillel Halkin (New Milford: 2008). 18.  Ibid., 106. 19. Agnon, Present at Sinai, 18 (for Hebrew, Atem reitem, 33). 20. Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections:  Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven: 2002), 29.

46 

Yaniv Hagbi

21. Agnon, Sefer sofer vesipur, 136. 22. Aristotle, De Interpretatione, trans. and annotated J.L. Ackrill (Oxford: 1963), 43–​44 (16a19; 16a26). 23.  Agnon, “The Sign,” in A Book That Was Lost, 425. For Hebrew see “Hasiman” in Kol sipurav shel Shmuel Yosef ’Agnon, vol. 8, Haesh veha’etzim (Jerusalem: 1966), 283–​312. 24.  For relevant sources in Agnon, see, for example, Sefer sofer vesipur, 161, 222, 334, 339. 25.  Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Me’atzmi el ’atzmi (Jerusalem: 1976), 222. 26.  Agnon and Kena’ani, Sh.Y. ’Agnon be’al peh, 34. Agnon was very serious about the matter, as his daughter, Emunah Yaron, confirmed in an interview. See Yaakov Shmuel Spiegel, ’Amudim betoledot hasefer ha’ivri: hagahot umagihim (Ramat Gan: 1972), 26 (ff. 8). 27. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in idem, Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: 1998), 88–​95. 28. Agnon, Sefer sofer vesipur, 111–​126. 29.  Ibid., 113. 30. Shmuel Yosef Agnon, “’Edo and ’Enam,” in idem, Kol sipurav shel Shmuel Yosef ’Agnon, vol. 7, ’Ad Hena (Jerusalem: 1966), 343–​395; cf. Kurzweil, Masot ’al sipurav shel Sh.Y. ’Agnon, 142 (Kurzweil is critical of this aspect of the story). Other examples of the importance of single letters in Agnon’s works include the vav in “Le’aḥar hase’udah,” in Lifnim min haḥomah (Jerusalem: 1976), 260–​261 and lamed in “The Document,” in A Book That Was Lost, 439 (for Hebrew, see “Hate’udah,” in Kol sipurav shel Shmuel Yosef ’Agnon, vol. 6, Samukh venireh (Jerusalem: 1966), 116. 31. For more on these characters, see Haim Be’er, Ḥadarim meleim sefarim:  “republikat hasefer” be’Ad henah bein bedayah lemetziyut (Jerusalem: 2016), 55–​76, 87–​95. Herr König may be based on Leo König, who was a Yiddish author and an art student at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem (see Haim Be’er, Gam ahavatam gam sinatam [Tel Aviv: 2002], 28). The fact that Leo König wrote in Yiddish rather than Hebrew may explain Agnon’s patronizing characterization. 32. Agnon, To This Day, 31. 33.  Ibid., 77. 34.  For an original and comprehensive study of Sefer yetzirah, see Yehudah Liebes, Torat hayetzirah shel sefer yetzirah (Jerusalem: 2000). 35. Sefer Yetzirah: The Aryeh Kaplan Edition (Northvale, N.J.: 1995). 36. Agnon, To This Day, 129; cf. idem, “Hanidaḥ,” in Elu ve’elu, 9–​56. An English version recently appeared as the title story in idem, The Outcast and Other Tales, trans. Marganit Weinberger-​Rotman, ed. and annotated Jeffrey Saks (New Milford: 2018). 37.  See Laor, Ḥayei ’Agnon, 132–​134, where he notes the importance Agnon attached to this story (it was dedicated to Agnon’s father). 38. Agnon, Sefer sofer vesipur, 97. 39. Agnon, To This Day, 119. 40.  Ibid., 160. 41. Ibid. 42.  Ibid., 32. In Mittel’s account, he was ultimately vindicated. He tells Shmuel Yosef: “You know me well, my friend. I’ve never wished anyone ill. Still, at that moment I couldn’t help feeling sorry that Steinschneider was dead, because had he been alive, the one to feel sorry would have been him” (ibid.). 43.  It may or may not be coincidental that the project Shmuel Yosef is ostensibly working on is a “universal history of clothing” (ibid., 50). In this sense he may be regarded as a meta-​tailor who not only cuts but also reassembles texts; indeed, the Latin word textus is derived from the verb texere, “woven.” 44.  See Dan Miron, “German Jews in Agnon’s Work,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23 (1978), 277. For more on Steinschneider, see Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal (eds.), Studies on Steinschneider: Moritz Steinschneider and the Emergence of the Science of Judaism in Nineteenth-​Century Germany (Leiden: 2012). 45.  “Ribi” is a variant form of Rabbi.

Textual Transmission as Textual Participation

47

46.  Michal Arbell, “Haḥazanit ha’atzuvah Miryam Devorah veḥazanim aḥerim besipurei ’Agnon: ‘Haḥazanim’ ve-​‘Lefi hatz’ar hasakhar,’ ” ’Ayin Gimmel 2 (2012), 120 (n. 32); Laor, Hayei ’Agnon, 380. 47.  Shmuel Yosef Agnon, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,” in Haesh veha’etzim (Jerusalem: 1966), 7. 48.  One of these colleagues is the main character in Agnon’s “Tale of the Scribe” (appearing in A Book That Was Lost, 177–​194). Here as well one can easily see how Agnon’s description of the work of the religious poet is essentially materialistic. 49.  Agnon, “The Sense of Smell,” in A Book That Was Lost, 141. 50.  Agnon, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,” 8. For a similar description of pre-​writing rituals, see idem, “The Tale of the Scribe,” in A Book That Was Lost, 179. 51. Agnon, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,” 8. 52.  Agnon, “The Sense of Smell,” 139–​146. 53. Agnon, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,” 6. 54.  Ibid.,  6–​7. 55. Agnon, Sefer sofer vesipur, 161. 56.  Agnon, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,” 5–​6. 57.  Ibid., 7. 58.  Ibid., 9. 59.  Ibid., 11. 60. Ibid. 61.  Ibid., 12. 62.  See, for instance, Dan Laor, Sh.Y. ’Agnon: hebetim ḥadashim (Tel Aviv: 1995), 62. 63.  Agnon, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,”12. 64.  Ibid.,  18–​19. 65.  Ibid., 13. 66.  Ibid., 14. 67.  See Yaniv Hagbi, “Aspects of Primary Holocaust in the Works of S.Y. Agnon,” in Agnon and Germany:  The Presence of the German World in the Writings of S.Y. Agnon, ed. Hans Jürgen Becker and Hillel Weiss (Ramat Gan: 2010), 451–​472. 68.  Agnon, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,” 16–​17. 69.  Ibid.,  17–​18. 70.  See, for example, Barbara Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett, “The Cut That Binds: The Western Ashkenazic Torah Binder as Nexus between Circumcision and Torah,” in Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual, ed. Victor Witter Turner (Washington, D.C.: 1982), 136–​146. 71.  Agnon, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,” 18. 72.  R. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gur Aryeh ’al hatorah (Lev. 26:42). 73. Agnon, Sefer sofer vesipur, 137. 74.  Agnon, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,” 18. 75.  Here, too, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar” invites comparison with “The Tale of the Scribe.” In the latter story, the artist is a sofer, a scribe of ritualistic Jewish texts. Among those who come to him are childless couples who ask him to write a Torah scroll. This is meant to be a kind of replacement for their unborn child, to help them pay an unwritten debt of creation they owe God, the world, the cosmos (Agnon, “The Tale of the Scribe,” in idem, A Book That Was Lost, 177). 76.  Agnon, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,” 9. 77. Agnon, To This Day, 91. 78.  Agnon, “Lefi hatza’ar hasakhar,” 18. 79.  Eddy Zemach cleverly noted that Tehilla is the personification of Psalm 104. See his work Keriah tamah basifrut ha’ivrit bat hameah ha’esrim (Jerusalem: 1990), 71–​90. 80.  Shmuel Yosef Agnon, “Tehilla,” in idem, Tehilla and Other Israeli Tales, trans. I.M. Lask (London: 1956), 19. 81.  Cf. Michal Arbell’s interpretation of Agnon’s story “In the Prime of Her Life” in idem, Katuv ’al oro shel kelev: ’al tefisat hayetzirah etzel Sh.Y. Agnon (Tel Aviv: 2006) 41–​46. 82.  Agnon, “Tehilla,” 20.

48 

Yaniv Hagbi

83.  Ibid.; see also 21, 29, 31–​32. 84.  Ibid., 30. 85.  Ibid., 38. 86.  Ibid., 26. 87.  Ibid., 42. 88.  Ibid., 38. 89.  Ibid.,  39–​40. 90.  Ibid., 42. 91.  Ibid., 40. 92.  Ibid., 45. 93. Ibid. 94.  For more detailed discussion, see Patrick Fuery, The Theory of Absence: Subjectivity, Signification and Desire (Westport: 1995). 95. Agnon, Present at Sinai,18. 96. That is how Peter Hayman interprets Sefer yetzirah; see, for example, his essay “Was God a Magician? Sefer Yesira and Jewish Magic,” Journal of Jewish Studies 40, no. 2 (1989), 232. 97.  Agnon, “Sefer takhlit hama’asim,” in Haesh veha’etzim, 194. 98. Agnon, Sefer sofer vesipur, 428. 99. Ibid. 100. Laor, Ḥayei ’Agnon, 161. 101. Agnon, Me’atzmi el ’atzmi, 7–​8. He mentioned it on other occasions as well (ibid., 139–​140, 213–​214, 271); idem and Kena’ani, ’Agnon ba’al peh, 22. Furthermore, within his belletristic work, Agnon mentions the loss of In Eternal Life several times—​for example, in idem, A Guest for the Night, trans. Misha Louvish (London: 1968), 206–​208. 102.  S.Y. Agnon, “Fable of the Goat,” in idem, A Book That Was Lost, 199–​202 (for Hebrew, see “Ma’aseh ha’ez,” in Elu veelu, 373–​375). For more on this idea in Agnon’s work, see Anne Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return:  S.Y. Agnon and the Drama of Writing (Albany: 1991), 32. 103.  The English texts can be found in the following books by Agnon: “The Sermon,” in A Dwelling Place for My People: Sixteen Stories of the Chassidim, trans. Jacob Weinberg and Helen M. Russell (Edinburgh: 1983)—​in Hebrew, “Haderasha,” in ’Elu veelu, 213–​215; “A Book That Was Lost,” in A Book That Was Lost, 137–​144—​in Hebrew, “Sefer sheavad” in ’Ir umloah (Jerusalem: 1973), 207–​211; “On One Stone,” in A Book That Was Lost, 145–​148—​in Hebrew, “’Al even aḥat,” in Elu veelu, 302–​304. 104.  Avraham Kariv, “Ribui partzufin uklaster eḥad” in Shmuel Yosef ’Agnon: Mivḥar maamarim ’al yetzirato, ed. Hillel Barzel (Tel Aviv: 1982), 294–​298. For more on Dr. Levi, see Be’er, Ḥadarim meleim sefarim,  29–​54. 105. Agnon, To This Day, 39–​40. See Nitza Ben-​Dov, Ahavot lo meusharot: tiskul eroti, omanut umavet be’avodotav shel ’Agnon (Tel Aviv: 1997), 120. 106. Ibid. 107.  Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: 1977), 303. 108.  On Jewish textual intimacy, see Avriel Bar-​Levav, “Intimiyut textualit uvrit hakeriah bein gerush sefarad leAmsterdam,” in Baderekh el hamodernah: shai leYosef Kaplan, ed. Avriel Bar-​Levav, Claude B. Stuczynski, and Michael Heyd (Jerusalem: 2018).

The Lost Souls of Meshugah: Textual Transmission of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s World Literature Jan Schwarz (LUND UNIVERSITY)

Great works of literature always take root in particular linguistic, cultural and national traditions, but they are at the same time capable of transcending the limitations of the local and the parochial to reach readers beyond the boundaries of their provenance, either in the original forms or in successful translations.1

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–​1991) 2 once penned a list of favorite readings on a scrap of paper that is now located in his archive at the Henry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. The list reads as follows: The Bible The Best of Pearls by Moses Khayyim Luzzatto3 Crime and Punishment Anna Karenina Gogol’s short stories Madame Bovary E.A. Poe Pan, by Knut Hamsun Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell The Phantasms of the Living This list demarcates the kind of world literature that informed Bashevis’ work throughout the course of his career. Framing the list are the Hebrew Scriptures, a Jewish book of musar (ethics), the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, and a study of “the transcendental reality.”4 Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gogol represent the grand Russian novelistic tradition, which explores (as does Bashevis) universal issues of evil, repentance, belief, and crime and punishment. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are canonical 19th-​century realist novels that, Jan Schwarz, The Lost Souls of Meshugah In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel BarLevav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0004

50 

Jan Schwarz

like many of Bashevis’ own novels, depict the characters’ marital transgressions and sexual desires. Bashevis’ fascination with extreme spiritual and psychological states such as madness, criminal acts, the supernatural, and non-​normative sexuality are also central themes in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Knut Hamsun. What is missing from the list is the modernist revolution of the 20th century: Kafka, Proust, and Joyce. There is no modern Jewish writer on the list, although Bashevis’ work would have been inconceivable without Sholem Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, I.J. Singer (Bashevis’ older brother), and Aaron Zeitlin.5 In a literary memoir published in the New York Yiddish daily newspaper Forverts in 1978–​1979, Bashevis pointed out that the 19th-​century European (and particularly Russian) writers whom he read in translation in Yiddish, Hebrew, and later Polish and German, informed his literary imagination at the outset of his career in Warsaw in the 1920s: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Strindberg, Maupassant, Knut Hamsun, Lermontov, Chekhov, Sienkiewicz, Mickiewicz, Pushkin were extraordinary close to me. I admired them a lot more than Yiddish or Hebrew writers. I read their works with a curiosity that I couldn’t satisfy. I was potentially a writer, but unknown, a kind of literary lamedvovnik [one of the 36 hidden saints] who still needed to be revealed to others and to myself.6

Another important step in the young Bashevis’ education in world literature was his prolific output as a Yiddish translator of contemporary novels by European writers, mostly from the German. Between 1928–​1931, Bashevis translated eleven prose works into Yiddish, most of which were published by Kletskin Farlag in Warsaw and Vilna. Among these were three novels by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (Pan, Viktoria, and The Vagabonds), for which Bashevis worked from German translations; he also produced a four-​volume, highly praised translation of the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, published in Yiddish as Der tsoyeberbarg in 1930, six years after the work’s first publication in German; and translations of two novels by Erich Maria Remarque: the “only authoritative” Yiddish translation of All Quiet on the Western Front, which appeared as Oyfn mayrev front keyn nayes a year after the novel’s publication in 1929, and The Way Back, which came out in Yiddish as Oyfn veg tsurik in 1931. Translating Hamsun, Mann, and Remarque gave the young Bashevis an immersion course in how to transfer the various styles, forms, and narratives of the contemporary European novel into readable, literary Yiddish. His first artistically accomplished attempt to create a fully textured world of Yiddish fiction was realized in the debut novel Der sotn in Goray. A mayse fun fartsaytns (Satan in Goray: A Story of Bygone Days). It was first serialized in the journal Globus in 1933 and then published in book form by the Yiddish PEN Club in Warsaw in 1935. This novel owed a great deal to his reading and translating world literature as a teenager during the First World War, when he lived in Bilgoraj, a town in the Lublin region where his grandfather served as a rabbi, and later as a young aspiring writer at the center of Yiddish culture in Warsaw between 1921–​1935. As a Jewish writer, Bashevis escapes most classifications in terms of nationality, language, and literary tradition:

The Lost Souls of Meshugah

51

He was a Polish citizen for more than thirty years, but he never wrote in Polish, although he draws profusely from the Polish language, literature and folklore. He was an American citizen for more than fifty years but he never wrote in English, except by participating in his translations. And despite the fact that he considered himself a Yiddish writer, his “Yiddishness” was questioned by a number of Yiddish critics.7

What set Bashevis apart from the majority of contemporary Yiddish writers is precisely his lack of “Yiddishness,” that is, the fundamental belief in the humanist, forward-​looking ethos that I.L. Peretz had espoused in the early 20th century. Bashevis’ nihilism, anti-​messianism, and exploration of the demonic side of human nature made him an outlier among Yiddish writers in Warsaw prior to his emigration to the United States in 1935.8 Dismissed as an anachronism by his colleagues in the Communist-​ dominated Warsaw Yiddish milieu, Bashevis embraced the label as a badge of honor and later made the mythological past of the shtetl the cornerstone of his oeuvre in its transformation from the periphery of the East European Jewish world to the Anglo-​ American center in postwar New York. In the mid-​to late 1950s, Bashevis began to rewrite his Yiddish oeuvre in English translation, which, in some cases, resulted in a toning-​down of the nihilism and pessimism that he had embraced from his readings of German philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Otto Weininger, and Oswald Spengler.9 At the same time, Bashevis’ sensitivity to shifting literary markets went hand in hand with a deep loyalty to his original artistic credo, which remained remarkably constant in form, style, and worldview from interwar Warsaw through his work in postwar New York. Bashevis’ early writings, published in Warsaw journals between 1925 and 1936, were written in the stark, naturalist style typical of contemporary Yiddish literary trends. His first American-​published book was Satan in Goray un andere dersteylungen (Satan in Goray and Other Stories) (1943), which included the 1935 novel and a series of demon monologues, “Der togbukh fun yeytser-​hore” (The Diary of the Evil One). These monologues were the first time Bashevis used the “I” narrative, followed two years later by the monologue “Gimpel tam” (Gimpel the Fool), published in the Yiddish journal Yidisher kemfer in 1945. Bashevis’ artistic turn to the classical Yiddish monologue opened a rich artistic resource, one he would continue to tap throughout his long career in the United States. In a retrospective article from 1943, Bashevis noted: Modern Yiddish literature did not represent either a new beginning or true continuity; it was rather the aftergrowth of a great and rich culture. Its creators were split personalities, and everything they said had to have the dual meaning of mockery (or stylization), even when their intentions were completely serious.10

As was the case with two classical Yiddish writers, Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovich) and Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovich), who made use of folksy narrators (Mendele the Bookseller and Tevye the Dairyman, respectively), Bashevis’ return to the monologue allowed him to utilize the “dual meaning of mockery (or stylization).” He first used this technique at the end of Satan in Goray, when a dybbuk who has possessed Rechele, the novel’s protagonist, speaks from her mouth in a long monologue of stylized and subversive old Yiddish speech.

52 

Jan Schwarz

By returning to the classical monologue of Yiddish literature, Bashevis also discovered the artistic possibilities of Yiddish humor, which had been absent from his earlier writings. In his American monologues, Bashevis utilized the rich resources of East European Jewish folklore and humor, as well as archetypical figures such as the fool, the trickster, and the schlemiel. From the 1950s, Bashevis’ work began to be published and circulated in two separate transnational literary networks—​Yiddish and Anglo-​American—​before entering a globalized field of translation, circulation, and reception. Starting in the mid-​1950s, the American literary field increasingly informed his work. The event and aftermath of being awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in literature elevated Bashevis’ status to that of a writer of world literature. It is noteworthy, however, that what he published in Warsaw before the war in the Yiddish press is almost entirely invisible outside its Yiddish source; it remains untranslated, with a few important exceptions such as Satan in Goray and a few short stories. The rest of Bashevis’ writings in the periodical press in Warsaw during the years 1925–​1936 have never been republished or collected in book form.11 Yet Bashevis’ first decade as a Yiddish writer in Warsaw is crucially important. It was his only period as a working journalist, writer, and translator in what was then the main Yiddish cultural center in Eastern Europe. This is perhaps the most significant gap in the textual transmission of Bashevis’ work, without which any understanding of his postwar artistic trajectory and influences is incomplete.12 Bashevis’ work in English and, to a lesser degree, the Yiddish book form, is merely the tip of the iceberg of an enormous body of works in multiple genres and formats in the Yiddish and Anglo-​American periodical press, which remains invisible beyond scholarly journals. In order to address the huge gaps in the accessibility of the full scope and variety of Bashevis’ work, several anthology projects have been initiated.13 In describing the conundrum of compiling Bashevis’ work from the periodical press, the late Yiddish scholar Joseph Sherman noted that “the question of what texts constitute the true canon of his work will become even more vexed than it is at present.”14 In what follows, I will demonstrate how the mid-​to late 1950s marks a turning point in Bashevis’ literary career. At this time, he began to cultivate a more expansive view of himself as a Jewish American world writer in English translation. I will exemplify this in a close reading of the novel Farloyrene neshomes (Lost Souls), written by Bashevis in the early 1950s and serialized thirty years later in 1980–​1981 in the Forverts. This work was translated into English by Bashevis in collaboration with Nili Wachtel and published posthumously in 1994, with the new title Meshugah. Although the novel did not reach an English readership until 1994, I argue that it provides a missing link in Bashevis’ first venture outside the Yiddish cultural circuit, contemporaneous with his acclaimed breakthrough in English in 1953 with the story “Gimpel the Fool” (translated by Saul Bellow) in the literary journal Partisan Review. My comparison of Farloyrene neshomes and Meshugah will demonstrate some of the gaps in the textual transmission of Bashevis’ work, which is paradigmatic of the larger gaps in the transmission of Yiddish literature in America. I will delineate the ways in which Bashevis reshaped his Yiddish work in English translations in response to shifting, globalizing literary trends and market demands.

The Lost Souls of Meshugah

53

Starting in the mid-​1950s, Bashevis took advantage of the breakup of the Western literary model of center and periphery as a result of the postcolonial, immigrant, and minority trends that increasingly reshaped American literature in the postwar period.15 These trends created a new model of Jewish world literature based on a more equal and fluid exchange of works in their original languages and translation: Multilingual, transnational, and characterized by mobility, the Jewish literatures of this period exemplify many of the core ideas informing the discourse on world literature; but they represent a model of cultural circulation with no clear center. Moving fluidly between local and transnational contexts, they negotiate literary influences from non-​ Jewish contexts while circulating texts among Jewish languages.16

The postwar period enabled the gradual development of a new discourse of world literature that represented “a model of cultural circulation with no clear center.” Bashevis benefited from the paradigm shift in the concept and writing of world literature, which took shape in Jewish American literature in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1938, an excerpt from Der sotn in Goray appeared in English as “Hail, the Messiah,” published in an anthology of Jewish short fiction that was edited and translated by Morris Kreitman, the son of Bashevis’ older sister, the Yiddish writer Hinde Esther Kreitman (1891–​1954).17 The anthology placed Bashevis in the company of Jewish writers such as Dovid Bergelson, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Boris Pasternak, I.J. Singer, and Stefan Zweig.18 Notwithstanding, it was only a decade and a half later that Bashevis became widely known among English-​readers. In 1955, Satan in Goray finally appeared in an English translation by Jacob Sloan, twenty years after its first Yiddish book publication. The novel’s publication in English was made possible by the sudden attention to Bashevis’ work on the part of New York Jewish intellectuals affiliated with Partisan Review, where “Gimpel the Fool” had appeared two years before. In Bashevis’ note to the English translation of Satan in Goray, he mentioned “the difficult labor of translating a work which many considered untranslatable.” Sloan, for his part, characterized the work as medieval, classic, archaic, epic, and a masterpiece of the Yiddish language.19 Both in English and in subsequent translations that were based on the English version, the novel was severed from its original literary context. Its subtitle, “A Story from Bygone Days,” was removed. In addition, Der sotn in Goray’s rich stylistic pastiche of Hebrew and Yiddish generic and linguistic features was molded into a uniform English literary diction that universalized the archaic linguistic features of the Yiddish. However, the work’s narrative energy and fable-​like morality were maintained in the English translation, highlighting its themes of political and religious mass hysteria and totalitarianism. Indeed, by the 1950s, Bashevis’ original “story from bygone days” about ideological fanaticism and collective descent into chaos and nihilism was received as an eloquent response to the anti-​Communist zeitgeist in Cold War America. From being an anachronistic outlier in the Communist-​dominated Yiddish Writers’ Union in interwar Warsaw, Bashevis became the darling of the Jewish anti-​Communist Left in postwar New York. The critical consensus has been that Bashevis’ breakthrough to an American readership occurred in the genres of the short story (“Gimpel the Fool”) and the historical

54 

Jan Schwarz

novel (The Family Moskat). Although Bashevis excelled and published prolifically in these two genres, it was the novelistic “long” story (mayse, or dertseylung)—​such as Satan in Goray, The Slave, and Meshugah—​that distinguished him from other Yiddish and Jewish Anglo-​American writers. As storyteller, Bashevis remained on the margin of the major trends in Yiddish literature in the interwar and postwar period, whose dominant figures were historical novelists such as I.J. Singer, Sholem Asch, Joseph Opatoshu, Zalman Shneur, and Dovid Bergelson. These writers wrote expansive historical novels that they serialized in the Yiddish press in Warsaw, New York, and Moscow, often followed by publication in book form in Yiddish and translation into many other languages. After the Holocaust, the surviving Yiddish writers no longer had an indigenous Yiddish literary world and mass readership in Eastern Europe. In the United States, the circulation of Bashevis’ work now followed a less common movement from the Yiddish periphery to the semi-​periphery of Jewish American literature, which experienced a renaissance in the 1950s and 1960s, and then into Anglophone world literature.20 The translation and transmission of Bashevis’ work in the postwar United States exemplified the gradual transformation of the world literary field from a center​/periphery to a more fluid multicentered field of circulation. Bashevis’ English “second original” was translated into more than thirty languages during his lifetime. Throughout this complex cultural and literary transfer, Bashevis constantly rewrote his themes, settings, and main characters in Yiddish and American publications in both the periodical press and book form. Bashevis is unique among Jewish American writers in the postwar period because he commanded a huge bilingual literary and journalistic domain in various textual formats, genres, and publication venues.21 Bashevis’ bilingualism is fundamentally different from the “internal” bilingualism of classical Yiddish/​Hebrew writers such as Mendele Moykher Sforim and I.L. Peretz. The latter writers wrote two sets of works (Yiddish and Hebrew) for various and sometime overlapping segments of the relatively small Jewish readership prior to the First World War.22 Neither does Vladimir Nabokov’s bilingual fiction (Russian and English) offer a model for Bashevis’ bilingualism. Nabokov was thoroughly proficient in English from childhood on, so that, from the age of 42, he could write his fictional work directly in English, while his native proficiency in Russian enabled him to translate his English fiction into Russian (and vice versa). Bashevis, in contrast, began to study English only after his immigration to America at the age of thirty. English became his fifth language, as he already was proficient in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and German. Not until the 1950s did he achieve sufficient proficiency in English to write non-​artistic pieces such as critical essays and lectures, and he did not start to collaborate with his translators until the latter part of that decade. After being translated into English by highly competent translators and native Yiddish-​speakers such as A.H. Gross (The Family Moskat), Saul Bellow (“Gimpel the Fool”), and Jacob Sloan (Satan in Goray), Bashevis’ reliance on native English-​ speakers in translating his work began with the translation of his first collection of short stories, Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957). Nine different translators are credited with the English texts of the eleven stories included in the volume. The next volume of stories, The Spinoza of Market Street (1961), gave credit to ten translators, only one of whom (Elaine Gottlieb) had participated in the 1957 volume. As

The Lost Souls of Meshugah

55

with Bashevis’ original stories in Yiddish, the English translations of his stories first appeared in literary journals and newspapers. It was only in 1963, twenty years after the publication of his first collection of Yiddish stories, that Bashevis published his second Yiddish collection of stories, Gimpl tam un andere dertseylungen (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories); this collection included some of the same stories as did the similarly named English volume but in a different sequence. Two features characterized Bashevis’ translation methodology. First, from the mid-​ to late 1950s, he increasingly redirected his work toward creating “a second original” in English translation. Rebecca Walkowitz’s term “born translated” applies to Bashevis’ collaborative work with multiple translators: In born-​translated novels, translation functions as a thematic, structural, conceptual, and sometimes even typographical device. These works are written for translation, in the hope of being translated, but they are also often written as translations, pretending to take place in a language other than the one in which they have, in fact been composed.”23

As I have demonstrated elsewhere, Bashevis initiated English translations of several of his serialized novels and short stories in the Yiddish daily Forverts when the Yiddish installments first appeared in print.24 In essence, these novels were written for translation and, simultaneously, as representations of translations of the characters’ multiple languages (Yiddish, English, German, Polish, Russian). Many of Bashevis’ translators were young women, often with scant knowledge of Yiddish. This gave Bashevis full control over the translation process, whereas the young women translators charged the collaborative work with a sexual, youthful energy in the creation of a “new” Jewish American literature. This enabled Bashevis to transcend his creative work in Yiddish, which he experienced as imprisoning him in a dying cultural environment, and which he repeatedly characterized as a ghostly activity or even as ghost-​writing.25 The critical reception of The Slave (published in English and Yiddish book form in 1962 and 1967, respectively) by prominent reviewers such as Susan Sontag, Ted Hughes, and Orville Prescott put Bashevis on the map of contemporary world literature in English. Set during the Chmielnicki pogroms in the mid-​17th century, The Slave deepened Singer’s artistic vision, rooted as it was in a distinctly Polish Jewish universe suffused with religious sensibility and moral edification. The reviewers agreed that The Slave was “deeply removed from the world of modern fiction” (Susan Sontag). In the Kenyon Review, Ellington White stated: The Slave is not a comfortable book to read in the year 1962. We are much closer to Doris Lessing’s fragmented Anna and Philip Roth’s hovering Gabe than we are to Jacob, who seems almost freakish in his wholeness. Still, that is our fault, not Isaac Singer’s. Remote though it is, The Slave is a beautifully done book.

In the New York Times, Orville Prescott characterized the novel as “a sort of Jewish ‘Pilgrims Progress’ ” and pointed out that “the necessities of his allegory, its folk story simplicity, ensure that ‘The Slave’ always seems a little unreal and very far away.”

56 

Jan Schwarz

The critical consensus was that the novel was an anachronism, a term frequently used by both Yiddish and American critics in evaluating Bashevis’ work. In the New Republic, Jean Stafford summed up the American critical view: “Bashevis’ remarkable gift as a storyteller is that he can keep attention and sympathy of his reader through a fiction that is a combination movie scenario and hagiography. It is an admirable performance.”26 The Slave became Bashevis’ novelistic breakthrough to a non-​Jewish American readership. It confirmed his artistic genius as a storyteller of romance and allegory situated in a Polish Jewish context. As the poet Ted Hughes observed, Bashevis’ work was “not discursive, or even primarily documentary, but revelation . . . ”27 The Slave demonstrated vividly that Bashevis’ response to what he bundled together as the evils of modernity, modernism, and the Holocaust was to perform as a traditional storyteller in didactic and hagiographic modalities. Another key component of Bashevis’ performance as storyteller in America was his use of penitence in the representation of the lost world of East European Jewry. Bashevis’ novel The Magician of Lublin, published in both English and Yiddish book form (respectively in 1961 and 1971), demonstrated the centrality of penitence for Bashevis, as he pointed out in an unpublished author’s note: I am deeply interested in the behavior of penitence and to me, Yasha Mazur (the Magician of Lublin) is the penitent par excellence. For years he yearned to gain fame among the Gentiles, ready like Uncle Esau to sell his birthright for the porridge of what modern man calls art, culture, progress.28

Yasha Mazur becomes Bashevis’ prototype of the modern artist, balancing on a tightrope, chasing fame, women, and money. The Magician of Lublin is a morality play that, in a dynamic narrative, piles experiences and plot twists on top of each other until the last chapter, when everything crashes and burns for the protagonist, both sexually and professionally (among other things, his female assistant and lover commits suicide). As a result, Yasha decides to become a penitent and walls himself in a small hut close to his former wife’s house. This narrative trajectory—​the penance and return to tradition of the sexually transgressive man—​characterizes several of Bashevis’ novels and also some of his short stories. In some cases, particularly the novels, translation significantly improved the artistic quality of the “baggy” and often rambling serialized Yiddish works that appeared in the Forverts.29 However, it was primarily Bashevis’ short fiction that facilitated his work’s entry into a world literary field. In 2004, his eleven English collections of short fiction were published in a three-​volume edition of the Library of America series, the first time an American writer working in a language other than English had been included in this important collection. To date, only four books of Bashevis’ short fiction, including a total of 46 stories, have been published in Yiddish, as opposed to the 198 stories published in thirteen English books.30 The quantity of Bashevis’ work from the mid-​1940s until his death in 1991 is breathtaking even in comparison with contemporary Yiddish writers such as Yankev Glatshteyn, Avrom Sutzkever, Chava Rosenfarb, and Chaim Grade, who also

The Lost Souls of Meshugah

57

published prolifically in the postwar period.31 Roberta Saltzman’s bibliography of Bashevis’ publications in the Yiddish press for the years 1960–​1991 comprises 1,109 items, an average of 37 items per year, including journalistic writing and weekly segments of multiple novels and life writing.32 During this period, the English translations of Bashevis’ work replaced the original Yiddish work as the authoritative version. As the translator Nili Wachtel points out in her postscript to Meshugah: “He stressed the fact that the English translations, not the Yiddish, provided the basic texts of all his foreign editions, and that was why he involved himself in the translation process.”33 Bashevis’ huge output during more than half a century as resident of New York demonstrates a deep commitment to writing fiction and journalism in both Yiddish and English, addressed to two very different readerships. In Yiddish, there are clear differences between the weekly journalistic pieces that he published under the name of Yitskhok Varshavski or D. Segal, as opposed to the novels, memoirs, or short stories that he published as Yitskhok Bashevis. To produce such a huge weekly output required “an ironclad discipline” on Bashevis’ part, which reflected the quasi-​religious aspect of his work ethic. Hillel Rogoff, the editor of the Forverts in the 1950s and 1960s, described Bashevis’ workload in the early 1950s: “He produces more than two other writers who work ‘full time’ in the editorial offices”—​in his view, Bashevis was “a first-​class writer, a competent journalist and an excellent newspaperman.”34 In the early 1950s, before Bashevis became known in English translation, he wrote a semi-​autobiographical novel titled Farloyrene neshomes. Dertseylung (Lost Souls: Story). 35 The novel portrays a middle-​aged writer on the staff of an unnamed New York Yiddish newspaper that is clearly meant to be the Forverts. His name is Aaron Greidinger (the same as the protagonist of Shosha, another of Bashevis’ novels, and also that of the main character in a number of short stories), and he is modeled on Bashevis.36 Farloyrene neshomes gives a raw, uncensored portrait of the New York Yiddish world of survivors and recent refugees from Europe. These people were understandably caught up with memories of the khurbn (Holocaust); most of them were also readers of the Forverts and knowledgeable about yidishkeyt (Jewish law and customs), and they often came from the very Polish towns that Bashevis depicted in his stories. In a particularly hilarious scene, Greidinger discovers that he made a mistake regarding when the Yizkor memorial prayer is recited: The blunder was not a mere oversight, a typographical error committed by the young typesetter. It occurred in a lengthy paragraph filled with descriptions. I would be a laughingstock with the paper’s readers. Was there still time for me to rectify it? The metal frame containing the text was still on the printer’s table in the composing room, and the type would probably be cast first thing in the morning. There was one way to save my literary name from disgrace—​get dressed, go down to the editorial offices, and pluck out the entire paragraph with my own hands—​something a mere writer was not permitted to do under the laws of the printers’ union.37

This is exactly what Greidinger does, entering the newspaper’s offices at night and crossing out the paragraph on the proof sheet. The incident demonstrates the exacting standards to which contributors to the Forverts were held. The paper’s Jewishly knowledgeable readers responded to each segment that was printed with intense

58 

Jan Schwarz

scrutiny: “Thirty or forty thousand readers were reading it every day, most of them Polish Jews acquainted with every town, street, and house I described. The most minute error brought scores, sometimes hundreds of letters.”38 The use of a Yiddish title (Meshugah) for a book in English translation is an exception in Bashevis’ oeuvre (apart from his children’s books, which include titles with such Yiddish words as mazl, shlimazel, shlemiel, and golem). According to the “Translator’s Postscript,” after Wachtel completed a draft in English, Bashevis “decided to change the title and wrote the word MESHUGAH in ink on the first page of the typescript.”39 The book is introduced with a dictionary-​like entry: MESHUGAH (me-​shug’-​a) –​ Yiddish  word meaning crazy, senseless, insane. This is obviously addressed to a reader with no knowledge of American Jewish culture, in which the word is quite common. The shorter, edited English version also erased the original Yiddish subtitle—​dertseylung (story). Bashevis often blurred the borderlines between the documentary and the fictional in an attempt to circumvent and refashion the relationship between “literature” and “life.”40 Meshugah is a typical example of a monologue narrated by a Bashevis-​like figure: in this case, a middle-​aged journalist and novelist who is also a vegetarian (unlike Bashevis, however, Greidinger is a bachelor and lives in a rooming house). Bashevis’ older brother, the novelist I.J. Singer, and his father and mother are mentioned in Meshugah. In addition, the narrator notes his mother’s burial place in Dzhambul, Kazakhstan, where Bashevis’ mother and younger brother Moyshe perished in the Gulag in the early 1940s. The vignettes in Bashevis’ childhood memoir, In mayn tatns bezdn shtub (In My Father’s Court), typically begin with his father, a rebbe, being approached by visitors who request his rabbinical advice. Similarly, Meshugah begins with the opening of the narrator’s newspaper office door on a spring day in 1952. In comes Max Aberdam, an old friend from Warsaw who is thirty years’ Greidinger’s senior. Greidinger is stunned to see Aberdam because he thought that his old friend had perished in the Holocaust. The sudden appearance of survivors who were thought dead was not an uncommon phenomenon in Yiddish New York in the early 1950s. The narrative takes place between spring 1952 and spring 1953, when Bashevis was still almost completely unknown outside the Yiddish literary world. According to Chone Shmeruk, Farloyrene neshomes was completed in 1955 and then put away in Bashevis’ archive, which Greidinger refers to as “genuine works of literature lying in those suitcases you drag from one furnished room to another.”41 Unlike serialized work that required regular delivery of installments to the Forverts twice a week, Farloyrene neshomes was written almost thirty years prior to its newspaper publication. It was Bashevis’ first attempt to depict Holocaust survivors in New York. Only later, in 1972, did he publish his first novel about this topic, Enemies, A Love Story, serialized in the Forverts in 1966.42 During the 1950s, his breakthrough period as a Yiddish writer in English translation, Bashevis’ storytelling was closely associated with the pre-​Holocaust shtetl of the Lublin region and with his childhood home on Krochmalna Street, in the poor Jewish section of Warsaw. At this point in his career, his work was focused entirely on the pre-​Holocaust Polish Jewish world.

The Lost Souls of Meshugah

59

The four books that Bashevis published in the 1950s (two in Yiddish and two in English) were all set either in the East European Jewish shtetl or in Warsaw in the pre-​ Holocaust period. Shadows on the Hudson, another major novel about survivors in New York (serialized in 1957–​1958 in the Forverts as Shotn afn Hodson) was first published posthumously in English in 1998. Following Enemies, A Love Story, Meshugah and Shadows on the Hudson completed Bashevis’ Holocaust trilogy. The latter two novels demonstrate the delayed textual transmission of some of Bashevis’ works in English translation. Moreover, the two posthumously published novels were never reworked by the author for publication in Yiddish book form. In Meshugah, Bashevis rewrites his typical plots and characters in new constellations. Whereas the typical Bashevis male hero (such as Herman Broder in Enemies: A Love Story or Yazur Kotik in The Magician of Lublin) is involved with three or more women, here it is Miriam, the female protagonist, who becomes Greidinger’s lover while also remaining sexually involved with both her husband, Stanley, and Max Aberdam. Moreover, in a departure from the more typical Bashevis ending in which the main character withdraws from the world (again, as in Enemies and The Magician of Lublin), Meshugah is marked by a kind of “happy ending” when Miriam and Greidinger get married. Meshugah is a meta-​literary text that continually reflects and comments on itself as in a hall of mirrors.43 The main characters are Greidinger, Miriam—​who is writing a dissertation about his work—​and Max Aberdam, who represents the pulsing “life force” from the past that infuses the novel with vitality. The interpersonal intrigues of the book as recounted by Greidinger contain numerous intertextual references to Bashevis’ works, narrative world, and recurring themes, and these transform Greidinger’s monologue into a meta-​literary play. For instance: We toyed with the idea of my writing a novel entitled Three, the story of two men and a woman, the theme of which was the emotions heeded no laws, no religious, social, or political systems. We agreed it was the mission of literature to express the emotions with honesty—​savage, antisocial, and contradictory as the emotion might be.44

Meshugah becomes this novel. In it, Greidinger creates a gallery of characters, all of whom are readers of his serialized novels and articles in the Yiddish newspaper and whose relationship to him is based on his artistic work. As in many Bashevis novels, the blurring of literature and real life, and the textual exchange between writer and reader via newspapers and books, comprise the portrayal of the “lost souls” in New York. The Holocaust and the Gulag have eradicated the world of their communities and families. They live in a claustrophobic, insular world, a parallel textual universe, a Yiddishland in New York where the taxi drivers speak Yiddish and come from the same towns in Poland, and where people in the subway read Yiddish newspapers.45 However, this Yiddishland only comes to life in the suspense of the narrator’s monologue of romance and sexual intrigues. Some of the changes made in Meshugah make the postmodern meta-​poetic play less radical. For instance, in the Yiddish installment appearing in the Forverts on June 12, 1981, Miriam is depicted as a projection of Greidinger’s imagination and vice

60 

Jan Schwarz

versa. In Miriam’s words: “Der emes iz az mir beyde ir un ikh, zenen gekumen fun zelbikn teyg. Ikh derkon mir in aykh. Ir trakht mayne gedankn” (The truth is that both of us, you and I are derived from the same dough. I recognize myself in you. You think my thoughts). In Meshugah, this becomes: “The truth is that we, you and I, are birds of a feather.”46 This type of translational methodology characterizes part of Bashevis’ work in English, as Anita Norich points out in her comparison of the Yiddish and English versions of Bashevis’ story “Yentl, der yeshive-​bokher” (Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy): “It will perhaps strike contemporary readers as ironic that, in each case, it is the Yiddish text that is more radical, more willing to explore the various possibilities of identity, more assertive of the individual, more prepared to revolt.”47 In Meshugah, several repetitive sections in which the narrator elaborates on his worldview and literary credo have been eliminated.48 At the same time, the English text’s focus on the theme of meshugah is emphasized by the insertion of sentences that do not appear in the Yiddish original. One example is the following exchange between Max and Greidinger: “Trotsky’s permanent revolution is being staged in front of our eyes. Whether it is all social, or spiritual, or a result of God’s madness I don’t know. Let the professors decide that. I know only what my eyes see.” “What do they see?” I asked. “The world is turning meshugah. It had to happen.”49

In the Yiddish text, Max’s comment that “the world is turning meshugah” does not appear. The word meshugah connects the English novel to the world of Yiddish. Simultaneously, the use of meshugah as a master trope in English associates it with the Yiddish universe of exile, trauma, and loss caused by the Holocaust. As Greidinger puts it: “We were what the Cabala called ‘naked souls,’ remnants of a spiritual holocaust.”50 Greidinger’s recreation of characters and textual worlds are the remnants of an almost extinct tribe of survivors who live out their desperate lives in postwar New York; constitutionally unable to procreate, they are the last of a generation and a civilization, in constant rebellion against any societal and religious norms. Meshugah ends with these lines: “If we have a child, we’ll name him Max.” “There will be no children,” I said. “Why not?” she asked. “You and I, we are like mules,” I answered, “the last of a generation.”51

In another key passage, Miriam refers to the novel A Hero of Our Times by the Russian author Mikhail Lermontov (1814–​1841), comparing Greidinger and Max to that novel’s main characters as well as to Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. Miriam’s literary universe, like that of Bashevis (via his narrator stand-​in Greidinger), is made up of 19th-​century Russian novels that she read as a child in interwar Warsaw, and Hebrew Scriptures. At one point, she tells Greidinger:

The Lost Souls of Meshugah

61

“You always keep yourself hidden. In my unfinished dissertation I call you ‘the Hider.’ I wrote in English, naturally. Ah, I’ve given my life a goal—​to make you famous. Don’t laugh, someone has to do it. I have still one other ambition—​actually two.” “What are they?” “To tell you all that I have lived through—​everything, leaving out nothing, even the most foolish things.”52

In the Yiddish text, this exchange reads as follows: “Ir bahalt zikh keseyder. In mayn nisht farendikter esey ruf ikh aykh ‘the hider’ der vos bahalt zikh. Ikh hob es geshribn natirlekh in english.” (“You hide constantly. In my unfinished essay I call you ‘the hider,’ the one who hides himself. Naturally, I  wrote this in English.”)53 Significantly, in the Yiddish text, Bashevis uses the English term “hider,” which he then explains in Yiddish, thus indicating that Miriam’s “essay” (which was changed to “dissertation” in Meshugah) is addressed to an English readership. It is noteworthy, however, that Yiddish readers were likely to understand “the hider” as a reference to the Soviet Yiddish modernist writer Pinkhas Kahanovitsh (1884–​1950), who wrote under the pen name Der Nister (the Hidden One). Kahanovitsh is the prototype of a narrator who plays textual hide and seek with his readers in post-​modernist and meta-​ literary modes.54 In contrast, Bashevis points to his own “hidden” presence behind the narrative voice of Greidinger, whose Yiddish world and textual references the author is staging for an English readership with almost no Yiddish literacy. Repeatedly, the characters in both the Yiddish and English versions point out that Greidinger has published an unnamed historical novel in English translation (a reference to Bashevis’ first English book translation, The Family Moskat, from 1950), and that he should continue this trajectory toward literary acclaim and commercial success. As with the use of the designation “the hider,” this reference indicates that the Yiddish text is already being shaped with an English readership in mind. As such, it has been “born translated.” Although Meshugah did not reach an English readership until 1994, it nevertheless demonstrates how Bashevis, back in the early 1950s, set out to write a new English version of Farloyrene neshomes by creating a very different kind of implied reader than in the serialized Yiddish novel. Negotiating and foregrounding his use of English words in Farloyrene neshomes enabled Bashevis to contrast the different functions and potentialities of the two main languages of Jewish American literature. Thus, in Lawrence Rosenwald’s words, Bashevis entered the larger field of Jewish American literature originating with the Yiddish and English immigrant writers of the prewar period: In Jewish American writing in English, Yiddish is the Other. The reverse is true of writing in Yiddish. Other things being equal, the writer is one step farther from assimilation, one notch more strongly identified as an immigrant, a Jewish outsider, a person about to make a choice about assimilation and Americanization rather than one carrying out a choice already made. America itself is one notch stranger, more bewildering. English, not Yiddish, is the other.55

The use of the English word “the hider” in the Yiddish serialized novel defines Miriam and the other characters as Yiddish-​speaking immigrants, outsiders in postwar

62 

Jan Schwarz

New York, a world associated with an earlier generation of immigrant Yiddish and Anglo-​Jewish writers such as Yankev Glatshteyn, Joseph Opatoshu, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Henry Roth. In contrast, in the 1994 English book, it is the Yiddish and Hebrew words that emphasize the characters’ foreignness and exoticism far removed from assimilation and Americanization. The distinction between Greidinger and Miriam is significant:  “We sat at one table like two refugees, but it was Miriam who was Hitler’s victim, not I.”56 As a former kapo in the concentration camps, where she was forced to have sex with Nazis, Miriam inhabits a Holocaust universe that is closed off to Greidinger. Miriam experienced the atrocities: “I found myself in Riga with hundreds of other lost souls.”57 Yet while the survivors have written “heaps of books” about their war experiences, they are increasingly being rejected by the Yiddish newspaper editors and readers, who less than a decade after the war have been saturated by accounts of atrocities.58 Instead of placing the khurbn front and center in the lives of the survivors, as was the case in the main trend of post-​1945 Yiddish literature (for instance, in memoirs and historical novels by Elie Wiesel, Mordekhai Strigler, Leib Rochman, and Chava Rosenfarb, and in many of the 175 works in the Buenos Aires-​based series Dos poylishe yidntum [1946–​1966]), a few of the most brilliant postwar Yiddish writers, among them Avrom Sutzkever, Chaim Grade, and Bashevis, subsumed the khurbn in their artistic quest.59 Bashevis rewrote the genre of eyewitness accounts from the camps and Gulags in ways that highlighted his pre-​Holocaust artistic credo, according to which modern literature blurs the lines between the religiously permissible and the forbidden. The traditional inner conflict between an individual’s “good inclination” (yeytser-​tov) and “evil inclination” (yeytser-​hore) remained the primary lens through which Bashevis viewed life and literature and served as the deep ideological/​philosophical scaffolding of his work. As depicted in his 1928 story, “Oyfn oylem-​hatohu” (In the world of chaos)—​the only story from interwar Warsaw to be republished in Yiddish in the postwar period and referred to several times in Meshugah—​human existence and emotions are chaotic and incontrollable.60 As a result, Greidinger sees literature’s main task as depicting emotion “honestly—​savage, antisocial, and contradictory as the emotion might be.” The only counterweight to the licentiousness of modern Jews and Gentiles are the inner voices of pious moderation such as Greidinger’s deceased father and mother, along with a rabbi that he meets on a return flight from Israel to New York, who admonishes him to build religious fences around the “world of chaos.”61 The reversal of gender roles—​here it is Miriam who is polyamorous, in contrast to the typical polyamorous male protagonists in Bashevis’ other work—​heightens the comedy of a meshugah world. Greidinger twice succumbs to breakdowns and violent vomiting when he learns about Miriam’s past as a prostitute in Warsaw and as a kapo in the camps. However, in rebellion against his inner parental voices, Greidinger has great compassion for Miriam and marries her in the end: Who am I that I should judge victims of Hitler? I had also heard that among the kapos there had been decent people who helped the inmates in the camps. What they all wanted was to save their lives. I was filled with great pity for this young woman who, at twenty-​ seven, had experienced so much of life’s bitterness as a Jew, as a woman, as a member of the human species.62

The Lost Souls of Meshugah

63

Here, Bashevis addresses one of the most controversial issues that preoccupied Yiddish writers after the Holocaust: Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. In novels by Yitskhok Perlow and Ka-​tzetnik (Yehiel De-Nur), the main themes are the female survivors’ victimization and collaboration with the Germans in the ghettos and concentration camps through prostitution and sexual depravity.63 Unlike these survivor writers, Bashevis had no firsthand knowledge of the war. Consequently, he subsumed moral issues regarding Jews’ culpability in their own destruction in a discourse of commemoration and the archetypical internal struggle between yeytser-​hore and yeytser-​tov. A main theme of Meshugah is the author’s attempt to commemorate the destroyed world of the survivor characters. Indeed, Miriam points out that such an artistic response to the khurbn might be the raison d’etre of Greidinger’s work: “A whole world collapsed before my very eyes. But you, my favorite author, are bringing it to life again.”64 Rather than viewing the translation of his Yiddish work as the eradication of the Yiddish source and context, Bashevis created a bilingual set of works that has stood the test of time by reaching new readerships via translations from the English oeuvre into other languages. As exemplified in my reading of Meshugah, Bashevis’ creative use of “the translation zone” gave his work a new lease on life beyond the Yiddish-​ speaking diaspora.65 Deeply embedded in the periodical press, the pulsing heart of Yiddish culture, Bashevis transmitted and circulated his work among multiple national readerships. In conclusion, I would like to touch upon a few main features of the transmission and reception of Bashevis’ works in Sweden and China. The Swedish reception is closely associated with Bashevis’ Nobel Prize of 1978, which almost immediately bestowed canonicity on his work. The Chinese translation and reception also commenced at this time, and it provides a non-​European perspective that poses a new set of questions about the circulation of Bashevis’ work beyond the Western world’s Yiddish, Anglo-​Jewish, and American contexts. As has been seen, Bashevis started to gain an international reputation as a Jewish storyteller and novelist in the 1960s, thanks mainly to the publication of his historical novels The Slave and The Magician of Lublin. However, prior to 1978, relatively few works from Bashevis’ English corpus were translated into other languages. Bashevis was fortunate to benefit from a shift in the criteria for selecting the Nobel Prize in literature that began to take hold in the 1970s, namely, a new-​found preference for “unknown masters.”66 Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish academy from 1999 to 2009, points to what he calls the nomadic, exilic character of a number of Nobel laureates, emphasizing their ambivalence with regard to their people, culture, and language (which also characterizes Bashevis):  “Great authors are quite often nomadic beings, hard to classify ethnically or linguistically. It is striking how many prize-​winners, especially in recent years, have had uncertain or problematic nationalities.”67 Prior to Bashevis’ Nobel Prize, only two works by him had appeared in Swedish: The Slave in 1966 and Enemies, A Love Story in 1974. Bromberg’s Publishers, a small publishing house established by two Polish Jewish refugees to Sweden, Adam Bromberg and his daughter Dorotea, bought the rights to a number of Bashevis’ novels in early 1978. After the announcement of the prize in October of that year, they quickly published The Magician of Lublin, the short story collection Gimpel the Fool, and the first

64 

Jan Schwarz

Swedish introduction to Bashevis’ work by Knut Ahnlund, a permanent member of the Swedish academy and the main lobbyist for Bashevis’ candidacy for the prize. The Magician of Lublin sold an astounding 150,000 copies in Sweden (whose population numbers less than 10 million) and cemented the reputation of Bromberg as the publisher of Nobel literature laureates. According to Dorotea Bromberg, almost one million copies of some thirty Bashevis novels, short stories for children and adults, and memoirs have been sold in Sweden, mostly in the first and second decade following the awarding of the prize.68 In China, as in Sweden, The Magician of Lublin became one of the most popular of Bashevis’ books. Between 1979 and 2012, the Chinese translation was reissued in four different editions. Here, too, the awarding of a Nobel Prize had a galvanizing effect in making Bashevis available in Chinese, and in addition initiated a genuine interest in Jews and Jewish literature: And the year 1979 in the Chinese foreign literary world can be called an I.B. Singer Year. Subsequently, almost all foreign literary magazines . . . issued articles about Singer or translations of his novels and stories. And in October, the Shanghai Yiwen Publishing House issued The Magician of Lublin. In September 1980, the Foreign Literature Publishing House issued The Collection of Singer’s Short Stories, translated by a dozen famous translators, and this pushed the first wave of the Singer fad to a climax with 90,000 copies quickly sold out.69

“Gimpel the Fool,” the first of Bashevis’ stories to reach a widespread Jewish American readership, has also had an impressive impact on Chinese literary circles. As Fu Xiaowei and Wang Yi point out, the story has exerted a strong influence on contemporary Chinese writers such as Yu Hua, who modeled some of his most famous stories on Gimpel-​like characters: “[A]‌lmost all these works imitating Singer’s Fool are among Chinese readers’ favorites.”70 The success of Bashevis’ works in Sweden and China may be due to three factors:  its use of 19th-​century genres (historical novels, novellas and short fiction with fantastic and supernatural features, and picturesque memoirs) addressed to both adults and children; its classical Jewish storytelling in the mode of “laughter through tears”; and its frequent use of fool and schlemiel characters. Moreover, Bashevis’ work is eminently translatable because it almost never transcends a conventional generic and narrative framework and typically employs a straightforward English style with only a few traces of Yinglish (American English infused with Yiddish words and syntax). The centrality of figures such as the fool, the trickster, and the schlemiel in Bashevis’ work can be viewed as a universal hook for its initial reception in the United States, China, and Sweden. Gimpel the Fool, Aaron Greidinger in Meshugah, Herman Broder, the protagonist of Enemies, and many other Bashevis-​like narrators in his short fiction present a gallery of various types of fools: the holy and the simpleminded fool (tam and nar, as in “Gimpel the Fool”) crystalized in the figure of the luft mentsh (a person who lives on nothing, or on castles in the air). These nomadic figures sustain themselves precariously as storyteller (Gimpel), journalist and novelist (Greidinger),

The Lost Souls of Meshugah

65

and ghost writer (Herman). They embody the powerlessness and rootlessness of the Jewish diaspora experience, which, I  would argue, has contributed to making Bashevis’ world literature eminently translatable and transmittable in multiple national contexts.

Notes 1.  Zhang Longxi, “Epilogue: The Changing Concept of World Literature,” World Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch (Chichester: 2014), 514. 2.  In this essay, Isaac Bashevis Singer will be referred to as Bashevis, the name by which he is generally known in the Yiddish-​speaking world. In the Yiddish press, he most often signed off as Yitskhok Bashevis, signifying his identification with his mother Batsheva (born Zylberman), who came from a family of misnagdim (opponents)—​staunch rationalists and opponents of the hasidim (his father’s side of the family were hasidim). Moreover, Yitskhok Bashevis distinguished him from his older brother I.J. Singer (1893–​1944), a respected and successful Yiddish novelist. For some of his journalistic writing, Bashevis made use of the pseudonyms Yitskhok Varshavsky and D. Segal. 3.  Ibn Gabirol wrote The Best of Pearls, not Moses Khayyim Luzzatto. It is unclear if the mistake is that of Singer or of Florence Noiville, who included the list in her biography Isaac B. Singer: A Life (New York: 2006), 161. 4.  According to a Google Books entry (accessed 27 February 2018), Phantasms of the Living, published in 1886, is “the first comprehensive scientific study, undertaken by the Society for Psychical Research, London, of para psychology: Thought-​transference, tele­pathy, witchcraft, dreams, hallucinations, the theory of chance-​coincidence, illusions, etc., with descriptions of 702 cases. It is a basic reference work on these subjects.” Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–​1772) was a Swedish philosopher and theologian whose most famous work was Afterlife: Heaven and Hell (1758). 5.  Spinoza, too, played an important role early on in Bashevis’ career, as evidenced in the latter’s memoirs Love and Exile: An Autobiographical Trilogy (London: 1984). Under his pseudonym Varshavsky, Singer published several articles about Spinoza in the Forverts in 1947. However, as Daniel B. Schwartz points out in his chapter about Bashevis and Spinoza in The First Modern Jews: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Princeton: 2012), by the late 1940s, “the one-​time romance had largely faded” (p. 162). When Bashevis compiled his list, Spinoza did not figure in his literary/​philosophical world view. 6. Yitskhok Bashevis, “Figurn un epizodn fun literatn farayn,” Forverts (28 June 1979); ibid. (second installment, 29 June 1979). 7. Monika Adamczyk-​ Garbowska, “The Place of Isaac Bashevis Singer in World Literature,” Studia Judaica 13 (2005), 223. 8. On Bashevis’ non-​normative religiosity, see David Stromberg, “Was Isaac Bashevis Singer Religious?” Tablet (24 July 2017) (accessed 27 February 2018). 9.  Moreover, in the early 1960s, Bashevis started to write children’s stories, based in part on tales about the “wise men” of Chelm. This resulted in his publication of several volumes of popular children’s books in English. See Ruth Von Bernuth, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York: 2016), 31–​42. 10.  Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Concerning Yiddish Literature in Poland,” trans. Robert Woolf, Prooftexts 15 (1995), 120. Originally published in Tsukunft 48, no. 8 (August 1943), 468–​475. 11.  According to Dvorah Telushkin, Bashevis’ secretary and translator (1975–​1988), they jointly worked on an anthology of his early writings from the Warsaw period. Bashevis suggested the title First Steps in Literature for the volume, which was subsequently abandoned. See Telushkin, Master of Dreams: A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: 1997), 241–​255. 12.  Elias Schulman, “I.B. Singer’s Early Fiction: A Critical Bibliographic Survey,” Yiddish 14, nos. 2–​3 (2006), 2–​67. According to Schulman: “I. Bashevis had his beginning in Europe,

66 

Jan Schwarz

a great beginning, but it was in the United States that he developed into a major Yiddish writer” (p. 5). 13.  I am currently compiling an anthology of Bashevis’ early writings in English translation from Warsaw. David Stromberg has edited a volume of Bashevis’ essays and criticism from the Yiddish press in English translation. 14.  Joseph Sherman, “Isaac Bashevis Singer,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Novelists since World War II, vol. 278 (Farmington Hills: 2003), 310. 15.  See Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–​1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: 2002). 16.  Lital Levy and Allison Schachter, “Jewish Literature/​World Literature:  Between the Local and the Transnational,” PMLA 130, no. 1 (2015), 93; idem, “A Non-​Universal Global: On Jewish Writing and World Literature,” Prooftexts 36 (2017) (special issue about Jewish literature and world literature), 1–​26. For another perspective on world literature and Yiddish literature, see Saul Zarritt, “ ‘The World Awaits Your Yiddish Word’: Jacob Glatstein and the Problem of World Literature,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 34, no. 2 (2015), 175–​203; idem, “Maybe for Millions, Maybe for Nobody: Jewish American Writing and the Undecidability of World Literature,” American Literary History 28, no. 3 (Fall 2016), 542–​573. 17.  The first English translation of a full-​length book by Bashevis was The Family Moskat (1950), published the same year in Yiddish book form as Di familye Moshkat. This historical novel about multiple generations of a Warsaw Jewish family, which concluded with the German bombardment of Warsaw in 1939, was dedicated to the memory of I.J. Singer (who died in 1944). It was translated by I.J. Singer’s only surviving son, Joseph Singer, who became an important translator of Bashevis’ work. Other family members who collaborated with Bashevis in translating his works were his son, Israel Zamir, who translated it into Hebrew (he also wrote a memoir about his father), and his wife, Alma. 18.  Morris Kreitman (ed.), Jewish Short Stories of To-​day (London: 1938). See Faith Jones, “The Real First Translation of Bashevis into English!” (posted 20 September 2015), online at:  https://​ingeveb.org/​blog/​the-​real-​first-​translation-​of-​bashevis-​into-​english (accessed 6 March 2018). 19.  Introduction to the first edition of Satan in Goray, 1955. 20.  See Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January– February 2000), 1–​ 12; idem, “More Conjectures,” New Left Review 20 (March–​ April 2003),  73–​81. 21.  Among the periodicals in which Bashevis published were Playboy and The New Yorker. 22.  See Dan Miron, “Abrahamovitsh and His Mendele between Hebrew and Yiddish,” in idem, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford: 2010), 421–​499. 23.  Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Literature (New York: 2015), 4. 24.  See my essay, “I.B. Singer’s Art of Ghost-​Writing: Enemies, A Love Story,” in Laughter After:  Humor and the Holocaust, ed. Gabriel Finder, David Slucki, and Avinoam Patt (Detroit: forthcoming). In a letter from Aliza Shevrin to Bashevis dated February 23, 1966, only a few weeks after the novel Sonim, a geshikhte fun libe (Enemies, A Love Story) began to be serialized in the Forverts, she reports her progress in translating the first installments of the novel into English. From the start, Singer intended to make the novel available in English, though it took six years until it was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1972. There are several similar letters between translators and Bashevis in the early stages of the serialization of his work in the Forverts; these may be found in the Harry Ransom Center, I.B. Singer archive. 25.  In a piece published in the Forverts (23 May 1965)  under the pseudonym Yitskhok Varshavski, the ghost motif is presented in typical Singer fashion: “I once said that a Yiddish writer is like a ghost who can see but is not seen. Perhaps that is why I like to write ‘ghost’ stories. The Yiddish writer not only belongs to a minority but he is a minority within a minority. He is a paradox to his own people. Theoretically, a Yiddish writer is dead. He moves around like one of my phantoms, a corpse who either ignores his own death or is not yet aware of it.”

The Lost Souls of Meshugah

67

Reprinted as “Vi filt zikh a yidisher shrayber in Amerike”? How Does It Feel to Be a Yiddish Writer in America?” trans. I.B. Singer, PaknTreger 77 (Summer 2018), 47. 26.  These reviews are found in the Harry Ransom Center, I.B. Singer archive. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29.  See Chava Rozenfarb, “Yitskhok Bashevis un Sholem Ash. A pruv fun a farglaykh,” Di goldene keyt 133 (1992), 76. 30. Yitskhok Bashevis, Gimpl tam un anderes dertseylungen (New  York:  1963); idem, Mayses fun hintern oyvn (Tel Aviv:  1971); idem, Der shpigl un andere dertseylungen (Jerusalem:  1975). In addition, five monologues were included in Satan un Goray un andere dertseylungen (New York: 1943). The full texts of Bashevis’ ten Yiddish books have recently been made available by the Yiddish Book Center (Steven Spielberg Yiddish digital library), online at:  yiddishbookcenter.org/​collections/​digital-​yiddish-​library (accessed 3 September 2018). 31. See Jan Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles:  Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Detroit: 2015). 32.  Roberta Saltzman, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Bibliography of His Works in Yiddish and English, 1960–​1991 (Lanham: 2002). 33. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Meshugah, translated by the author and Nili Wachtel (New York: 1994), 231. 34.  Hillel Rogoff, Di gayst fun forverts. Materialn tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher prese in Amerike (New  York:  1954), 228–​229. The “ironclad discipline” quote is from Florence Noiville: “He had witnessed his father and mother’s extreme rigidity about schedules, rules, prayers. He wasn’t religious—​his way of life was completely secular—​but he was still imbued with a self-​imposed, ironclad discipline all the time” (Noiville, Isaac B. Singer, 103). 35.  On dating the novel, see Chone Shmeruk, “The Perils of Translation: Isaac Bashevis Singer in English and Hebrew,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 12, Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 1996), 230–​231. 36.  Shiri Shapira’s master’s thesis (Hebrew University, 2017), titled “The Author-​Narrator in Yitskhok Bashevis Zinger’s Short Fiction,” examines the figure of the author-​narrator (for instance, Aaron Greidinger) and his narrative function in Bashevis’ short fiction. This genre belongs to the period starting in the early 1960s, and it includes a few posthumously published stories. Shapira concludes that “the author-​narrator stories make up over thirty percent of the overall short stories published during his career in America in either Yiddish or English (mostly in both languages) or to be more precise, at least 73 author-​narrator stories out of a total of at least 203 stories” (ibid., 4). Shapira’s analysis of this short fiction genre complements my reading of Farloyerene neshomes and Meshugah, which exhibits several similar features with regard to the narrator’s function, styles, and themes. For another perspective on Farloyrene neshomes and Meshugah analyzed in a literary historical study of American Yiddish literature, see Abraham Novershtern, Kan gar ha’am hayehudi: sifrut yidish beartzot habrit (Jerusalem: 2015),178–​197. Comparing Meshugah with the 1974 novel Shosha, which is narrated by Aaron Greidinger and mostly takes place in prewar Warsaw, Novershtern argues for the artistic superiority of the latter. 37. Singer, Meshugah, 127–​128. 38.  Ibid., 224. The “thirty or forty thousand readers” refers to the time of the novel’s serialization in the Forverts (1981–​1982), and not to the novel’s narrative time frame, the early 1950s. In an interview I conducted with Mr. Katz (June 2015, New York), a typesetter who started working at the Forverts in the early 1960s (he retired in 2013), the number of daily Forverts readers in the 1960s was about 90,000, and there were approximately 36 typesetters and 80 journalists and writers working for the newspaper. According to Katz, Bashevis came to the Forverts twice a week to read page proofs of the installments of his serialized works. He always requested that his manuscripts be returned to him; he was clearly aware of their future monetary value during his rise to literary prominence in the 1960s. 39. Singer, Meshugah, 229.

68 

Jan Schwarz

40.  See David Neal Miller, The Fear of Fiction: Narrative Strategies in the Works of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Albany: 1985),1–​27. 41. Singer, Meshugah, 225. 42.  Schwarz, “I.B. Singer’s Art of Ghost-​Writing.” 43.  Shapira, “The Author-​Narrator in Yitskhok Bashevis Zinger’s Short Fiction,” 59, 75. 44. Singer, Meshugah, 124. 45.  Ibid., 10, 27. 46.  Ibid., 55. 47. Anita Norich, Writing in Tongues:  Translating Yiddish in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: 2013), 65. 48.  A typical example is the installment of the serialized novel that appeared in the Forverts on May 15, 1981, which contains a section about “love philanthropy” and a man who had 36 wives and lived in the same shtetl as Greidinger’s grandfather; this is followed by a paean to polygamy. The section was cut in the English translation. 49. Singer, Meshugah, 8. 50.  Ibid., 144. 51.  Ibid., 228. 52.  Ibid., 41. 53.  Forverts (15 May 1981), 8. 54.  See Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov (eds.), Uncovering the Hidden: The Works and Life of Der Nister (Abington: 2014). 55.  Lawrence Rosenwald, Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: 2008), 83. 56. Singer, Meshugah, 49. 57.  Ibid., 205. 58.  Ibid., 143: “In recent years the editor almost stopped printing the memoirs of survivors of Treblinka, Maidanek, Stutthof, other concentration camps. I heard him explain to an author of one such memoir: ‘We no longer publish these things. Our readers don’t want to read them . . . ’ ” 59.  See Jan Schwarz, “A Library of Hope and Destruction: The Yiddish Book Series Dos Poylishe Yidntum, 1946–​1966,” and “Appendix: List of 175 Volumes of Dos poylishe yidntum,” Polin 20 (2008),173–​196. 60. Singer, Meshugah, 4, 51 (in Yiddish: Forverts [6 June 1981]). See also Jan Schwarz, “ ‘Death Is the Only Messiah’:  Three Supernatural Stories by Yitskhok Bashevis,” in The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Seth L. Wolitz (Austin: 2001), 107–​119. The story, which originally appeared in Di yidishe velt (Warsaw) in April 1928, is the only early story from the Warsaw period to be republished in Yiddish by the author, in Di goldene keyt 124 (1988), 87–​95. 61. Singer, Meshugah, 213–​215. 62.  Ibid., 209. 63.  Yitskhok Perlow serialized works about survivors in Israel in the Forverts in the 1950s, including two novels published in book form, In eygenem land (1952) and Flora Ingber (1959). Under his pseudonym Yitskhok Varshavski, Bashevis reviewed Perlow’s works very positively; see the Forverts (28 November 1954; 8 April 1956; 14 May 1961, and 4 June 1965). Katzetnik’s most controversial and best-​known work is The House of Dolls (1955), which deals with prostitution and sexual abuse of Jewish women by the Nazis in the camps. It was also published in Hebrew and Yiddish book versions. See Gali Drucker Bar-​Am, “Revenge and Reconciliation:  Early Israeli Literature and the Dilemma of Jewish Collaborators with the Nazis,” in Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust, ed. Laura Jockusch and Gabriel N. Finder (Detroit: 2015), 279–​303. 64. Singer, Meshugah, 31. 65.  Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: 2006). 66. Sture Allén and Kjell Espmark, The Nobel Prize in Literature:  An Introduction (Stockholm: 2006),  33–​36.

The Lost Souls of Meshugah

69

67.  Horace Engdahl, “Canonization and World Literature: The Nobel Experience,” in World Literature:  A Reader, ed. Theo D’haen, Cesar Dominquez, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (Abingdon: 2013), 318. 68.  Interviews with Dorotea Bromberg (Stockholm: November 2015 and March 2018). 69.  Fu Xiaowei and Wang Yi, “Influence of Jewish Literature in China,” in The Jewish-​ Chinese Nexus: A Meeting of Civilizations, ed. M. Avrum Ehrlich (New York: 2008), 124. 70.  Ibid., 126.

Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–​1991 Gennady Estraikh (NEW YORK UNIVERSITY)

In the fall of 1956, a group of British Communists visited the Soviet Union. As did a number of other delegations and individual visitors of the time, they sought to examine the extent of progress of de-​Stalinization in the political system and, in particular, to understand the status of Jews in post-​Stalinist society. In their report, the delegation noted that among Jews of the older generation, including the one or two thousand who came to the Leningrad Synagogue to celebrate the festival of Simchat Torah, “the non-​existence of a Yiddish paper was regarded as a deprivation and an injustice.”1 The absence of periodicals and books in Yiddish exposed the demise of virtually the entire Jewish publishing infrastructure in the Soviet Union. This infrastructure, rich and variegated in the 1920s, had been thrice contracted and then destroyed in the two decades that followed. First, in the 1930s, the authorities hit at Jewish educational and cultural institutions, including the Moscow Yiddish daily Der emes. Following the establishment, in May 1934, of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) in the far eastern portion of Russia, the state increasingly treated Jews as a territorial ethnic group whose “diaspora” outside the JAR deserved less cultural attention (this, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Soviet Jewry resided outside the autonomous region). At the same time, Yiddish publications continued to appear. In 1940–​ 1941, for instance, Yiddish books (359 titles in 1940) and periodicals were produced in Moscow, Kiev, Minsk, Kharkov, Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga, Lvov, and Bialystok, as well as in Birobidzhan, the administrative center of the JAR.2 However, beginning in June 1941, the German occupation of parts of the Soviet Union brought an abrupt end to Yiddish periodicals and book publishing in the entire European part of the country, apart from Moscow, where the specialized Jewish publishing house Der Emes, now the centralized book-​producing hub, maintained an ambitious program of releasing scores of titles in Yiddish and Russian.3 Finally, there came the repressions of the late 1940s, which liquidated remaining Jewish organizations, among them the Jewish Anti-​Fascist Committee (JAFC) and its newspaper, Eynikayt; the three literary periodicals, in Moscow, Kiev, and Birobidzhan; and the publishing house Der Emes. The lone surviving newspaper, Birobidzhaner shtern, appeared in Birobidzhan, but its subscription was open only to residents of the region, and it had a tiny circulation.4 Gennady Estraikh, Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–1991 In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0005

Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–1991

71

This last phase of destruction of Yiddish publishing in the late-​Stalinist Soviet Union was a direct concomitant of the fabricated charges brought against leading members of the JAFC. Thirteen individuals, including five leading Yiddish writers—​ David Bergelson, Perets Markish, David Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Itsik Fefer—​ were accused of being part of seditious plots hatched by foreign “imperialists” and were executed by firing squad on August 12, 1952. According to the Russian historian Gennadii Kostyrchenko, additional affiliated cases brought between 1948 and 1951 resulted in the arrest of another 110 people, ten of whom were subsequently executed, whereas a majority of those who survived the initial investigation were eventually sentenced to long imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag.5 In what follows, I offer an overview of Soviet Yiddish cultural developments in the post-​Stalinist era, focusing on three main subjects: Birobidzher shtern, the fate of the surviving Yiddish cadre, and the revival of Yiddish publishing in Moscow.

The Last Yiddish Newspaper: Birobidzhaner shtern Following the abrupt closure of the Moscow publishing house Der Emes, the Moscow newspaper Eynikayt, and the literary journals Heymland (Moscow), Der shtern (Kiev), and Birobidzhan, the Birobidzhaner shtern, appearing three times a week, remained the only enduring remnant of the Yiddish press. The circulation of Birobidzhaner shtern did not exceed 400-​500 in the late 1940s and early 1950s.6 As part of the case centered around the JAFC, a wave of repressions affected leading party and administrative figures of the region, along with local intellectuals. Among those imprisoned was Buzi Miller, the former editor of Birobidzhaner shtern and the leading local Yiddish writer, who was accused of authoring and publishing “politically harmful,” “bourgeois nationalist” works.7 In the meantime, Birobidzhan had virtually disappeared from the Soviet media, whereas previously it had been the focus of attention despite its failure to attract any significant number of Jewish resettlers. Nevertheless, and despite its negligible Jewish population, Birobidzhan provided Soviet ideological strategists with the missing theoretical link in defining Jews as a nation—​national territory that would ultimately become a Jewish republic (“region” was considered to be a transitional status) in the Siberian Far East. The existence of a “national territory” made Soviet Jews look less abnormal, at least by the dogmatic yardsticks used in qualifying ethnic groups as nations. Territory was a key component in Statin’s definition: “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-​up manifested in a common culture.”8 The Birobidzhan project also served as an excuse for decision-​makers to minimize or curtail completely Jewish cultural and educational activities outside the JAR, in this way accelerating the assimilation of Jews elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Demographically, Jews made up less than a tenth of the population of the JAR. The 1959 census revealed that only 5,597 of the 14,269 local Jews claimed Yiddish as their first language. In 1954, when Birobidzhaner shtern had a print run of 500, its Russian-​language sister publication, Birobidzhanskaia zvezda (with the same

72 

Gennady Estraikh

meaning of “Birobidzhan star”), had a circulation of 20,000.9 In September 1954, Herschel Weinrauch, a journalist at Birobidzhaner shtern in the years 1932–​ 1938, appeared in Washington, D.C. as a witness before the House Committee on Communist Aggression. According to him, “Birobidzhan was fake,” and although Soviet authorities “didn’t officially liquidate it, . . . they closed the Jewish schools and eliminated Jewish cultural life.”10 Still, Birobidzhan continued to attract international attention. In the summer of 1956, local party functionaries were taken aback to learn that references to articles published in Birobidzhan had appeared in the foreign press. In alarmed letters to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, they pointed to the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Folks-​shtime, the only foreign recipient of a complimentary copy of the Birobidzhan newspaper, as the source of the information leak. Such excessive parochialism did not meet with the approval of Communist Party strategists. On the contrary, they suggested making Birobidzhaner shtern available to the editors of “progressive Jewish newspapers.” Meanwhile, experts criticized the Birobidzhan newspaper for its inferior design and for its publishing dull, hackneyed articles written in poor (“Germanized”) Yiddish.11 In 1956, the newspaper began to appear in an expanded, four-​page format (instead of two pages), but with the same periodicity of three times per week. New equipment provided to the newspaper’s printing shop allowed for the mechanization of its typesetting, which had hitherto been done by hand.12 Nonetheless, many Yiddish readers continued to ridicule the newspaper for publishing parochial news and numerous translations from central Soviet dailies.13 The orthography of Birobidzhaner shtern reflected the results of the radical Soviet language-​planning reforms of the 1920s and 1930s, which meant, in particular, the application of phonetic-​morphological spelling to all Hebrew and Aramaic elements and the elimination of the word-​final forms for five letters (mem, nun, khof, fey, tsadik) used in Hebrew and traditional Yiddish writing systems. Absence of the final letters remained a hallmark of Birobidzhaner shtern during the entire Soviet period, even following the restoration of these letters in Moscow Yiddish publications. The reason was purely technical: the Moscow printing shop could print these letters, whereas the typographic equipment in Birobidzhan lacked them.14 In addition, Moscow publications targeted an audience that included foreign readers, and these were likely to be deterred by a Yiddish text lacking the final letters.15 In June 1956, Yosef Avidar, the Israeli ambassador to Moscow, and his wife, Yemima Tchernovitz, were allowed to spend several days in Birobidzhan. Tchernovitz, a Hebrew children’s writer, described in her diary their visit to the editorial office of the Yiddish newspaper: We entered the office of Birobidzhaner shtern. A young man with curly hair and a repulsive face received us quite coldly. He seemed as if his tongue, hands and legs were tied, afraid to utter a word. The corpse itself was thrown in front of us, the remnant of what had perhaps once been a Yiddish newspaper, but now was a pitiful copy of the local Russian paper, which itself was a copy of Pravda. When we asked him where he got his material from, he shamelessly lied and said: “Mainly from readers’ letters. We print everything sent to us.” We asked about the number of copies distributed. At first his answer was evasive like all his answers, but finally he stuttered: 3000.16

Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–1991

73

Two years earlier, when the New York Times journalist Harrison E. Salsbury made a stopover in Birobidzhan, he learned that the newspaper came out three times a week, with a circulation of one thousand copies.17 The same inflated circulation figure can be found in 1959 dispatches by the American journalist Max Frankel, who provided some details of its non-​subscription distribution: “Two newsstands had a few copies; a third, placed near a publicly posted copy of the paper, had not heard of it.” Moreover, he wrote, the newspaper in large part carried translations from the daily, four-​page Birobidzhanskaia zvezda.18 Judging by the available information, Birobidzhaner shtern did not manage to increase its real circulation much above 1,000, even when, from 1970 onwards, it could be subscribed to both outside the JAR and abroad. In 1983, it boasted 444 subscribers in the JAR, 243 in other places in the Soviet Union, and 28 abroad. In 1985, the number of subscribers reached 529 in the JAR, 465 in other places in the Soviet Union, and 89 abroad. A few hundred copies also appeared, though not necessarily sold, on newsstands in various Soviet localities.19 I remember that in the 1970s and 1980s, Birobidzhaner shtern, as well as the Israeli Communist Yiddish weekly Der veg, was available at the newspaper kiosk near the Moscow metro station Ploshchad revoliutsii. Even before 1970, some copies of the newspaper were supplied to kiosks in areas other than the JAR; one American journalist, for instance, spotted it in Vilnius in 1965.20 Birobidzhaner shtern’s circulation grew to almost 2,000 in 1989, at the time of “high perestroika,” when its editor, Leonid Shkolnik, and other journalists made the contents of the newspaper “more Jewish.”21 In 1977, Shkolnik was among several young Birobidzhaners, all of them card-​carrying Communists, who were selected for studying at the Khabarovsk Higher Party School, where their specialized curriculum included Yiddish studies.22 Back in the late 1950s and 1960s, however, the Warsaw Folks-​shtime had more readers in the Soviet Union than did Birobidzhaner shtern. As I argue elsewhere, the Warsaw newspaper became a surrogate Soviet periodical. Significantly, a number of Soviet Yiddish literati who never, or hardly ever, sent their literary and journalistic works to Birobidzhan were happy to have their work published in Folks-​shtime.23

The Surviving Yiddish Cadre In 1954 and 1955, imprisoned writers began to be released from the Gulag camps, following years of isolation and privation. Only a minority of them regretted their Communist activism, consoling themselves with the belief that, after shedding Stalinism, the Soviet Union remained the best place in the world. Rehabilitation returned them to “normal” life, reinstating them in the Party (if they were members) and in the Soviet Writers Union. In December 1955, the Writers Union’s weekly Literaturnaia gazeta informed its readers about a commission responsible for Perets Markish’s literary legacy. During the subsequent months, it published information about similar commissions formed to deal with the legacies of five other posthumously rehabilitated Yiddish writers: David Bergelson, Leyb Kvitko, Isaac Nusinov, Shmuel Persov, and Itsik Fefer.24 In most instances, the commissions comprised a number

74 

Gennady Estraikh

of Russian writers, one or two Yiddish writers (the poets Shmuel Halkin and Aron Vergelis, for example, were on the Markish commission), and the widow of the writer being commemorated. A well-​established member of the literary community chaired such a body. Vsevolod Ivanov, for instance, chaired the Bergelson commission; he had been a neighbor of the executed writer.25 In a letter written to the poet Aleksei Surkov, who headed the Writers Union, three former leading figures of the publishing house Der Emes stressed the urgency of revitalizing Yiddish literary activity: Now, when the Supreme Court has rehabilitated Yiddish writers, the Soviet Writers Union faces the urgent task of rehabilitating Yiddish Soviet literature. The Writers Union has to undertake measures to publish the tragically perished writers’ works in their original language and to restore publication of works by other Yiddish writers, who in recent years have been robbed of the possibility of seeing their writings in print. Such steps are expected by many thousands of Jews, whose proud feeling of being Soviet citizens was hurt in the last several years, because of the actions of enemies of the people.

The letter was signed by Moyshe Altshuler, the former head of the department of Marxist-​Leninist literature; Moyshe Belenky, the former editor-​in-​chief; and Eli Falkovich, the former head of the department of belles-​lettres.26 By the end of the 1950s, the Writers Union had among its members about seventy writers, critics, and translators associated with Yiddish literature. In 1959, Paul (Peysekh) Novick, editor of the New York Communist Yiddish daily Morgn-​frayhayt, reported on this cadre of writers. He quoted Halkin, who had provided a geographical breakdown: about 30 of the writers lived in Moscow or its suburbs (during the 1940s, the main employers of Yiddish literati—​Eynikayt, Der Emes, the Yiddish theater, and the Jewish Anti-​Fascist Committee—​had all been based in the capital); in addition, about a dozen lived in Kiev, and small clusters of writers were to be found in Birobidzhan, Chernivtsi, Odessa, Vilnius, Kishinev, and Minsk. Novick, who attended a meeting with some of them, noted that “their average age appeared to be considerably lower than at a similar meeting in the United States.”27 The surviving writers represented three age cohorts. Among the oldest were Zalman Wendroff, who had become a popular belletrist on the eve of the First World War, and literary critic Nokhem Oyslender. Halkin and several established authors, including Joseph Rabin, Itsik Kipnis, and Noah Lurye, became involved in literary activities during the decade following the Russian Revolution of 1917, whereas a number of writers, among them Shmuel Gordon and Hershl Polyanker, were part of the later crop of the Soviet Yiddish literary harvest. Several professional Yiddish literati got their start during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when young workers who displayed literary talent were encouraged to move from “the machine-​tool” to literature. Ritalii Zaslavskii, a Ukrainian poet and translator who was acquainted with a few Yiddish proletarian writers, later wrote: “I sometimes wondered whether these people would have become writers in another, non-​ Soviet society. Most likely they would not have. The thought of devoting themselves to such a strange activity never would have crossed their minds.”28 Aron Vergelis was the odd one out. He became a member of the Writers Union in 1940, on the same day as Emanuel Kazakevich and Buzi Miller. All three were

Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–1991

75

categorized as Birobidzhan authors, although Kazakevich and Vergelis already lived in Moscow. Vergelis, only 22 at the time, was the youngest in the group, and he claimed to be the youngest member of the Writers Union as a whole. In the same year he was called up for military service; he served in the army until the end of the Second World War. Following demobilization, Vergelis set out to build a successful career —​ albeit undistinguished from a literary point of view—​among the inner circle of the Moscow Yiddish literary elite. Among the posts he attained were those of head of the Moscow Yiddish radio program, secretary of the Yiddish section at the Writers Union, and member of the editorial board of Heymland. At the same time, Vergelis appeared on a list of 213 individuals “stored up” for future arrest in the event of a witch hunt against Jewish intellectuals. In February 1953, he came close to losing his status as a Communist Party candidate member. Stalin’s death the following month stopped the process of his expulsion.29 Many among the Yiddish literati had been educated in Yiddish-​language schools, or even in university-​level Yiddish departments that had existed in the Soviet Union prior to the Second World War. Apart from a strong and relatively young cadre of belletrists and critics, the Yiddish cultural elite included journalists, scholars, artists, theater directors, composers, and actors. A number of Jewish writers who had previously lived in the territories belonging to the Baltic countries, in Poland, or in Romania, and who had become Soviet citizens only in 1939 or 1940, augmented the Soviet Yiddish literary circles. Culturally and ideologically, these “Westerners” were often a world away from their homegrown Soviet colleagues, especially those who had grown up in the post-​1917 period. Overall, the Stalinist repressions left a heavy burden on the writers. Even those who did not experience the Gulag endured enormous psychological stress and a threadbare existence. Some of them remained terrified even during the post-​Stalinist liberalization period.30 Nonetheless, the vast majority of them continued to write, predominantly in Yiddish.31 In the Moscow circle of Yiddish literati, two people, Moyshe Belenky and Aron Vergelis, competed for leadership in the reemerging Jewish cultural establishment. Belenky, released from the Gulag in 1954, found a job at Goslitizdat (State Publishing House of Belles-​Lettres), the parent organization of the liquidated Emes publishing house. There he was involved in a major project that, in 1956, was abruptly aborted: the publication of more than one hundred volumes of Jewish literature translated into Russian.32 An ambitious intellectual with wide-​ranging knowledge, Belenky found his métier in atheism and literary history. Although not a member of the Writers Union, he aspired to lead the Yiddish literary community. Nonetheless, it was Vergelis, an experienced literary functionary without a Gulag past, who gradually took on this role. Members of the Soviet establishment apparently regarded Vergelis as more acceptable than Belenky or several venerable surviving members of the Soviet Yiddish literary guild. Halkin, for instance—​although the most distinguished among these writers—​could not boast such important titles as the “first poet of Birobidzhan” or “a Great Patriotic War veteran,” both of which would appear in Vergelis’ biographical sketches.33 Significantly, in the second half of the 1950s, Vergelis worked as an expert on Jewish affairs at the Writers Union’s International Commission.

76 

Gennady Estraikh

The Struggle for the Revival of Yiddish Publishing Boris Polevoy, a prominent Russian writer and chairman of the International Commission of the Writers Union, played an important role in creating post-​Stalinist outlets for Yiddish letters. Thanks to his numerous trips abroad, Polevoy knew at first hand the state of opinion among foreign left-​wingers and could not see any harm in allowing Soviet Yiddish writers to publish their works in the original. Corporate solidarity also played a role in Polevoy’s and many other Soviet writers’ willingness to help their Yiddish colleagues. In April 1956, for instance, Polevoy argued in a letter to the Central Committee that “it would be expedient to speed up the release of an anthology of Yiddish literature together with the regular publication of books by Soviet Yiddish writers, about which the Secretariat of the Writers Union had already come to a decision following corresponding consultations [with the Central Committee].”34 In July 1956, Surkov received a representative of Morgn-​frayhayt, Khaim Suller, and reassured him that the Writers Union had prepared a detailed program for reviving Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union, which included the establishment of a publishing house, a newspaper, and a theater as well as the convening of an All-​Union conference of Yiddish writers. In August 1956, Dr. Henry (Khaim) Shoshkes, a staff writer at the New York Yiddish newspaper Tog-​morgn-​zhurnal, heard about the same package of projects during a three-​hour conversation with Surkov, Esther Lazebnikova (Perets Markish’s widow), Vergelis, Halkin, and several other Yiddish literati. Shoshkes was told that a Yiddish periodical would be launched in a few weeks’ time, and that the Writers Union had pledged to invest a good chunk of the union’s net profit to advance the cause of Yiddish revival. In September, there were talks about reopening the publishing house Der Emes and convening a conference on Yiddish literature in January 1957.35 The Yiddish revival program had been drawn up by a commission that included such writers as Vasilii Azhaev (chairman), Halkin, and Vergelis.36 Azhaev’s lasting imprint on Soviet literature was his Stalin Prize-​winning novel, Far from Moscow, which had a sympathetically rendered Jewish protagonist and was set in the Russian (Siberian) Far East, where the author had spent a strenuous decade of his life, first as a prisoner of the Gulag and later as a journalist. The novel had a celluloid and an operatic version as well as being translated into a score of languages, including Yiddish (the Yiddish translation appeared in 1954, put out by the Buenos Aires publishing house Heymland). Yet presumably the most decisive bureaucratic factor for appointing Azhaev, a Russian writer, to head the commission on Yiddish literature was his “Far Easternness,” which meant closeness to Birobidzhan; this gave him a certain “Jewish aura.” Meanwhile, Vergelis’ name began to surface in foreign publications. In July 1956, his article in Jewish Life, the American forum for English-​speaking Jewish leftists, presented a rosy picture of the life of Soviet Yiddish writers. According to Vergelis, Yiddish creative activity was going on and publications of new and old works were planned.37 On September 6, 1956, Vergelis coordinated a meeting of G.  Kenig (Melekh Gromb, editor of the Parisian Yiddish Communist newspaper, Di naye prese) and his Canadian colleague Joe Gershman with a group of Yiddish writers. This gathering also became something of a coming-​out party for Vergelis, who emerged as the

Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–1991

77

main Soviet Yiddish spokesperson. In March 1958, a French Communist delegation discussed Soviet Yiddish literary matters with a group of Russian writers. Again, Vergelis gave an introductory talk, arguing for a renewal of Yiddish publishing in the country. The writer Aleksandr Chakovskii, who chaired the meeting, was a vociferous opponent of the renewal. He represented a type of Soviet Jewish intellectuals who were often the strongest adversaries of developing Jewish culture. Several days later, the same delegation encountered another staunch assimilationist, the leading Soviet philosopher Mark Mitin, founding member and chairman of the Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge.38 Somewhat surprisingly, Vergelis did not take part in a session that brought together several Soviet Yiddish writers and foreign delegates to the 1957 Moscow Youth Festival (he may not have been in the city at that time). During the session, which was chaired by Zalman Wendroff, the oldest Soviet Yiddish writer, the keynote speaker, Nokhem Oyslender, highlighted the “miracle” of Soviet Yiddish literature’s transformation “fun oys-​literatur tsu groys-​literatur”—​from rejected literature to great literature—​and revealed the secret of his fellow writers’ post-​comatose creative survival: the opportunity to be translated into Russian had stimulated them to continue writing in Yiddish. He cited a letter by Sholem Aleichem, in which the classic Yiddish author expressed his dream of becoming part of “the ocean of Russian literature.” Oyslender admitted, though, that without outlets for publishing their works in the original, this stimulus would eventually fail. Following Oyslender, the children’s poet Rokhl Boimwohl punned on Sholem Aleichem’s words, saying that the river of Soviet Yiddish literature could merge with the Russian ocean only if it could flow, whereas now only a few “spoonfuls” were being transfused. Still, she ended her speech by reassuring the guests that “we write, and we hope that the morrow will bring us good news.”39 On September 14, 1956, the secretariat of the Central Committee gave a green light to the decision of the Writers Union to publish, beginning the following year, both Yiddish books and a literary quarterly with a print run of 5,000.40 This resolution, however, was soon shelved, and Morgn-​frayhayt informed its readers that, because of a divergence of views among Soviet officials, the Kremlin had reneged on promises to renew Yiddish cultural activities.41 Presumably, Nikita Khrushchev was the only man who could overrule the Secretariat’s resolution. Judging by a number of pronouncements that had a disparaging tone regarding Jews, the Soviet leader did not trust Jews en masse and did not see any reason to develop their culture. Believing that Soviet society was ready to take a short-​cut to Communism, he viewed religious and ethnic differences as obstacles to the march to the ideal society. In 1957, Maurice Thorez, the secretary general of the French Communist party, learned from his Soviet colleagues that they regarded Jews as the weakest link in Soviet society, and that reviving Yiddish culture would only reinforce Jewish nationalism.42 In the meantime, the Soviet propaganda machine once again played the Birobidzhan card. On June 13, 1958, for instance, the New York Yiddish daily Der tog quoted Khrushchev as saying that “all the Jews could go to Birobidzhan and set up a Jewish state, but he was not prepared to allow Yiddish schools to be established all over Russia.”43 Later that year, Israeli sources spread the word that the Soviet government was considering a mass forced resettlement of Jews to the JAR and that the plan would

78 

Gennady Estraikh

be placed before the twenty-​first congress of the Soviet Communist Party, which was scheduled to meet on January 27, 1959. In a way, this report echoed the historically unsubstantiated rumors concerning deportation of Jews that had circulated at the end of Stalin’s life.44 On January 14, 1959, the Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom received a memorandum from an influential organization of the British Jewish establishment, the Anglo-​ Jewish Association (AJA), titled “Reported Renewal of Settlement of Soviet Jews in Birobidjan.” The AJA urged that “no transfers of populations by compulsion, direct or indirect, of Jews or others be undertaken in the Soviet Union.”45 Two weeks before the congress, representatives of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), established in 1906 by people concerned about pogroms in Russia, had a meeting with Anastas Mikoyan, the first deputy chairman of the Soviet council of ministers and a member of Khrushchev’s inner circle. Mikoyan at the time was touring the United States, where he “smiled through the vilifications he was subjected to during several public appearances.”46 His mission was a reconnaissance-​in-​force before Khrushchev’s historical visit to the United States in September 1959. Like the AJA, the AJC was not a mass organization. Its membership was made up largely of prominent and wealthy citizens, and Zionism was not part of its ideology. Rather, it strove for Jewish equality throughout the world, which accounted for its concern with regard to the Soviet state’s attitude toward Jews. Mikoyan apparently came to the conclusion that it was unwise to avoid contacts with this influential body. Indeed, Herbert H. Lehman, the former New York governor and U.S. senator, and Jacob Blaustein, a top American entrepreneur, were among the four representatives of the AJC who participated in the meeting.47 During the two-​and-​a-​quarter-​hour luncheon, Mikoyan flatly denied the rumors about any planned expulsions of Jews to the JAR.48 It seems that these rumors did not spread within the Soviet Union. Thus, Aron Liblikh, who had lived in Birobidzhan before repatriating to Poland, his home country, prior to the Second World War, never heard of any plans for new resettlements to the JAR. Moreover, he saw a different direction of migration, namely from Birobidzhan.49 The rumor, however, left an enduring trace in Soviet Jewish culture, because Mikoyan’s American visit and encounter with Jewish establishment figures led to a sea change in the Soviet leadership’s view on reviving Yiddish publishing. The first book to be published was a collection of stories by Sholem Aleichem, produced with remarkable speed by the Moscow-​based Khudozhestvennaia literatura publishing house in order to be ready by the writer’s centenary on March 2, 1959.50 According to the Jewish Chronicle (London): Although the preparations for the Sholem Aleichem Centenary celebrations were completed some time ago, the Soviet authorities have taken unprecedented pains to give the event the widest publicity, especially abroad. Bookshops in Israel and the United States were informed by cable that the Sholem Aleichem volume in Yiddish, of which 30,000 copies have been printed, would be supplied to them for sale shortly. At the same time the Russian Embassies in London, New York, Paris, and several other capitals have distributed a special article by . . . Aron Vergelis, on Sholem Aleichem’s influence in Russia, and describing how much his works are appreciated all over the Soviet Union. . . .

Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–1991

79

Like most activities in the Soviet Union, the publication of a volume in Yiddish and the widespread nature of the celebrations are not without political meaning. The Soviet authorities are by now fully aware of the apprehension felt by Jews all over the world at the discrimination shown against the Jewish minority in the USSR. . . . [T]‌his issue was the subject of a conference recently between Mr. Mikoyan and American Jewish leaders.51

Boris Gershman, a former proofreader at the publishing house Der Emes, helped to find Yiddish typesetting equipment. He recalled bits and pieces of conversations heard years before, to the effect that, after the Yiddish publishing house had been closed down, its equipment had been moved to the printing shop of the newspaper Isvestiia. Indeed, it was stored there in a cellar.52 The Sholem Aleichem volume opened a new page in the history of Yiddish publishing in the Soviet Union. During 1959, Khudozhestvennaia literatura published similar volumes by two other classic Yiddish writers—​Mendele Moykher-​Sforim and Yitskhok Leybush Peretz. In 1960, the Khabarovsk publishing house produced a book titled Di yidishe avtonome gegnt (The Jewish Autonomous Region). In 1961, the Writers Union’s publishing house, Sovetskii pisatel’, became the main producer of books in Yiddish. Of the 277 Yiddish books published in the Soviet Union between 1961 and 1991, 251 came out under its imprint. More than half of the published Yiddish books (163 titles) came out during the 1980s.53

Sovetish heymland In May 1960, Vergelis wrote to Khrushchev, claiming that it was imperative to establish a Soviet Yiddish forum for literature and propaganda.54 It is clear that somebody gave him the signal to write this letter. Assuming that Khrushchev dealt personally with this issue, his reaction was tardy. In 1988–​1991, when I worked as managing editor of the journal Sovetish heymland, I  heard from several people that Halkin, physically broken after six years of imprisonment (rather than Vergelis, two decades younger and in good health), was widely seen as the best possible choice for the position of editor-​in-​chief of the new Yiddish periodical. Although it would be naive to suggest that functionaries of the Central Committee and Writers Union coordinated their plans with Halkin’s expected demise, rumor had it that Vergelis (whose demonization deserves a separate treatment) and his supporters intentionally delayed the journal’s launching, because they knew that Halkin’s days were numbered. He died in September 1960 and became the only Yiddish writer buried at the prestigious Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow. In fact, the delay in launching the journal had to do with the resistance of two top functionaries in the Central Committee: Leonid Ilyichev, head of the propaganda and agitation department, and Dmitri Polikarpov, head of the department of culture. On July 20,1960, they suggested rejecting Vergelis’ proposal, arguing that it sufficed to publish Yiddish books. It seems, however, that on the eve of the twenty-​second Communist Party congress, scheduled for October 1961, at which the utopian program of building Communism was to be announced, Khrushchev decided to approve

80 

Gennady Estraikh

the proposed journal as a kind of gift to foreign Communists and pro-​Soviet liberals. A number of factors—​incessant international pressure, the findings of the 1959 Soviet census (which reported more than 400,000 claimants of Yiddish as a mother tongue, a figure that contradicted the official Soviet line that the Jews had been fully acculturated),55 a potential worldwide readership, and the support of several influential Russian writers —​may have played a role in convincing Khrushchev to sanction a new Yiddish literary journal.56 On February 11, 1961, the secretariat of the governing board of the Writers Union rubber-​stamped the decision of the Central Committee to start publishing (in the second half of the year) a Yiddish journal to be titled Sovetish heymland, with a print run of 25,000 copies. The secretariat (or, most probably, an earlier document of the Central Committee) formulated the main objective of the new periodical: “to publish the best works of Soviet writers, which reflect the achievements of the Soviet people in building Communism and developing the economy and culture, and which contribute to the education of toilers in the spirit of Soviet patriotism, proletarian internationalism and peoples’ friendship.” The secretariat appointed Vergelis as editor-​ in-​chief and allocated funds for 19 salaried staff members, as well as for royalties and production of the journal. Even with the planned but never achieved target of 25,000 copies sold through subscription and single-​copy sales, the Sovetskii pisatel’ publishing house had to cover at least half of the expenses.57 Initially, the editorial staff of the new journal occupied several desks at the office of the Literaturnaia gazeta, but it later moved to more spacious quarters at 17 Kirova Street. The name of the journal—​a collocation of the titles of the journals Sovetish (1934–​1941) and Heymland (1947–​1948)—​stressed the continuity of Yiddish literary publications in Moscow. It appeared first as a bimonthly (the first issue came out in August 1961) and in 1965 became a monthly publication. Over time, Sovetish heymland became the state-​sponsored central forum of Soviet Yiddish culture. In addition, it controlled the publication of the majority of Yiddish books. From 1965 onwards, the majority of Yiddish books published in Moscow were reprints of works by active writers that had previously appeared in Sovetish heymland. Based in Moscow, the journal effectively undermined the Birobidzhan-​centered model of Soviet Jewry. Whereas domestic factors had shaped Soviet policy toward the Jews in the 1920s and 1930s, post-​Stalinist Soviet leaders paid more attention to international factors.58 By the 1960s, a Moscow-​based journal was deemed a more valuable Cold War propaganda tool than the failed Jewish colonization project. Indeed, Sovetish heymland, “the most discussable literary journal in the history of Yiddish literature,”59 came to be a significant political phenomenon. The appearance of the expensive and handsomely printed periodical was reported around the world. Its initial print run was unprecedented in the history of Yiddish literary periodicals. (The exact circulation of the flagship Yiddish literary periodical in the post-​Holocaust period, the Tel Aviv-​based journal Di goldene keyt, remains unknown, but it hardly exceeded a few thousand copies.) In addition, Sovetish heymland boasted the biggest and youngest pool of contributors; in 1961 alone, more than one hundred writers were listed in its pages.60 On August 26, 1961, an article in the New York Times noted that “the Yiddish language [has] won a round in the struggle with the Kremlin.” Indeed, the status of Yiddish as the officially recognized national language of Soviet Jews was

Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–1991

81

restored and placed beyond dispute. Only antisemitic authors and Jewish self-​haters would bring themselves at times to question the status of Yiddish; such claims were then met with rebuffs on the part of Sovetish heymland, whose editors regarded themselves as custodians of the language.61 Sovetish heymland never had its own bank account or other markers of financial or administrative independence. In fact, it was a department of Sovetskii pisatel’ and was wholly dependent on subsidies of the publisher, one of the most successful monopolies of the Soviet book market. A single Moscow printing shop (No. 7, Iskra revoliutsii) was responsible for the entire process of typesetting and printing. Until the end of 1991, linotypes belonging to this printing house also produced almost all of the secular and religious books in Yiddish and Hebrew for the Soviet Union. Subscription and distribution were functions of other centralized organizations:  Soiuzpechat (Soviet Union Press), a unit in the ministry of communications, for Soviet readers, and the foreign trade organization Mezhdunarodnaya kniga for readers living outside the Soviet Union. In terms of ideology, Sovetish heymland was guided by the dictates of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Like any Soviet institution, Sovetish heymland had a “triangle” (treugol’nik), or troika of management (editor) and two elected people: the Party secretary and the trade-​union organizer. Significantly, the Communist cell of the journal was not subordinate to the Sovetskii pisatel’ Party bureau. Of the initial 1961 print run of 25,000 copies, about 8,000 went to domestic subscribers (via Soiuzpechat) and 7,000 to foreign subscribers (via Mezhdunarodnaya kniga); some copies—​though less than the remaining 10,000 copies—​were sold in kiosks. According to the annual Pechat’ v SSSR (Periodicals in the USSR), in 1966, the number of printed copies fell to 16,000; in 1971, to 10,000; in 1978, to 7,000; and in 1985, to 5,000. A detailed geographical breakdown is known only for 1989, when the journal had 2,732 Soviet subscribers and 547 foreign subscribers. Of the latter, 155 were from Israel and 116 were from the United States.62 By this time, the number of foreign readers had declined sharply. To a large extent, the drop in foreign readership can be attributed to the aftermath of the Six-​Day War in June 1967; following the war, the Soviet Union embarked on a virulent anti-​Zionist campaign, in which Sovetish heymland had to participate. This led to its losing readers in the country and abroad. Acting as a mouthpiece for anti-​Zionist vitriol did, however, bring some benefits: beginning in October 1977, for instance, the journal was allotted an additional sixteen pages for abstracts in Russian, English, and (for a short period of time) Spanish. From January 1980, each monthly issue of the journal appeared with a booklet supplement containing new material or (more often) reprints of essays, literary works, Yiddish self-​teaching lessons, dictionaries, and bibliographical indexes. Vergelis also succeeded in organizing a two-​year course for Yiddish editors under the auspices of the advanced literary program of the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. This came about in 1981 and was meant to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of Sovetish heymland. Five students—​among them, such undoubted talents as Lev Berinsky (b. 1939), Velvel Chernin (1958), and Boris Sandler (1950)—​enrolled in the course, and their presence in a prestigious institution of higher education was clearly meant to be a trump card in the Communist regime’s continual battle to get the better

82 

Gennady Estraikh

of foreign criticism of Sovietish heymland, and of Soviet policy generally, vis-​à-​vis Jewish culture. The rejuvenation project also shows that Vergelis still believed, to a certain extent, in the as yet unrealized potential of the younger generation. In any event, he was the sole editor in the Yiddish literary world who seriously endeavored to train literati born after the Holocaust. In 1983, Chernin became the first young editor to be employed as a full-​time staff member of the journal. He played an active role in the further development of the youth drive initiated by Vergelis, recruiting and inspiring neophyte authors. In 1986–​1989, the July issues of the journal were devoted to publishing works by younger—​predominantly post-​1945-​born—​authors. In 1989, another group of Yiddish students, ten in all, were admitted to the Gorky Literary Institute program; the group included the poet Moyshe Lemster (1946) and the literary scholar Mikhail Krutikov (1957). In July 1989, together with the last issue devoted to young writers, the 128-​page Yungvald (New Growth) was launched as a bimonthly supplement to Sovetish heymland; it was published until the latter part of 1991. Notwithstanding such accomplishments, Vergelis’ reputation was irreparably damaged as a result of his editorship of Sovietsh heymland. The journal was rich in Soviet-​ speak mumbo-​jumbo and concentrated on current issues of the Cold War; Vergelis, for his part, was repeatedly referred to as a Soviet Gauleiter (the title given to the highest-​ranking Nazi party officials) and as the only serious enemy among the Soviet Yiddish writers.63 In 1971, the American journal Midstream accused him of being an agent of the Soviet secret police whose role “had become evident long before, back in Lavrenti Beria’s heyday, when he was entrusted with the task of countering the rise in national feeling among Yiddish writers that had been encouraged by the Kremlin’s favorable attitude toward the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine.”64 Elie Wiesel was one of the most fervent anti-​Vergelists. In 1965, when he first visited the Soviet Union on a fact-​finding mission organized by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he avoided contacts with the Yiddish journal: “Whatever Aron Vergelis and his comrades were prepared to tell me they had already repeated countless times before to visitors from the United States, France, and Israel.”65 Addressing the Second World Conference on Soviet Jewry in Brussels in 1976, Wiesel indicated his willingness to forgive the publicly voiced anti-​Zionism of all Soviet Jewish figures, with the exception of one—​Vergelis. “He, I believe, is an enemy of the Jewish people,” Weisel said, “and should be treated as such.”66 Vergelis was disliked or even hated by many of his Soviet colleagues as well. His abrasive character caused so much discontent that, a year after the appearance of Sovietish heymland, 17 writers signed a letter demanding his resignation. A stormy meeting chaired by the Russian literary celebrity Konstantin Fedin ended with the decision to keep Vergelis as editor.67 Although many of his opponents later described their conflict with Vergelis as being grounded in ideology, it was more often a personal matter. Members of the Soviet Yiddish literary milieu was generally prone to cliquishness, and the competition for publication space and the editor’s attention in only one available journal made for particularly quarrelsome relations among them.

Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–1991

83

The Death of Yiddish Printing In the spring of 1991 an “ecological catastrophe” fell upon Yiddish publishing in Moscow: the municipal authorities ordered the removal of lead-​casting equipment operating in the very heart of the city, including the linotype machines of the No. 7 printing house that had been the base for Yiddish and Hebrew printing in the Soviet Union since the 1960s. In April 1991, the director of Sovetskii pisatel’ gave official notice that, deprived of its typesetting base, the publishing house would not be able to produce any further issues of Sovetish heymland. For the publisher, the dismantling of the linotypes was, in fact, a “politically correct” pretext to get rid of its non-​profitable Yiddish publications. In 1991, the last five Yiddish books came out under the imprint of Sovetskii pisatel.’ Several abortive appeals to the government showed that, in the atmosphere of ruthless application of economics, the journal could not get any state support. In this era of perestroika preceding the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Central Committee of the Communist Party was an enfeebled institution. There was one other way to save the publication—​finding a sponsor among the mushrooming Jewish organizations. Two or three people, most notably Tankred Golenpolski, editor of the Russian-​language newspaper Vestnik sovetskoi evreiskoi kul’tury, did offer support, finding it tempting to appropriate the spacious premises of Sovetish heymland in central Moscow. However, Vergelis was reluctant to become dependent on newborn organizations whose leaders undermined his three-​decade-​long status as doyen of the Soviet Jewish cultural milieu. Apparently, he still hoped to preserve his niche as the main exponent of deeply rooted Jewish culture. In this desperate situation, Vergelis appealed to the editors of the Parisian Di naye prese, a relic of the vanishing pro-​ Soviet press. The newspaper provided $5,000 for buying a computer with software for Yiddish typesetting (this was the price quoted by an Israeli firm, whose representative had recently opened his office in Moscow). Using the computer and subletting part of the premises to a commercial organization, Vergelis managed to keep the editorial office afloat, albeit with a skeleton staff. In January 1993, having obtained additional donations from the United States and Argentina, he began to publish the bimonthly Di yidishe gas as the direct continuation of Sovetish heymland. In issue no. 10 of 1991, he announced that the journal would change its name, stressing the independent character of the renamed periodical while acknowledging that Sovetish heymland had been overseen by “numerous curators.”68 In reality, Di yidishe gas did not extend the life of Sovetish heymland. Rather, it was the journal’s afterlife. Emigration and deaths among the Yiddish writers narrowed dramatically the circle of its contributors. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, combined with an unprecedented wave of emigration, left the journal with a token number of readers. Finally, Vergelis’ death on April 7, 1999 bookended the Moscow page in the history of Yiddish publishing. Several months before his death, the staff of the journal had been thrown out from its premises at 17 Miasnitskaia, formerly Kirova Street. Since then various commercial organizations have occupied this site. By 2017, it housed a branch of the state-​owned Sberbank of Russia.

84 

Gennady Estraikh

Notes 1.  “Jews in the Soviet Union,” World News 4, no. 2 (12 January 1957), 21–​22. 2.  Leyb Strongin, “Dos yidishe bukh in 1947 yor,” Eynikayt (1 February 1947), 3. 3.  Ibid.,  3–​4. 4. David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–​ 1930 (New  York:  2004), 88–​133; Gennady Estraikh, “The Yiddish-​Language Communist Press,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 20, Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Dan Diner (New York: 2004), 62–​66. 5.  Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: vlast’ i antisemitizm (Moscow: 2003), 488–​494,  507. 6.  Olga P. Zhuravleva, Istoriia knizhnogo dela v Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti (konets 1920-​ kh –​nachalo 1960-​kh gg.) (Khabarovsk: 2008), 58. 7.  Dmitrii V. Korolev, “Kampaniia po bor’be s ‘burzhuaznym natsionalizmom’ v srede birobidzhanskikh pisatelei v 1948 g.,” in Evrei v Sibiri i na Dal’nem Vostoke: istoriia i sovremennost’, ed. Iakov M. Kofman (Krasnoiarsk: 2007), 143–​155. 8.  Joseph Stalin, The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings (New York: 1972), 60. 9. Olga P.  Zhuravleva, “Periodicheskaia pechat’ Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti (1928–​ 1960 gg.),” in Birobidzhanskii proekt: opyt mezhnatsional’nogo vzaimodeistviia, ed. Valerii S. Gurevich et al. (Birobidzhan: 2008), 89. 10.  “Birobidzhan Help Called Diverted,” New York Times (23 September 1954), 5. 11.  Matvei Chlenov, “Puteshestvie iz Birobidzhana v Moskvu: reabilitatsiia iazyka idish v SSSR,” Tirosh 4 (2000), 251. 12.  Zhuravleva, “Periodicheskaia pechat’ Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti,” 90. 13.  See, for instance, Khaim Sloves, In un arum (New York: 1970), 145. 14. Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish:  Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Oxford: 1999), 136–​140. 15.  Aron Vergelis, Di tsayt (Moscow: 1981), 411–​412. 16.  “The Visit to Khabarovsk and Birobidzhan of Israeli Ambassador to Moscow Yosef Avidar and His Wife, Yemima Tchernovitz (1956):  Excerpt from Yemima’s Dary,” introduced and annotated by Yaacov Ro’i, in Mizrekh: Jewish Studies in the Far East, ed. Ber Boris Kotlerman (Frankfurt: 2009), 154. 17. Harrison E.  Salisbury, “Birobidzhan Jews Drop Yiddish, Prefer Russian, Visitor Is Told,” New York Times (22 June 1954), 6. 18.  Max Frankel, “Jewish Birobidzhan Is Found Quiet Corner in Brisk Siberia,” New York Times (1 May 1959), 1; idem, “Siberia’s New Look,” Los Angeles Times (1 May 1959), 1. 19. Zisi Veitsman, “ ‘Birobidzhaner shtern’:  vsego lish’ odna stranichka istorii,” online at: newswe.com/​index.php?go=Pages&in=view&id=8083 (accessed 11 November 2018). 20. Theodore Shabad, “Surprises Greet Visitor to Vilna:  Yiddish Paper on Newsstand,” New York Times (26 July 1965), 6. 21.  Gennady Estraikh, “The Era of Sovetish Heymland: Readership of the Yiddish Press in the Former Soviet Union,” East European Jewish Affairs 25, no.1 (1995), 21. 22.  Il’ia Lipin, “Fradkin Mikhail Markovich,” Birobidzhaner shtern (3 March 2010), online at: http://​eao.memo27reg.org/​pamat-​1/​fradkinmihailmarkovic (accessed 19 December  2018). 23.  Gennady Estraikh, “The Warsaw Outlets for Soviet Yiddish Writers,” in Under the Red Banner: Yiddish Culture in the Communist Countries in the Postwar Era, ed. Elvira Grözinger and Magdalena Ruta (Wiesbaden: 2008), 217–​229. 24.  Literaturnaia gazeta (29 December 1955); ibid. (24 January 1956); ibid. (29 March 1956); ibid. (15 May 1956). 25.  Vsevolod Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow: 1960) 8:456. 26.  Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, 631/​43/​128 (“Sekretariu Prezidiuma SP SSSR Surkovy A.A.”). 27.  Paul Novick, “Yidishe shrayber in ratn-​farband,” Morgn-​frayhayt (12 April 1959), 4. 28.  Ritalii Zaslavskii, “Drugoi zhizni u nee ne bylo: iz vospominanii o Rive Baliasnoi,” Egupets 3 (1997), 92–​99.

Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953–1991

85

29.  Vladimir Naumov (ed.), Nepravednyi sud: poslednii stalinskii rasstrel (Moscow: 1994), 11; Mark Kupovetsky, “Aron Vergelis: Survivor of the Destruction of Soviet Yiddish Culture, 1949–​1953,” Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 1 (58) (2007), 40–​94. 30.  See, in particular, Nisn Rozntal, Yidish lebn in ratnfarband (Tel Aviv: 1971), 298–​303; Khaim (Henri) Sloves, A shlikhes keyn Moskve: dokumentn, komentarn un intermetso-​mayses (New York: 1985), 157–​171; Esther Rozental-​Shneiderman, “Der pakhed far yidish,” in Yidish-​ literatur in Medines-​Yisroel, vol. 2, ed. Hirsh Osherovich et al. (Tel Aviv: 1991), 358–​361. 31.  Khaim Suller, “Iber vos arbetn baym hayntikn tog di yidishe shrayber fun ratnfarband,” Folks-​shtime (14 July 1956), 4. 32.  G. Kenig, “Der ‘goldener fond’ fun der yidisher literatur in sovetn-​farband,” Morgn-​ frayhayt (19 October 1956), 3. 33.  In fact, it was Emanuel Kazakevich who arguably had a better claim to be called the “first poet of Birobidzhan.” He had settled in the region in 1931, and between 1932 and 1941, he published books, poems, and stories devoted to the land. Kazakevich also had a much more impressive military record than Vergelis. He made use of these experiences as the basis of his Russian novels. After the success of his 1947 debut novel Zvezda (Star), Kazakevich reinvented himself as a successful Russian novelist and henceforth did not write in Yiddish. 34. Gennady Estraikh, “Literature versus Territory:  Soviet Jewish Cultural Life in the 1950s,” East European Jewish Affairs 33, no. 1 (2003), 34–​35. 35.  Sam Pevzner, “Prospects for Soviet Yiddish Culture: Recent Developments as Reported from the Soviet Union,” Jewish Life 10, no. 11 (1956), 27–​29; Luis Harap, “Latest News on Soviet Yiddish Culture,” Jewish Life 11, no. 1 (1957), 30–​31; Ben Zion Goldberg, The Jewish Problem in the Soviet Union: Analysis and Solution (New York: 1961), 150. 36. Sloves, A shlikhes keyn Moskve, 63, 139. 37. Aron Vergelis, “A Soviet Yiddish Writer Visits His Publisher,” Jewish Life 10, no.  9 (1956),  21–​23. 38. Sloves, A shlikhes keyn Moskve, 138–​147. 39. Abraham Kwaterko, “Vikhtiker tsuzamentref mit yidishe sovetishe shrayber in Moskve,” Folks-​shtime (27 August 1957), 3. 40. E.S. Afanas’eva et  al. (eds.) Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1953–​ 1957 (Moscow: 2001), 456. 41.  [“A Reporter”], “Redaktor fun Kanader Vokhnblat brengt frishn grus fun sovetnfarband,” Morgn-​frayhayt (1 December 1956), 4. 42. Sloves, A shlikhes keyn Moskve, 89–​91. See also Goldberg, The Jewish Problem in the Soviet Union, 211–​212. 43.  Andrew Wiseman and Otto Pick, “Soviet Jews under Khrushchev,” Commentary 27, no. 2 (1959), 127–​132 (quoting Der Tog). 44.  See, for instance, Samson Madievski and Françoise Cordes, “1953: La déportation des juifs soviétiques était-​elle programmée?,” Cahiers du Monde russe 41, no. 4 (2000), 561–​568; Victor H. Winston, “Reflections on the Anticipated Mass Deportation of Soviet Jews,” Post-​ Soviet Affairs 31, no. 6 (2015), 471–​490. 45. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives, file NY AR2132 00733, “Reported Renewal of Settlement of Soviet Jews in Birobidjan,” (14 January 1959). 46. Theodore Otto Windt, Jr., “The Rhetoric of Peaceful Coexistence:  Khrushchev in America, 1959,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 57, no. 1 (1971), 14. 47.  “Mikoyan Bars Jewish Visitors,” Jewish Advocate (15 January 1959), 1; “Mikoyan Denies Planned Exile of Jews to Siberia,” American Israelite (22 January 1959), 1. 48.  Judd L. Teller, “Exit of Jews to Siberia Hinted,” Christian Science Monitor (5 January 1959), 4; Irving Spiegel, “Jews’ Resettling by Soviet Is Seen: U.S. Group Says Moscow May Develop Birobidzhan Under 7-​Year Plan,” New York Times (11 January 1959), 2; “Mikoyan Says Reds Plan No Jewish Colony,” Chicago Daily Tribune (16 January 1959), 3; Marianne Rachel Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong: The American Jewish Committee, 1945–​2006 (Waltham: 2007), 120. Interestingly, a settlement in the JAR, Mikoyanovsk, was named after Mikoyan (who was of Armenian background). The name was changed in 1957, following a decree that banned the naming of settlements, towns, streets, or institutions after people who were still alive.

86 

Gennady Estraikh

See V.P. Shuliatikov and L.I. Shvangerus (eds.), Putevoditel’ po fondam Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti (Birobidzhan: 2013), 44; Sergei N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev: Reformator (Moscow: 2010), 532. 49.  Shmuel L.  Shneiderman, “Tsvey yidn fun Biro-​Bidzhan dertseyln zeyere iberlebungen,” Forverts (10 December 1959), 2. 50.  “Soviet Plan to Begin Publishing Yiddish Writers after Ten Years,” The Sentinel (26 February 1959), 3; Paul Novick, “Volume of Sholom Aleichem’s Works in Yiddish Is to Appear in Moscow Soon,” Morgn-​frayhayt (23 February 1959) (English page). 51.  “Soviet Concessions,” Jewish Chronicle (6 March 1959), 36. 52.  Semen Reznik, Vmeste ili vroz’? Sud’ba evreev v SSSR (Moscow: 2005), 516. 53. Khaim Beider, “Yidishe publikatsyes in sovetn-​farband, 1961–​1993:  bibliografishe reshime,” in Idish: iazyk i kul’tura v Sovetskom Soiuze, ed. Leonid Katsis, Masha Kaspina, and David Fishman (Moscow: 2009), 68–​69. 54.  Aleksandr Lokshin, “Iz istorii literatury ‘samogo slabogo zvena’: popytka vozrozhdeniia,” Lekhaim 4 (2004), 35–​43. 55.  See, for instance, Mark Neuweld, “The Latest Soviet Census and the Jews,” Commentary 29, no. 5 (1960), 426–​429. 56.  Gennadii Kosturchenko, Tainaia politika Khrushcheva: vlast’, intelligentsia, evreiskii vopros (Moscow: 2012), 194–​195. 57.  Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, 631/​30/​874, (“Protokol no. 4 zasedaniia Sekretariata Pravleniia Soiuza pisatelei SSSR ot 11 fevralia 1961”). 58.  Khone Shmeruk, “Yidishe kultur in ratn-​farband—​geshikhte un perspektivn,” Di goldene keyt 76 (1972), 144–​145. 59.  Mordechai Tsanin, “Tsen yor ‘Sovetish heymland’,” Di letste nayes (24 September 1971), 3. 60.  See Khaim Sloves, “Sovetish heymland,” in Yidishe dialogn: asifes fun yidishn velt-​kongres, vol. 1, ed. Moyshe Lavani (Paris: 1968), 162–​165. 61.  Wolf Moskovich, “Postwar Soviet Theories on the Origin of Yiddish,” in Origins of the Yiddish Language, ed. Dovid Katz (Oxford: 1987), 105–​109; Aron Vergelis, “Undzer replik,” Sovetish heymland 4 (1987), 128–​130. 62.  Gennady Estraikh, “The Era of Sovetish Heymland: Readership of the Yiddish Press in the Former Soviet Union,” East European Jewish Affairs 25, no. 1 (1995), 19–​20; idem, Evreiskaia literaturnaia zhizn’ Moskvy, 1917–​1991 (St. Petersburg: 2015), 286. 63.  Arnold Mandel, “France,” in American Jewish Year Book 73 (1972), 489; “Nokh der velt-​konferents far yidish un yidisher kultur,” Bay Zikh 8 (1977), 192. 64. Quoted in Shmuel L.  Shneiderman, Stalin’s Inferno:  The Jewish Circle (New York: 1971), 5. 65.  Elie Wiesel, The Jews of Silence (New York: 1966), 8. 66. Irving Abrahamson (ed.), Against Silence:  The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel, (New York: 1985), 234. 67. Estraikh, Evreiskaia literaturnaia zhizn’ Moskvy, 286–​290. 68.  Gennady Estraikh, “ ‘Jewish Street’ or Jewish Cul-​de-​sac? From Sovetish Heymland to Di Yidishe Gas,” East European Jewish Affairs 26, no. 1 (1996), 25–​33.

The Discovery and Recovery of Hebrew Manuscripts: The Case of Germany Andreas Lehnardt (JOHANNES GUTENBERG UNIVERSITY MAINZ)

In recent years, numerous and wide-​ranging efforts both in Europe and in North America have sought to recover and identify sources of Jewish culture and history. Digitization projects in libraries and archives have made accessible a great number of important ancient, medieval, and early modern manuscripts in high-​quality reproductions. Moreover, many manuscript collections have been reexamined and newly cataloged; in several cases, long-​forgotten or neglected manuscripts or fragments have come to light and have been made available for further research. Among the more prominent new websites in the field are those dealing with manuscript fragments or genizah material.1 There is also an ever-​growing online presence of large collections containing complete Hebrew manuscripts.2 Finally, printed catalogs of manuscripts continue to be published.3 The rapidly changing development of Hebrew manuscript research in times of technological reformation has been documented in the second, revised edition of Benjamin Richler’s Guide to Hebrew Manuscript Collections (2014).4 However, since the publication of this useful tool, many new discoveries have been made. In what follows, I provide a brief overview of two fields of recent manuscript research in Europe, with special emphasis on Germany. When I started my research in these two fields, many fragments and manuscripts that were subsequently published by me were still unknown. I started with a project on book binding fragments, since some of them were found in my close vicinity. Later, the project was expanded to include classic genizah material.

Remnants of Medieval Manuscripts in Book Bindings Beginning in the Middle Ages, it was common practice to use fragments of Hebrew parchment manuscripts in the process of bookbinding—​a practice that inadvertently served as a mechanism for some textual preservation, alongside the widespread destruction of Jewish texts. While the considerable research potential of such fragments has long been acknowledged, it was only in the 1990s that the first steps were taken in the direction of their systematic study. Such efforts, which began in Italy, Andreas Lehnardt, The Discovery and Recovery of Hebrew Manuscripts In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0006

88 

Andreas Lehnardt

have so far resulted in the recovery of approximately 30,000 fragments of medieval Hebrew manuscripts—​more than double that of extant Hebrew volumes produced in the Middle Ages.5 The texts they contain (some of them previously unknown), along with the insights they provide with regard to book-​making techniques of the time, are an unprecedented source for those seeking to understand not only Hebrew book culture and literacy, but also the economic and intellectual exchanges between the Jewish minority and their non-​Jewish neighbors. Yet despite their importance, the Hebrew fragments found in book bindings are not readily available for scientific scrutiny, and many of them are completely unknown to the general public. Hidden in the bindings of Latin or vernacular books, almost absent from the catalogs of complete manuscripts, and often unknown even to the librarians who deal with the collections within which they are contained, these fragments remain in urgent need of systematic research, description, and conservation.6 In the last few years, researchers in German archives and libraries have brought to light several hundred additional fragments of medieval Hebrew manuscripts. In Frankfurt, for example, many fragments with texts from the Bible, the Talmud, or the mahzor were reused as binding material in the aftermath of the so-​called Fettmilch uprising of 1614–​1616. This event, which led to the expulsion of the Jewish community from Frankfurt, ended with the looting of the Judengasse (Jewish lane).7 Many Hebrew manuscripts that were robbed during this pogrom were sold and later reused by bookbinders, as was the case with the fragment of the seliḥot prayer from the municipal library (Stadtbibliothek) of Mainz, shown in Fig. 6.1. A somewhat different trajectory characterizes other manuscript fragments preserved at the municipal library of Mainz, whose holdings include a great number of significant incunabula, including many books originally found in monastery libraries.8 From among these Christian works, more than 60 manuscript fragments from the Bible, the Talmud, and (in one instance) the Midrash Tanhuma have been uncovered and identified.9 In comparison with the fragments originating in Frankfurt, those of Mainz come from different places and their reuse in Christian books might have been the result of several events of expulsion and robbery. This holds true for Hebrew fragments that have been identified in other libraries in Mainz, among them the Martinus Library (a diocesan library).10 Among the Hebrew fragments discovered recently at this institution is a partly unknown text belonging to a work called Sefer hamiktzo’ot. This book was composed in the eleventh century, its contents following the order of the tractates of the Babylonian Talmud. In the mid-​20th century, Simha Assaf collected all the quotations from Sefer hamiktzo’ot that he had discovered in the Cairo Genizah, thereby enabling him to identify and publish several whole or almost whole folio pages from this work. Additional pages of this lost book have now been prepared for publication.11 The largest collection of Hebrew binding fragments in Germany is housed in the municipal library of Trier.12 As far back as the 19th century, liturgical and midrashic fragments from this collection were the subject of scholarly interest.13 A new and systematic survey of all incunabula, old printings, and manuscripts has brought to light several dozen hitherto unexplored Hebrew manuscripts. The importance of the liturgical fragments, which was described in part by Jakob Bassfreund, a former rabbi of Trier, has recently been reiterated by Elisabeth Hollender.14 Since most of the Hebrew fragments in the Trier municipal library have been identified in

The Discovery and Recovery of Hebrew Manuscripts: The Case of Germany

89

Fig. 6.1  Fragment of seliḥot prayer, municipal library of Mainz.

bindings of manuscripts and incunabula originating in the nearby Augustine convent at Eberhardsklausen, Marco Brösch has studied the provenance of the host volumes of the Hebrew fragments from this particular monastery.15 Most probably the Jewish books reused later as binding material were donated to the canons as a so-​called Buchlegat—​a book present—​from the bishop of Trier, sometime after the expulsion of the Jews in 1418–​1419.16 Several other libraries and archives in Germany have been examined and searched for Hebrew binding fragments. In many places, similar remnants of manuscript material have come to light and thus could be identified. In Friedberg (close to Frankfurt), for example, dozens of fragments have been found in addition to a number of fragments already listed in a catalog dating from the 1970s.17 Many of these parchment

90 

Andreas Lehnardt

fragments with Hebrew texts were reused as binding material only in the 17th century. Obviously, many Jewish book collections or libraries were destroyed or plundered during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–​1648, an era in which many Jews were expelled and Jewish communities were destroyed. This can be shown, for example, not only in Friedberg, but also with the fragments identified in the archives of Wertheim on Main and Amberg in Bavaria.18 In many other cases, especially in the region of Hesse, the discovered fragments of manuscripts were recycled as book wrappers or as endpapers on the inner cover of books during or after the Thirty Years’ War.19 The sheer number of places in Germany that are likely to hold undiscovered fragments is surprising. Even after decades of research carried out mainly by Israeli scholars associated with the Jerusalem-​based Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the National Library of Israel, many archives and book collections have not been researched appropriately, or have not yet come under scrutiny. Approximately 500 German libraries contain substantial collections of incunabula and post-​incunabula, and Hebrew parchment fragments have been discovered in most of them. In addition, there are almost 1,000 archives preserving files from the 15th to 17th centuries. In a number of these files, Hebrew parchment leaves are used as binding material and wrappers. During the search campaigns of the last decade, I came to identify many additional smaller archives and collections, some of them in private hands, and there still are dozens of public institutions that need to be checked more carefully. The usual procedure involved writing an e-​mail to the head of the institution, if there was someone serving in this function. In many cases I traveled, together with a number of student researchers, to sometimes far distant places, where we checked the respective libraries or archives in person. Often, librarians or archivists were not familiar with Hebrew characters; sometimes, for instance, we received photos showing fragments written in Gothic Latin characters rather than in Hebrew or Yiddish. During the search campaigns we opened thousands of books and manuscripts, looking for fragments glued to the inner cover or hidden in the spine of the books. This difficult and sometimes exhausting work brought hundreds of positive results, but it was often marked by great frustration when nothing but Latin or German fragments were identified. Given the ongoing search for fragments of Hebrew manuscripts in Germany, it is too early to attempt a thorough statistical analysis of the material that has already been identified (since the outset of the latest research campaign in the summer of 2017, several dozen new fragments have already been discovered).20 Keeping in mind the necessarily tentative nature of findings, we may note that certain literary genres are more heavily represented than others among the fragments found in Germany. Most of the identified texts—​indeed, approximately half of them—​are liturgical compositions such as statutory prayers (tefilot kev’a), piyutim, or seliḥot, or else texts from the Bible (often with Targum). This group is followed by fragments containing texts from the Babylonian Talmud (often with Rashi and/​or Tosafot), medieval codices and, to a much lesser extent, Bible commentaries. Fragments containing texts from midrashim are rare, and literary forms such as mystical or kabbalistic writings are almost entirely missing.21 A more thorough content analysis is likely to provide much revealing information about the contents of the Jewish bookshelf at the end of the Middle Ages and early modern period.

The Discovery and Recovery of Hebrew Manuscripts: The Case of Germany

91

Genizot in Old or Former Synagogues In contrast to the “European genizah” consisting of fragments discovered in old book bindings, the manuscripts found in many of the recently explored and cataloged “classic” genizot—​that is, storerooms of used holy books and utensils—​are generally of more recent vintage, dating from the 18th until the 20th century.22 A great number of such hidden storerooms, located near or under the roofs of various synagogues, have been revealed and opened in the last decades.23 In the event of a synagogue being abandoned, either because the community became too small to keep it going or because the Jews were expelled, such storerooms might have been opened by bookbinders seeking an additional supply of material for their work.24 In other cases, genizot of smaller communities were forgotten until a roof of a former synagogue building was opened for restoration or overhaul. In several of these hidden treasure rooms, I recently discovered hundreds of unexplored Hebrew, German (in Hebrew characters), and Yiddish manuscripts. Most of these manuscripts are preserved on paper and concern mundane matters such as bills, notes, and contracts. In some instances, ketubot and tenaim (engagement contracts) have also been identified. Most of the manuscripts written on parchment are texts for mezuzot or tefillin; there are also a few fragments of Torah scrolls and megilot. Some of the other findings consist of handwritten material such as private letters and documents, but to date most of this material has not been studied. Among these genizot is that of the former synagogue in Reckendorf, Upper-​Franconia, where 400 manuscripts were discovered. None of them has been identified so far, and only some Yiddish book remnants have been published. In another instance, some rare and hitherto unknown Yiddish printings found in a very large genizah in the former synagogue of Veitshöchheim (not far from Würzburg) have been analyzed.25 As yet, however, there has been no comprehensive research on the majority of Hebrew material found in this genizah. Several smaller genizot from Rhineland-​Palatina have been analyzed and documented in a more comprehensive way. For instance, a genizah in the small village of Alsenz has been cataloged, and some of the findings have been published online.26 This particular genizah was found under the roof of a building erected in 1762–​1765. The main corpus of the findings—​printings, handwritten material, and textiles such as Torah binders (mapot) and Torah covers (me’ilim)—​was produced from the 18th century until the beginning of the 20th century.27 Among the manuscripts were ketubot, private contracts, and bills. There was also a double leaf containing the statutes of the Bikur Holim (visiting the sick) welfare society. This document from 1821 is written in a clear cursive script and offers insights into the social history of this particular community.28 Upon completion of our research in Alsenz (which entailed the rescue of material from the roof and the identification and cataloging of its contents), all the material was handed over to the state archive of Speyer, with the permission of the building’s present owner and with the blessing of the local Jewish community. This marked the first time that findings from a genizah in Germany were stored in a national public institution, thus safeguarding the material and allowing for future scholarly research.29 The same goal was reached with the remnants of a genizah discovered in the 1980s in the synagogue of Weisenau, a village that was subsequently incorporated into the city of Mainz. Built during the 18th century, the synagogue was partly destroyed in a

92 

Andreas Lehnardt

war and was later renovated at the beginning of the 19th century.30 By the outbreak of the Second World War, the synagogue was no longer functioning, and at the end of the war, there were no Jewish survivors from the village. Thus, when the roof was renovated, materials from the genizah were transferred to the municipal archive. Up until 2014, only a portion of the Yiddish texts had been analyzed by Erika Timm and Simon Neuberg at the University of Trier. Beginning that year, however, there began a more thorough process of sorting, cataloging, and scanning the printed pages and Hebrew manuscripts.31 In addition, all of the names appearing on the Torah binders were identified and transcribed.32 Among the Hebrew manuscripts that have been analyzed and published are an old parchment leaf—​a bifolio from a medieval mahzor containing lines from the well-​known “Unetaneh tokef” prayer (Fig. 6.2).33 This, together with the other findings, appear in a memorial volume for the Jewish community of Weisenau.34 To date, the largest genizah researched and documented in Germany is that of Niederzissen, a small village not far from Koblenz.35 The synagogue was established in 1841. For some years following the Second World War, the building was used as a blacksmith shop. Eventually it was purchased by the local parish of the church, and in 2009 the roof was restored. A remarkable number of fragments of books, manuscripts (including religious and business documents), and textiles (including well-​ preserved Torah binders) have been recovered. Among the more noteworthy findings are a ledger of the Jewish parish that details the social structure of the community; a letter written in 1807 by a Jewish soldier serving in the Napoleonic army (Fig. 6.3);

Fig. 6.2  Excerpt from a medieval mahzor containing lines from the “Unetaneh tokef” prayer, municipal archive of Mainz.

Fig. 6.3  Letter written by a Jewish soldier serving in the Napoleonic army (1807), from the genizah in Niederzissen.

94 

Andreas Lehnardt

and a handwritten mohel-​book containing dates of circumcisions performed between 1792 until around 1809.36 Following publication of a short booklet summarizing the most significant findings, a complete online catalog was put together. Many smaller documents, however, remain unidentified and undeciphered. Among the genizot with older materials is the one located in the former synagogue of Freudental, a small village in the southern part of Germany. In recent months this genizah has been recataloged, and many findings that have not yet been analyzed appropriately have been identified. The synagogue building was erected in 1770 and survived the Shoah. After the war it was used as a stable and a barn. During its refurbishment in 1981, the genizah was discovered under the roof of the main hall of the building. Although scholarly investigation began in the 1980s (with some findings published the following decade), to date there is no comprehensive catalog or documentation of the genizah’s many hundreds of fragments from old books and manuscripts. There are manuscripts both in Hebrew and in German (the latter are written partly in Hebrew characters). Among the most recent discoveries from this genizah is a remarkable handwritten amulet written after the birth of a child, and a ketubah from the 19th century. The amulet (Signature F Ms 18) is written on a small piece of parchment (5 x 3 cm) and therefore might have been overlooked by those who first opened the genizah (Fig. 6.4). The text names the baby (Gabriel) and his mother (Rekhele [Rachel]) and wishes them health (asuta). According to Gideon Bohak, the amulet

Fig. 6.4  Amulet from the synagogue genizah in Freudental (Signature F Ms 18).

The Discovery and Recovery of Hebrew Manuscripts: The Case of Germany

95

uses the technique of the magic square of 4 x 4 letters; the numerical value of the letters in each line totals 40 (where aleph = 1, bet = 2, and so forth). It is interesting to note that on similar amulets from the Cairo Genizah, the magic square made use only of 3 x 3 letters.37 The newly discovered ketubah in the Freudental genizah is written on parchment (measuring 11.5 x 17.5 cm.) that is partly damaged (Fig. 6.5). The text follows the standard Ashkenazic Aramaic formulation; we learn that the groom is Meir bar Aharon ha-​Lewi, who was called Seligman Leib ha-​Lewi, and the bride is Brendel bat Efraim Arye. According to the first lines, the document was signed on the 18th of Iyar 5573 (1813). The names of the two witnesses (’edim) are clearly readable. Interestingly, these witnesses came not from Freudental, but from Metz and from Mainz.38 This brief overview on recent projects and discoveries of Hebrew manuscripts in Germany highlights the importance of further fieldwork. In both realms—​the discovery/​recovery of manuscript fragments preserved in book and file bindings, and the documentation of genizah material found in early modern synagogues—​research is still in its infancy. Further analysis of the medieval manuscript fragments should provide important insights into the medieval Jewish bookshelf, whereas findings derived from the genizot are likely to form the basis for revised or newly written social histories of Jews in rural Germany. The necessary research tools, among them easily searchable databases and tools for dating different Ashkenazic handwritings, are still being developed; many local projects have yet to be connected in a manner that

Fig. 6.5  Ketubah from the synagogue genizah in Freudental (Signature F Ms 105).

96 

Andreas Lehnardt

encourages collaboration. Consequently, a comparative approach to the genizot in Germany remains a desideratum. Over time, however, scholars are expected to overcome these obstacles and make the material fully available for further research on the long and eminent history of Jews in Europe.

Notes 1.  For Hebrew binding fragments found in bookbinding and archival files, see the online site “Books within Books:  Hebrew Fragments in European Libraries” (hebrewmanuscript. com). For manuscript fragments found in the Cairo Genizah, see in particular the following online sites:  the Friedberg Genizah project (fjms.genizah.org); the Princeton Geniza Lab (geniza.princeton.edu/​pgp); the Cambridge Taylor S ​ chechter Genizah Research Unit (lib.cam. ac.uk/​collections/​departments/​taylor-​schechter-​genizah-​research-​unit); the Penn/​Cambridge Genizah Fragment Project (sceti.library.upenn.edu/​genizah/​index.cfm); and the University of Manchester’s Rylands Cairo Genizah collection (luna.manchester.ac.uk/​ luna/​ servlet/​ ManchesterDev~95~2) (all sites accessed 6 April 2019). 2.  See, for instance, collections found on websites affiliated with the following institutions: Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum (MDZ) (digitale-​sammlungen.de/​index.html?c=ku rzauswahl&l=de&adr=daten.digitale-​sammlungen.de/~ ​ db/​ausgaben/​gesamt_​ausgabe.html?pr ojekt=1157527575&ordnung=sig&recherche=ja); Goethe University Frankfurt (sammlungen. ub.uni-​frankfurt.de/​mshebr/​nav/​index/​all); the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (kaufmann. mtak.hu/​index-​en.html); the British Library (bl.uk/​collection-​guides/​hebrew-​collections); The Jewish Theological Seminary (jtsa.edu/​ library-​ special-​ collections); the New  York Public Library (digitalcollections.nypl.org/​collections/​hebrew-​illuminated-​manuscripts#/​ ?tab=navigation); the Aleppo Codex (Jerusalem) (aleppocodex.org/​links/​11.html) (all sites accessed 8 April 2019). 3. See, for instance, Benjamin Richler (ed.), Hebrew Manuscripts in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma:  Catalogue (Jerusalem:  2001); idem (ed.), Hebrew Manuscripts in the Vatican Library:  Catalogue (Vatican City:  2008). See also Michèle Dukan, Biblipthèque de l’Alliance Israelite Universelle:  fragments bibliques en hébreu provenant de guenizot (Paris:  2008); David Rosenthal (ed.), Osef hagenizah haKahirit beGeneva:  katalog umeḥkarim (Jerusalem: 2010). 4. For a review of this work, see Andreas Lehnardt, “Book Review:  Guide to Hebrew Manuscript Collections. Second Revised Edition, written by Benjamin Richler,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 8 (2014), 223–​227. 5. Although much better preserved than other forms of medieval Jewish material culture, manuscripts in Hebrew characters that have been discovered to date constitute a notoriously small percentage of the Hebrew books produced in the Middle Ages. See Collette Sirat, Hebrew Manuscripts of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: 2002). On recovery efforts, see Mauro Perani, “Un convegno internazionale sui frammenti ebraici rinvenuti negli archivi italiani (la ‘Ghenizàh italiana’) e sul loro contributo allo studio del giudaismo,” Rassegna degli Archivi di Stato 56 (1996), 104–​118; Simcha Emanuel, “The ‘European Genizah’ and Its Contribution to Jewish Studies,” Henoch 19, no. 3 (1997), S. 311–​340. See also Andreas Lehnardt (ed.), “Genizat Germania”:  Hebrew and Aramaic Binding Fragments from Germany in Context (Leiden: 2010),  1–​28. 6.  On findings in Austria during the past few decades, see Josef Oesch, “Genizat Austria: The ‘Hebrew Manuscripts and Fragments in Austrian Libraries’ Project,” in Lehnardt (ed.), “Genizat Germania,” 317–​328; Almut Laufer, “Überlegungen zu Relevanz und Zielsetzung des Projekts ‘Hebräische Handschriften und Fragmente in österreichischen Bibliotheken’ aus judaistischer Sicht,” in Fragmenta Hebraica Austriaca, ed. Christine Glassner and Josef M. Oesch (Vienna: 2009), 33–​48.

The Discovery and Recovery of Hebrew Manuscripts: The Case of Germany

97

On the Czech Republic, see Daniel Polakovič, “Hebrew Manuscript Fragments in the Czech Republic:  A Preliminary Report,” in Lehnardt (ed.), “Genizat Germania,” 329–​332; Petr Gajdošik, Tamas Visi, and Alžběta Drexlerová, “Fragmenty hebrejských textů na knižních vazbách ve fondech Státního okresního archivu Olomouc,” in Olomoucký archivní sborník, ed. Bohdan Kaňák (Olomouc: 2011), 31–​52; Tamas Visi, “Die Rebellion gegen die rabbinische Tradition:  Eine Episode in der intellektuellen Geschichte des mährischen Judentums,ˮ in Individuum und Gemeinde. Juden in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien 1520 bis 1848, ed. Helmut Teufel et al. (Prague: 2011), 11–​32. On France, see Judith Kogel and Simcha Emanuel, “Des Fragments du commentaire perdu de Samson de Sens sur le Talmud découverts à la bibliothèque de Colmar,ˮ Revue des Étude Juives 170, no. 3–​4 (2011), 503–​519. On Hungary, see Alexander Scheiber, Hebräische Kodexüberreste in Ungarländischen Einbandstafeln (Budapest: 1969). On Italy, see catalogs edited by Mauro Perani and his team. See, in particular, the most recent catalog, Mauro Perani and Luca Baraldi (eds.), I fragmenti Ebraici dell’ Archivo di Stato di Modena (Florence: 2012), esp. 5–​14 and 109–​115 (bibliography). On Poland, see Judith Olszowy-​Schlanger, “An Early Ashkenazi Fragment of the Babylonian Talmud from the Czartorski Museum in Cracow,” in Lehnardt, “Genizat Germania,ˮ 199–​206. On Spain, see Mauro Perani, “The ‘Gerona Genizah’: An Overview and a Rediscovered Ketubah of 1377,” Hispania Judaica 7 (2010), 137–​173; Esperança Valls Pujols, “Hebrew Fragments as a Window on Economic Activity: Holdings in the Historical Archives of Griona (Arxiu Històric de Girona),” in Books within Books. New Discoveries in Old Book Bindings, ed. Andreas Lehnardt and Judith Olszowy-​Schlanger (Leiden: 2014), 149–​183. On Switzerland, see Daniel Teichman, “Ein hebräisches Bibelfragment aus dem 14. Jahrhundert als Einband eines Hagenbucher Gemeindebuches,” Zürcher Taschenbuch (2013),  1–​40. Discoveries have also been made in other countries, among them the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Croatia; see, for example, Darko Tepert, “Fragment of Targum Onkelos of Exodus Recently Found in Rijeka,” Liber Annuus 61 (2011), 347–​353. 7.  Andreas Lehnardt, Hebräische Einbandfragmente in Frankfurt am Main: Mittelalterliche jüdische Handschriftenreste in ihrem geschichtlichen Kontext (Frankfurt: 2011). 8. Andreas Lehnardt and Annelen Ottermann, Fragmente jüdischer Kultur in der Stadtbibliothek Mainz. Entdeckungen und Deutungen (Mainz: 2015). 9. Andreas Lehnardt, “Ein neues Einbandfragment des Midrasch Tanchuma in der Stadtbibliothek Mainz,ˮ Judaica. Beiträge zum Verstehen des Judentums 63 (2007), 344–​356. 10.  See Andreas Lehnardt, “Mittelalterliche hebräische und aramäische Einbandfragmente in der Martinus-​Bibliothek,ˮ in Bibliotheca S. Martini Moguntina. Alte Bücher –​Neue Funde, Mainz, ed. Helmut Hinkel (Würzburg: 2012), 117–​136. 11. Andreas Lehnardt and Simha Emanuel, “Me’ein ‘Sefer miktzo’ot’ lemasekhet bava metzi’a—​serid ḥadash mi‘genizat eiropah,’ˮ Ginzei Qedem 14 (2017), 25–​38. 12.  Andreas Lehnardt, “Die Trierer Talmud-​Fragmente. Rekonstruktion der Kodizes und ihre Bedeutung für die Forschung,ˮ in Die Bibliothek des Mittelalters als dynamischer Prozess, ed. Michael Embach, Claudine Moulin, and Andrea Rapp (Wiesbaden: 2012), 191–​204; idem, “Die Einbandfragmente des Sefer Teruma des Baruch bar Isaak in der Bibliothek des ehemaligen Augustiner-​Chorherren-​Klosters in Eberhardsklausen,” in Zur Erforschung mittelalterlicher Bibliotheken. Chancen—​-​Entwicklungen—​Perspektiven, ed. Andrea Rapp and Michael Embach (Frankfurt: 2009), 245–​273. 13.  Jakob Bassfreund, “Über ein Midrasch-​Fragment in der Stadt–​Bibliothek zu Trier,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 38 (1894), 167–​176, 214–​219; idem, “Hebräische Handschriften–​Fragmente in der Stadtbibliothek zu Trier,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 39 (1895), 263–​271, 295–​302, 343–​350, 391–​ 398, 492–​506. 14. Elisabeth Hollender, “Reconstructing Manuscripts:  The Liturgical Fragments from Trier,ˮ in Lehnardt (ed.), “Genizat Germania,ˮ  61–​90.

98 

Andreas Lehnardt

15.  Marco Brösch, “Makulierte hebräische Handschriften in Eberhardsklausen—​eine bibliotheks-​und literaturgeschichtliche Untersuchung,ˮ in ibid., 91–​156. 16.  A comprehensive catalog of all fragments from Trier has been published by Andreas Lehnardt, Die hebräischen Einbandfragmente in der wissenschaftlichen Stadtbibliothek Trier (Wiesbaden: 2016). 17. Andreas Lehnardt, “Die hebräischen Einbandfragmente in Friedberg. Verborgene Zeugnisse jüdischen Lebens in der Wetterau,ˮ Wetterauer Geschichtsblätter 58 (2009), 137–​350. 18. Andreas Lehnardt, “Neue Funde hebräischer Einbandfragmente im Staatsarchiv Wertheim am Main (Bronnbach),ˮ Wertheimer Jahrbuch (2010/​2011), 137–​160; idem, “Newly Discovered Hebrew Fragments in the State Archive of Amberg (Bavaria)—​Some Suggestions on Their Historical Background,” in Lehnardt and Olszowy-​Schlanger (eds.), Books within Books, 271–​285. 19. Andreas Lehnardt, “Ein neues Fragment eines mittelalterlichen Kommentars zu den Chronikbüchern aus der Alten Bibliothek des Theologischen Seminars auf Schloss Herborn,ˮ Judaica 69 (2013), 60–​69, idem, “Ein mittelalterliches hebräisches Bibelfragment im Stadtarchiv Esslingen,ˮ Esslinger Studien 47 (2013) 25–​36; idem, “Fragmenta Hebraica. Jüdische Einbandfragmente in kirchlichen Archiven,ˮ in Das Ganze im Fragment. Zerstörte und wiederentdeckte Schätze aus kirchlichen Bibliotheken, Archiven und Museen, ed. Sorbello Staub, Jahrbuch kirchliches Buch-​und Bibliothekswesen NF 4 (Stuttgart: 2018) 91–​110. 20.  See my most recent reports: Andreas Lehnardt, “Makuliert—​zerschnitten—​wiederverwendet. Mittelalterliche hebräische Einbandfragmente in Dresden,ˮ Medaon 11 (2017), 20; idem, “Genisa. Fundorte jüdischer Buchreste auf Dachböden und in Bucheinbänden,ˮ in Biographien des Buches, ed. Ulrike Gleixner, Constanze Baum, Jörn Münkner, Hole Rössner (Göttingen 2017), 349–​366. 21.  For a first fragment with mystical content found in Germany, see Andreas Lehnardt, “Shedding Light on Metatron—​Recently Discovered Fragments of Mystical Writings in Germany,” in Jewish Manuscript Cultures: New Perspectives, ed. Irina Wandrey (Berlin: 2017) 131–​154. 22.  On the “European Genizah,” see Yaakov Sussman, “Seridei talmud ba‘genizah haeiropit,’ ” in The Italian Genizah, ed. Abraham David and Joseph Tabory (Jerusalem:  1998), 53; idem, “I frammenti talmudici della ‘Genizah Europea,” ’ in La “Genizah italiana,ˮ ed. M. Perani (Bologna: 1999), 149. 23.  On the custom of either burying or depositing in a storeroom old manuscripts containing God’s name and Hebrew letters, see, for instance, Malachi Beit-​Arié, “ ‘Genizot:’ Depositories of Consumed Books as Disposing Procedure in Jewish Society,” Scriptorium 50 (1996), 407–​ 444; Andreas Lehnardt, “Genisa—​ Die materielle Kultur des Judentums im Spiegel neu entdeckter synagogaler Ablageräume,” in Einführungen in die Materiellen Kulturen des Judentums, ed. Nathanael Riemer (Wiesbaden: 2016), 173–​202. 24.  On several known and recovered genizah findings, especially in Franconia, see Falk Wiesemann, Genizah—​Hidden Legacies of the German Village Jews (Vienna: 1992). 25.  Erika Timm, Yiddish Literature in a Franconian Genizah: A Contribution to the Printing and Social History of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Jerusalem:  1988); Martin Przybilski, “Zu einigen jiddischen Fragmenten aus der Veitshöchheimer Genisa,” Aschkenas 11 (2001), 233–​238. 26.  See Geniza-​Projekt Alsenz, online at: blogs.uni-​mainz.de/​fb01genizatalsenz (accessed 10 April 2019). 27.  On the history of this small Jewish community, see August Kopp, Die Dorfjuden in der Nordpfalz, Dargestellt an der Geschichte der jüdischen Gemeinde Alsenz ab 1655, 2nd ed. (Otterbach: 1988). 28.  Cf. the edition and translation of this document (Ms Alsenz 2) in Lehnardt, “Genisa—​ Die materielle Kultur des Judentums im Spiegel neu entdeckter synagogaler Ablageräume,” 197–​202. 29.  Andreas Lehnardt, “Die Genisa von Alsenz—​ein lange verborgener Schatz befindet sich nun im Landesarchiv Speyer,ˮ in Unsere Archive. Mitteilungen aus den Rheinland-​Pfälzischen

The Discovery and Recovery of Hebrew Manuscripts: The Case of Germany

99

und Saarländischen Archiven 57 (2012), 51–​52. In most other cases the discoveries from genizot in Germany are still in private hands or else are found in municipal archives. Only in rare cases has the material remained in the possession of longstanding or reestablished Jewish communities (Bayereuth, for example). 30.  Dieter Krienke, “Weisenau—​Synagoge und Mikwen ‘Wiederentdeckung’ und Rettung der Weisenauer Synagoge,ˮ in Die Mainzer Synagogen, ein Überblick über die Mainzer Synagogenbauwerke mit ergänzenden Beiträgen über bedeutende Mainzer Rabbiner, das alte Judenviertel und die Bibliotheken der jüdischen Gemeinden, ed. Dieter Krienke and Hedwig Brüchert (Mainz: 2008), 119–​136. 31.  See online findings of the Geniza-​Projekt Wiesenau at: blogs.uni-​mainz.de/​fb01genizatweisenau/​(accessed 10 April 2019). 32. Andreas Lehnardt, “ ‘Mazzal tov’—​Die Tora-​Wimpel aus der Genisa der Synagoge Weisenau,ˮ in Mainzer Zeitschrift. Mittelrheinisches Jahrbuch für Archäologie, Kunst und Geschichte 109 (2014), S. 103–​112. 33. Andreas Lehnardt, “Die Geniza der Synagoge Weisenau—​ Verborgenes jüdisches Erinnerungsgut wiederentdeckt,ˮ in Verbogen—​Verloren—​Wiederentdeckt. Erinnerungsorte in mainz von der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Joachim Schneider and Matthias Schnettger (Darmstadt: 2012), 84–​95, esp. 95. 34. See Andreas Lehnardt, “Abgelegt—​ Verborgen—​ Die Funde aus der Genisa der Synagoge Weisenau,ˮ in Spuren unter Asche. Dokumentation zur Geschichte der ehemaligen Jüdischen Gemeinde Weisenau bei Mainz, ed. Max Brückner (Mainz: 2016), 273–​297. 35.  Falk Wiesemann (ed.), in collaboration with Richard Keuler, Andreas Lehnardt, and Annette Weber, Zeugnisse jüdischen Lebens in Niederzissen. Genisa-​Funde in der ehemaligen Synagoge (Niederzissen: 2012), 29–​48. 36. Both of these manuscripts have been published. See Nathanael Riemer, “Brief des Doderer Schmul (Schmuel ben Mosche) aus Niederzissen,ˮ in Jüdische Soldaten—​Jüdischer Widerstand in Deutschland und Frankreich, ed. Michael Berger and Gideon Römer-​ Hildebrecht (Paderborn: 2012), 507–​510, and Gerd Fried, “Das Beschneidungsbuch aus der Synagoge Niederzissen,ˮ in Heimatjahrbuch Kreis Ahrweiler 2014, 163–​167. 37.  I am grateful to Prof. Gideon Bohak (Tel Aviv) for his remarks and for his transcription of the text. 38.  See Andreas Lehnardt, Die Genisa der alten Synagoge Freudental. Dokumentation der Funde (Freudental: 2019). For a provisional overview, see: blogs.uni-​mainz.de/​fb01genizatfreudental/​inventor (accessed 10 April 2019).

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment Edwin Seroussi (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

Orality is the hallmark of all Jewish music cultures, and most especially of their liturgical music. Orality is not simply a technique of music mnemonics and transmission among Jews through the generations; it became, as Judit Frigyesi puts it, an aesthetical ideal, and this principle applies not only to the East European Jewish traditions studied by her but to all Jewish traditions.1 Musical notation—​that is, capturing one version of an orally transmitted liturgical melody and freezing it on paper—​entailed the obliteration of its potential to generate a renewed spiritual experience each time it was deployed in live performance. Therefore, until the late 18th century, the use of musical notation among Jews in Europe was a rarity, and the production of Jewish liturgical music in print was nonexistent. Among Christians in Europe, in contrast, handwritten notation of music began to develop in the 9th century, and from the early 16th century, printed music gradually gained dominance in the documentation, distribution, and performance of musical works. In the Islamic world, music notation, and certainly printed music, was nonexistent until the turn of the 20th century (with the notable exception of the Ottoman court and Eastern churches, such as the Armenian church), when European colonization made this tool accessible.2 Excluded from the courts and churches that were the main centers of artistic music-​ making in Europe, European Jews relied on orality as a means of music transmission as well as maintaining it as an aesthetic ideal. Only during the 18th century, as the civil status of Jews in Western Europe started to shift, with more options to non-​Jewish society becoming available to them, did proficiency in musical notation among cantors became more noticeable. Such proficiency ran parallel to changes in synagogue music pedagogy and aesthetics. Notwithstanding, orality long remained the reigning medium of liturgical music transmission in Jewish communities around the globe, and this continues to be the case among many contemporary Jewish congregations.3 This study focuses almost exclusively on the impact of music printing on Ashkenazi liturgical music since about 1840, a watershed date after which Jewish communities in Europe began to produce a remarkable and growing volume of printed liturgical music (a short detour toward the end of this essay will treat the few, exceptional Sephardi examples). In spite of the importance of this phenomenon to the history of Edwin Seroussi, The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0007

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

101

the music of the Ashkenazi rite, there is no overall assessment of the subject. Abraham Zvi Idelsohn presented a succinct survey of those printed works of Jewish liturgical music that were known to him as sources for research.4 However, he did not focus on theoretical issues related to the printed medium, such as processes of content selection, graphic design, distribution, marketing, or reception. While, on the other hand, Philip Bohlman did emphasize some of these issues, his discussion of the topic dealt in the main with works exemplifying Jewish folk song and art music rather than liturgical music printed and consumed by practitioners and scholars.5 The same applies to James Loeffler’s examination of the scope and reception of Jewish printed music in the Russian Empire.6 Other writings are dedicated to printed music of specific Jewish repertoires, such as the Passover seder.7 Finally, scholars of Jewish liturgical music have benefited from printed music as source material, though only rarely have they delved into the social, economic, and technological contexts in which these sources were produced and their contents engendered.8 This essay is therefore a first preliminary analytical survey of this rather vast and neglected aspect of Jewish liturgical music research. It is impossible to understand Jewish liturgical music in print in the 20th century without knowing something about its immediate predecessors. Moreover, as we shall see, 19th-​century printed music had a pervasive presence in the field of synagogue music well into the 20th century. Therefore, this essay is divided into three main sections. The first deals with the pre-​history of Jewish liturgical music printing, dating from the early 16th century to around 1840. Following it is a central section discussing Jewish liturgical music printed in Europe from the late 1830s to the early 1930s, while the concluding section mainly covers the era following the Second World War. The justification for these chronological and spatial divisions will become clear as the essay unfolds.

A Short Pre-​history of Jewish Liturgical Music in Print As noted, the evolution of printed music proceeded gradually from the early 16th century, and it did not entirely take the place of transmission of music via manuscripts until at least the late 18th century.9 Music printing was an expensive venture, and for this reason the industry generally produced small numbers of exemplars, which resulted in a continual shortage of supply. Moreover, music printing was most often limited to art music and thus appealed to a professional audience of performers, critics, and connoisseurs. Broadsides of folk songs, another musical product propelled by the invention of the printing press and addressing much larger publics than scores of art music, seldom included the notation of the melodies. These single sheets of inexpensive paper guided performers to the appropriate music with the indication “sing to the tune of . . . ,” assuming that consumers knew how to recycle tunes of popular songs by heart. Indeed, the earliest printed sources bearing some tangible musical cues in the Jewish religious sphere appear in a similar fashion as collections of sacred Hebrew poetry that include terms such as beno’am (in Italy), benigun (in Ashkenaz), or belahan (in the Arabic-​speaking realm), all meaning “[sing] to the melody of . . . ”

102 

Edwin Seroussi

Considering the marginal status of music notation among European Jews until the late 18th century, it is not surprising that the earliest specimens of Jewish music in print catered to non-​Jewish inquisitiveness about Jewish matters. (I use the word “specimens” because these early printed notations consisted of small-​scale musical illustrations rather than the large, independent scores that began to appear after c. 1840.)10 Renaissance Hebraists’ interest in the practice of reading the Scriptures by Jews triggered these earliest prints of “Jewish music.” Johannes Reuchlin’s musical transcription (and four-​part harmonization) of the te’amim (biblical cantillation signs) according to the Western Ashkenazi tradition in his De accentibus et orthographia linguae hebraicae (1518) was a pioneer publication that triggered subsequent printings of the same material throughout the 16th century. Caspar Amman (1520), Sebastian Münster (1524), Sébastien Auguste de Neusen (1532), Jerzy Liban (1539), and Johannes Vallencis (1545) all printed musical transcriptions of the Ashkenazi te’amim. Hebrew grammarians and encyclopedists of the 17th century, some of whom reproduced the prints of the Ashkenazi te’amim by their 16th-​century predecessors, continued this trend. Johann Heinrich Alsted’s Triumphus bibliorum sacrorum (1623, 1630, 1642) launched this new period, followed by volumes compiled by Wilhelm Schickard (1633, 1646, 1670, 1675), Athanasius Kircher (1650), Michael Beck (1678), and Giulio Bartolocci (1693). Daniel Ernst Jablonsky in his Biblia hebraica cum notis hebraica . . .  (1699) was the first to print the te’amim according to the Spanish-​Portuguese tradition. These transcriptions would continue to reverberate in the centuries ahead, not only in tractates on biblical cantillation or Hebrew grammar but also in texts of music history. Scattered melodies for the Passover Hagadah also appeared in print as illustrations. Johann Stefan Rittangel initiated this trend in his Seder hagadah lepesah/​Liber rituum paschalium (1644), which included two traditional German Jewish tunes for “Ki Lo naeh” and “Adir Hu.” The practice of appending musical notations to the Passover Hagadah, a process that arguably contributed to the fixation of certain regional canons of chanting in the Passover seder, continued well into the modern period. This process picked up at the beginning of the era of massive Jewish music printing with the Hagadah oder Erzählung von Israels Auszug aus Egypten . . . mit Musikbeilage del alten . . . Tradition und einigen neu componirten Melodien by Isaac ben Judah Eberst (better known as Itzik Offenbach), published in Cologne in 1838. Other unique initiatives of printing Hebrew melodies prior to 1840 had long-​lasting effects beyond their influence on Hebraists and encyclopedists. Perhaps the most celebrated case concerns the tunes in Hebrew that are found in Benedetto Marcello’s eight-​volume Estro poetico-​armonico: Parafrasi sopra li salmi (1724-​1727), a collection of fifty Italian paraphrases of Psalms by Girolamo Ascanio Giustiniani, written for one to four voices with continuo accompaniment. Ten out of these fifty settings employ as raw material eleven melodies (six Ashkenazi and five Sephardi) transcribed by the composer from the repertoires of contemporaneous Venetian ghetto synagogues. Mensural notations of the original Hebrew melodies (a graphic visualization of the antiquarian approach of Marcello) are printed at the top of the Psalm in which they appear. The musical notation is from right to left, following the direction of the text underlay printed in Hebrew characters. While in their original version Marcello’s Hebrew melodies would have been forgotten as a mere curiosity, the wide reception of his Psalms throughout the 18th and

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

103

even the 19th century led as well to their transcription into contemporary musical notation in a “normal” direction.11 The users of these reproductions, however, were not performers but rather a new breed of scholars of the Enlightenment: early modern music historians. This impressive gallery of historians, including Giovanni Battista Martini, Charles Burney, and Johann Nikolaus Forkel, mined Marcello’s Hebrew melodies for tangible musical examples they could insert in their chapters on “Hebrew music,” which in turn formed part of the “music of antiquity” section of their volumes.12 In some instances, Marcello’s specimens were combined in these music histories with the aforementioned 16th-​and 17th-​century transcriptions of the te’amim. An interesting early printed score that echoes traditional Ashkenazi synagogue tunes from early 19th-​century Georgian London is A Selection of Hebrew Melodies Ancient and Modern: With Appropriate Symphonies & Accompaniments (1815) by Isaac Nathan, a British composer of Jewish ancestry. In some of these musical settings of the “Hebrew” poems by Lord Byron, Nathan quoted tunes from the liturgy (provided by the cantor and famed opera tenor, Isaac Braham) that could be recognized by a German Jewish audience. Despite its enthusiastic reception and later 19th-​century rearrangements, this score is far from being a printed document of synagogue music; it is more like a footprint of this music, framed within a British Romantic musical antiquarianism crossed with imperial Orientalism.13 Other isolated cases of early music printing accommodated the specific needs of Jewish authors appealing to a Jewish audience, even when this audience, except for a few exceptional individuals, could not read music. A unique example is the use of printed musical notations in R. Mordecai ben Jacob Zahalon’s Metzitz umelitz (1714-​ 1715), a responsum addressing a dispute on the proper singing of the liturgical Priestly Blessing (birkat kohanim) in the synagogues of northern Italy.14 Salamone Rossi’s Hashirim asher lishlomo (1622-​1623), comprising polyphonic settings of 33 liturgical and non-​liturgical Hebrew texts, was, and remains, the only major work of printed synagogue music until about 1840.15 Its historical importance and exceptionality is clear and needs no further elaboration; I would like to stress its modern reception. Rossi’s work fell into oblivion soon after its publication, in part because small Italian synagogues lacked the means to maintain a trained choir capable of performing such music, but more fundamentally because of rapid changes in musical taste. Hashirim reappears, however, in modernity, once the musical past had become usable and Jewish musicologists began to construct a historical Jewish musical narrative. From the perspective of the present discussion, it is not the original Venetian print of Rossi’s work that is meaningful but rather its modern editions, starting with the first one edited by the Parisian cantor Samuel Naumbourg in 1877.16

A Golden Age for Jewish Liturgical Music Printing (1840–1939) 1840: A Watershed in Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Substantial publications of Jewish liturgical music began to appear around 1840, and from the outset, they exhibited different approaches. Overall, there were two major categories. The first publications generally reflected the lore of one cantor, including his own compositions and versions or arrangements of traditional music. The second,

104 

Edwin Seroussi

and later, category comprised compilations of works from various other printed sources, whose origins were sometimes, but not always, specified in the publication. Within these two main categories, one can discern a number of often overlapping goals. Some publications are geared to the preservation of liturgical musical memory in the face of its looming and inescapable erosion. Others attempt to advance a liturgical music agenda. All in all, their explicit or implicit goal is to serve as a repository of musical references for new generations of cantors who, by default, acquired the proficiency to read music. A second goal of these prints is pedagogical, that is, to serve as a tool for the instruction of cantors. In many cases, the divide between preservation and instruction goals remains porous. In addition, there were instances in which other goals, such as the advancement of an aesthetic agenda, were paramount. Between 1838 and 1840, as if in a coordinated effort awakened by a zeitgeist, three major scores of synagogue music appeared in print: in Stuttgart, in Munich and in Vienna (Figs. 7.1, 7.2).17 All three publications shared similar practical and ideological concerns. On the practical level, the dramatic expansion of modern choral singing in synagogues, especially of major cities in German-​speaking lands, created a demand for musical scores and parts. At the same time, a new, unprecedented style of Jewish liturgical music that departed from traditional patterns was coming into existence.

Fig. 7.1  Cover and p. 1 of Choral-gesänge zum Gebrauche bei dem israelitischen Gottesdienste, 2 vols., vol. 1, Melodien für den Sabbath Gottesdienst (Württemburg: c. 1838), courtesy of the department of music, National Library of Israel (NLI).

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

105

Fig. 7.2  Title page of Maier Kohn, Vollständiger Jahrgang von Terzett-und Chorgesängen: Der Synagoge in München nebst sämmtlichen Chorresponsorien zu den alten Gesangsweisen der Vorsänger (Munich: 1839), courtesy of the department of music, National Library of Israel (NLI). The rapid and widespread distribution of this new liturgical music, as its promoters aspired, could be achieved only through the mechanical reproduction of scores. Although modern choral compositions and recitatives circulated in manuscript from at least the mid-​1820s, the efforts to publish them in a comprehensive collection covering the entire liturgical year (and the rumors concerning their imminent appearance) led to an unveiled race between the communities of Vienna, Munich, Stuttgart, and beyond. These enterprises were extremely complex in terms of their production, and they were also expensive, demanding a serious financial effort from the individuals and the communities behind them. The efforts by Salomon Sulzer in Vienna to have his influential Schir Zion published first betray his awareness of the transformative times in which he was living. However, these efforts were slowed down by the labor-​intensive proofreading of his work, as attested by the gap between the date of the preface to Schir Zion (1838) and the actual date of publication (not before mid-​1840).18 Financial issues also haunted the Munich publication. A report on the status of this work, an effort carried out by the Synagogue Choir Committee under the guidance of Cantor Maier Kohn, discloses the financial stress of this major printing initiative and its dependence on subscribers beyond the city of Munich. Although a subscription was launched “with great zeal in the realization of this very contemporary and

106 

Edwin Seroussi

desirable work,” the number of subscribers “did not reach even the minimum number of 150.” Moreover, despite the encouragement and commendations of the community, the subscribers' commitments are until now still very sparse, thereby delaying the start of the publication. It would, therefore, be very fruitful if the gentlemen who intended to buy this work for their congregations and for themselves, would not delay their subscription . . . and thereby help to accomplish the rapid completion of the work.19

These three inaugural publications of Stuttgart, Munich, and Vienna set the parameters for later publications. Such publications combine, in different proportions, traditional (albeit “cleansed”) recitatives for cantor solo or with keyboard accompaniment, simple choral responses, congregational tunes, and choral compositions. The works are by the compiler as well as by various other composers, some of them specially commissioned, including pieces by non-​Jewish composers. In general, these publications open with a preface or introductory essay disclosing the credo of the compiler or editor(s) and including information about their sources of inspiration and the process of bringing the publication to fruition.20 The music in these publications is ordered according to the liturgical cycle, usually opening with the daily or Shabbat liturgy, and moving into the New Moon, Festivals, and the High Holidays. The compilations contain detailed tables of contents to facilitate the location of the materials; in some cases, there is also a list of donors or subscribers. These lists have great value for research because they provide a sense of the distribution and the potential users of the publications.21 Some of the compilations also include words of praise for the authors and approval by rabbinical, cantorial, and musical figures (Jewish and/​or non-​Jewish), following the well-​entrenched Jewish tradition of rabbinical haskamot. In the course of the 19th and early-​20th century, this type of publication became more popular. Works contained a wider repertoire and covered a greater geographical span, especially moving eastward from Germany and the Austro-​Hungarian Empire into Poland and Russia. Some publications acquired a canonical status whereas others dwindled into oblivion soon after publication. As hinted above, Salomon Sulzer’s Schir Zion, which the author expanded with a second volume in 1865–​1866, became the yardstick against which many later publications measured themselves.22 Moreover, its format, a single large hardbound score, was widely imitated.23 The successful reception of Sulzer’s printed work relates to the iconic prestige of its author as the direct or indirect inspirational teacher of a generation of European cantors from West to East. However, its success also derives from Sulzer’s achievement in attaining a balanced score that navigated between a “modern” reformulation of traditional Ashkenazi melodic formulae (still recognizable by traditionalists in spite of their “cleansing”) and artful, four-​part choral arrangements. Only the works by two other “imperial” composers, Naumbourg (in Paris) and Louis Lewandowski (Berlin), rivaled Sulzer’s publication in their magnitude and positive reception by 19th-​ and 20th-​century practitioners and scholars. Notwithstanding this wide success, the demanding technique of Sulzer’s music and the large format of his printed work were beyond the capabilities of small

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

107

communities. Thus, alternatives were engendered. A mere three years after the publication of Schir Zion, Cantor Hirsch Goldberg published in 1843 his Gesänge für Synagogen for the Reform-​oriented congregation in Braunschweig in Lower Saxony, which had hired him just one year earlier. In his preface, Goldberg noted that Sulzer’s work was not suited to the personnel of small German communities, which accounted for the majority of German Jewry at that time. Gesänge für Synagogen provided extremely simplified and shorter recitatives, along with unassuming two-​part “choral” arrangements that were up to the skills of amateur musicians with limited schooling. Moreover, the format of Goldberg’s book—​a small, octavo size and a limited number of pages—​appealed to the modest pockets of smaller Jewish communities such as Braunschweig. The success of the publication caused it to appear, in an expanded edition, two years after its initial publication; over the following decades, two further editions came out.24 Eventually the demand for such low-​cost and accessible publications led even the great synagogue composers, such as Sulzer and Lewandowski, to publish “simplified” liturgies.25 For instance, despite its large format, Lewandowski’s Kol rinnah u’t’fillah became a best-​seller, going into a second edition hardly a decade after its first publication in 1871, to the “surprise” of its author.26 This trend continued into the 20th century, particularly in Germany. Selig Scheuermann’s Die gottesdienstlichen Gesänge der Israeliten (1903) is an example of a manual that in fact emerged, as the author states in the introduction to his work, from his notes as teacher at the cantors’ seminar in Karlsruhe. While praising his distinguished predecessors Sulzer and Lewandowski, Scheuermann stresses the need for an updated approach to liturgical music that would attract a new generation of synagogue-​goers. Especially noticeable in his publication is the rhythmization of traditional recitatives, a method that made the task of the young cantors easier to perform and by default weakened a primary feature of traditional Ashkenazi ḥazanut, its flowing rhythm (Figs. 7.3–​3a).27

Printed Liturgical Music as Pedagogical Tools Printed scores were not only tools facilitating synagogue performances but also a source for teaching and learning how to perform the Jewish liturgy. From this pedagogical perspective, we can distinguish between two types of printed products, instruction materials with annotations, and piano arrangements of liturgical music for Hausgebrauch, that is, for the enjoyment of individuals and families in their homes. An example of the first type of publications is the Liturgische Zeitschrift (ca. 1848–​ 1862), edited by the cantor and teacher Hermann Ehrlich (1815–​1879) from Berkach. This early publication, which was widely commented upon in the German Jewish press at the time, combines practical information for cantors, including many musical transcriptions arranged according to the liturgical calendar, with essays on the general history of Jewish music and the cantorate in particular. A more sophisticated type of pedagogical publication are the fascicles of Liturgische Übungen by the pioneer scholar and collector (as well as cantor and composer) Eduard Birnbaum (1855–​1921) from Königsberg.28 These two fascicles (Birnbaum obviously intended to publish more of them) feature copiously annotated

Fig. 7.3–3a  Selig Scheuermann, Die gottesdienstlichen Gesänge der Israeliten für das ganze Jahr (Heildelberg: 1903; Frankfurt: 1912, 2nd ed. 1926). Cover and score of the kiddush for the Sabbath, reproducing the version that Louis Lewandowsky included in his Todah w’simrah (Berlin: 1882), no. 27 (courtesy of the department of music, National Library of Israel [NLI]). This version, with slight variants, became normative in most modern Ashkenazi communities.

Fig. 7.3–3a Continued. 

110 

Edwin Seroussi

Fig. 7.4–4a  Cover of Samuel Naumbourg, Agudat shirim: Recueil de chants religieux et populaires des Israelites: des Temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours … Précédés d’une historique sur la musique des Hébreux (Paris: 1874) and two pages of musical scores from that book, illustrating traditional cantillation according to the Ashkenazi and Moroccan Jewish traditions (courtesy of the department of music, National Library of Israel [NLI]). The cover drawing depicts an elderly King David playing a harp and singing from a book open to Psalms 57:9: “Awake, harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn.” His music resonates with that of the angels. The drawing is signed by “Barbizet,” perhaps a reference to the famous pottery artist Achille Barbizet (c. 1825–1885), who illustrated other French musical scores.

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

111

Fig. 7.4–4a Continued. essays about specific liturgical melodies, accompanied by musical transcriptions. The goal of such publications was the edification (Bildung) of well-​informed cantors. Put differently, Birnbaum translated his eminent scholarship for the enlightenment of his performing colleagues across German-​speaking Europe. Such types of endeavors continued after the First World War, as part of the effort to maintain the traditional cantorial profession in an era of dramatic upheavals triggered by commercial recordings and concerts of Jewish liturgical music. Abraham M. Bernstein’s Awodat habore (1930) was the beginning of an aborted printing initiative with similar educational goals that was aimed at resisting the commercialization of Jewish liturgical music. The second type of pedagogical publications is piano arrangements of liturgical melodies for playing at home. A  noted example is Arnold Marksohn and William Wolf’s Auswahl alter hebräischer Synagogal Melodien of 1875.29 This is in fact an historical essay accompanying an anthology of Hausmusik written on behalf of a bourgeois German Jewish constituency. It stresses its goal of elevating the Jewish masses who no longer know the traditional melodies, making possible an edifying experience of musical Judaism at the home, especially at a time when synagogue attendance was in sharp decline. This text also stresses German Jewish difference (vis-​à-​vis Sephardi and Polish Jews) rather than a shared Jewish musical lore. Similar works for the piano, with different ideological agendas but in a similar format and spirit, were produced by Naumbourg and even by a German-​trained musician on behalf of the Europeanized elite of Sephardi Jews in the Kingdom of Bulgaria (Figs. 7.4–​4a  ).30

112 

Edwin Seroussi

Liturgical Monumenta A different selection of printed music adopted a more encompassing view of the liturgical music anthology, attempting to present the wholeness of the liturgy in its most minute details. Worthy of special mention in this context is the compendium of Ashkenazi liturgical music compiled by Abraham Baer, Baal T’fillah oder “Der practischer Vorbeter (Fig. 7.5).”31 Baer’s model was the Denkmäler (“monuments”), the “definitive” comprehensive and scientific collections of musical corpora that became a hallmark during the early stages in the development of the new “science of music” (Musikwissenschaft) later known as musicology. This major anthology by Baer, a cantor in Gothenburg, Sweden (a minor corner of the German-​speaking Jewish world, by all accounts), had a lasting reception; the appearance of four European editions of Baal T’fillah—​in Gothenburg (1877), Frankfurt (1883 and ca. 1900), and Nuremberg (1930)—​attest to a continuous demand well into the early 1930s.32 The remarkable list of congratulatory notes by cantors and musicians from all corners of European Jewish and general musicological circles that appears in the opening to the second edition are indicative of the impact and status that this anthology instantly acquired. Baer’s anthology eventually became an authoritative source in the new schools for training cantors that were established in the United States by the Reform and Conservative Jewish movements in the 1950s. Evidence of its canonical standing was its being selected as the opening volume of a massive 35-​volume collection titled Out-​of-​Print Classics Series of Synagogue Music, which will later be discussed.33 The American reprints of Baer’s work show the wide acceptance of its authority. Nor was it only cantors who used Baer’s anthology as an authoritative source for research on Ashkenazi liturgy; musicologists made use of it as well.34 The end of the 19th century witnessed an exponential growth in the publishing of such monumenta, though none of them surpassed Baer’s in scope. For example, a publication compiled by the Hungarian-​born cantor Mayer Wodak, Hamnazeach, focused attention on the relatively peripheral Hungarian Ashkenazi tradition. Undoubtedly, the Viennese market offered the resources for the publication of such a large work.35 Indeed, as we have seen, the economics of liturgical music publishing was a matter of major concern for cantors and their publishers. One may question the economic logic of such magnificent publications. Was profit (or, at the least, not losing money) a major goal, or were these publications motivated by other, non-​capitalist considerations? If the former, how many copies had to be purchased in order to break even? Which marketing strategies were deployed to ensure financial viability? Alternatively, was the main agenda the disinterested promotion of Jewish culture and artistic creativity vis-​à-​vis non-​Jewish audiences? Or perhaps liturgical music publications were part of the necessary credentials of distinguished cantors or choirmasters to advance their careers? All these questions, and others, require further research. However, an episode that took place in Odessa toward the end of the 19th century may provide some illumination. In late August 1895, the great Brody synagogue in Odessa celebrated the yovel, twenty-​five years of service, of its Kapellmeister, the renowned composer David Nowakowsky (1848–​1921). The event was marked by a special music festival, an innovation at the time that was reviewed by the amateur Zionist composer David

Fig. 7.5  Cover of Abraham Baer, Baal T’fillah: oder “Der practische Vorbeter” Vollständige Sammlung der gottesdienstlichen Gesänge und Recitative der Israeliten nach polnischen, deutschen (aschk’nasischen) und portugiesischen (sephardischen): Weisen nebst allen den Gottesdienst betreffenden rituellen Vorschriften und Gebräuchen (Gothenburg: 1877; “distributed by the editor and by J. Kauffmann Bookseller in Frankfurt a. M.”), courtesy of the department of music, National Library of Israel (NLI). Illustrations depict external and internal views of the synagogue of Gothenburg, Sweden.

114 

Edwin Seroussi

Kawonowsky in Hatzefirah.36 The following extended excerpt of this article is quoted here because of its historical importance: For thirty-​five years, Mr. Nowakowsky has worked on the sacred [music] literature, and the number of scores [he has produced] totals some eight hundred and beyond. Moreover, in order to provide our worthy readers with a reliable idea of the extent and breadth of his professional knowledge, we should add that he has not left out a single corner or genre [whether] in the siddur or mahzor, dirge or penitential prayer (kinah veseliḥah), Sabbath or Holy Day prayer, joyful occasions related to the life-​cycle, confirmation, funerals and supplications, in addition to [producing] scores of great value such as psalmodies, concerts, oratorios and more. Moreover, many music scholars, among them the late composer Anton Rubinstein and the professor from the Paris Conservatoire, Ferdinand David, to whom Mr. Nowakowsky sent some of his scores for their evaluation, praised him and were astonished by the extent of his gift and comprehensive knowledge of music, considering that he never attended conservatories and all his knowledge and expertise came from itself, a self-​made-​man [original in English in Latin characters]. And we see that the great singer Mr. [Pinchas] Minkowsky [chief cantor of the Brody Synagogue] did not exaggerate when he defined Mr. Nowakowsky as “the second Lewandowski” in his article “Avodat yisrael beOdessa.”37 We must thank the honoree of the festival, Mr. N[owakowsky], for searching among old manuscripts in order to uncover all of the liturgical-​melodic traditions [nusḥaot], and also all the melodies [neginot] that were condemned to oblivion, or those that he heard from the great cantors of the period of Betzalel [Shulsinger, aka “Odesser”], David Brody and others, renewing them, inserting new life into them, and providing them with the splendor of the new musical style that fits the contemporary spirit and taste of the new generation. Many cantors have already wished to acquire the scores of Mr. Nowakowsky and have repeatedly urged him to hasten his output and publish in print. However, in spite of [his] willingness the author has been unable to meet their demand, as the printing of all his scores would cost from eight to ten thousand rubles, an undertaking that is impossible to carry out all at once. Only now, on the occasion of the event honoring his twenty-​five years of service, has he published his first score, T’fillah Ne’ilah,38 and when it becomes widely [accessible] to cantors, something that we do not doubt for a moment, only then he will publish his highly learned and invaluable score already known . . . as Shirei David.39

In consequence of financial constraints and the eventual political upheavals of 1905 and 1917, which deeply affected the Jewish community of Odessa, Shirei David was never published. However, against all odds, it has survived to this day in manuscript form; the dramatic fate of this music collection during the Holocaust and its eventual relocation in America has been recounted on several occasions.40

Printed Liturgical Music as an Ideological Testimonial The Germanized canon of Ashkenazi liturgical music in print reviewed until this point acquired its authority through its frequent reiterations in scholarly writings about Jewish music. It also reflected the aesthetic and ideological leanings of leading cantors whose work was hailed by Jewish music scholarship. As a consequence of these

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

115

choices, printed musical collections whose agenda differed from the dominant ones remained outside the master narratives of Jewish liturgical music. A notable example of a collection of liturgical compositions hardly mentioned in scholarly writings is Ozar [sic] Schirei Jeshurun by cantor Jacob Leopold Weiss (1825-​1889) of Warsaw, self-​published in Vienna in 1881 at the Jos. Eberle printing house. Several features of this publication stand out. Its title page is mostly in English, a rare feature in European printed collections of Jewish liturgical music outside of England. The reason for this was that Ozar Schirei Jeshurun catered to British synagogues (and probably to British pockets as well), probably because Weiss, as he indicated in his introduction, regarded the very high quality of contemporary British synagogue choirs as an ideal to be imitated in other parts of Europe. No wonder, then, that the publication was endorsed not only by Sulzer (Weiss’ mentor of youth), but also by three major synagogue Kapellmeisters and composers of England in the late 19th century to whom Weiss probably appealed: Charles Kensington Salaman, Julius Lazarus Mombach, and Marcus Hast. More substantial to our argument is the introduction to this volume (in German and Germanized English), in which Weiss fulminates against the current styles of synagogue music composition. Only rarely, he writes, does one come across “sublime elevations which would express the deep action conveyed to the soul by the sense of the text itself”; in most instances, the same music is repeated with different sections or stanzas of the same text. In truly Wagnerian rhetoric, Weiss claims that the “higher musical and national aims” of his approach to music-​text relations will have redemptive educational effects on the Jewish masses, “strengthen[ing] the national consciousness” as well as reviving interest in the sacred Hebrew language (in fact, the texts of most of the pieces are in German, Polish, or Russian). In addition, Weiss’ poly­phonic compositions, mostly in a rather conservative Romantic operatic style, aim to “restore the jewish [sic] Divine Service to its strength of bygone times, when still the tune acted by popular masses, and has not been intrusted [sic] to the single voice of the virtuous [sic] Chief-​Singer (Chanter), when there has been no Autocracy but Democracy in the World of Sounds.” Such a diatribe against the Central European cantorial establishment—​and this, on the part of a relatively unknown musician born in Slovakia and active mainly in Poland—​sets Weiss’ publication far apart from the collections discussed above that focus on performance, preservation, and/​or pedagogy. His was a political statement about the redemptive power of music to mobilize the masses and to generate a national revival, which must be read alongside modern nationalist music pamphlets (especially Polish ones) of the second half of the 19th century.41 In this sense, it is a unique production of Jewish liturgical music. Weiss’ life was restless, marked by frequent moves from one synagogue to another in places such as Zagreb, Warsaw, Vilnius, and then back to Warsaw. He never attained a position as chief cantor; eventually, he ran his own small (rented) synagogue and ended his life in poverty.42 A note included on the title page of Ozar Schirei Jeshurun informs the reader that “the net product [of the sales of this publication] is destined for establishing of a College where office-​bearers of Jewish congregations will be trained,” thus disclosing an additional, philanthropic, aspect to the publication. It appears that Weiss operated a small cantorial school in Warsaw in the last years of

116 

Edwin Seroussi

his life. He also had in mind an ambitious and continuing publication project (explicitly stated in the introduction) that never came to fruition (the published volume is designated “Band I” of a series to be known as Musikalische Synagogen Bibliothek). It seems probable that Ozar Schirei Jeshurun, with its sophisticated and demanding score, was far from a financial success—​indeed, it may have brought Weiss to the verge of financial collapse. Thus, in spite of its exceptionality, Ozar Schirei Jeshurun became a rare item, hardly ever mentioned in the literature about synagogue music.43 It is noteworthy that the European model of the anthology by a single cantor-​author was perpetuated as well in America. Nishmas Eliyohu by the choirmaster and cantors’ instructor Eliyohu (Elias) Shnipelisky (1879–​1947), exemplifies this genre of printed music.44 Published posthumously and copyrighted by Abraham N. Gordon, the nephew of the composer, the manuscripts left unpublished by Shnipelisky were prepared for publication by “the eminent teacher of Chazonuth, Rev Simon Raisin [who] undertook the task of making the proper selection of the compositions.” The deceased author’s authority is reinforced retroactively by the mention of one of his most distinguished disciples, “the now famed [cantor and opera singer] Jan Peerce, [who] in his youth, was a member of the composer’s choir.”45

Centers and Peripheries in Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Although Central and West European centers, especially imperial capitals such as Vienna, Berlin, and Paris dominated the publication of Jewish liturgical music until roughly the First World War, Jewish musical peripheries also came into existence and even competed with these centers. A  number of early American productions, for instance, are unique and worthy of note. One specimen of particular interest is A Collection of the Principal Melodies of the Synagogue: From the Earliest Time to the Present by Alois Kaiser and William Sparger, both of whom were among the first disciples of Sulzer, who established themselves as cantors in America. This collection appeared in connection with the World Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, which marked the fourth centennial of Columbus’ expedition of 1492.46 It was a peculiarly eclectic volume meant to exemplify the whole of the Jewish liturgical lore in its historical development, and it shows that, by the late 19th century, a nascent American Jewish liturgical tradition had begun to distinguish itself from its European foundations.47 Another notable example is the emergent and vibrant center that developed in Saint Petersburg around the circle of the Society for Jewish Folk Music.48 Publications of the society comprised different models of Jewish liturgical music similar to those we have already seen, except for the monumenta format by one cantor that characterized the Central and West European scenes. These Russian collections show elaborate artistic compositions of liturgical music next to compilations of songs for voice and piano that were geared to the domestic sphere as well as to Jewish schools.49 The Lider-​zamelbukh far der yidisher shul un familye is the most celebrated instance of the latter.50 In it, liturgical pieces are mixed with Yiddish folk songs and hasidic

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

117

nigunim in an attempt to decentralize Jewish music away from the synagogue and into the home and the (secular) school. More localized publications, the work of individual cantors, appeared in extremely modest pocket-​size formats whose technical production was of low quality. A remarkable specimen of this genre is that of Alexander Eliezer Niswizski (1840–​1906), titled Hamitpalel: yakhil retzitativim be’ad ḥazanim uba’alei tefilot litfilot yamim noraim (1903) (Figs. 7.6–​6a). Head of a family of legendary 20th-​century Jewish musicians,51 Niswizski’s homemade publication offered his version (nusaḥ) of High Holiday recitatives for those sections of the liturgy performed by the cantor according to the Lithuanian tradition. It is hard to assess the level of diffusion of such a print in Europe beyond its place of origin, Vilnius. However, in the course of the year in which it was published, Hamitpalel was reprinted across the ocean in New York City (still containing a note that the Censor of Vilnus had approved it on December 31, 1903). This three-​volume edition, intended for daily, Shabbat, and festival prayers, in addition to those of the High Holidays, and also special poetic additions for the six Shabbatot between Passover and Shavuot, is a vivid testimony of the early transfer of the Lithuanian liturgical tradition to America on paper (and not only orally). Moreover, it is revealing of the power of the American Jewish market to sustain this type of liturgical music publication, which addressed a selected number of experts. Unlike the music publications of the German-​speaking Jewish lands, Hamitpalel is, in a certain sense, an auto-​ethnography, an individual’s musical memory put on paper that can also be of use for reference by or inspiration to other cantors—​a format that became more widespread in the publications of immigrant Lithuanian cantors in America. Its effectiveness depended on the ability of the user to read music that, in addition to being printed in the form of a low-​quality lithograph, contained a squeezed handwritten notation from right to left to suit the text underlay in Hebrew characters.52 (Aware of the technical deficiencies of his product, Niswizski inserted an epigraph from the Ethics of the Fathers [Avot 4:20]: “Look not at the vessel, but at what it contains.”) Significantly, Niswizski is not mentioned even once by Aron Friedmann, the chief cantor of Berlin, in any of the three volumes of his very comprehensive Lebensbilder berhümter Kantoren (1918, 1921, and 1927), a compendium that, notwithstanding its Germano-​centric approach, includes rich information about many East European cantors who were deemed worthy of mention for their contributions.

Printed Collections as Consolidators of “National Nusaḥim” of Synagogue Music Music prints were also recruited to consolidate the liturgical music practices of multi-​ ethnic Jewish communities, with the aim of creating a “national” nusaḥ (here, in the sense of a corpus) that would represent the liturgical soundscape of heterogeneous constituencies within the modern nation-​states. In this regard, the cases of France and Great Britain are telling. Musique religieuse ancienne et moderne en usage dans les Temples Consistoriaux Israélites de Paris (1895) was an attempt to standardize the liturgical music of the

Fig. 7.6–6a  Alexander Eliezer Niswizski, Hamitpalel: yakhil retzitativim be’ad ḥazanim uba’alei tefilah litfilot yamim noraim (Vilnus: 1903), cover and kaddish prayer for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, courtesy of the department of music, National Library of Israel (NLI). This copy, which originally belonged to the library of the Jewish community in Berlin, is a good example of the mobility of Jewish liturgical music in print.

Fig. 7.6–6a Continued.

120 

Edwin Seroussi

Parisian synagogues affiliated with the Central Consistoire (the umbrella organization of Jewish communities in France, established originally by Napoleon) regardless of the ethnic background (Sephardi or Ashkenazi) of its members. The distinguished Jewish composer Samuel David (1836–​1895) edited this compilation. Born in Paris, David received his musical education at the famous Conservatoire of Paris, where he was a student of François Emmanuel Joseph Bazin and Fromental Halévy. He wrote operas, four symphonies, and a number of choruses and songs. In 1872, David became musical director of the Consistoire. He collected materials from the various synagogues of Paris and published a large selection of them in his comprehensive volume. This publication offers cantors and choirmasters a complete music program for each liturgical occasion, including the precise timing of each item—​the latter, a small revealing detail that underscores David’s attempt to formalize the liturgy of the French synagogues during the Third Republic.53 Victorian England’s United Synagogue (the association of Orthodox communities) similarly attempted to formalize the music of its synagogues through a printed product that would regulate performances of the liturgy in all its affiliated synagogues. To this day British Jews commonly refer to this publication as “The Blue Book.” First published in 1889 as Shirei Knesset Yisrael/​A Handbook of Synagogue Music for Congregational Singing, the compendium was edited by Francis L. Cohen and B.L. Mosely. Ten years later, the Handbook reappeared in an expanded edition bearing its characteristic blue cover, retitled Kol Rinnah VeTodah /​The Voice of Prayer and Praise (edited by F.L. Cohen and D.M. Davis). The third edition (1933) was further expanded via a “Supplement” section edited by the distinguished Podolia-​born cantor and composer Samuel Alman, who settled in London after 1903 to become a pivotal figure in the synagogue musical life of the imperial capital. Since then the volume has remained in print.54 It was intended not only for choirs but also for average worshipers who would sing along with the choir, a point that is stressed in the original preface and again in the preface to the 1948 edition. For this purpose, the scores are complemented with cipher notation, a peculiar musical system used at times in church music that allows untrained singers to sing the tunes of the prayers. These cases of France and England are rather exceptional. The newer nation-​states that emerged from the unification of smaller political units, namely, Germany and Italy, did not have a comparable centralized Jewish authority that could enforce a liturgical formula for all the synagogues within their territory. Communities from the states that emerged from the dismemberment of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire were no more uniform in their liturgical music than those in Italy and Germany.

Expanding the Production of Printed Jewish Liturgical Music Publishers and Distributors of Jewish Liturgical Music Until the advent of computer software, music publishing required special expertise and the management of special printing equipment. When Jewish liturgical music started to appear around 1840, the Jewish communities and cantors who sponsored

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

121

them relied on existing publishing houses; these needed to adapt themselves to the circumstance of foreign Hebrew texts appearing below the music. Two strategies developed. The first was publication with established non-​Jewish music publishers. For example, the prestigious Berlin-​based printing house Bote & Bock published the original editions of Louis Lewandowski’s works, and the major non-​Jewish music publisher of New York, G. Schirmer, published a work by Lewandowski as early as 1910.55 The second strategy was to engage a workshop to prepare the plates, which were then printed and distributed by the synagogue of the cantor-​author or by a Jewish-​owned bookselling firm.56 Thus, the early 20th-​century reprints of Lewandowski’s works appeared under J. Kaufman’s prestigious label in Frankfurt, as did many other works of Jewish liturgical music reprinted in Germany prior to the Second World War. In the case of Samuel Naumbourg, the author appears as printer in the Paris edition but a parallel edition appearing in Leipzig was distributed by a major Jewish book dealer, M.W. Kaufmann. In the Russian Empire, in contrast, Jewish liturgical music publications were much more uncommon than in Germany and appeared, as we have seen, under the auspices of the Society for Jewish Folk Music.57 In major American cities there were a number of companies established and owned by Jewish immigrants that engaged in music printing. While some major Jewish publishers such as Bloch Publishing Company and Hebrew Publishing Company produced scores of Jewish music as did their European Jewish counterparts, there were also small companies specializing in Jewish music publications that catered to the growing scene of Jewish liturgical and secular music. Joseph P. Katz’s Musical Publishing House was among these pioneers; it absorbed several smaller companies. In 1928, Metro Music Company, established by the composer Henry Lefkowitch, absorbed Joseph P. Katz. Up until the Second World War, Metro Music and J. and J. Kammen were the two main Jewish music companies in the United States.58 In the post-​Second World War era, publications of Jewish liturgical music became mainly an American affair. Two American Jewish music-​publishing companies are worth mentioning: Transcontinental and Tara. The first was founded in 1938 by Josef Freudenthal, a German Jewish composer and copyright lawyer. Freudenthal, who immigrated to the United States in 1936, was alert to the needs of new immigrant European Jewish composers as well as young American Jewish composers of liturgical music. His company, which became identified with the Reform movement, functions nowadays under the auspices of the American Conference of Cantors, the professional association of that religious movement. Transcontinental superseded established companies that published synagogue music in America, such as Bloch Music Publishing and Mills Music.59 Tara Publications is a much later and more diversified operation.60 Founded in 1971 by Velvel Pasternak, it is aimed at a wider audience, emphasizing a loosely hasidic-​ based approach to Jewish liturgical music. This approach addresses new trends of spiritual religiosity that spread among American Jews beginning in the late 1960s. Much of the liturgical music published by Tara is rather simple, based on American popular music styles, arranged for one voice with basic instrumental accompaniment, usually guitar, and oriented toward community singing.

122 

Edwin Seroussi

The selection of liturgical music publications and publishers reviewed above is just a small sample of a much larger output that, at times, appeared to supply more products than the market could absorb. A canon of European Jewish music publications emerged over time, continuing after the Second World War in the United States, where new schools dedicated to the training of cantors for the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements were founded in the 1950s. Despite the availability of local printed music suited to the specific needs of the American synagogues, a post-​ Holocaust respect for the devastated European Jewish past, coupled with an expanding Jewish musicology, formed the basis for initiatives that sought to reprint masterpieces of synagogue music of the past. One such venture, which actually predated the Holocaust, was the six-​volume Cantorial Anthology compiled by Gershon Ephros (Efrat) over a forty-​year period (1929–​1969). Ephros was born in Serotsk, Poland in 1890. He received his first musical training when he sang in the choir of his stepfather, Moses Fromberg. By the age of 17, he was conducting his own choir in Zgersh. In 1909, he left for Palestine and pursued his studies in ḥazanut and harmony with Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, serving under him as choir director. He immigrated to the United States in 1911, where he continued his musical studies and pursued a career as a cantor. Ephros was the first direct disciple of Idelsohn to set foot in the United States. His American cantorial career started with his appointment at Congregation Beth-​El in Norfolk, Virginia in 1918. He went on to serve congregations in the Bronx and then in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he remained for most his life. Efros taught Jewish music in Hebrew schools and served as a member of the faculty of the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music.61 The major innovation of Ephros’ initiative resided in his universalist approach to the Jewish liturgy. True to contemporary perceptions of Jewish nationalism, and under the spell of his revered mentor Idelsohn, Ephros conceived his anthology as a manual for practical use in modern synagogues that would combine solo and choral music covering the liturgical yearly cycle. Following European precedents on the part of individuals such as Selig Scheuermann from Frankfurt and Louis Liebling and Bernhard Jacobsohn from Leipzig,62 the Cantorial Anthology contains materials from a large array of European and American sources. These sources include Ephros’ own transcriptions of traditional music as he learned it, alongside extant arrangements and new compositions by him and by other composers from unedited manuscripts and rare prints. All of these were freely reworked in accordance with Ephros’ vision of what the musical capital of a modern cantor should include. As with many other Jewish musical anthologies, Ephros’ compilation had an implicit canonizing underpinning, and echoes of this aspiration can be read between the lines of the introductions to these volumes. Idelsohn, already established in the United States when the first volume of Cantorial Anthology appeared (1929), wrote an evocative introduction in which he praised the efforts of his former student. Interestingly, the introductions to Ephros’ volumes, including Idelsohn’s, appeared in English and Hebrew, with the two texts not always overlapping. The English introduction to Volume 5 (1957) is one of the most important among these programmatic texts. It displays a grand narrative of Jewish music documentation, stressing Ephros’

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

123

indebtedness to the collections of Eduard Birnbaum and, of course, to Idelsohn. In contrast, the Hebrew introduction to the same volume praises the “founders” of modern Jewish music—​Birnbaum, Idelsohn, Naumbourg, and Pinchas Minkowski. Thus, Ephros’ anthology summarized a chain of canonization of liturgical music in print that stressed the role of cantor-​composers who were also scholars rather than of exclusively cantor-​composers such as Sulzer. A complementary undertaking to that of Ephros was the five-​volume Zamlu Lo, compiled by the Jerusalem-​born cantor and composer Moshe Nathanson, which was published beginning in 1955. Nathanson, who moved to the United States in 1922, was also a former pupil of Idelsohn. His compilation, however, was very different from that of Ephros. Whereas Ephros’ highly sophisticated polyphonic settings were addressed to the professional cantor and to the choirmaster of a skilled choir, Nathanson targeted the laity by means of simple, one-​voice unaccompanied melodies (this heralded the approach of Tara Publications). The crowning American printing project of European Jewish liturgical music was undoubtedly the Out of Print Classics Series of Synagogue Music. Initiated by the Sacred Music Press of the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music and the American Conference of Certified Cantors, this 25-​volume series was launched in 1953 with, not coincidentally, a reprint of Abraham Baer’s Ba’al T’fillah, a work that by then had acquired the status of a textbook for Ashkenazi cantors in America.63 In his preface to the first volume, the German-​born musicologist Eric Werner, at the time one of the most powerful figures in American Jewish music and successor of Idelsohn at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, stressed the basic tenets of the new printing endeavor. Among other things, he pointed out the need for “didactic works” that would aid in the “systematic and scientific training of the cantor,” the “danger of the disintegration of our musical heritage” in face of the “extinction of the great European centers of Jewish learning,” and the increasing “interest in source and reference works” for the study of “Jewish folk-​ lore, the acme of which is the chant of the Synagogue, [which] is now a serious musicological discipline.” The preface also includes Werner’s lament regarding “the confluence [in the Western hemisphere] of Sephardi, German, Polish, Russian, Roumanian, and Hungarian Jews during a relatively short span of time,” which, he claimed, had “wrought havoc with the purity of the respective traditions.” The “hodge-​podge” of traditions prevailing in America created “a confusion,” hence the need for ensuring that Baer’s compilation would become an accessible standard reference work. Notwithstanding, even in 1953, when the first volume of Out of Print Classics Series of Synagogue Music was published, Werner’s rhetoric of “science,” “purity,” and “discipline” was already out of step with prevailing trends. Although cantorial schools made selective use of volumes of the Out of Print series, the musical tastes of the new generation of Reform and Conservative cantors and their synagogues were far removed from the rich, highly Germano-​centric materials offered by the series between 1953 and 1955. At the same time, this venture reveals the financial strength of the American Jewish community at that time, which facilitated such a massive reprinting project without concern regarding its economic viability.

124 

Edwin Seroussi

Synagogue Music Pedagogy in Print: America and Israel By the 1960s, the American cantorate associated with the liberal Jewish denominations was ripe for other types of printed music. What was in demand was not massive reproductions or anthologies of European works but rather songsters and basic instruction manuals that would ensure the maintenance of the Ashkenazi nusaḥ hatefilah.64 The compendia of Ashkenazi liturgical recitatives by the Jerusalem-​born American cantor Pinchas Spiro (1922–​2008) comprises one of the most ambitious enterprises of its kind, and still enjoys an extensive reception. Widely used by cantorial students of diverse affiliations, its appeal derives from the relative simplicity and clarity of the musical transcriptions.65 Unlike the recitatives published by the previous generations of cantors in Europe and America, Spiro emphasized melodic skeletons rather than elaborated embellishments. Although his work could be compared to Sulzer’s attempt in the early 19th century to “cleanse” traditional recitatives from spurious baroque accretions, the difference resides in its appeal to less experienced cantors and its combination of recitatives and simple congregational responses without instrumental accompaniment. Spiro’s work was one of many similar pedagogical publications developed by teachers in the cantorial schools of the Reform and Conservative movements.66 Finally, there is a totally different type of American publication that is geared toward informing cantors about their craft rather than instructing them or providing them with a repertoire. The Musical Tradition of the Eastern European Synagogue, a work-​in-​progress produced by the music theorist, cantor, and composer Sholom Kalib (b. 1929), is a spiritual descendant of Birnbaum’s Liturgische Übungen. Five volumes, comprising 20 separate books, are planned; to date, three volumes (in nine books) have been published: History and Definition (2002), The Weekday Services (2005), and The Sabbath Eve Service (2017). Framed within a thick scholarly narrative, this work is the apotheosis of the lachrymose approach to the alleged disappearance of the traditional Ashkenazi cantorial art, of nusaḥ. In this case, the printing of Jewish liturgical music functions as a sort of summary for what many patrons of this tradition perceive as an inexorably declining musical capital. At the same time, as we have seen above in relation to Tara Publications, numerous new anthologies of simple liturgical melodies for congregational singing have been published since the 1960s. These reflect new liturgical styles that emphasize congregational singing rather than cantorial nusaḥ, a process that might be termed the “Carlebachization” of the Jewish liturgy, as it incorporates aesthetics of performance associated with R. Shlomo Carlebach. One example of this trend is the new multi-​ volume Zamru Lo, a sequel to the five volumes of the same name edited by Moshe Nathanson.67 While the status of musical notation in American synagogues was central to liberal congregations that continued the modernizing European Jewish musical practices, in British Palestine and Israel the situation was quite different. Here, “Modern Orthodox” cantors generally affiliated with religious Zionist circles were those who engaged in music printing, primarily as an auxiliary tool for the training of young

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

125

cantors and also for choral and congregational singing. Their publications were much fewer in number and more modest in volume in comparison with their American counterparts because of financial constraints reigning at the time in Israel. Shlomo Zalman Rivlin (1884–​1962), founder in collaboration with A.Z. Idelsohn of the ambitious (but aborted) Shirath Yisrael Institute in 1910, headed a one-​man academy of music under the same banner in the form of a choir whose members received individual instruction in cantorial music. Rivlin produced scores in which he implemented his aesthetic ideals.68 Following in Rivlin’s footsteps was Yehoshua Leib Neeman, who worked as a music teacher both in religious schools and in secular academies of music. For purposes of documentation and instruction, Neeman developed his own kind of musical notation that drew its inspiration from ethnomusicological models.69 These Israeli publications attempted to amalgamate diverse liturgical traditions into an “Israeli nusaḥ” based on the Lithuanian Ashkenazi custom but with “Sephardi” pronunciation of Hebrew and, in the case of Rivlin, also the integration of Oriental Jewish tunes and motifs. Such efforts recall the attempts to create multiethnic liturgies in England and France in the late 19th century. Generally speaking, the Israeli musical curriculum did not include elaborate cantorial compositions by European composers. With the exception of the Great Synagogue of Tel Aviv and a few synagogues founded by German Jewish immigrants in the 1930s through the 1950s (mostly in Haifa and Jerusalem), such compositions were rarely performed.

The Hasidic Nigun in Print Liturgical music is not the only Ashkenazi religious repertoire that was eventually documented and distributed in printed form. Other no less important repertoires were eventually put down on paper, even if there was initial opposition to that step. The most important and rich of these repertoires was the hasidic nigun. Hasidism enacted many liturgical music innovations, in which the concept of nigun (a vocal melody with or without text) became a crucial component. In the eyes of hasidic leaders, oral memory and live performance possessed a highly spiritual value; the opposite was true of musical scores that promoted standardization of performance. As the intellectual and bodily experience of nigun became central to the distinctiveness of hasidic worship, the fixation of nigunim and their dissemination by the music press implied potential harms. Thus, for reasons similar to those expressed in non-​ hasidic circles, and in more intense manner, the transcription and printing of the nigun became a source of anxiety and controversy among hasidim. Among their fears were that the revelation of well-​kept secret intentions (kavanot) of certain tunes or their spreading beyond hasidic circles could result in misuse or even desecration. Above all, musical notation—​with its strong associations to the secular and non-​Jewish ways of music-​making—​smacked of modernity. Beginning in the late 1920s, however, a revolutionary shift began to occur among circles of Chabad hasidim when the leader of the movement, the sixth Rebbe, R. Yosef Yitzhak Schneersohn of Lubavitch (HaRayatz, 1880–​1950), decided to allow, and even promote, the publication of Chabad nigunim.70 This decision was motivated

126 

Edwin Seroussi

by a quintessential anxiety characteristic of modernity: a concern that authentic oral versions of sacred nigunim would be either forgotten or else transfigured. R. Yosef Yitzhak opted to recruit the nigun both as a tool to enhance the unique experience of Chabad’s spirituality and as a means of reaching out to prospective devotees through the power of communal singing. Accordingly, in 1935, while residing in Otwock (a suburb of Warsaw), the Rebbe suggested to his followers left behind in the Soviet Union that they undertake a program to notate all of the nigunim of Chabad.71 The following year, Hatamim, the journal of the Chabad circles in Warsaw, published a lengthy letter, originally sent by R. Yosef Yitzhak to an unnamed addressee in December 1929, whose main subject was “the nigun of the Rebbe”—​a reference to a melody associated with the founder of Chabad, R. Shneur Zalman of Liady.72 A printed musical transcription of the nigun preceded the letter, with the following note attached: And because the well-​known nigun of our great Rebbe [Shneur Zalman of Liady], may his soul rest in peace . . ., in spite of its diffusion among all strands of our haredi [pious] people, is indeed corrupted, especially among those who sing it, and because this nigun has a great deepness and each movement in it is geared toward higher matters that stand at the center of the universe, as is explained at length in the [following] letter by the holy admor [R. Yosef Yitzhak], may he live a good life, amen,. . . for [all] these reasons, we here deem it proper to write down this exalted nigun in musical notation, precisely and correctly, as it is in the tradition of Lubavitch from time immemorial, so that it will remain as an eternal memory.73

Apparently, this transcription of “The Nigun of the Rebbe” stirred controversy among the more conservative circles of Chabad. Nonetheless, R. Yosef Yitzhak persevered in his stand, though the actual task of transcribing nigunim was not immediately undertaken, in part because of the lack of competent transcribers and in part because Europe was moving ever closer to the outbreak of war. After the Rebbe fled to the United States in 1940, he increasingly stressed the power of the nigun in his addresses to his followers. In 1944, he commissioned one of his close collaborators (and a former editor of Hatamim), R. Shmuel Zalmanoff, to create a committee of Chabad hasidim who were well acquainted with the musical traditions of the dynasty in Europe; this committee would then launch a musical project called Nichoach (Nigunei Hasidei Chabad) with the goal of publishing the nigunim in their “correct” versions. The Rebbe further instructed them to engage professionals to carry out this task, and to make it a global initiative by engaging the Chabad hasidim in Eretz Israel as well as a renowned connoisseur of hasidic music who resided there, Meir Shimon Geshuri. Finally, the Rebbe ordered the formalizing of music education at the yeshivot of Chabad and even called for employment of music coaches who knew how to read music.74 The New York cantor contracted to make the musical transcriptions of the nigunim was Joshua Samuel Weisser, whose identity was somewhat obscured in Chabad sources (these referred to him as Weizer). This extremely prolific performer, composer, choir conductor, and arranger was among the most distinguished contributors to the printed literature of East European ḥazanut in the United States. Born in the

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

127

Podolia region of Ukraine, he was a wunderkind who very early acquired professional musical training, both at the conservatory of Vinnytsia and (in ḥazanut) under the great cantor and composer Eliezer Gerovitch.75 After immigrating to the United States in 1914, Weisser became a prominent figure in New York synagogues. In addition, he published a vast output of music for the synagogue, along with nigunim and songs in Yiddish, starting as early as 1915.76 Weisser was obviously acquainted with the Ukrainian and perhaps the Bessarabian repertoires of Jewish liturgical music and hasidic nigunim. However, it is safe to assume that he became acquainted with the Chabad repertoire only in New York and that his transcriptions are based on an ethnography carried out there in the early 1940s. He incorporated Chabad nigunim alongside other hasidic nigunim that were grouped by dynasties and geographical areas (Modzhitz, Ukranian, Galician) in the two volumes of his major liturgical work, ’Avodat haḥazan, published by Metro Music Publishing (vol. 1, 1943; vol. 2, 1948). In these works, Weisser was careful to provide the names both of the composers and of the transmitters of the tunes. The graphic design of the nigunim in Weisser’s ’Avodat haḥazan was used as well in the first volume of Sefer hanigunim edited by Zalmanoff (1948). This codex of the Chabad musical repertoire, expanded by two more volumes (1957; 1995-​1996, the third volume appearing in Israel), became a major authoritative reference for performers (and musicologists) even as oral transmission of music continued to be the rule among hasidic circles.

Sephardi Liturgical Music in Print As noted, Jewish liturgical music in print was almost exclusively an Ashkenazi phenomenon. One of the rare exceptions involved music of the Spanish-​Portuguese communities in Western Europe, which were established in the mid-​16th century by Jewish conversos from the Iberian Peninsula who had returned to Judaism. The liturgical music of these communities drew from a combination of Ottoman and Maghrebi Sephardi traditions and adaptations of new music composed by contemporary composers, Jewish and non-​Jewish, that were engaged by the communities. An early example of such a commission is the work of the Parisian composer Emile Jonas on behalf of the Portuguese synagogue in Paris in the mid-​19th century.77 By the 20th century, the Portuguese communities of Bordeaux and Bayonne followed the example of the Parisian synagogue.78 Of greater impact on the European musical scene was the publication of the liturgical anthology published in London in 1857 by an immigrant from Amsterdam, Cantor David Aharon de Sola of the Spanish-​Portuguese synagogue, which was arranged by the Jewish-​born pianist and composer Emanuel Aguilar. This work signaled the centrality that printed music would have in the Spanish-​Portuguese congregation of the capital of the British Empire until the present.79 Another Sephardi exception was the Turkish Jewish community established in Vienna. Exposed to the musical atmosphere of the capital of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire, the community published

128 

Edwin Seroussi

in print some of its own liturgical music, which was transcribed and arranged in a modern fashion by the Hungarian-​born cantor Jacob Bauer and the local choirmaster Isidor Löwit.80 The Sephardi enclave in Bucharest followed this path.81 The monumenta model can also be found within the European Sephardi musical realm. One noteworthy example is the comprehensive collection of 1892 that documented the liturgical cycle according to the usage of the Portuguese synagogue of Livorno. Carried out on behalf of the new temple of Florence within the framework of the 400th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, this massive anthology remained an exception within the Sephardi world until the 1950s.82 Even more unusual was the large volume covering the liturgical music cycle of the ancient Jewish communities of the Papal States in Provence, France. When this volume appeared in 1885, it was a swan song of an already impoverished local musical tradition integrated into French Jewry after the 1789 Revolution.83 Memorialization, rather than practical purpose, distinguished this publication. Even though Sephardi liturgical music publishing continued during the 20th century, few of these items were intended for practical use in the synagogue.84 Instead, most the publications memorialized musical practices that were, for all practical purposes, a matter of the past. This process is especially noticeable in publications put out by Spanish-​Portuguese congregations.85 Later projects that were carried out in the wake of the Holocaust highlighted the sense of loss of communal musical memory or else documented the lore of one cantor.86 To date, the major endeavor to document the wholeness of the Sephardi liturgical lore in musical notation is the ten large volumes published by the Turkish-​born Israeli composer, singer, and collector Isaac Levy.87 This massive effort had no effect on Sephardi cantorial traditions and was not put to practical use by Sephardi cantors inside or outside Israel. However, it unintentionally became a repository for modern Israeli arrangements of Sephardi liturgical tunes. Until the outset of the internet era, oral tradition (and, from the last third of the 20th century, recordings) continued to serve as the only repository for the transmission of Sephardi liturgical music.

The Internet Era The emergence of the internet changed the map of music transmission in general and that of Jewish liturgical music in particular. It marked the end of the role of printed music and the opening of a period that can be defined as new or digital orality. To be sure, printed music did not disappear, but rather became transformed into digital files. For example, the venerable European printed canon of Ashkenazi music can now be accessed at www.shulmusic.org. Sophisticated hardware allows for the teaching and training of liturgical music, such as training in biblical cantillation at http://​bible.ort. org. In addition, YouTube offers innumerable files featuring lectures on Jewish liturgical music of diverse ethnic traditions as well as recordings of concerts and live performances at synagogues. While this democratization of the access to resources clearly decreases the dependence of cantors, choir conductors, and amateur prayer leaders on printed scores, it does not necessarily expand their horizons. As we have

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

129

seen, the leaning toward simple congregational singing in American synagogues—​a trend that has greatly benefited from the internet—​has accelerated the impoverishment of venerable Ashkenazi liturgical traditions. In contrast, the liturgical traditions of the Jews of Muslim lands, which had relied exclusively on oral transmission, have been enriched by websites such as www.pizmonim.com that serve both as a repository of historical recordings and as a learning tool for young cantors. Printed music was never a primary resource for the maintenance, transmission, and diffusion of Jewish liturgical music. Its adoption and relatively intensive use by composers, cantors, and choirs in European synagogues since around 1830 was a vital component in the modern “musicalization” of the Jewish liturgy. This process entailed the abandonment of orality as a religious ideal and the relinquishment of flexible performances marked by individual improvisation. Musical scores enabled controlled performances, the adoption of elaborate pieces of polyphonic music, and above all, the desirable degree of decorum in religious rituals that European Jewry so craved in its path to acceptance by Gentile society. We have observed that the publication of liturgical music entailed a major financial effort, which resulted in economic pressure both on individuals and on congregations that supported these enterprises. The creative drive of cantors and composers to publish had to be moderated by marketing considerations—​among them, the fact that the market was limited either to large and more liberal synagogues that maintained a professional music staff, or to music collectors. Archival materials show that cantors and choirmasters of poorer congregations often assiduously copied printed synagogue music by hand. Obviously, the technological advances in printing techniques and photocopying in the second half of the 20th century reduced prices dramatically. Yet the general sense is that there was always more supply than demand for printed synagogue music, a subject that will have to be treated in the future with more quantitative research tools. Until the advent of computer software, music printing was a comparative luxury. Thus, much of the history of synagogue music prior to the Second World War still needs to rely on manuscript sources as much as on prints if it aspires to comprehensiveness. As we have seen in the case of David Nowakowsky, even the music of an extremely distinguished composer in the early 20th century remained in manuscript form in consequence of the lack of public support for funding its printing. In the case of Jacob Leopold Weiss, it appears that an attempt at self-​publishing ended up in economic collapse and in the consequent obscuring of an important source. The sources discussed in this essay are only a small fraction of the total output of printed scores of Jewish liturgical music published from the 1830s to the present. Space constraints have precluded the discussion of numerous seminal contributions by important cantors and composers. More intensive research on this important subject can shed light on details such as geographical spread of the phenomenon, networks of distribution, the actual uses of these scores, and the stylistic qualities of the music printed or even copied by hand from hard-​to-​get printed sources. It is important to again stress that orality remained the main venue of transmission throughout the “golden age” of Jewish liturgical music in print. The outpourings of today’s digital era represent, in essence, a technological adjustment of a venerable oral practice.

130 

Edwin Seroussi

Notes 1.  Judit Frigyesi, “Orality as Religious Ideal: The Music of East-​European Jewish Prayer,” Yuval 7 (2002), 113–​153. 2.  On the status of musical notation in the Arab world, see Issam El-​Mallah, Arab Music and Musical Notation (Tutzing: 1997). 3.  Geoffrey Goldberg discusses in detail these processes as they occurred in Germany, as well as printed works that evolved from them; see “Maier Levi of Esslingen, Germany: A Small-​Town Ḥazzan in the Time of the Emancipation and His Cantorial Compendium” (Ph.D.  diss., The Hebrew University, 2000); idem, Between Tradition and Modernity:  The High Holy Days Melodies of Minhag Ashkenaz According to Ḥazzan Maier Levi of Esslingen (Jerusalem: 2019). 4.  Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, Jewish Music in Its Historical Development (New York: 1929), ch. 16, esp. 337–​346. 5.  Philip V. Bohlman, “The Age of Jewish Music Collection,” in Music, Libraries, and the Academy: Essays in Honor of Lenore Coral, ed. James P. Cassero (Middleton, Wisc.: 2007), 81–​103; idem, Jewish Music and Modernity (New  York:  2008), 84–​93; idem, “Inventing Jewish Music,” Yuval 7 (2002), esp. 33–36. 6.  James B.  Loeffler, The Most Musical Nation:  Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven: 2011), 136–​153. 7.  Ruth Sragow Newhouse, “The Music of the Passover Seder from Notated Sources (1644–​ 1945)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1980). 8. See, for example, Boaz Tarsi, “On a Particular Case of Tonal, Modal, and Motivic Components in Sources for Liturgical Music of East and West European Origins,” in Iggud: Selected Essays in Jewish Studies, vol. 3, Languages, Literature, Arts, ed. Tamar Alexander, Ziva Amishai-​Maisels, Dan Laor, Ora Schwarzwald, and Yosef Tobi (Jerusalem: 2007), 145–​ 164. For an exemplary examination of one source, see Anders Hammarlund, A Prayer for Modernity: Politics and Culture in the World of Abraham Baer (1834–​1894) (Stockholm: 2013). 9.  The subject of music printing in the context of music history has not been a major topic in musicology. For authoritative overviews of the subject, see Hans Lenneberg, On the Publishing and Dissemination of Music, 1500–​1850 (Hillsdale, N.Y.: 2003); idem (ed.), The Dissemination of Music: Studies in the History of Music Publishing (Lausanne: 1994); Donald W. Krummel and Stanley Sadie (eds.), Music Printing and Publishing (New York: 1990); and especially, Rudolf Rasch, Music Publishing in Europe 1600–​1900: Concepts and Issues (Berlin: 2008). 10.  The most comprehensive list of printed music of Jewish interest up to the year 1840 appears in Israel Adler (with the assistance of Lea Shalem), Hebrew Notated Manuscript Sources Up to Circa 1840: A Descriptive Catalogue with a Checklist of Printed Sources, 2 vols. (Munich: 1989) 2:875–​893. Adler’s decision to limit the catalog to “c. 1840” reflects the revolution in Jewish liturgical music printing that started around that year. 11.  For a detailed discussion of this work and the reception of these liturgical melodies, see Edwin Seroussi, “In Search of Jewish Musical Antiquity in the 18th-​century Venetian Ghetto: Reconsidering the Hebrew Melodies in Benedetto Marcello’s Estro Poetico-​Armonico,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 93, nos. 1–​2 (2002), 149–​200. 12.  Giovanni Battista Martini, Storia della musica, 3 vols. (Bologna: 1757–​1781), music in vol. 1, plate VI between pages 424 and 425; Charles Burney, A General History of Music, 4 vols. (London: 1776–​1789), vol. 1, plate IX between pages 252 and 253, copied from Martini; Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, 2 vols. (Leipzig: 1788–​1801), vol. 1, 162–​165, music also probably copied from Martini’s Storia della musica. 13.  For the modern critical edition of this work, see A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern, by Isaac Nathan and Lord Byron, edited with introduction and notes by Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglas (Tuscaloosa: 1988). For a later reworking, see, for example, that by the German composer Max Bruch, Hebraïsche Gesänge nach Lord Byron's Hebrew Melodies für Chor, Orchester und Orgel (ad Lib.) (Leipzig: 1888). For a contextual study of this work and a discussion of the rich scholarly bibliography associated with it, see Terence A. Hoagwood, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-​Songs (New York: 2010), 105–​128.

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

131

14. See the detailed discussion of this episode in Adler, Hebrew Notated Manuscript Sources, 1:26–​30. 15.  See Don Harrán’s definitive edition and study of this work in Salamone Rossi, Complete works, pt. 3, Sacred Vocal Works in Hebrew, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 100, vol. 13a–​b, Hashirim asher liShlomo, ed. Don Harrán (Middleton, Wisc.: 2003). 16. Samuel Naumbourg, Cantiques de Salomon Rossi, Psaumes, Chants et Hymnes (Paris: 1877). I discuss the modern reception of Rossi’s work extensively in “On the Footsteps of the ‘Great Jewish Composer’:  Review-​Essay of Don Harrán’s Salamone Rossi:  Jewish Musician in Late Renaissance Mantua,” Min’ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online 3 (2004). 17. On the Stuttgart score, see Choral-​gesänge zum Gebrauche bei dem israelitischen Gottesdienste, 2  vols., vol. 1:  Melodien für den Sabbath Gottesdienst; vol. 2 [for the High Holidays] (Württemburg: c. 1838); a copy of these precious volumes is found at the National Library of Israel (NLI), department of music, JMA 3606, including a handwritten copy of vol. 1 from the same period with some corrections. On the Munich score, see Vollständiger Jahrgang von Terzett und Chorgesängen:  Der Synagoge in München nebst sämmtlichen Chorresponsorien zu den alten Gesangsweisen der Vorsänger (Munich: 1839). On the Vienna score, see Salomon Sulzer, Schir Zion (Vienna: ca. 1840). It is worth noting that the Stuttgart collection includes works by Sulzer—​a testimony that musical manuscripts from Vienna circulated in Germany prior to their publication in Schir Zion. Indeed, a manuscript dated in 1832 that was recently located by Alon Schab and David Rees at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich (Mus. coll. 8.1, online at https://​opac.rism.info/​metaopac/​search?View=rism&id=450063015 [accessed 21 October 2018]) reinforces this musical connection between Vienna and Munich. See also Goldberg, Between Tradition and Modernity, n. 88. At about the same time (1836), the Königliche Israelitische Oberkirchenbehörde of the principality of Württemburg produced a collection of Jewish German chorales titled Gesang-​buch: Zum Gebrauch bei dem Unterrichte in Der Mosaischen Religion und zur Öffentlichen und häuslichen Gottesverehrung der Israeliten (Stuttgart: 1836; 2nd ed. 1848). This last publication does not contain a single item related to the Ashkenazi liturgical traditions and is not the first of its kind. 18. See the detailed discussion of this gap in Israel Adler, “Supplement:  Sulzer-​ Dokumente aus der Birnbaum Collection,” in Kantor Salomon Sulzer und seine Zeit:  Eine Dokumentation, ed. Hanoch Avenary in collaboration with Walter Pass and Nikolaus Vielmetti (Sigmaringen: 1985), 246–​250. 19. In Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (12 March 1839): Das Komitee des hiesigen Synagogen-​Chores geht nun, nachdem es die Subskription auf das annoncierte Werk: Vollständiger Jahrgang für Terzett-​und Chorgesänge etc. eröffnet hat, mit vielem Eifer an die Realisierung dieses sehr zeitgemässen und wünschenswerten Werkes. Es sind und werden noch immer alle möglichen Anstalten getroffen, um dasselbe so vollständig und gediegen, als nur immer geschehen kann, zu liefern, und von Seiten des Herrn Verfassers, Maier Kohn, und der Buchhandlung Alles aufgeboten, um jeden ausgesprochenen Wunsch berücksichtigen und befriedigen zu können. Allein trotz alles uneigennützigen Anstrengungen wird es doch unmöglich, an die Ausführung des Werkes selbst zu gehen, da ohne eine Zahl mindestens von 150 Subskribenten selbst die nötigsten Kosten nicht gedeckt sind, und trotz der vielseitigen Aufmunterungen und Belobungen, deren dies Unternehmen sich erfreute, bis zur Stunde die Meldungen der Subskribenten noch sehr spärlich einlaufen, und dadurch den Beginn der Herausgabe verzögern. Es wäre daher sehr erspriesslich, wenn die Herren Gemeindevorsteher und Vorsänger, die dieses Werk für ihre Gemeinden und für sich anzukaufen gedenken, die Subskription nicht zu sehr in die Länge schieben, und dadurch die baldige Vollendung des genannten Werkes bewerkstelligen helfen würden. 20.  See Geoffrey Goldberg, “Neglected Sources for the Historical Study of Synagogue Music:  The Prefaces to Louis Lewandowski’s Kol Rinnah U’t’filah and Todah W’simrah,” Musica Judaica 11 (1989–​1990), 27–​57.

132 

Edwin Seroussi

21.  See, for example, the list of subscribers to Alfred Rose’s Schire Jaakow, published in Hanover in 1914, which includes congregations in Adelaide (Australia), Baltimore, and even the Synagogue Lasry in Oran (Algeria). 22.  Sulzer’s son Joseph reprinted his father’s Schir Zion posthumously (1905) in a volume that combines pieces from the two original volumes of this work published in 1840 and 1865. In addition, special separata from Sulzer’s work appeared intermittently—​see, for instance, Shir Zion: A Friday Evening Service Arranged for Use in American Synagogues by the Society of American Cantors from the “Shir Zion” of Salomon Sulzer (New York: 1904), which appeared on the composer’s centenary. 23.  Aware of the impact of his novel printing initiative even before its publication, Sulzer specifically emphasized in his prospektus of Schir Zion that his compendium would first be published in one large volume and not in installments (“Das Werk ercheint nicht in Heften sondern wird erst nach Vollendung des Ganzen ausgegeben”). See Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums no. 38 (1840), 550. 24.  Hirsch Goldberg, Gesänge für Synagogen: Eingeführt in der Synagoge zu Braunschweig (Braunschweig: 1843). Later, expanded editions came out in 1845, 1853, and 1888. Of similar character to Goldberg’s work is the popular self-​published collection by N.H. Katz and L[evi] Waldbott, Die Traditionellen Synagogen Gesänge (Brilon: 1868). 25.  Salomon Sulzer, Kleines liturgisches Gesangbuch zum Gebrauche für Schulen, kleinere Gemeinden und die häusliche Andacht, fascicles 1–​2 (Vienna: 1860); Louis Lewandowski, Kol rinnah u’t’fillah: Ein und zweistimmige Gesänge für den israelitischen Gottesdienst (Berlin: 1871; 2nd. ed. 1882). Lewandowski’s extremely popular work was republished in Berlin in 1921 and in New York in 1954. Sections of it, printed by Isaac S. Moses, appeared in Chicago as early as 1900. See Temple Music: Book III: A Song Service in Accordance with the Union Prayer Book, for the Evening and Morning of the Sabbath, Arranged from Lewandowski’s “Kol Rinnah Ut'fillah,” for One and Two Voices, and Congregational Choir (Chicago: 1900). 26.  See the foreword to the second edition of 1882. In between these two editions of his “simplified” liturgy, Lewandowski produced Todah w’simrah (Berlin:  1882), a Sulzer-​like volume that includes his complex choral compositions. This work, too, was reprinted in the 20th century in Berlin (1921, 1930) and in New York (1954). 27.  Selig Scheuermann, Die gottesdienstlichen Gesänge der Israeliten für das ganze Jahr (Heidelberg:  1903; Frankfurt:  1912; 2nd Frankurt ed. 1926). Scheuermann was cantor at the Westendsynagogue in Frankfurt. The process of rhythmization of recitatives had a long pedigree in German ḥazanut, as is clear, for example, in the work by Katz and Waldbott (see above, n. 24). 28.  Eduard Birnbaum, Liturgische Übungen, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: 1910, 1912). 29.  Arnold Marksohn and William Wolf, Auswahl alter hebräischer Synagogal Melodien. In genauem Anschluss an ihre originale Gestalt: für das Pianoforte bearbeitet, und mit einer erläuternden Vorrede versehen (Leipzig: 1875). 30.  Naumbourg’s publication is in fact a short history of Jewish music presented through musical examples for playing on the piano. See Samuel Naumbourg, Agudat shirim: Recueil de chants religieux et populaires des Israélites:  des Temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours . . . Précédés d'une historique sur la musique des Hébreux (Paris: 1874). On the Sephardi publication, see Maurice J.  Rosenspier, Chir Akavod:  Album de chants religieux chez les Israëlites du rite Espagnol pour le piano (Varna: 1890). These Sephardi liturgical melodies arranged for piano were collected in Ruse (Bulgaria) at the initiative of the local Sephardi community. See Edwin Seroussi, “Sacred Song in an Era of Turmoil: Sephardic Liturgical Music in Southeast Europe at the Turn of the 20th Century,” Musica Judaica 21 (2016), 1–​64, esp. 37–​38. 31.  The full (and telling) title is Baal T’fillah: Oder, Der practische Vorbeter: Vollständige Sammlung der gottesdienstlichen Gesänge und Recitative der Israeliten nach polnischen, deutschen (aschk’nasischen) und portugiesischen (sephardischen):  Weisen nebst allen den Gottesdienst betreffenden rituellen Vorschriften und Gebräuchen. 32.  On Baer and his work, see Hammarlund, A Prayer for Modernity. 33.  The series was published by the Sacred Music Press, affiliated with the Hebrew Union College, in 1953 and again in 1985. 34.  For example, entries on liturgical music in The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906, edited by Cyrus Adler, are copiously illustrated with examples from Baer’s volume. See also Jakob Schönberg, Die

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

133

traditionellen Gesänge des israelitischen Gottesdienstes in Deutschland. Musikwissenschaftliche Untersuchung der in A. Baers “Baal T'fillah” gesungenen Synagogengesänge (Nuremberg: 1926); Virginia Louise Danielson, “Melodic Structure in Hebrew Liturgical Song:  An Analysis of the Weekday Prayer Melodies Contained in Abraham Baer’s Baal T'fillah (1877),” (master’s thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign, 1979); Eric Werner, A Voice Still Heard: The Sacred Songs of the Ashkenazic Jews (University Park, Pa.: 1976), passim. 35. M[ayer] Wodak, Hamnazeach:  Schule des Isr. Cantors:  Praktische und bewährte Methode zur gründlichen Erlernung aller Sing und Vortragsweisen der gesammten Synagogenliturgie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Recitatives, sowie jener Markanten Stellen, welche der Cantor mit Vorliebe Pflegt (Vienna: 1898). 36.  On Kawonowsky, see Israel Klausner, “David Kawonowsky: eḥad miḥalutzei halaḥan ha’ivri haleumi,” Tatslil 5 (1965), 133–​134. 37.  Pinchas Minkowski, “’Avodat yisrael beOdessa veshirei David,” in Hatzefirah, nos. 20–​ 22 (4–​6 February 1895); reference is in no. 22, p. 93. 38.  David Nowakowsky, Schlussgebet für Jom-​Kippur: Für Cantor Solo und gemischten Chor (Moscow: 1895). 39.  Hatzefirah (20 August 1895). Only one more work by Nowakoswky appeared during his lifetime. See David Nowakowsky, Gebete und Gesänge zum Eingang des Sabbath: Für Cantor Solo und Chor, mit und ohne Orgelbegleitung (Leipzig: 1901). 40. See, in particular, the detailed account in Emanuel Rubin, “The Music of David Nowakowsky (1848–​1921): A New Voice from Old Odessa,” Musica Judaica 16 (2001–​2002), 20–​52. The manuscripts are nowadays located in the libraries of Hebrew Union College and YIVO in New York. Only a few compositions by Nowakowsky were published in the United States, among them, Schlussgebet für Jom-​Kippur and Gebete und Gesänge zum Eingang des Sabbath, which were included in the Out of Print Classics series (see later discussion). 41.  See, for example, Michael Murphy, “Moniuszko and Musical Nationalism in Poland,” in Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture, 1800–​1945, ed. Harry White and Michael Murphy (Cork: 2001), 163–​180. 42.  All the information about Weiss is from the Polish website https://​sztetl.org.pl/​pl/​biogramy/​4128-​weiss-​jakub (accessed 4 February 2019). 43.  Gershon Ephros, whose library was vast, reprinted a piece by Weiss in his Cantorial Anthology (later discussed). 44.  Eliyohu Shnipelisky, Nishmas Eliyohu: Cantorial Recitatives, ed. Henry Lefkowitch (New York: 1949). 45.  Ibid., introduction (“In Memoriam”). 46. Alois Kaiser and William Sparger, A Collection of the Principal Melodies of the Synagogue: From the Earliest Time to the Present (Chicago: 1893). Among the earliest American publications of Jewish liturgical music, a testimony to the emergent German-​based local tradition is that of Kaiser and S. Welsch, Zimrat Yah: Liturgic Songs Consisting of Hebrew, English and German, ed. Morris Goldstein (New York: 1875). See also Judah M. Cohen, Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack (Bloomington: 2019). 47.  On the musical phenomenon of minhag or nusaḥ America and its printed sources, see Boaz Tarsi, “Observations on Practices of ‘Nusach’ in America,” Asian Music 33, no. 2 (2002), 175–​219. On the impact of printed music on the training of cantors in the United States, see Neil W. Levin, “Music at JTS,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, vol. 1, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: 1997), 717–792, esp. 762–768, 777–779. 48.  On this society, see Loeffler, The Most Musical Nation. 49.  Among the liturgical publications is that of Moshe Milner, Unsane Tojkef für Solo und Chor (St. Petersburg: 1913). 50.  Susman Kisselgoff, Aleksandr M. Zhitomirskiĭ, and Pesach Lvov, Lider-​zamelbukh far der ydisher shul un familye (St. Petersburg: 1912; rpt. 1914). 51.  The most prominent of his children was his son Ephraim, renamed Abileah, (1881–​ 1953), who was a founding member of the Saint Petersburg Society of Jewish Folk Music and, later, a key figure in the development of the musical life of British Palestine. 52.  Writing music from right to left is not a modern “Hebrewist” or “Zionist” idea, as some have claimed. We have already noticed it in Marcello’s publication as an antiquarian sign

134 

Edwin Seroussi

of privileging the direction of the Hebrew language over that of the musical score. It is also featured, somewhat paradoxically, in Israel Jacobson’s Hebräische und Deutsche Gesänge (Kassel: 1810), a revolutionary music edition of chorales in German for the first Reform Jewish school. See also Goldberg, Between Tradition and Modernity, n. 91. 53. Gerald Ganvert, “La musique synagogale á Paris á l’époque du Premier Temple Consistorial (1822–​1874)” (Ph.D. diss., Sorbonne [Paris IV], 1984). 54.  Charles Heller, “Masters of the London Blue Book—​Marking 350 Years Since the Resettlement of Jews in England,” Journal of Synagogue Music 31, no.  1 (2006), 67–​76; Alexander Knapp, “The Influence of German Music on United Kingdom Synagogue Practice,” Jewish Historical Studies 35 (1996–​1998), 167–​197, esp. 182–​183. 55.  Louis Lewandowski, Halelujoh, Halalu El B’kod’sho: For Four-​Part Chorus of Mixed Voices (New York: 1910). 56.  This division of labor is not uniquely Jewish but rather a basic feature of the early music printing industry. See Rasch, Music Publishing in Europe, 39ff. 57.  After the Bolshevik Revolution, the printing operations of the Society moved to Berlin. Two music publishing firms, Jibneh and later Juwal–​Verlagsgesellschaft für Jüdische Musik, established in 1922 and 1923, respectively, and led by major Russian Jewish musicians (among them, Joel Engel and Joseph Achron) specialized in Jewish art music rather than liturgical music. Although Engel moved to Palestine in 1924, he continued to edit (from Tel Aviv) the same line of Jewish art music on behalf of Jibneh in Berlin. See Elliot Cahn, “The Salomon Rosowsky Collection,” in Jüdische Kunstmusik im 20. Jahrhundert: Quellenlage. Entstehungsgeschichte, Stilanalysen, ed. Jascha Nemtsov (Wiesbaden: 2006), 46–​57, esp. 52–​55. 58.  Irene Heskes, Passport to Jewish Music: Its History, Traditions and Culture, 2nd ed. (Milwaukee: 2002), 197–​198. 59.  On the history of Transcontinental, see transcontinentalmusic.com/​C-​TMP-​History-​59 (accessed 21 October 2018). On Freudenthal, see Sophie Fetthauer, “Josef Freudenthal,” in Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-​Zeit, ed. Claudia Maurer Zenck and Peter Petersen (Hamburg:  2006), online at www.lexm.uni-​hamburg.de/​object/​lexm_​lexmperson_​ 00000922 (accessed 21 October 2018). 60.  Velvel Pasternak, Behind the Music: Stories, Anecdotes, Articles & Reflections (New York: 2017). For oral histories of Tara Publications, see Velvel Pasternak Oral History Interview (15 August 2011; interviewed by Hankus Netsky), Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, online at http://​archive.org/​details/​VelvelPasternak15aug2011YiddishBookCenter (accessed 6 February 2019); “The History of Tara Publications,” online at http://​jewishmusic. com/​pages/​the-​history-​of-​tara-​publications (accessed 6 February  2019). 61. Heskes, Passport to Jewish Music,  12–​34. 62.  On Scheuermann, see n.  27 above; Louis Liebling and Bernhard Jacobsohn (1846–​ 1925), Shire Bet Ya’akov–​Schire Beth Jaacob: Israelitisches Schul und Gemeinde-​Gesangbuch zum Gebrauche beim Unterricht in der Liturgie und beim Öffentlichen Gottesdienste. (Leipzig: 1880–​1881). This collection incorporates pieces by Salomon Sulzer from Vienna, Louis Lewandowski from Berlin, Jacob Freudenthal and David Hessel from Munich, and Moritz Deutsch from Breslau. 63.  On the wider historical context of the School of Sacred Music and the Out of Print enterprise, see Judah M. Cohen, The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor (Bloomington: 2009), esp. 41–​43. 64.  On the American cantorate and its publications, see Mark Slobin, Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate (Urbana: 1989). 65. There are a large number of publications by Spiro. The following are some highlights, in chronological order: Pinchas Spiro, Complete Weekday Service: For Youth and Adult Congregations (Philadelphia: 1959); idem, The Complete Service of the High Holy Days: A Musical Machzor (New York: 1991); idem, The Complete Services of the Three Festivals: A Musical Siddur (New York: 1997). 66.  Among the notable publications are the musical editions of the teaching materials by Cantor Max Wohlberg, edited by composer Charles Davidson (1907–​1996), at the Jewish Theological Seminary; the work by the distinguished Cantor Israel Alter (1901–​ 1979),

The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment

135

prepared on commission by the Cantors’ Assembly; and the publications by Cantor Adolph Katchko (1886–​1958), all of them published by the Sacred Music Press. All these cantors were born and trained in Eastern Europe and immigrated at a relatively young age to Western Europe and America; they represent a bridge between the Old and New World Ashkenazi liturgical practices. See, for example, Madrikh lenusaḥ hatefilah, compiled by Max Wohlberg, ed. Charles Davidson, 4rd ed. (New York: 2003) (originally compiled in 1952, 1978, 1980); Israel Alter, The High Holy Day Service: The Complete Musical Liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur for the Hazzan (New York: 1971); Adolph Katchko, A Thesaurus of Cantorial Liturgy, Volume 2 for the Sabbath and Three Festivals (New York: 1952; second ed. 1986). For more recent publications in this American pedagogical genre, see Jacob Ben-​Zion (“Jacky”) Mendelson, T’filot Ya’acov:  Improvizations [sic] on Schacharit l’Shabbat, ed. Noah Schall (New York: 2001); Charles Davidson, Weekday Services according to the Ashkenazi Tradition with a Complete Weekday Ma’ariv by Max Wohlberg (Elkins Park, Pa.: 2013), and the ongoing series of publications by cantor Sol Zim (b. 1939), the self-​declared “America’s Superstar of Jewish Music”: Musical Siddur Shabbat: A Sol Zim Anthology (New York: 2002); idem, Musical Machzor Rosh Hashanah: A Sol Zim Anthology (New York: 2006); idem, Musical Machzor Yom Kippur: A Sol Zim Anthology (New York: 2008). 67. Jeffrey Shiovitz, Zamru Lo:  The Next Generation:  Congregational Melodies for Shabbat (New York: 2004). More volumes appeared later. 68.  Shlomo Z. Rivlin, Shirei Shlomo, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: 1944–​1961). 69. Yehoshua L.  Neeman, Nusaḥ leḥazan:  lefi masoret haneginah haliṭait-​yerushalmit (Jerusalem: 1963). 70. The following episode is based on Naftali Loewenthal, “Spirituality, Melody and Modernity in Chabad Hasidism,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Jewish Music (April 1994), ed. Steve Stanton (London: 1997), 62–​78. 71.  According to Loewenthal, the Rebbe’s suggestion may have been sparked by a letter/​ request sent to him by a hasid named S.Z. Idel Zislin. This letter recounted how another hasid, Yechiel Halperin, had written down in musical notation all the nigunim of the Chabad court at the beginning of the 20th century. Upon learning about this deed, R. Leib Hoffman, an emissary of the previous Rebbe (R. Shalom Dovber Schneerson), not only reprimanded him for carrying out such a dangerous innovation, but also tore up all the manuscripts. Subsequently, Halperin wrote down only the opening measures of the melodies as an aide du memoire. R. Zislin requested permission to re-​transcribe these melodies, with Halperin’s assistance (ibid., 70). 72.  The letter, dated Tuesday, 15th Kislev 5690 (17 December 1929), appears to have been written, or mostly written, while R. Yosef Yitzhak was in Philadelphia. Quote by Loewenthal, ibid., 70. 73.  Hatamim (Warsaw) 5 (1936), 480–​489. 74.  R. Yosef Yitzhak, Igrot kodesh, 8:303–​304, quoted by Loewenthal, “Spirituality, Melody and Modernity,” 72. In addition, the Modzitzer Hasidim began to print nigunim in the 1940s. 75.  For biographical information on Weiser, see Paul Kavon, “Joshua Samuel Weisser,” Journal of Liturgical Music 1, no. 3 (1968), 16–​42. 76. See, for instance, Joshua Weisser, Tfilath Jeschua:  Synagogue Recitative [sic] (New York: 1915). 77.  Emile Jonas, Recueil des chants hébraïques anciens et modernes (Shirot Yisrael), exécutés au Temple du Rit Portugais de Paris (Paris: 1854); see also Alphonse de Villers, Offices hébraïques—​Rit Oriental appelé communément Rit Portugais (Paris: 1872). 78.  See Henry Léon, Airs traditionnelles et prières du Temple Israélite de Bayonne, appendix to his Histoire des juifs de Bayonne (Paris: 1893); S. Foy, Recueil des chantes hébraïques anciennes et modernes du rite Sefardi dit Portugais en usage dans le communauté de Bordeaux (Bordeaux: 1928; 2nd ed. 1958); M.J. Benharoche-​Baralia, Chants hébraïques traditionnels en usage dans la communauté sephardi de Bayonne (Biarritz: 1961). 79.  David Aharon De Sola and Emanuel Aguilar, The Ancient Melodies of the Liturgy of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews (London: 1857); a second, expanded edition was published in 1931. 80.  Jacob Bauer and Isidor Löwit, Schir Hakawod (Vienna: ca. 1889).

136 

Edwin Seroussi

81.  M. Cohen-​Linaru, Tehillot Israel, 2 vols. (Paris: 1910). 82.  Federico Consolo, Libro dei Canti d’Israele. Antichi canti liturgici del rito degli Ebrei Spagnoli (Florence: 1892). 83.  Jules S. Cremieux and Mardochee Cremieux, Zemirot Israel. Chants hébraïques suivant le rite des communautés Israelites de l'ancien Comtat Venaissin (Aix: 1885). 84.  For instance, see Leon M. Kramer and Oskar Guttman, Kol Sheherit Israel—​Synagogal Melodies (New York: 1942), which was published by the Spanish-​Portuguese synagogue in New York. 85. See, for instance, Hans M.  Krieg (ed.), Eighteen Spanish Liturgical Melodies of the Portuguese Israelitish Community [of] Amsterdam, recorded by J.H Pimentel (Amsterdam: 1952); David Ricardo, Ne’im zemirot: Selected Tunes from the Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, Amsterdam (Rishon Lezion: 1975). 86.  On the attempt to preserve the musical memory of Sephardi communities after the Holocaust, see Ovadiah Camhy (ed.), Liturgie séphardie (London:  1959). For individual anthologies, see Abraham Lopes Cardozo, Sephardic Songs of Praise according to the Spanish-​ Portuguese Tradition as Sung in the Synagogue and at Home (New York: 1987); idem, Selected Sephardic Chants (New York: 1991); Isaac Behar, Sephardi Sabbath Chants (New York: 1992); Sam Abitbol-​Mayost, The Jewish Music of Fez (Ottawa: 1992); Elio Piatelli, Canti liturgici di rito spagnolo del Tempio Israelitico di Firenze (Florence: 1992). 87.  Isaac Levy, Antología de la litúrgia judeo-​española, 10 vols. (Jerusalem: 1964–​1980). On Levy, see Edwin Seroussi, “Reconstructing Sephardi Music in the 20th Century: Isaac Levy and His Chants judeo-​espagnols,” The World of Music 37 (Jewish Musical Culture—​Past and Present) (1995), 39–​58.

Media in the Dissemination of  Land of Israel Songs Ido Ramati (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

In The Land of Promise, a Zionist propaganda film directed by Yehuda Leman and produced in 1935, there is a sequence depicting a prominent cultural phenomenon in the life of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) in the early 20th century—​ the community sing-​along.1 The sequence, which was filmed on Kibbutz Givat Brenner, features Daniel Sambursky, a composer who regularly led such events at the kibbutz. In the first scene, Sambursky is seen in the kibbutz dining hall, where he begins playing, in a supposedly spontaneous manner, the “Song of the Valley” (“Shir ha’Emek,” written by Nathan Alterman, to music composed by Sambursky). When he reaches the chorus of the second verse, he is joined by kibbutz members singing together. The following scenes show the kibbutz members singing this song at every opportunity: while peeling potatoes in the kitchen, while shaving, hanging out laundry to dry, milking cows, and collecting the harvest. The sequence thus presents the oral transmission of the song—​including both lyrics and melody—​and its integration in the kibbutz members’ daily life. Although the entire sequence is staged and portrays an idyllic reality, it also depicts a cultural phenomenon that often occurred outside the silver screen: folkish and semi-​institutionalized Hebrew songs, today identified in research as “songs of the land of Israel” (shirei eretz yisrael), were in fact a central trope in the formative years of modern Hebrew culture. Their transmission among members of the community, which in the film is entirely oral, actually involved a variety of media and usage practices. This essay discusses three ways in which land of Israel songs were disseminated in Palestine between the late 19th century and the period of early statehood: orally, in written and printed songbooks, and in sound recordings. The central medium of dissemination was songbooks, which combined oral practices with written and printed formats; in addition, there was a relatively small number of audio recordings, in which acoustic information was engraved on records. As the main medium for preserving and disseminating the land of Israel songs, songbooks constituted an integral part of everyday life: they were distributed and used by youth movements, schools, and kindergartens, and were even found at workplaces. Reflecting the life of the community, the songs also assisted in learning Hebrew, as they introduced new words Ido Ramati, Media in the Dissemination of Land of Israel Songs In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0008

138 

Ido Ramati

to the growing vocabulary of the reemerging language and implemented the correct pronunciation of Hebrew sounds. In this manner, the songs and songbooks had a formative role in building the emergent Hebrew culture.2 In seeking to answer the question of how a culture emerges and develops, I turn to the concept known as Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques)—​that is, an examination of people’s actions, the tools they use, and the concepts they develop in the process of creating culture.3 Although the term Kulturtechniken was first employed in the late 19th century, it later became part of the post-​Second World War intellectual discourse in Germany, nourished by the mutual influence of ideas from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, and media studies, and particularly indebted to the thought of Marcel Mauss, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault.4 The cultural technique envisions culture-​building as a spiral process (that is, both circular and evolving). In this process, a chain of practices and acts precedes the concepts associated with a cultural phenomenon; tools and technologies created in this process lead to new practices that involve the use of the tools, thus creating an evolving circle of culture creation. For example, people sang and created music before developing a system of notation or a complex musical theory; however, the creation of music requires tools for the production of sound, whether these are bodily organs that produce the sound, or musical instruments. Objects are thus part of the act itself, yet they also shape it to a significant degree: singing with guitar accompaniment is an act that is essentially different from unaccompanied song, both in terms of the process and in terms of the heard result. Thus, tools, machines, or media technologies enable a new form of the same cultural technique, and each tool or medium reorganizes a series of usages of itself for the production of the cultural practice. Just as computation using a calculator is essentially different from counting on the fingers or on an abacus, so singing in an acoustic studio into a microphone, and for a recording, requires different preparations and provides a completely different result compared with singing in the open without amplification. Cultural techniques belong to both nature and culture, since they mediate between man and the world, but they also position media and tools as replacements for what used to be considered “natural.”5 They expose the interplay of categories usually seen as dichotomies in relation to the human body: the human body is often seen as belonging to the world of nature, yet, simultaneously, it is the most basic element in producing cultural meaning, as evidenced by the example noted above, of the body used as an instrument for producing sound. Therefore, the idea of cultural techniques also subverts the convention of seeing man and medium as two separate, autonomous categories, since these techniques indicate the processual sequence that links the two categories: the human body is the first “tool” in any cultural technique, and it is joined by tools created by man that assist cultural production. Thus, instead of dividing a cultural act into an object versus a process of signification and interpretation; technology versus culture; or meaning versus lack of meaning, the idea of cultural techniques allows us to comprehend these concepts as a continuum that includes them all—​the tool, its operation, the creation of meaning, and the act of interpretation. All are parts of a complex whose components are interdependent and mutually variable. Such an encompassing perspective on cultural and societal phenomena takes into account cultural diversity, since it grants special emphasis to processes as well as to

Media in the Dissemination of Land of Israel Songs

139

local and particular configurations of cultural phenomena. In this, it differs from other approaches in the study of media technologies that occasionally tend to isolate technology analysis from the influence of local cultural, social, and economic elements, and therefore usually examine technologies only in their Western configuration. The concept of cultural techniques is eminently suitable for examining the formation of modern Hebrew culture and for considering its unique circumstances. The emergence of the Hebrew language—​during the course of which the Hebrew language was revived in speech and in writing—​is considered to be an unprecedented event in terms of its scope and success. Songbooks and recordings of land of Israel songs were media that took part in this revival process. In this essay, the transmission of Hebrew folksongs by these media is examined as a cultural technique that involved mechanisms of dissemination and their cultural and social meanings. The focus will be on how written or printed, recorded, and heard media were involved in the processes of production, dissemination, and activation of the human voice; how a change in the distribution medium led to a reorganization of the other factors in the cultural technique; and how the repercussions of each medium were different, albeit within a shared general framework.

Medium–​Genre Relations in the Cultural Technique of Hebrew Song The corpus of the songbook phenomenon includes thousands of written and printed items that were prepared at different professional levels: single leaves written by hand and mimeographed (stenciled), alongside booklets produced by institutions such as the Jewish National Fund (JNF) or the local educational system; postcards printed with a song or two, which were made for profit as well as for the dissemination of Zionist ideas and values in Jewish communities around the world (Figs. 8.1–​1a); personal notebooks in which songs were collected according to the tastes of the notebook owner; and other forms of print and writing.6 Through the prisms of love of the country, nature, and the seasons; the connection to the earth and its cultivation; and the process of turning Palestine into a homeland, the land of Israel songs conveyed ideological messages that referred both to the life of the Jewish community in Palestine and to the ideals that community had set for itself. In this sense, the songs were more secular than other songs in Hebrew (liturgical or hasidic) that were disseminated in writing or in print. Land of Israel songs are considered one of the points of departure of modern Hebrew culture. To date, most of the research regarding them has considered the emergence and particular features of this genre with respect to the development of folk and popular music throughout the world.7 The division formulated by Raymond Williams between high culture (created by the elites), folk culture (created by the masses), and popular culture (created by the elites for the masses), also contributes to a central issue in the study of land of Israel songs: namely, were the songs a product of folk creativity, emerging “from below” and expressing spontaneity and “authenticity,” or were they a product of popular culture, disseminated by cultural elites for the masses with institutional support, in the hopes of synthesizing an “authentic” folklore?8

Fig. 8.1–1a  Jewish National Fund (“Keren Kayemeth Leisrael”) postcard, c. 1930s, in author’s possession.

Media in the Dissemination of Land of Israel Songs

141

On the one hand, the songs were folksy: in many cases they were created spontaneously by members of the first ’aliyot (from the 1880s through the 1930s)—​whether on their way to working the fields and orchards, while working, upon returning home, during holidays and special events, or even while sitting around the campfire. Some of these songs were based on familiar melodies drawn from the folksongs of other nations, or on other Jewish folksongs to which Hebrew words were substituted. Singing was the hallmark of the ḥalutzim (pioneers), and often their singing was not accompanied by a musical instrument.9 In a majority of instances, however, land of Israel songs were written by a known poet and composer, especially with an eye to their distribution. Often the songs were commissioned by institutional bodies (such as the educational system in Palestine or the JNF) that sought to “create” a folk culture. At times, composers preferred to compose music to known texts, and in many cases, a melody was paired to lyrics only years after the lyrics had been written. With the institutionalization of the songbooks, the use of instruments considered “folksy”—​the harmonica, the mandolin, the recorder, and eventually the accordion—​became the norm as instrumental accompaniments to the singing.10 This later period, between the 1930s and the 1950s, also saw more recordings of land of Israel songs, some intended for radio broadcasting and others distributed via the private consumer market. Although the record market in Palestine was not large, it did, like the world recording industry, show characteristics of a popular culture shaped by capitalist market forces, as will be discussed more fully below. Given these characteristics, it is difficult to place the land of Israel songs decisively in one category, as either folk music or popular music. As Edwin Seroussi and Motti Regev have noted, land of Israel songs are a “dynamic genre, defined more through its functions and performance contexts than its contents, period of composition, or manner of transmission.”11 The documentation of songs in writing is a well-​known phenomenon dating from the invention of writing.12 In the early modern era, music also began to appear in print in a variety of manifestations, cultures, and genres.13 For example, research on the development of the popular music industry in the United States has explored the relationship between recordings and printed songs as two separate media in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: printed songbooks were used alongside recordings, especially to gauge the song’s popularity among future audiences before it was recorded.14 The distribution of single songs in a printed format thus played a part in the emergence of popular music as a capitalist industry, even at the stage when it was already based mostly on recordings. The printed format enjoyed central importance in the development of folk music as well, and music scholarship has extensively discussed the relationship between folk music, its collection and documentation in notes for ethnographic or other purposes, and the building of a nation-​state and a national culture.15 Inspired by Romantic notions, folk music was considered an art that captured the spirit of the people and the psyche of the nation. The collection of folk songs and their documentation in writing became an act of constructing the national culture based on these concepts. One example out of many is the way in which the collection of 18th-​century Hungarian folk songs, their systematic notation during the 19th century, and their mass distribution became part of the construction of Hungarian culture and its distinction from the

142 

Ido Ramati

Austro-​Hungarian framework.16 Similarly, in the Jewish world of the 19th century, booklets and printed music in book form were used to disseminate a range of popular or artistic songs in a variety of Jewish languages (such as Yiddish, Ladino, and Hebrew).17 During this period, various cultural and musical centers were active in the Russian Empire, in Germany, in the United States, and in Palestine, each developing in diverse societal, political, economic, and Jewish and non-​Jewish cultural contexts. The musical cultures in these centers differed, to varying degrees, in the type of audience they addressed, the audience’s socioeconomic situation, its main language, its ideological views, and in the technology available for distributing and playing the music. The phenomenon of songbooks in the land of Israel songs genre developed in the context of the center in Palestine, but it was not disconnected from parallel phenomena in other Jewish centers. All centers featured a mixture of genres and formats: Zionist and secular songs were composed and recorded in the diaspora as well as in Palestine, in Hebrew and in other languages, while songs of a more religious affiliation were also created and distributed in the four centers listed above. With the appearance of the phonograph and then the gramophone in the last quarter of the 19th century, practitioners began to record Jewish songs in a variety of languages and genres.18 The media operated in parallel and did not exclude one another; thus, at times, the same songs distributed in writing were also recorded. For example, the famous song “Havah nagilah,” written and composed by Abraham Zevi Idelsohn in Palestine, based on a hasidic folk melody, was recorded in Berlin by a choir of cantors unversed in modern Hebrew.19 Similarly, some of the songs that appear in songbooks produced by Zinoviy Kiselgof were also recorded by him in Europe; in these songbooks, liturgical songs appeared alongside hasidic and folk songs, some in Hebrew and others in Yiddish, and the recordings reflect this diversity. Such examples indicate blurred boundaries and heterogeneity rather than a clear, absolute distinction between Jewish spheres of creative expression. Within this rich world, songbooks operated alongside recordings. However, the type of medium and its nature had different repercussions on the Hebrew vocal space.

Dissemination of Land of Israel Songs in Songbooks As with the film sequence described at the beginning of this essay, a number of memoirs of early immigrants and Yishuv natives documented the distribution mechanism of land of Israel songs and explained the social function they fulfilled in the life of the community. Thus, the autobiography of Mordechai Ben Hillel HaCohen, an author, journalist, and Zionist activist who was among the founders of Tel Aviv, describes gatherings and impromptu parties held in what was then a small town. At these events, community members and their friends would meet at one of the homes, and sometimes the company “included someone who could recite songs [ . . . ] piano playing would assist the recital. That was the unforgettable Hanina Karchevski accompanying the singer.”20 HaCohen emphasizes the spontaneity of the gatherings and the improvised nature of the singing—​oral recitation from memory, sometimes accompanied

Media in the Dissemination of Land of Israel Songs

143

by a musical instrument—​but he mentions as well the name of Karchevski, an immigrant of the Second Aliyah and one of the first residents of Tel Aviv, who was also a music teacher, a director of choirs, and a composer of land of Israel songs. HaCohen’s description exemplifies the mixture of arbitrary and folk elements with the artistic activities of famous composers (or composers who would later become famous). At the same time, he notes that the dissemination of land of Israel songs was also based on, and sometimes limited to, oral communication. Oral transmission is a basic, though limited, form of communication. The notation of the songs in writing or their production in print was a means of documenting them, and this also assisted the oral performance (the reciter and singer avail themselves of written materials in order to memorize the lyrics and music). From the moment the songs were written down in songbooks, the latter became a medium of distribution within the small community (of the kibbutz or the neighborhood) and outside it (in other neighborhoods or towns, as well as abroad). A later testimony can be found in Netiva Ben-​Yehuda’s Autobiography in Poem and Song, which describes diverse practices of distribution and preservation of land of Israel songs: in many cases, their dissemination was oral, transmitted from one person to the next, even when it was based on one printed copy.21 A number of material causes were responsible for the mixture of oral and written culture. First, in many cases the level of production of the songbooks was poor, since they were stenciled and reproduced by hand; moreover, being hand-​produced, not many copies were made. In such cases, distribution began in print and was completed orally. Second, some songbooks did not include musical notes in addition to the lyrics, or else they included one line of notes at the beginning of the lyrics or on the line preceding the lyrics. This was in consequence of the fact that, for many years, there was no way of printing notes in addition to Hebrew. In addition, many of the songbook users could not read music.22 The lack of notes or an inability to read them meant that the melody had to be known beforehand (indeed, in many cases, the inscription “To the tune of . . . ” appeared), or else had to be learned by heart.23 Memorizing songs was a routine part of the praxis of their distribution, even when there was a sufficient number of songbooks. Another form of distribution was by means of copying the songs into personal notebooks. This form of transmission also enabled the preservation of songs in accordance with an individual’s personal taste. Thus, such notebooks often contain songs that were once popular and that remain popular, alongside others that were later forgotten, or that never became popular. This kind of interpersonal dissemination was often marked by changes or common mistakes in the songs, as noted by Ben-​Yehuda: “And mostly, the ‘song-​notebook’ itself would be copied from one to the other and handed on, and in that way a multitude of mistakes entered into it, as in the ‘telephone game.’ ”24 The broad range of means of distribution—​oral transmission, writing a song down in a notebook and then copying from notebook to notebook, memorizing the song at organized or spontaneous sing-​alongs, stenciled reproductions, and, finally, well-​organized and institutionalized printings—​all these attest to the fact that the songbooks were part of the fabric of daily life, appearing in a number of daily manifestations. Even after it had undergone a process of institutionalization, song distribution was still closely associated with interpersonal communication and with the network of community relations of the Yishuv. This reflects the cohesive

144 

Ido Ramati

power of the songbooks: sing-​alongs of land of Israel songs were a social activity that reinforced the Yishuv’s communal structure, and the means of transmission and distribution of the songs orally, in writing, and in print took part in shaping the relations that constituted its social network. The songbooks were a medium of documentation, distribution, and daily use whose function with regard to group cohesion operated on two parallel levels: the songs’ contents, and the very fact of their distribution and use. Many of the songs contained in the songbooks were about singing itself, about the joy it brings and the way in which it creates the group and the experience of sharing as part of community life. A familiar example appears in the words of appeal and encouragement in the song “Havah nagilah” (“Let us rejoice and be happy [ . . . ] let’s sing [ . . . ] Awake, my brothers, with a happy heart”). Apart from the reflexive level of the songs’ contents, the distribution of the songbooks and their use in company constituted a recurring act that carried cultural significance as a marker of the community’s boundaries. Whoever kept, copied, and distributed a songbook was part of a community that shared not only the texts themselves and their performance, but also the very fact of holding, repeating, memorizing them, and transmitting them to others. This was a community based on phatic relations: a community in which relations between the group members are defined not only by the message and its content but by the very fact that a message is transmitted. In such a communication framework, the songbooks also contributed to the canonization of familiar songs and to the dissemination of new songs and their transformation into hits of the period. Knowing the songs of the developing Hebrew canon was the “entry ticket” into Yishuv society. This is attested by the fact that a number of kibbutz members noted the sing-​along nights as one of the reasons for their having joined the kibbutz in the first place.25 This phatic community was also an imagined community in space. Those living in distant settlements, as well as those living closer to the heart of the growing Hebrew cultural establishment, those living in Palestine and abroad, knew that, by transmitting the songs and the songbooks, they were taking part in an act shared by them and by others whom they had never met. Through the transmission of the songs and participation in sing-​alongs, they were part of one imagined community. For example, Zionist youth movements abroad held such sing-​alongs frequently, and part of the preparation for immigrating to Palestine involved learning the songs. Holding and distributing the songbooks and the songs they contained thus also carried a symbolic dimension of yearning for the land of Israel. The “land of Israel” that appeared in the songs was often idyllic and imagined, even for those who already lived there. As in the reflexive songs, whose subject was singing itself, the common imagination that was integral to these songs had a part in the community’s cohesion processes. Sing-​along nights and songbooks were also associated with specific personalities. The description of sing-​along nights in Tel Aviv in HaCohen’s book, as well as the example from The Land of Promise, illustrate the participation of famous composers in organized and regular sing-​alongs, as well as in improvised or one-​off events. Many times, community sing-​alongs were conducted by a composer who used the opportunity to present his new songs; in addition, these frameworks fostered the development of the role of group singing leader, who, even if he was not the composer himself, was entrusted with moderating and organizing the event.26 Some of the group

Media in the Dissemination of Land of Israel Songs

145

singing leaders became famous figures as a consequence of this activity, and in some cases famous composers or performers were invited to conduct sing-​alongs (as with Sambursky, the composer Nahum Nardi, and others). Institutions also had a part in the organization of sing-​along nights as a communal cultural activity at kibbutzim, workers’ unions, or in community centers or public institutions. Institutionalized sing-​ along nights, whether in the city or in the kibbutz, took on a nostalgic role as well: they became reminders of the moments of spontaneous singing in the early stages of the land of Israel songs. The institutionalized sing-​along nights (which began to become popular in the 1930s) thus reinforced and preserved the self-​image of the Yishuv as a small, cohesive community centered around the values of work and sharing, precisely because the community had already grown (and perhaps also because, as in any nostalgic yearning, they painted the past in idyllic colors). In time, the nostalgic role of the group sing-​alongs grew more significant; decades later, when other musical and genre styles had become dominant and the penetration of foreign songs into the Israeli acoustic space had grown more pronounced, sing-​ along nights still had a canonical status in Hebrew culture, becoming a signifier of the “good old land of Israel.” Befitting their nostalgic nature, sing-​alongs added a dimension of imagination, beyond the boundaries of time, to the past and the future, conjuring a sense of belonging to the community in the past and to the idyllic values on which it was founded. In addition, they became an unbroken tradition that continues to this day.27

Technological Advances in the Mandate Palestine Arena Sound recording and replaying technologies that came into being near the end of the 19th century had a rather different societal effect. The invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison in 1877 was preceded by more than a century of experiments in the preservation and replaying of voices through mechanical means, some of which even produced machines that preceded Edison’s phonograph. The phonograph, however, was the first machine to record voices, preserve them, and play them back by means of a single, easy-​to-​operate device.28 In the decade following its introduction, Edison’s competitors invented similar devices. The gramophone, invented by Emile Berliner in 1887, introduced the flat discs that, because of their shape, were more easily replicated, thus enabling the mass reproduction of copies identical to the original and thereby ushering in the development of the recording industry.29 In the first thirty years of the 20th century, a robust recording market and a flourishing industry developed in the United States and Europe, characterized by fierce competition between the major producers. In the course of these decades, the industry grew more sophisticated in its technological developments, which included a prolongation of the time span of the recording, the growing use of condenser microphones, and the introduction of recording sessions in professional studios.30 Competition between recording companies resulted in a broad variety of recordings, and although in the early 20th century the most common and popular genre was that of non-​musical recordings (speech accents, skits, imitations, and sounds of nature), most of the musical recordings were of folk and popular music.31 With the improvement in recording

146 

Ido Ramati

methods in the early 1930s, records became clearer and sharper in sound, with a longer recording time, and the record industry expanded and became one of the major economic forces of the 20th century.32 The recording and replaying media were part of an array of other, less dominant forms of distribution that gradually entered the system of distribution of land of Israel songs; other forms included the popular theater, and later, beginning in the 1940s, modern broadcasting media, starting with radio. As described by Derek Penslar and by Tamar Liebes and Zohar Kampf, radio had a formative role in the nation-​building years, from the beginning of organized broadcasting in 1936 to the early years of the state of Israel.33 As the first broadcasting technology in Mandate Palestine, it gave voice to the Hebrew language and helped shape Israeli identity. In this context, Hebrew radio had a central role in playing and distributing the recordings of land of Israel songs—​as early as the days of the Voice of Jerusalem (1936–​1950), it played recordings of live broadcasts of song performances.34 However, until the beginning of the 1950s, radio recordings were unusual in the song distribution scene.35 To be sure, the first Hebrew recordings, made in the late 19th century, included some of the songs of the First Aliyah.36 However, even at the beginning of the British Mandate period, when there began a period of economic prosperity in Palestine that was marked in part by an increasing number of technologies and cultural products that were imported to the country, it was only on special occasions that land of Israel songs were recorded—​and even then only by famous singers such as Yehuda Har-​Melach or Bracha Tzfira, who were able to travel to places such as Egypt, Europe, or America where it was possible to make recordings. As noted, other recordings of songs in the genre were the result of private initiatives, such as Idelsohn’s, but these were rare and usually accompanied the songs’ printed distribution, or else were the result of the popularity of a song already distributed in print. Regular recordings only began in the 1940s and 1950s, following more than half a century in which land of Israel songs were disseminated mostly in writing and print. Prior to this period, there were no recording studios, and the single attempt to produce records in Palestine (Achva Records, which used cheap production materials in order to reduce costs), was unsuccessful.37 In addition, until the 1930s, there was a limited number of phonographs and gramophones in Palestine, such that a public of recording consumers was too small to support a profitable industry. The first phonograph was brought to the country by a tourist passing through at the end of the 19th century,38 and in the following years only a select few had the opportunity to listen to records. When phonographs or gramophones were acquired, the Hebrew press, whether in Palestine or abroad, would notify the public about it in a special notice; such notices attest to the rarity of the occurrence.39 In the first decades of the 20th century, the device was regarded as both foreign and magical, and even in the case of gramophones owned by (usually wealthy) members of the Jewish community or by communal organizations, listening to records was often done in company.40 Even when Tel Aviv’s coffee house scene began to flourish in the mid-​1920s, with records played on gramophones in the cafés,41 this was not enough to support a profitable local recording industry. Lacking an organized recording industry, and in light of the small scale of the market of gramophone or phonograph owners, songbooks retained their dominant status until the 1950s.

Media in the Dissemination of Land of Israel Songs

147

Different Media as Part of One Cultural Technique Both the phonograph and the gramophone recorded a physical phenomenon free of human intervention, promising the listener an auditory experience analogous to the recorded reality, yet also severing the ties between the recorded voice and its spatial and temporal context.42 Like songbooks, recordings inscribed a reality that could be heard in a different time and place, even many years later. Yet unlike the songbooks, the inscription and playing of records were performed by a machine, whereas the songbooks depended on symbolic human inscription (musical notes, words) and were deciphered by each consecutive user. Each medium, as well as transmitting the songs orally, had a different effect within the complex of the cultural technique whose aim was to make singing heard. The dissemination of songs by exclusively oral means would most probably reach fewer people, whereas printed songbooks could be passed from hand to hand and yet did not depend on geographic proximity (as mentioned above, one of the common configurations of songbooks was in the form of postcards). Moreover, their being printed on paper, not to mention their inscription in personal notebooks, resulted in the songs being preserved over time. Although variations often occurred (especially in the case of the songs recorded in notebooks), the written documentation allows us, in many cases, to follow the development of variants. The appearance of variants had to do with the fact that the songbooks constituted a potential for cultural realization, a potential that was indeed realized each time the songbook was used. They contained written instructions in lyrics and (sometimes) musical notes of how to perform the song but did not inscribe an actual performance as did the sound recordings. Sound recordings offered a singular experience in the sense that any given recording could be repeatedly played and yet always sound the same. Although printed songs and sound recordings were both products of mechanical reproduction (of the printing press or record press), the realization of the information they contained was entirely different. Recordings “locked” one specific performance, thereby acting against the creation of variants: even if they locked a song that was already “garbled” in its lyrics or melody, its distribution in record form made it the more familiar version, almost the “original” of the song. In addition, sound recordings tended to glorify the performing singer more than any other figure involved in the record’s production; different recorded performances of the same song emphasized the interpretation of the performer, and thus put him (or her) at the center. In contrast, in constituting a potential to be realized each time anew, songbooks indicated the centrality of the composer (who was sometimes also the conductor of the sing-​alongs, as mentioned above), and in any case the performance was collective, expressing the spirit of the singing group. By their very nature, gramophone records did not suit accompanying group singing, though in many cases they were employed for company listening. On the one hand, individuals singing along with the recording tended to drown out the sound of the gramophone; on the other, the actual recording, containing one specific performance, was likely to impair the dynamics of a public gathering. In this sense, gramophone records induced relative passivity in their listeners, mostly activating the listening

148 

Ido Ramati

ear,43 whereas songbooks, activating a number of senses and organs, required the audience to be active and were therefore better suited to group singing.

Epilogue When the number of gramophones grew in the Yishuv and later in the state of Israel, the influence of foreign musical trends on Hebrew music became more pronounced. Through radio, cinema, and records sales, foreign songs “invaded” the Israeli acoustic space, initiating competition between them and the land of Israel songs.44 Later, the status of land of Israel songs as the dominant genre in Hebrew music diminished, with songbooks gradually replaced by records. Western music was listened to in other contexts, such as social gatherings in private homes, and later, in concerts and in dance clubs, where audience participation was far different from the experience of sitting around the campfire or singing in a kibbutz dining hall.45 Nevertheless, though their frequency dropped and their function in Israeli culture changed, sing-​along nights did not cease. Indeed, radio broadcasts of land of Israel songs continue to preserve their status as inalienable musical assets of Hebrew culture, and land of Israel songbooks (along with songbooks featuring other musical genres, such as hasidic or liturgical songs) are still in frequent use, whether in schools, at sing-​ alongs, or at other communal events. The connection between songbooks and group sing-​alongs has not been severed, even though songbooks are more often than not replaced by slides, digital presentations, or internet video clips, and technologies of home amplification and karaoke singing have, to some extent, transformed the praxis of singing.46 The cohesive function of sing-​along nights, with their genre content and the media used in them, is on display particularly at times of distress and crisis in Israeli society, as well as during holidays and national ceremonies such as those held on Israel Independence Day; significantly, such events have multigenerational appeal. Regarded by many as the authentic local culture,47 land of Israel songs are valued not only for their melodies, but also for their invocation of values—​in particular, unity and sharing—​and for their nostalgic rendering of Israel as a small, cohesive society.

Notes 1.  The film was a highly important cultural product of the Yishuv; see Hillel Tryster, “ ‘The Land of Promise’ (1935):  A Case Study in Zionist Film Propaganda,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15, no. 2 (1995), 187–​217. It can be viewed on the YouTube channel of the Spielberg Jewish Film Archive at the Hebrew University:  youtube.com/​ watch?v=QDoD6W2z01s&t=1474s (accessed 7 November 2018). 2. Shulamit Marom, Amtzaat masoret:  hithavutah vereshit hitgabshutah shel hatarbut hamusikalit hapopularit ha’ivrit 1882–​1918 (Ramat Gan: 2005); Yael Reshef, Hazemer ha’ivri bereshito:  perek betoledot ha’ivrit haḥadashah (Jerusalem:  2004); Natan Shahar, “Hashir ha­eretz-​yisreeli bein hashanim 1920–​1950” (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 1989). 3.  Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-​Young (New York: 2015); Geoffrey Winthrop-​Young, “Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (2013), 3–​19.

Media in the Dissemination of Land of Israel Songs

149

4. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self (Amherst:  1988); Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in idem, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: 1977); Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Techniques, Technology, and Civilisation, ed. Nathan Schlanger (New York: 2006), 77–​95. 5.  Sybille Krämer, Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy (Amsterdam: 2015). 6.  The corpus to which this essay refers is based on findings collected in previous research, especially in the studies of Natan Shahar and Shulamit Marom (see n. 2), which categorize the songbooks into groups and subgroups according to content and features such as format. Songbooks can be found in archives and libraries throughout Israel, including the National Library archive, the Central Zionist Archives, and the archive of the Pinhas Lavon Institute for Labor Movement Research; a few can also be found in international libraries. In addition, many songbooks are found in private collections and in bequests. See Shahar, “Hashir haeretz-​yisreeli bein hashanim 1920–​1950.” 7.  See, for instance, Shai Burstyn, “Shinui vehamtzaah signoniyim: hamikreh shel hazemer ha’ivri,” in Omanut veumanut: zikot ugvulotomanim, ed. Nurith Kenaan-​Kedar and Asher Ovadia (Tel Aviv: 2003), 3–​9; Talila Eliram, Bo, shir ’ivri: shirei eretz yisrael—​heibetim muzikaliyim veḥevratiyim (Haifa:  2006); Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel (Berkeley: 2004). 8. Raymond Williams, “The Analysis of Culture,” in idem, The Long Revolution (London: 1961), 57–​70; Philip V. Bohlman, Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe, 2nd ed. (New York), 60. 9.  Shahar, “Hashir haeretz-​yisreeli bein hashanim 1920–​1950,” 49–​51, 69–​70. 10.  Ibid., 112, 125. 11. Edwin Seroussi and Motti Regev, Musikah popularit vetarbut beyisrael (Raanana: 2013), 77. 12. See, for instance, Ann D.  Kilmer and Miguel Civil, “Old Babylonian Musical Instructions Relating to Hymnody,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 38, no.1 (Spring 1986), 94–​98; Martin Litchfield West, “The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts,” Music & Letters 75, no. 2 (1994), 161–​179. 13.  Other than songbook, the following terms are among those used in research concerning the distribution of popular songs in print: sheet music, songster, and broadsides—​see, for example, Philip V.  Bohlman, Jewish Music and Modernity (Oxford:  2008), 100–​102; Shahar, “Hashir haeretz-​yisreeli bein hashanim 1920–​1950,” 18; Calvin Elliker, “Toward a Definition of Sheet Music,” Notes, Second Series 55, no. 4 (1999), 835–​859. 14.  Calvin Elliker, “Sheet Music Special Issues: Formats and Function,” Notes, Second Series 53, no.  1 (1996), 9–​ 17; Charles Hamm, Yesterdays:  Popular Songs in America (New York: 1979). 15.  See for example Bohlman, Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe. 16.  An example of the function of folk songs in the construction of modern secular Turkish culture recalls the Hebrew case, both in terms of the songs vis-​à-​vis the tension between Eastern and Western elements in the Turkish identity, and in terms of the historical period. See Koray Değirmenci, “On the Pursuit of a Nation: The Construction of Folk and Folk Music in the Founding Decades of the Turkish Republic,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 37, no.1, (June 2006), 47–​65; Bohlman, Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe, 68; cf. Mária Domokos and Katalin Paksa, “The Hungarian Folk Song in the 18th Century,” Studia Musicologica 49, nos. 1–​2 (March 2008), 105–​125. 17.  See the essay by Edwin Seroussi in this volume. 18.  Eliyahu Hacohen, “Hataklit ha’ivri, sivuvim rishonim: perakim bediskografiyah shel hazemer ha’ivri,” in Hakol zahav: hazemer ha’ivri—​hakol ’al hashirim, hazamarim, halahakot, habitzu’im vehahaklatot, ed. Yossi Mar-​Haim and Yair Stavi (Tel Aviv: 1993). 19. Marom, Amtzaat masoret. 20.  Mordechai Ben Hillel HaCohen, Olami, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: 1928), 179. 21.  Netiva Ben-​Yehuda, Otobiografiyah beshir vezemer (Jerusalem:  1990). Many additional historical testimonies regarding the songs’ means of distribution can be found in the

150 

Ido Ramati

comprehensive studies by Eliram, Bo, shir ’ivri, Marom, Amtzaat masoret,; and Shahar, “Hashir haeretz-​yisreeli bein hashanim 1920–​1950.” 22.  Jehoash Hirshberg, Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–​1948: A Social History (Oxford: 1995); Shahar, “Hashir haeretz-​yisreeli bein hashanim 1920–​1950,” 52–​59. 23.  Shahar, “Hashir haeretz-​yisreeli bein hashanim 1920–​1950” cites many examples of songbooks containing referrals to well-​known songs whose melody was familiar (see, for instance, ibid., 47, 59). 24.  Ben-​Yehuda, Otobiografiyah beshir vezemer, 5, 26. 25.  Shahar, “Hashir haeretz-​yisreeli bein hashanim 1920–​1950,” 87. 26.  Ibid., 105–​106. 27. Ibid., 93. Eliram reviews the sociological and cultural perspective of this phenomenon—​from the definition of sing-​along as “secular prayer,” to its link with the idea of the Israeli metaphorical “campfire” (Bo, shir ’ivri, 117–​124). 28. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past:  Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: 2003). 29.  Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph: From Edison to Stereo (New York: 1965). One of the advantages of the gramophone over the phonograph was the durability of the flat gramophone discs, compared to the cylindrical records played on a phonograph. In addition, gramophone records were characterized by better-​quality sound; see Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (London: 1995). 30.  The introduction of electronics to recording studios led to changes in the means of recording. Between 1912 and 1929, the recording time span was increased to 40 minutes (that is, up to 20 minutes on each side). The birth of the LP record in 1931 dramatically changed the information storage capacity (more information was recorded in less space) and the distribution capacities (since one record contained more information, it was easier to distribute than a number of records containing the same amount of information). See ibid., 56–​66. 31.  The relative scarcity of musical recordings was due to a number of factors—​among them, the short recording duration (about two minutes, prior to the early 20th century) and the mediocre quality of the actual recording. These two factors discouraged practitioners of high culture such as opera singers and famous performers from making recordings. In addition, in the case of the phonograph, there was no means of mechanically reproducing a record, such that a performer had to perform a piece several times over, with a number of phonograph devices operating simultaneously. A real revolution in the field of music replication came about only when Emile Berliner invented a method of creating a master copy of a record that could easily be duplicated. See James Porter, “Documentary Recordings in Ethnomusicology: Theoretical and Methodological Problems,” Association for Recorded Sound Collections–​Journal 6, no. 2 (1974),  3–​16. 32. Chanan, Repeated Takes. 33.  Tamar Liebes and Zohar Kampf, “Hello! This is Jerusalem Calling”: The Revival of Spoken Hebrew on the Mandatory Radio (1936–​1948),” Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture 29, no.2 (2010), 137–​158; Derek Jonathan Penslar, “Transmitting Jewish Culture: Radio in Israel,” Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 1 (Fall 2003), 1–​29. 34.  Shahar, “Hashir haeretz-​yisreeli bein hashanim 1920–​1950,” 101. Israel’s national radio station, the Voice of Israel (Kol yisrael), was established in 1948. 35.  Motti Regev, “Mi ‘Gamal gamali’ ve’ad ‘Tipex,’ ” Panim 5 (1998), 67–​72. 36.  HaCohen, “Hataklit ha’ivri, sivuvim rishonim.” 37.  A news item published in Davar (16 December 1948) reveals that even when good recording means became available in the country, it was impossible to produce records because there was no way of duplicating them. The pressing was therefore done in America; see also HaCohen, “Hataklit ha’ivri, sivuvim rishonim”; Hirshberg, Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–​1948, 156. 38.  HaCohen, “Hataklit ha’ivri, sivuvim rishonim.” 39.  See, for example, a news item in Hatzvi (1 January 1897), the newspaper published by Eliezer Ben-​Yehuda in Jerusalem, and the column “Be’eretz hakodesh” in Hamelitz (published in Russia) (19 April 1899).

Media in the Dissemination of Land of Israel Songs

151

40.  In 1908, the newspaper Hapo’el hatza’ir reported that a gramophone was played at the first anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Organization; in 1921, Doar hayom reported on two acquisitions of gramophones by American philanthropists: in June, a gramophone was sent to the Tel Hai group “in recognition of their excellence in protecting the settlement in its days of siege” (23 June 1921), and in October a gramophone was donated to the Jerusalem Institute for the Blind (14 October 1921). 41.  Anat Helman, Or veyam hekifuhah: tarbut Tel Avivit bitkufat hamandat (Haifa: 2006), 46. 42.  Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Mass.: 2006); Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines:  Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: 1999). 43. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New:  Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.:  2006); Mark Katz, Capturing Sound:  How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: 2004). 44.  Shahar, “Hashir haeretz-​yisreeli bein hashanim 1920–​1950,” 108. 45.  Regev, “Mi‘Gamal gamali’ ve’ad ‘Tipex.’ ” 46.  Presentations and video clips of land of Israel songs are today distributed via email and websites devoted to the preservation of Israeli culture. Examples of sites that hold, preserve, and disseminate songbooks in diverse formats are “Nostalgia Online” (nostal.co.il) and zemereshet.co.il. In addition, the National Sound Archive (Jerusalem) contains a large collection of songbooks and recordings of songs in the land of Israel genre, online at: web.nli.org.il/​sites/​ NLI/​Hebrew/​infochannels/​Catalogs/​library%20catalogs/​Pages/​aboutmusicatalogue.aspx (accessed 7 November 2018). 47.  For a sociological study of how the songs are regarded by different segments of Israeli society see Eliram, Bo, shir ’ivri.

Digitization of Jewish Nahdah Texts: “Knowing the Enemy” or Preserving a Heritage? Guy Bracha (BAR-​ILAN UNIVERSITY)

In 1909, an Arabic book was published in Egypt under the title Al-​Talmud: asluhu wa-​tasalsuluhu wa-​adabuhu (The Talmud:  Its Origin, Transmission, and Ethics).1 As will later be discussed in more detail, this volume, containing a translation of the mishnaic tractate Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) was intended to be the first of a multivolume translation of the Talmud into Arabic. However, the chief rabbi of Cairo, R. Raphael Aharon ben S ​ himon, objected to the book, and this led to its being disregarded by the Jewish public.2 Ninety-​six years later, the nearly forgotten work was republished in a new edition and disseminated widely on the internet. Today, those searching online (in Arabic) for download links to the book are likely to get hundreds of different results. Al-​Talmud was part of a Jewish literature in literary Arabic that existed in the Arab Middle East between the end of the 19th century and 1948. This literature comprised translations of Jewish holy books from Hebrew, original and translated religious books, Jewish historical research, and poetry and other literary works. It was influenced both by the Arab enlightenment movement, al-​nahdah al-​arabiyya (the Arabic awakening) and by European Jewish intellectual movements. This essay discusses and analyzes the Jewish literary movement known as the Jewish nahdah.3 The intellectuals of the Jewish nahdah identified with two distinctly different forms of nationalism: on the one hand, local nationalism (wataniyya), which was connected with Arabic culture and, on the other, the Jewish nationalist movement—​Zionism.4 Over time, the Arab–​Jewish conflict led to the failure of their efforts. Both Arab nationalists and Zionists regarded their works as a betrayal of national values, the Arab nationalists because of their support for the Jewish state in Palestine, and the Zionists because of their assimilation in Arabic culture and their abandonment of the Hebrew language. Moreover, many rabbis did not approve the practice of translating holy books into literary Arabic. In consequence, with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Jewish nahdah came to an end. During the last two decades, however, interest in this neglected literature has significantly increased. Many of the books of the Jewish nahdah have been digitized and uploaded to digital libraries, though only a few can be found in Jewish digital Guy Bracha, Digitization of Jewish Nahda Texts In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0009

Digitization of Jewish Nahdah Texts

153

libraries. Rather, almost all of them have been digitized by Arabic publishing ventures and are available in Arabic digital libraries or through downloads found on various Arabic sites.5 In some cases, books have been digitized in their original format; in others, what appears online are new editions featuring a redesigned cover and often an introduction written by the publisher or by scholars (mainly from Egyptian universities) in the field of Jewish studies. Although each individual book can be found on its own, digital librarians and website content administrators often group Jewish nahdah works in various categories. In accordance with Avriel Bar-​Levav’s notion of “library awareness,” each category constitutes a specific corpus of knowledge.6 Thus, an online search for Jewish nahdah books reveals that, in different libraries and publishing websites, the same book can be assigned to different categories, resulting in varying perceptions of the work. To date, research concerning Arabic digital libraries has focused on technical issues, political matters, and internet usage habits in Arab countries.7 The aim of this essay is to examine how three representative texts are presented to the reader. I argue that, apart from the manner in which each of these books is categorized, their newly designed covers, introductions, or illustrations are a means of promoting a specific agenda; even if a text remains unchanged, it can be manipulated by means of framing devices such as these.8 The books under examination deal with three main aspects of the Jewish nahdah: Zionism (Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi), Judaism (Al-​Talmud), and academic research (Ka‘b al-​Akhbar). These are the most popular of the online Jewish nahdah volumes, and each has been scanned in several digital versions. After analyzing the declared objectives of the publishers and digital libraries that dealt with each work, I will examine the category to which each was assigned and, more important, what other works were included in this category.

Yaqzat al-​Alam al-​yahudi Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi (The Awakening of the Jewish World) was published in Cairo in 1934. Little is known about its author, Elie Levy Abu Assal, though it is reasonable to assume that he was involved with the Jamiyyat al-​shubban al-​yahud al-​ misriyin (Society of Young Egyptian Jews), established in that year, whose members promoted both Zionism and the local Egyptian nationalist movement.9 Abu Assal’s book examines the history of Zionism, reaching back several millennia to the time of Moses, “the first to come up with the idea of Jewish nationalism” (al-​qawmiyya al-​yahudiyya).10 Its theme is that Egypt in particular, and the Middle East in general, played an essential role in the evolution of the Zionist movement. At the beginning of his work, Abu Assal explains that his book is aimed at Jews who are trying “to solve the enigma of Zionism, its creation and its spread.”11 Since 2007, Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi has been uploaded to the internet in a number of versions, as detailed below.

154 

Guy Bracha

Bibliotheca Alexandrina The original edition of Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi was scanned by Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), a public library sponsored by the Egyptian government. According to its website, Bibliotheca Alexandrina is “dedicated to recapturing the spirit of openness and scholarship of the original Bibliotheca Alexandrina.”12 While not the library’s only project, digitization is accorded importance “as a means of preserving, managing, and disseminating information and knowledge . . . thus promoting greater understanding and tolerance between cultures.”13 Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi was cataloged by the library under two subject headings:  “Jews-​history” (Yahud-​ta‘rikh) and “Judaism-​history” (Yahudiyya-​ta‘rikh). The first category contains a total of 294 books; the second, 94. These works, in turn, can be classified in one of two groups. The larger group comprises academic studies written in the Arab world (mostly in Egypt) and dealing with various aspects of the Jewish people—​history, society, religious Zionism, and the state of Israel. The second group contains books and studies that are used as primary sources for these studies. Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi is one of the Jewish nahdah works within this group of primary sources.14 Among other primary sources are works by two Arab Christian authors who had close ties with local Jewish communities, Shahin Makarius from Cairo and Yusuf Rizqallah Ghanima from Baghdad,15 and Jewish works translated into Arabic, such as Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities16 and Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat.17 In addition, there are numerous antisemitic works, some originally written in Arabic and others translated into Arabic (among the latter are The International Jew, attributed to Henry Ford, and Gustave Le Bon’s Rôle des juifs dans la civilization).18 There are also translated anti-​Zionist studies authored by Jews, including Question juive, by Ilan Halevi (a French journalist who was also a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization); Isaac Deutscher’s The Non-​Jewish Jew and Other Essays; and Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion, which argues that Judaism, as reflected through the Talmud and in works by Maimonides and other prominent rabbis, is a form of racism.19 Finally, there are a number of translations of non-​polemical works by Jewish scholars that deal with the history of Jews in Islamic lands, such as Joel Beinin’s The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry and Daniel Schroeter’s The Sultan’s Jew.20 The polemical anti-​Jewish or anti-​Zionist nature of many of the sources is understandable, given that most Arab scholars specializing in the field of Jewish studies perceive their discipline as an instrument in the Arab–​Jewish struggle. Their declared goal is to confront Zionist historiography.21 In general, Arab research can be characterized either as nationalist (examining Jewish history from the Arab point of view); leftist (analyzing Zionism in the broader context of Western imperialism); or Islamic, with each approach making use of a different set of sources.22 As a government-​sponsored library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina mainly reflects a mainstream nationalist rather than an Islamic approach. Works authored by prominent Islamic scholars such as Ahmad Shalibi have generally not been digitized, nor have many of the primary sources they use. Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi, however, easily finds a place in nationalist Arab scholarship, as it deals with the history of Zionism among Jews of Egypt in the modern period.

Digitization of Jewish Nahdah Texts

155

Internet Archive: The Elsayed Taha Collection Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi was also uploaded onto the Internet Archive (IA), one of the largest American internet libraries, as part of the Elsayed Taha collection.23 The collection comprises 389 works in Arabic, only a few of which deal with Jews or Judaism—​apart from Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi, there are also original versions of Taʼrikh al-​Israʼilyyin (The History of the Jews ) by Shahin Makarius, which appeared in 1909, and an antisemitic volume authored by Habib Faris, Surakh al-​bari’ fi buq al-​ huriyya (The Cry of the Innocent with the Trumpet of Freedom), from 1890.24 Apart from their age, the common denominator of these three books is their site of publication, Egypt. This is true of many other books in the collection, more than half of which deal in some manner with the country. Thus, Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi is presented as the work of an Egyptian Jew and the emphasis is on its being an Egyptian (rather than Jewish) book.

Noon Library A second version of Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi was produced by a Saudi digital library, Noon. According to its website: Our goal is to ensure that all segments of the community receive information in the easiest possible way through our e-​library. Our quest is to utilize all available means to effectively convey our ideas . . . . [to] continue being a link in the e-​book world and a channel for developing ideas. . . .[A]‌nation that reads is a nation that progresses. . . .25

Noon also emphasized the dissemination of books via mobile devices and noted that it was affiliated with Al-​Mufakkirin al-​Judud (The New Thinkers), “a company specializing in e-​publishing and e-​learning.”26 As with Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi was featured in its original edition from 1934. However, the original cover of the book was not scanned. Instead, its title page appeared in orange, as was the case with all the other books found in the library. The book was cataloged under the heading of “heritage books” (kutub turath). This category included books representing a variety of subjects, not necessarily related to Jews. Moreover, in the download page of Yaqzat al-​alam al-​ yahudi there were icons of six “similar books,” none of which was written by a Jewish author or which dealt with Jews. Indeed, a number of other books in the Noon digital library that were written by Jews—​among them, Murad Farage, another writer associated with the Jewish nahdah—​were not cataloged as heritage books but rather as “rare books” (kutub nadira).27 It appears that the Saudi digital librarians ascribed little importance to the actual content or subject matter of Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi. Rather, the book’s significance seems to have resided mainly in its being an older work written in Arabic. The “heritage” aspect of Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi appears to have referred to Arabic rather than Jewish heritage.

156 

Guy Bracha

Historical Society of Jews from Egypt Based in New York, the Historical Society of Jews from Egypt (HSJE) is “designed to [gather and] provide historical and current information on the Jews [from] Egypt, one of the most ancient established societies in the world.”28 The site’s digital library contains an eclectic collection of books, documents, newspaper clippings, and articles, among them the original 1934 edition of Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi. In an online introduction to the book, which he had scanned (“it was time to make some order in my library”), Abe Mourad, who now lives in Melbourne, notes that “Abou Asal was well aware of the risks involved [but] nevertheless he was advocating the need for a homeland for the Jewish people. He believed in the tolerance and hospitality of the Arab people, and cited in many of the contents, how the Jews formed an integral element in the Orient.”29 This presentation seems close to Abu Assal’s own description of his work.

“Know Your Enemy” In 2003, the Cairo-​based Dar al-​Fadila publishing house published a new version of Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi as part of the series titled Know Your Enemy (i‘raf aduwwaka). Apart from replacing the original cover with a more modern design and omitting the title page, there are no changes to the book. Online, this is the most widespread version of the work. It is found in particular on Islamic library sites, the most prominent of which is Waqfeya, which features an upload under the category “books of contradiction, religions, and polemics” (kutub farq, wal-​Adyan wa-​rudud). Included in this category are polemical books against Christianity, Judaism, Communism, Freemasonry, and Shi‘a secularism—​basically, any ideology or faith other than Sunnite Islam. Most of the books dealing with Judaism, including academic volumes by scholars such as Shalibi30 and primary sources, have a clearly Islamist slant. Unlike the other libraries, Waqfeya contains only works that were written originally in Arabic; it has no translated works. In addition, almost without exception, the authors are either Muslims or else Jews who converted to Islam (for instance, Al-​Samaw‘al ibn Yahya al-​Maghribi).31 In this sense, Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi is an exception to the rule; it is likely that the main reason for its inclusion is its being part of the “know your enemy” series. Indeed, the series title, along with the threatening cover, showing a pile of flags (symbolizing the Jews taking over the world) and a Star of David dripping with blood, and the fact of its being written originally in Arabic, makes it appear as though Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi is itself an anti-​Jewish book.

Al-​Talmud As noted at the beginning of this essay, Al-​Talmud:  asluhu wa-​tasalsuluhu wa-​ adabuhu, containing a translation of Pirkei Avot, was intended to be the first of a multivolume translation of the Talmud into Arabic. The idea for this project came from

Digitization of Jewish Nahdah Texts

157

Jurji Zaidan, a leading Arab thinker who was the founder and editor of the influential journal Al-​Hilal. Zaidan suggested that the translation be undertaken by Shimon Moyal, a Jaffa-​born physician and journalist who had close ties to a number of prominent Arab thinkers.32 The basic aim of the Al-​Talmud project was to refute widespread antisemitic attacks against the Talmud—​and, by extension, against Judaism—​in the Arab world.33 With this in mind, Moyal dedicated his translation to Arab readers (al-​ natiqin bil-​dad), expressing his hope that the translation would aid in removing misunderstanding between Arabs and “the most ancient race . . ., the Jewish race.”34 To date, the original edition has not been scanned. In 2004, the Dar al-​Thakafa lil-​ Nishr publishing house, in Cairo, printed a new edition of the book. The publisher’s declared target was to make a scholarly work more accessible to the general public.35 The book came out with a newly designed cover and introductions written by two Hebrew studies scholars from Ain Shams University in Cairo, Rashad Abdullah al-​ Shami and Layla Ibrahim Abu al-​Majd. Another version was published in Damascus the following year, featuring an introduction by Suhayl Zakar, a Syrian historian. This version is available only at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina or in digital stores.36 The 2004 edition, however, has had widespread distribution via digital libraries and download sites, in two different versions described below.

Kotobarabia The official digital copyrighted version of Al-​Talmud was made by Kotobarabia (lit., Arab books), an Egyptian company that was the first in the Arab world to convert print books into e-​books.37 According to its website: “Our mission is to create a single web-​ based source for Arabic literature, knowledge and wisdom, and to make this source available to Arabic speakers and enthusiasts the world over. Our vision is to build a Library of Alexandria that cannot be burned down.”38 In the case of Al-​Talmud, the 2004 version was not scanned but rather retyped and saved as a PDF file. Although it is possible to search within the file, it has no page numbers. The entry to the book collection of Kotobarabia is available only to libraries and organizations on an annual licensing basis. However, many of the company’s books are disseminated via digital libraries.

Maktabtuka Ma‘ka Until recently, Maktabtuka Ma‘ka (lit., your library with you) was one of the largest free Arabic digital libraries.39 Al-​Talmud was cataloged there under “Judaism.” Under the download link of the book was a recommendation to download four similar books (kutub mushabiha). These were as follows: a book authored by an anti-​Zionist leftist activist, Assaf Sharon, titled The Jewish Terrorists; Baha’ al-​Amir’s conspiracy book The Jews and the Freemasons; Arfa Abduh Ali’s study on the Jews of Egypt; and Kamilya Abu Jabal’s study on the Jews of Yemen.40 In all, the “Judaism” category listed 41 books, some of which appeared twice in different editions. Twenty-​eight

158 

Guy Bracha

were academic works, of which six were clearly Islamic in nature, twenty were leftist, two were nationalist, and two were undefined. The primary sources consisted of nine books written by Jews, all translated from other languages into Arabic, with the exception of a work by Israel Ben Zeev (Wolfenson), one of the Jewish nahdah intellectuals, titled Ta‘trikh al-​Yahud fi bilad al-​Arab (History of the Jews in the Arab Lands).41 Finally, the “Judaism” category included four antisemitic books, among them a work of 1899 titled Al-​kanz al-​marsud fi qawa‘id al-​Talmud (The Awaited Treasure concerning the Laws of the Talmud), which was one of the books Al-​Talmud sought to refute.42 Overall, Maktabtuka Ma‘ka presented a demonic image of Judaism. This was reflected both in the content of the books chosen by its librarians and in the visual image of their covers, even when the books themselves were non-​polemical. The Arabic edition of R. Adin Steinsaltz’s introduction to the Talmud, for instance, featured a burning Star of David on a black background.43 Although the cover of the 2004 edition of Al-​Talmud did not depict Jewish or antisemitic symbols, its blood-​red color was well-​suited to the generally demonic visual impression of books in Maktabtuka Ma‘ka’s “Judaism” category.

Sur al-​Azbakeya A second version of Al-​Talmud was the low-​quality scanning in PDF format that was produced by the digital library Sur al-​Azbakeya, named after a famous secondhand bookstore in Cairo. As of early 2019, Sur al-​Azbakeya, which had billed itself as a “forum for sharing and publishing e-​books and searching for diverse books,” no longer had a website (it had previously been found on the books4all.net site). During its online existence, Sur al-​Azbakeya had assigned Al-​Talmud to a category called “religions and faiths” (adyan wa-​madhahib), containing 198 books. There is much similarity between this category and that of Waqfeya. Both of them list books that deal with a variety of non-​Muslim religions, mainly Judaism and Christianity, as well as non-​Sunnite branches of Islam. Both of them also reflect the Islamic stream of Jewish studies, although Sur al-​Azbakeya, unlike Waqfeya, contains many translations of Western works, including those of Jewish and/​or Israeli writers. The library is characterized by a large number of conspiracy books. Many of these are concerned with the Freemasons and its connections with Judaism and Christianity; among them are non-​academic books, including thrillers such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code.44 The category also contains several other books about the Talmud, most of them Arabic research studies from the Islamic stream that are marked by a clearly polemical, anti-​Jewish tone.

Al-​Muhtadin al-​Islamiyya li-​Muqarana al-​Adyan The second version of Al-​Talmud was uploaded as well to the al-​Muhtadin al-​ islamiyya li-​muqarana al-​adyan Sunnite library (whose name roughly translates

Digitization of Jewish Nahdah Texts

159

as “rightly guided by the Islamic way for comparative religion”). According to its website, the library is authorized by Abd al-​Aziz ibn Baz, the former mufti of Saudi Arabia, to upload books. The aim of the library, “to provide those who cannot obtain the paper version, and lead them to the lust for knowledge everywhere,” pertains to those engaged in Sharia studies.45 Al-​Talmud is classified under the category “Judaism”; as of 2017, this category listed 273 books, among them many works of Jewish nahdah intellectuals such as Murad Farage, Mas‘ud Hai ben Shim‘on, and Israel Ben-Zeev. The category included as well translations of Western and Israeli works that challenged Judaism and Zionism, among them, a volume on biblical archeology by the French Dominican priest/​archeologist Roland de Vaux and The Bible Unearthed, by archeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.46 Among the other authors featured in this category were the aforementioned Israel Shahak and Yaakov Malkin, who attacked Judaism from a secular point of view.47 There were also a number of Islamic authors who wrote against Judaism, including Ibn Hazm al-​Andalusi and an apostate Jew, Nissim Ahmad Sussa.

Ka‘b al-​Ahbar This book deals with Ka‘b al-​Ahbar, a rabbi from Yemen who lived in the age of the prophet Muhammad and converted to Islam. The author, Israel Ben-Zeev (Wolfenson), who was born in Jerusalem, was a scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies. He earned two doctoral degrees, the first, in 1928, from Dar al-​Ulum in Cairo, and the second from Frankfurt University in 1933. Ka‘b al-​Ahbar is based on the second dissertation. It was written in German under the title Ka‘b al-​Aḥbār und seine Stellung im Ḥadīṯ und in der islamischen Legendenliteratur (Ka‘b al-​Ahbar and His Place in the Hadith and in the Islamic Legend Literature) and was translated into Arabic sometime before 1976. Ben-Zeev was a prominent member of the Jewish nahdah circle in Egypt. After he completed his Ph.D. studies in Germany, he returned to Egypt, where he was one of the founders of the Society of Young Egyptian Jews in 1934. Therefore, even though the book was not originally written in Arabic, it reflects the ideas of the Jewish n­ ahdah. The translation into Arabic was made by a Jerusalem-​based translator, Mahmud Abasi. Its title in Arabic was Ka‘b al-​Ahbar (without any subtitle). On the first page the title appears as well in Hebrew (Ka‘b al-​Ahbar: yehudim veyahadut bamasoret hamuslemit) and in English, as Ka‘ab [rather than Ka‘b] al-​Ahbar: Jews and Judaism in the Islamic Tradition. The subtitle in both versions reflects the book’s objective to show the influence of Judaism on Islam. There are three editions of this book. The original 1976 edition is the most widespread in the free libraries. Another edition was produced by the Academic Center for Research in Beirut, on 2013. It is based on the original edition, with an introduction written by the head of the center, Nasir al-​Ka‘bi and a new cover featuring a painting by John Frederick Lewis that depicts Bedouins and their camels; in 2016, a digitized

160 

Guy Bracha

version of this edition was produced. A third version of the book, published by Dar al-​Babylon of Jbeil (2010), is described below.48

Al-​Kutub al-​Mamnu‘a Al-​Kutub al-​Mamnu‘a (lit., the forbidden books) is a free library. On its Facebook page, it is noted that this is “the first website specializing in forbidden books in the Arab world.”49 The site lists many books that critique the Islamic consensus, such as these of Farag Foda, an Egyptian thinker who advocated the separation of religion from the state, who was assassinated by members of the Islamist group al-​Gama‘a al-​Islamiyya.50 Ka‘b al-​Ahbar is cataloged under “historical studies” (dirasat ta‘rikhiyya), part of an eclectic collection of books dealing with various aspects of Islam, Judaism, ancient religions, gender, and general history. Although Al-​Kutub al-​Mamnu‘a uploaded the 1976 edition of Ka‘b al-​Ahbar, its description of the book refers to the 2010 edition produced by Dar al-​Babylon of Jbeil (Byblos), Lebanon, as part of a book series titled al-​Yahudiyya bi-​Aqlam Yahudiyya (Judaism [written] by Jewish Pens). The declared aim of the series, according to the publisher, was to provide an academic perspective on Judaism: It would be easy to call this series “know your enemy,” but its goal is to overcome the ideological and demagogical . . . in order to prepare for the world of tomorrow. The most important principle in the field of comparative religion is to learn about religion from the inside. . . . There is no way to understand it by observation from the outside. How does the Jew see his religion? How does he interpret it and express it? How does he observe the religious commandments? How does he see his history and describe it? How does he establish what is the [religious] law, adjusting it to the contemporary world? How does he teach his children the principles of religion?... The goal of this series is not to defend Judaism in any way, nor to turn it into demagogic propaganda. The goal is to learn about the human spirit. Even in court, a defendant is required to introduce himself before the trial. The same applies to the humanities.51

At the beginning of the book, there is a long essay, “Al-​Ithr al-​Yahudi fi al-​Hadith al-​Nabawi wal-​Tafsir” (The Jewish influence in the Hadith and the Tafsir), by the religious studies scholar, Lwiis Saliba. According to Saliba, the purpose of this work was to settle the argument between those who accuse Ka‘b of entering into Islam in order to corrupt it, and those historians and modernists who claim that his conversion to Islam was sincere.52 Including this book in a series dealing with Judaism indicates that Dar al-​Babylon regards Ka‘b al-​Ahbar as a Jewish, rather than Islamic, work.

Sooq al-​Okaz Sooq al-​Okaz is a free Jordanian library, named after a famous market in Mecca that, before the rise of Islam, was a major center for social and cultural activity of the Arab tribes.53 The library has a religious Muslim orientation, and Ka‘b al-​Ahbar is

Digitization of Jewish Nahdah Texts

161

cataloged there under the category “Judaism.” As with the listings of other Islamic libraries discussed above, this category lists works that are characteristic of the Islamic stream of scholarship, along with the usual source texts. As is not the case with some of the other Islamic libraries, the “Judaism” category at Sooq al-​Okaz does not contain polemical or antisemitic books, research works of a conspiratorial nature, or anti-​Zionist books. Rather, it contains many titles of works written by Jews; apart from Ka‘b al-​Ahbar, it includes Ben-Zeev’s Ta‘trikh al-​Yahud fi Bilad al-​Arab and several works by Murad Farage. Given the non-​polemical nature of the category, Ka‘b al-​Ahbar can be perceived as an objective work of scholarship rather than as a weapon against non-​Muslim religions.

Missionary Libraries Two additional online libraries featuring Ka‘b al-​Ahbar are each affiliated with Christian Arab missionary organizations. The first, Muhammadanism, is a Canadian Christian Arab missionary site whose declared purpose is to show that “true Islam” is tolerant: Central to both the Christian and Muslim viewpoint is the idea that Allah (or God) is the answer to life’s three major questions. Christians and Muslims accept the existence of Allah, and we both believe that we ought to live in submission to His revealed Will. So, there are areas of overlap between Christian and Muslim beliefs.54

Ka‘b al-​Ahbar, which attests to the Jewish influence on Islam, fits into this point of view. The books in the library were not cataloged by subject, but by language. Apart from this book, there are many studies and source books that deal with the influence of Christianity and Judaism on Islam. The second site, Islameyet,55 is much more militant in tone. It contains books that attack Islam and other non-​ Christian religions. The category “dialogue of religions” (hawar adyan) lists books about Judaism, including a book by Murad Farage, Al-​Yahudiyya (Judaism), the polemical book of Al-​Samaw‘al ibn Yahya al-​Maghribi, Badhl al-​juhud fi ifham al-​yahud (The Efforts to Silence the Jews), and Marc R.  Cohen’s Under Crescent and Cross:  The Jews in the Middle Ages. Interestingly, Ka‘b al-​Ahbar is not included in this category but rather in “Islamic books” (kutub Isalmiyya), which features books seeking to undermine the fundamental claims of Islam. This categorization of Ka‘b al-​Ahbar is the opposite of that of Muhammadanism.

Conclusion A number of Arabic digital publishing ventures and digital libraries have made use of Jewish nahdah books as tools to serve their agenda. The main expression of this can be seen in the categorization of these works. The digital format provides new tools

162 

Guy Bracha

with which to adapt each given book to the category to which it is assigned, such as graphic editing of the cover in accordance with the overall visual theme of the category; the inclusion of icons of other books of the same category in the download page of the book, which encourages readers to explore “similar” books; and the addition of a brief explanation or preface to the book on its download page. All of those enable different libraries to present a work such as Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi as Zionist, Egyptian, Arabic, or even anti-​Jewish.

Notes 1.  For a detailed account of this work, see Lital Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East: Literature, History, and the Politics of Enlightenment, 1863–1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007); Jonathan Marc Gribetz, “An Arabic-​Zionist Talmud: Shimon Moyal’s At-​Talmud,” Jewish Social Studies 17, no. 1 (Fall 2010), 1–​30. 2.  Jurji Zaidan, “Al-​Tamud wa-​tarjamatihi ila al-​‘Arabiyya,” Al-​Hilal 13, vol. 5 (1 February 1905), 303–​305. 3.  In Arabic, al-​nahdah al-​Isra’iliyya. Although not an official name, this was the term used by many of the intellectuals associated with this movement. 4.  On Jews who wrote in Arabic, see Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East”;  Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford: 2012); Reuven Snir, ’Araviyut, yahadut, tziyonut:  maavak zehuyot bitziratam shel yehudei ’irak (Jerusalem:  2005); Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-​Dor Benite (eds.), Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought:  Writings on Identity, Politics, and Culture, 1893–​1958 (Waltham: 2013). On works about Judaism in Arabic, see Nahem Ilan, “Ha’aravit hayehudit hapost-​asimilatorit,” in Mituv Yosef: sefer hayovel likhvod Yosef Tobi, vol. 3, ed. Ayelet Oettinger and Danny Bar-​Ma’oz (Haifa: 2011), 250–​ 265; idem, “Lemi no’adah hagadat Farḥi? Lidmutam shel yehudim bemitzrayim bamaḥatzit harishonah shel hameah ha’esrim,” JSIJ—​Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal 4 (2005), 35–​59. 5.  For various reasons, Arabic digital libraries are frequently in a state of flux. Thus, some of the domains cited in this essay, which had all existed at the time of writing in late 2017, are no longer to be found. 6.  Avriel Bar-​Levav, “Bein toda’at hasifriyah lerepublikah hasifrutit hayehudit,” in Sifriyot veosfei sefarim, ed. Moshe Sluhovsky and Yosef Kaplan (Jerusalem: 2006), 201–​224. 7.  See Ahmad Yusuf Hafiz Ahmad, Al-​Nishr al-iliktruni wa-mashru’at al-​maktabat al-​ raqmiyya al-​alimiyya wal-​dawr al-​Arabi fi raqmana wa-​rafiz al-​turath al-​thaqafi (Cairo: 2013). 8.  See Denis McQuail‫‏‬, McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (London: 2000); Robert M. Entman, “Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power,” Journal of Communication 57, no. 1 (March 2007), 163–​173. 9.  Israël (Cairo) (10 February 1938), 6. On the society, see Gudrun Kramer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–​1952 (Seattle: 1989), 168–​171. 10.  Ili Lifi Abu al-​Assal, Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi (Cairo: 1934), 13. 11.  Ibid., 7. 12.  Online at: bibalex.org/​en/​page/​overview (accessed 24 February 2019). 13.  Online at:  bibalex.org/​libraries/​presentation/​static/​12600.aspx?d=0 (accessed 24 February 2019). 14.  Another work is that of Murad Farage, Al-​Qara’un wal-​rabanun (Cairo: 1918). 15. Shahin Makarius, Ta’rikh al-​Isra’iliyin (Cairo:  1909); Yusuf Rizqallah Ghanima, Nuzhat al-​mishtaq fi ta’rikh al-​Iraq (London: 1997). On Makarius, see Jonathan M. Gribetz, “ ‘Their Blood is Eastern’:  Shahin Makaryus and Fin de Siècle Arab Pride in the Jewish ‘Race,’ ” Middle Eastern Studies 49, no. 2 (2013), 143–​161. On Ghanima, see Snir, ’Araviyut, yahadut, tziyonut,  23–​24. 16.  Yusifus al-​Yahudi, Ta’rikh al-​Yahud, trans. Antunius al-​Antuni (Cairo: 2006).

Digitization of Jewish Nahdah Texts

163

17.  Thiyudur Hirzil, Al-​Dawla al-​Yahudiyya, trans. Muhammad Fadhil (Cairo: 2007). 18. Hinri Furd, Al-​yahudi al-​ylami:  al-​mushkila al-​ula alti Tawajaha al-​alam, Ta’rib Khayra Hamad, trans. Akram Mu’min (Cairo: 2013), Ghustaf Lubun, Al-​yahud fi ta’rikh al-​ Khdharat al-​ula, trans. Adil Zu’aytar (Cairo: 1970). 19. Ilan Halifi, Al-​Mas’ala al-​Yahudiyya:  al-​qabila, al-​shar’iyya, al-​makan, trans. Fu’ad Jadid (Damascus: 1986); Ishaq Duytshir, Al-​Yahudi al-​la Yahudi, trans. Mahir Kiyali (Beirut: 1986); Isra’il Shahak, Al-​Ta’rikh al-​Yahudi, al-​diana al-​Yahudiyya wa-​wat’a thaltha alaf sana, trans. Salih Ali Sawdah (Beirut: 1995). 20. Jo’il Baynin, Shitat al-​Yahud al-​Misriyyin, trans. Muhammad Shakr (Cairo:  2008); Daniyil Shrutir, Yahud al-​sultan: al-​Maghrib wa-​alam al-​Yahudi al-​Sifarad, trans. Khalid Bin al-​Saghir (Rabat: 2011). 21.  Rachel Maissy-​Noy, “Sugiyot bahistoriyah hayehudit barei hahistoriografiyah hamitzrit” (Ph.D. diss., Bar-​Ilan University, 2006), 22–​25. 22.  Ibid.,  26–​31. 23.  Online at: archive.org/​details/​@elsayed_​taha (accessed 26 February 2019). 24. Makarius, Ta’rikh al-​Isra’iliyin; Habib Faris, Surakh al-​ bari’ fi buq al-​ huriyya (Cairo: 1890). 25.  “Hawl maktaba Noon al-​iliktruniyya” (about the Noon digital library), www.nooonbooks.com/​aboutnoon/​(accessed 10 January 2019). 26.  Online at:  facebook.com/​pg/​NooonBooksStore/​about/​?ref=page_​internal (accessed 5 March 2019). 27. As of February 2019, the library had moved to a new website (https://​nooon-​books. blogspot.com) on which Yaqzat al-​alam al-​yahudi and other cited books were not listed. 28.  Online at: hsje.org/​society/​aboutus.html (accessed 5 March 2019). 29.  Online at: hsje.org/​library/​awknjworld/​Awkngjworld.html (accessed 5 March 2019). 30.  Ahmad Shalibi, Muqarana al-​adyan: al-​yahudiyya, 8th ed. (Cairo: 1988). 31.  Al-​Samaw‘al ibn Yahya al-​Maghribi, Badhl al-​ juhud fi ifham al-​ yahud (Damascus: 1989). 32.  On Moyal, see Abigail Jacobson, “Jews Writing in Arabic:  Shimon Moyal, Nissim Malul and the Mixed Palestinian/​Eretz Israeli Locale,” in Late Ottoman Palestine: The Period of Young Turk Rule, ed. Yuval Ben-​Bassat and Eyal Ginio (New York: 2011), 165–​182; Gribetz, “An Arabic-​Zionist Talmud.” 33.  Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East,” 200–202; Gribetz, “An Arabic-​Zionist Talmud,” 6. 34.  Shim’on Muyal, Al-​Talmud: asluhu wa-​tasalsuluhu wa-​adabuhu (Cairo: 2004), 147. See also the introduction by Rashid Abdallah al-​Shami, an Egyptian Hebrew studies scholar, who writes about his decades-​long search for an Arabic translation of the rabbinic literature (Muyal, Al-​Talmud, 10). 35.  “Man Nahna” (Who We Are) www.dar-​althakafia.com/​inner.php?pageID=2 (accessed 5 March 2019). 36.  Shim’on Muyal, Al-​Talmud: asluhu wa-​tasalsuluhu wa-​adabuhu (Damascus: 2005). 37. Olivia Snaije, “Digital Publishing Growth in the Arab World:  Slow, But Steady,” Publishing Perspective (23 March 2012), online at: https://​publishingperspectives.com/​2012/​ 03/​digital-​publishing-​growth-​in-​the-​arab-​world-​slow-​but-​steady (accessed 10 January  2019). 38.  Online at: kotobarabia.com/​about (accessed 10 January 2019). 39. As of February 2019, the site, formerly online at mktba22.blogspot.com, no longer existed. 40.  Asaf Sharun, Al-​Irahabiyun al-​Yahud: min al-​irahab al-​Sahyuni fi Filastin hata 1948, trans. and ed. Muntada al-​Alaqatal-​Arabiyya al-​Dawliyya (Doha: 2016); Baha’ al-​Amir, Al-​ Yahud wal-​Masun fi turath al-​dasatir (Cairo: 2011); Arfa Abduh Ali, Yahud misr barunat wa-​ bu‘sa’, dirasa ta’rikhiyya (Cairo: 1997); Kamilya Abu Jabal, Yahud al-​Yaman: dirasa siyasiyya wa-​iqtisadiyya wa-​ijtima’iyya (Damascus: 1999). 41.  Isra’il bin Zi’ib (Wulfinsun), Ta‘trikh al-​Yahud fi bilad al-​Arab (Cairo: 1927). 42. Yusuf Nasr allah, Al-​Kanz al-​marsud fi qawa’id al-​Talmud (Cairo:  1899); see also, Gribetz, “An Arabic-​Zionist Talmud,” 6.

164 

Guy Bracha

43. Adin Shtaynsaltz, Madkhal ila al-​ Talmud, trans. Finita Butshifa al-​ Shaykh, (Damascus: 2006). 44.  Mishil Bijint, Hinri Linkulin, and Rishard Li, Al-​Dam al-​muqaddas al-​ka’s al-​muqaddasa, trans. Muammad al-​Waqid (Damascus: 2008); Dan Brawn, Shifra DaFinshi, trans. Sima Muhammad Abd al-​Rabbhu (Beirut: 2005). 45.  Online at: al-​maktabeh.com/​pageother.php?catsmktba=15 (accessed 3 March 2019). 46.  Rulan Dufu, Banu Isra’il: mu’asasathum wa-​tashri‘athum fi al-​du’ al-​‘ahd al-​qadim, trans. Abd al-​wahab Ulub (Cairo: 2010), Isra’il Finkilshtayn wa Nil Silbirman, Al-​Tawra alYahudiyya al-​makshufa ala haqiqha, trans. Sa‘ad Rustum, (Damascus: 2005). 47. Shahak, Al-​Ta’rikh al-​Yahudi; Ya‘qub Malkin, Al-​Yahudiyya al ‘ilmaniyya, trans. and ed. Ahmad Kamil Rawi (Cairo: 2003). 48.  Isra’il bin Zi’ib (Wulfinsun), Ka’b al-​Akhbar: muslama al-​Yahud fi al-​Islam, 2nd ed. (Beirut: 2016); idem, Ka‘b al-​Akhbar, trans. and intro. Lwiis Saliba (Jbeil: 2010). 49.  Online at:  facebook.com/​pg/​mamnoo3ah/​about/​?ref=page_​internal (accessed 4 March 2019). 50.  On Foda, see Meir Hatina, Haislam bemitzrayim hamodernit: ’iyunim bimishnato shel Farag Foda (Tel Aviv: 2012). 51.  “Ta’rif,” in Bin Zi’ib (Wulfinsun), Ka’b al-​Akhbar, 6. 52.  Lwiis Saliba, “Al-​Ithr al-​Yahudi fi hadith al-​nabawi wal-​tafsir,” in Bin Zi’ib (Wulfinsun), Ka’b al-​Akhbar, 18. 53.  Online at: www.sooqukaz.com (accessed 4 March 2019). 54.  Homepage of /​www.muhammadanism.org (accessed 4 March 2019). 55.  Online at: islamayet.com (accessed 4 March 2019).

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”: Approbation Letters and the Printing of 19th-​Century Moroccan Halakhic Books Yigal S. Nizri (UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO)

In an approbation letter to Minḥat Yehudah, a volume of exegetical texts, sermons, and commentary on rabbinic texts written by R. Yehudah ibn Danan (1875–​1961) of Fes, signed on 11 Elul 5695 (9 September 1935) by the tribunal rabbinique of Fes,1 Matityahu Siriro, Aharon Abutbul, and Moshe ibn Danan wrote the following: Respected readers: even though we do not wish to write an approbation for the author of any book, since the knights of Torah, the pillars of the earth, [those] who tremble at the [Torah’s] word, [those] who were marvelously able to act upon their wisdom and [on that of the] Torah ... their righteousness the girdle on their loins, and faithfulness the girdle of their reins[,]‌their sayings refined and purified seven times more [Ps. 12:7], their books worthy to be served at the table of kings[,] their words measured and leveled with knowledge and understanding ... their books [that were] valuable to Jewish communities everywhere―these giants of Torah have gone and vanished as the waters fail from the sea and the flood decayeth and drieth up. [As a result,] our bones are dried, and the wisdom of our Sages is lost. [We are left only with the option of] making many books. It was said, indeed, “The Torah is destined to be forgotten...”. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. This was the reason we refused [at first] to wave our pen for [writing an approbation for] the author of a book.2

Notwithstanding the hesitant tone of this opening, we learn later in this text that Yehudah ibn Danan asked the three rabbis to support his work by means of a written recommendation, and they could not refuse his request. In this short text written by three state-​appointed rabbis of the rabbinical court of Fes, one can find several common features that, during the first few decades of the 20th century, characterized the ways in which rabbinic endorsements (haskamot)3 of the printed work of Moroccan authors became a public site for contested ideas concerning authority, credibility, reputation, and tradition. Notwithstanding the presumed incapability of living halakhic scholars to produce books that might equal the great scholarship of past Moroccan rabbis—​those “knights of the Torah” whose books, at the time, Yigal S. Nizri, “Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print” In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0010

166 

Yigal S. Nizri

were beginning to be perceived as “valuable to Jewish communities everywhere”—​ the signatories of this approbation, though aware of their subordinate position in the chain of transmission, were willing to recommend this new work, which belonged, as did the “respected readers” and the signatories themselves, to the same scholarly circle. This potential community of the book, which was made possible with the mediation of a distinctive culture of writing, stands at the focus of this essay. The last third of the 19th century saw an unprecedented effort to edit and anthologize Maghrebi halakhic works, an enterprise that was considered by authors, printers, and readers (most of whom were members of different rabbinical circles) to be instrumental in the making of a “halakhic Morocco.” This philological rabbinic project had a lasting impact on the emergence and preservation of a sense of “Morocco” as a coherent halakhic geography over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries, both in the Maghreb and (following the departure of most Jews from the physical territory of Morocco) throughout the Moroccan Jewish diaspora. I seek to situate this body of halakhic literature in the broader context of the emergence of a Moroccan rabbinic identity, and to explore the processes by which Maghrebi rabbinic scribal and authoritative traditions were shaped by “endogenous” factors (the development of intracommunal intellectual interactions), the trans-​Mediterranean Maghrebi-​Jewish diaspora, and the accelerating integration of the Sharifan state.4 As is well reflected in the haskamot letters, Moroccan Jewish communities in the late 19th century existed in multiple geographies that interacted with one another in various ways. This, in turn, gave rise to new definitions of the very notion of “Moroccanness” on behalf of which different rabbinic authors acted; this, too, points clearly to the emergence of a well-​defined rabbinic scholars’ network. Tracing the paratextual activity of Jewish Moroccan rabbinic scholars reveals the geographical boundaries and the intellectual trajectories that characterized this scholars’ network at a time when its members had started to designate themselves as Maghrebis. My approach therefore gives prominence to a transregional framework in order to illustrate a sense of what might be called “Maghrebi diasporicity.”5 Haskamot literature, a somewhat forgotten part of the textual history of Moroccan Jews, provides a glimpse into processes of community-​making that took place in the most valuable site of the economy of Jewish knowledge, at least from the perspective of the learned elite members: the printed halakhic book. Simply put, these texts functioned not only as marketing devices of sorts, that is, as tools to raise funds for the printing of rabbinic works and to invite customers to purchase them, but also as an authoritative means of maintaining the proper circulation of halakhic knowledge among certain members of the learned rabbinic hierarchy. If one suspends the tendency to regard publisher’s notes (hakdamot), haskamot, and other rabbinic paratexts solely as formal bearers of prosopographic knowledge, one is better placed to appreciate them as texts characterized by particular restricted styles, conventions, formalities, and repetitions.6 Indeed, a close examination of these texts reveals the ways in which they functioned as tools in the creation of the written identities of authors and readers, and at the same time contributed to the very creation of these categories. It also allows us to place this understanding within the context of the study of Jewish tradition in late-​19th-​century Morocco.7

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”

167

In what follows, I take a closer look at manuscripts that became available en masse during the first few decades of the 20th century, often generations after their composition. Such halakhic compilations may be regarded as “new” printed materials in a final book version. Apart from posthumously published works, this period also featured a growing number of books authored by still-​living Moroccan Jewish scholars; from the 1920s, when Hebrew printing technology came to Morocco, some were published there. As the title of this essay suggests, the transmission from scribal to print culture bore theological significance. Indeed, as Joseph Tedghi observes in his monograph on the history of Hebrew printing and Hebrew books in Fes, Moroccan rabbis conceived of the print revolution as a halakhic event.8 This conception manifests itself in a terminological form. In almost the entire corpus of the examined paratexts, the terminology associated with print is borrowed from the vocabulary of worship practices of ancient Israel, namely, those dealing with sacrificial offerings. The printing press is repeatedly referred to as an altar (mizbeaḥ),9 and various verbs used by approbators and printers are also derived from the religious world of sacrificial offerings: the verbal phrase describing the act of writing, for instance, is “leha’alot ’al sefer,” “making an offering” of a book.10 Similarly, when referring to their consenting to write a haskamah, approbators make use of the verb “lehanif,” to wave—​an allusion to the lifting or waving of a sacrifice before the Lord (as in, for example, Lev. 9:21). Another often repeated expression of justification, limited to halakhic works that were printed posthumously, is “dovev siftei yeshanim” (Song of Sol. 7:10), which can be translated as “moving the lips of those who are sleeping [in the grave].”11

A Short History of Rabbinic Endorsements It is commonly held that the haskamah is a “new” rabbinic literary and legal form that was adopted with the spread of printing.12 Given that print publication gave rise to various halakhic issues, the evolution of Jewish approbations should be studied in the context of 15th-​and 16th-​century rabbinical awareness of the technological aspects of printing against the backdrop of the production, circulation, and reception of texts in early modern Europe.13 In 1897, the history of the early haskamot was discussed in some detail in the pages of the Jewish Quarterly Review. The author of this piece, Ludwig Blau, a Hungarian Jewish scholar at the Landesrabbinerschule in Budapest, cited the ordinance of Pope Clement VIII in 1592, appearing in the edition of the Latin Vulgate (the so-​called “Vulgata Sixto-​Clementina”), as the first approbation in the Christian context that expressed an appreciation of the contents of the published work while also meeting the wishes of the publisher to have his work recommended. Apart from praising the work, the pope prohibited reprinting the work within a period of ten years, authorized the Vatican with a copyright, and threatened with excommunication anyone who violated these rights—​all of these points, according to Blau, were to “meet again in the Rabbinical edicts.” Blau stated that even if there were Jewish approbations before 1592, “the characteristic points of the latter approbations

168 

Yigal S. Nizri

were undoubtedly taken from Clement’s ordinance.”14 This suggestion presents the Christian context of the early Hebrew haskamot from the perspective of one of its most powerful disciplinary tools, censorship.15 Indeed, as Amnon Raz-​Krakotzkin has suggested, the haskamot were developed within the context of church censorship, and therefore should be seen as “Jewish ‘internal censorship,’ ” that is, a disciplinary tool practiced by the Jews themselves.16 Raz-​Krakotzkin mentions a collective document, signed in Ferrara in 1554, as the first Jewish-​institutionalized step toward the regulation of the printing of rabbinic work.17 Other observers claimed that the history of Hebrew haskamot went back to the early 16th century. In 1898, an Austrian Jewish scholar named David Kaufmann published a short article in which he stated (after the German rabbi Joseph Perles) that the first approbations ever given to a Hebrew book were issued by the rabbinical court of Rome on September 10, 1518, to two books authored by the Hebrew grammarian Elia Levita “Bahur” (Eliyahu ben Asher Halevi Ashkenazi): Sefer harkavah (on the grammar of foreign and compound words in the Bible) and Sefer baḥur (a grammatical treatise). These approbations commence with appreciation of the value of the work and a note regarding the expenditure incurred in the art of printing, and from there threaten with excommunication anyone who would dare to reprint these works within the next ten years. What Kaufmann understood to be a “more commercial origin of the approbations” may instead reflect an awareness of the question of communal boundaries and authority that had emerged with the new printing technologies.18 Special attention has been given to haskamot in the field of Jewish bibliography and booklore.19 The first bibliographical lexicon of the haskamot literature was compiled by Leopold Löwenstein, an Orthodox rabbi and historian from the town of Mosbach in southern Germany, who penned important works on the Jews of Fürth and the rabbinate of Hanau. The book, Index Approbationum (with a Hebrew title, Mafteaḥ hahaskamot), which was based on the work of previous Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars such as Leopold Zunz, Moritz Steinschneider, Abraham Geiger, and Heinrich Graetz, lists 2,700 books in Hebrew and in old German gothic handwriting. It was published in Frankfurt in 1923, shortly before Löwenstein’s death; a decade and a half later, many of the books it cataloged were lost forever when the Mosbach Jewish community was destroyed by the Nazis.20 In the middle of the 20th century, the great Hebrew bibliographer Abraham Ya’ari and his colleagues were able to add a great deal of invaluable information to Loewenstein’s compendium.21 While the production of European Jewish print cultures generally occurred within specifically Jewish institutions, the latter were undeniably influenced by censorship and canonization practices that were developed in the early modern Christian European context. Since this essay deals with the production of rabbinic literature in a different historical setting, it is important to consider as well the validity of a narrative that links approbation, censorship and, ultimately, canonization to the early modern Islamic state.22 In this regard, the institutional settings within which books were produced and consumed in the Ottoman Empire,23 and the range of practices of issuing endorsements that were developed within the Ottoman manuscript culture,24 may add another dimension to the study of Moroccan Jewish haskamot for books that were printed in Ottoman cities.

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”

169

The Examined Corpus Once “sacrificed” on the altar of the printing press and sealed in the form of a book, the printed works of Maghrebi sages, dead or alive, were to become the embodiments of the time and place of their publication, while the paratexts of these books, and especially the haskamot, became part of a normative system of scholastic recognition and patronage. In order to identify and analyze potential patterns in the evolution, reception, and circulation of printed Moroccan rabbinic sources, I have examined 88 books by Moroccan authors that were published from 1803 to 1969 in conjunction with the year of death of their authors (see Appendix). While this number is far from being complete, as the several bibliographical dictionaries I consulted suggest, it nevertheless represents a considerable body of well-​circulated works of primarily halakhic texts, and also works in other realms of rabbinic textual creativity.25 Nearly two thirds of the books (64 percent) were published posthumously, with the trend of posthumously printed books evenly spread throughout the period. Furthermore, the bulk of past books was brought to print during the 20th century, a period that saw the growth of interest in local Jewish traditions along with the advent of print culture. With the arrival of new printing technologies, posthumous publishing became more frequent; a number of rabbinic works that had been kept in manuscript form for well over a century were printed for the first time. Multiple works by the same authors, each of which appeared in a different year, were framed differently according to changes in the accumulative codes and precedents of approbation conventions. As time is indeed a precious resource in the making of authoritative traditions, the names of the very same rabbinic authors meant quite different things to different generations. Take, for example, the works of R. Moshe Toledano (1724–​1773), who wrote Melekhet hakodesh (Livorno, 1803), a long and witty explication of Rashi’s commentary on the Torah, which was published posthumously three decades after Toledano died, when family members who knew him personally were still able to carry his memory forward. In contrast, another work by him, “new insights” (ḥidushim) in the field of halakhah, Hashamayim haḥadashim (Casablanca, 1939), was brought to print 166 years after Toledano’s death. In addition to praising Toledano’s ḥidushim, the paratexts foreground the genealogy of the learned circle to which its author belonged, the “Toledanos” of Morocco. Posthumous publishing becomes, therefore, an act, or an “event,” that requires a new set of rhetorical tools, restorative or constructive; that is, a new kind of framing, which in itself testifies to modifications in how the emergence of local traditions ought to be told. As opposed to changes in the manner in which the author or the content of a given book is described, the pattern of copyright conventions remains more or less the same throughout the examined corpus. The period within which the reprinting of a given book was prohibited was subject to changes in copyright conventions that were mediated by market forces as well as by families’ behavior regarding manuscripts. For instance, the prohibition by the rabbis of Livorno appearing in the approbation to R. Avraham Coriat’s Zekhut avot (Pisa, 1812) was in force for ten years, as was that of R. Habib Toledano’s Peh yesharim (Livorno, 1838). Similarly, in December 1886, the publishers of R. Raphael El’azar Halevi ibn Tobo’s Pekudat El’azar (Jerusalem,

170 

Yigal S. Nizri

1887) restricted the reprinting of the book for ten years; in addition, however, they issued a rather bold call to “our brethren in the diaspora,” warning against the transgression of copyright. A few years later, in a work by R. Ya’akov Abuhasera titled Maḥsof halavan (Jerusalem, 1892), the publisher Mas‘oud Turjeman (referring to himself as “the print endeavor” [hamishtadel]) limited the reprinting prohibition to three years. In R. Yosef ben Adhan’s Shufriya deYosef (Alexandria, 1897), the publisher Faraj Haim Mizrahi dedicated an entire page to a similar warning, while also renewing the ten-​year ban on reprinting. A ten-​year ban appeared as well in the approbation to R. Raphael Moshe Elbaz’s Arba’a shomrim (Fes, 1942).

Maghrebi Diasporicity The study of haskamot reveals the geographical boundaries of the Moroccan rabbinic scholars’ network.26 Moreover, it demonstrates the dialectical relationship between the formation of local traditions and the transregional ties that spanned North Africa and the broader Mediterranean. Manuscripts and books, funds and goods, emissaries and entrepreneurs were in constant movement between Tiberias and Tunis, Jerusalem and Fes, Alexandria and Tetuan, and Gibraltar and Livorno, to name but some of the trajectories. To illuminate this sense of multiplicity, let us look at the introduction to Raḥamim peshutim (Tunis, 1910), a volume of responsa by R. Raphael Haim Moshe ibn Naim (1845–​1920), where one finds the following self-​description (written in Tiberias): “I wish to ‘prepare a table in the wilderness,’ [Ps. 78: 19] in order not to be ungrateful, and to mention the names of the rabbis and colleagues who dealt bountifully with me in Eretz hatzvi [Palestine] in general, and in Tiberias, where I was brought up, in particular... and in the cities of No Amon [Alexandria], and in Egypt and its vicinities, and in all the cities of Turkey... and in the inland of the Maghreb, including Tetuan, where I was born, and Fes ... and Marrakech....” During the 19th century, the leading centers for the publication of books by Moroccan authors were Livorno, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. In most cases, members of the local rabbinic elite, as well as local print endeavors (the mishtadlim), were invited to submit written endorsements for the new Maghrebi books. These “local” approbations were accompanied by haskamot originating in various other Moroccan communities, mostly written in the plural voice and signed by the head of the local rabbinical court.27 In addition to detailing links between the new volume and other rabbinic texts, the haskamot often mentioned personal or collegial ties with the author. The Palestinian rabbi Eliyahu Moshe Panigel (1850–​1919), for example, reported in his haskamah to R. Yosef ben Walid’s Shemo Yosef (Jerusalem, 1907) that he become acquainted with the author while on a fundraising mission in North Africa.28

Paratexts as Rebuttal: The Anqawa Affair The process of unifying and codifying Maghrebi traditions in the second half of the 19th century was accompanied by increased emphasis on regional and transregional

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”

171

Maghrebi scholars’ networks, in which the printed halakhic book played a key role. The French invasion of Algeria in 1830 affected Jewish migratory movements in the region, and a number of Moroccans, eager to partake of the legal and financial advantages of foreign nationality, crossed the border into Algeria and assumed legal identities of Algerians.29 One of these individuals was R. Avraham ben Mordechai Anqawa (c. 1808–​1891). Born in Salé, Morocco to a family of Castilian scholars, Anqawa was a poet, jurist, and rabbinic manuscript enthusiast. After studying at the seminary of R. Raphael Bibas in Salé, Anqawa joined the rabbinical court there. Fearing for his personal safety after he brought a girl who had apostatized to Islam back into the Jewish fold,30 he moved to colonial Algeria in 1850 and, two years later, was appointed rabbi of the Jewish community of Mascara in northwestern Algeria.31 Anqawa also lived and taught in Tlemcen, an important pilgrimage site for Moroccan Jews at the time (it was where Anqawa’s distinguished 14th-​century ancestor, R. Ephraim Anqawa, was buried). His publishing entrepreneurial activities brought him to Livorno, where in 1845 he printed a kabbalistic siddur titled Ḥesed leAvraham. Back in 1838, while still in Salé, Anqawa had completed a short book on treifah laws,32 Zekhor leAvraham (Livorno, 1839), which was written in rhymed verse. Writing in verse had an important practical meaning for ritual slaughterers who needed an easily memorized and abbreviated halakhic manual, as indicated in the “author’s apology” on the first page of the booklet.33 This particular stylistic choice also relates to the legal definition of the work as halakhah lema’aseh, that is, law to be applied or practiced. The importance of this book, and of Anqawa’s contribution to the study of slaughtering laws in Morocco in general, has a social and communal dimension, as it was a product of Anqawa’s “ethnographic” work among slaughterers and rabbis in Fes who retained customs and habits peculiar to their Sephardi tradition. In the next two decades, Anqawa continued his combined interest in the subject of ritual slaughtering laws and in the Castilian adjudication traditions of the Maghreb.34 Two decades later, in Mascara, Anqawa completed a work titled Zevaḥim shelemim (Livorno, 1858), comprising three annotated commentaries on Maimonides’ explication of the laws of ritual slaughter and the examination of meat, with Maimonides’ text appearing in the middle of each page. In his introduction, Anqawa positioned himself halakhically and culturally as the heir of Maghrebi traditions, which themselves were a product of a long process of compilation and editing of Castilian traditions dating back to Maran (R. Yosef Karo, the great 16th-​century mystic and codifier).35 In fact, one of Anqawa’s commentaries included a genealogical list of rabbinic leaders of Spanish descent in Fes and Meknes taken from the manuscript Zivḥei ratzon, by R. Shelomo ben Raphael ibn Zur (1805–​1842).36 In the concluding part of his introduction, in a section dealing with the halakhic prohibition against deriving economic benefit from non-​kosher meat, Anqawa discussed a problem that had local implications. In certain cases, he wrote, Jewish butchers sold meat of animals that were not properly slaughtered (for example, they had been killed “with a sledgehammer”) to non-​Jews, most likely French and Spanish Christians.37 According to Anqawa, not only were these butchers criminals in the eyes of the halakhah (in their transgressing the prohibition on deriving benefit from selling forbidden meat), they were also going against divine laws of nature, by “destroying” the meat “in cruelty.” Anqawa’s description pertained to a shift in the local meat

172 

Yigal S. Nizri

market in the wake of the increased presence of Europeans in Algerian cities, which had significant repercussions for rabbinic authority versus that of the local consistoire and the colonial administration.38 Immediately after the first copies of Anqawa’s work arrived in Algeria, R. Moshe Sebaoun, a rabbinic scholar from Oran, a coastal city in western Algeria, launched an aggressive attack against Anqawa and his work that culminated in a halakhic decision (pesak halakhah) on his part to ban Zevaḥim shelemaim, which in turn was sent on Sebaoun’s behalf to rabbinic scholars in the Sephardi Mediterranean world. The controversy was further fueled with the printing of Anqawa’s lengthy response to Sebaoun’s accusations. This response, titled Taharat hakesef (Livorno, 1860), included Sebaoun’s pesak halakhah, followed by a spirited rebuttal in the form of numerous letters of approbation by various rabbis who were invited to clear Anqawa’s name and to legitimize his edited commentary on Maimonides’ laws of ritual slaughter (hence the Hebrew title, which translates as “purifying the silver”). Before turning to these haskamot, let us summarize Sebaoun’s original critique. “I studied closely the above-​mentioned book,” writes Sebaoun, and I found in it neither taste nor smell. It is all empty and void, the land cannot accommodate it. ... And I was astonished at the vision for one hour [cf. Dan. 4:16], and my knees smote one against another [Dan. 5:6] regarding this poor and empty man, [who] lacks any wisdom [but nevertheless] raised his offering. Who has believed our report [Is. 53:1]? Who has considered our claim: [that] all of this author’s sayings, the written and the printed, are no more than nonsense? Anyone with a brain in his head will understand that... [t]‌his author [Anqawa], with increasing arrogant desire, presumes to don the garb of rabbinical scholars.

After several paragraphs written in a similar fashion, the reason for Sebaoun’s polemic becomes clear. In his commentary, writes Sebaoun, Anqawa showed blatant disregard for the rabbinic luminaries—​shockingly, he even used the phrase “the fool walketh in darkness” (Eccl. 2:14) in reference to Maran39—​and he also misrepresented a work by R. Haim ibn Attar, Peri toar (novellae on the Shulhan Arukh; Amsterdam, 1742). This last point was especially sensitive, as Sebaoun himself had studied as a young boy at Ibn Attar’s yeshivah in Jerusalem. Sebaoun enumerated names of other rabbinic authorities (aḥaronim) who had written commentaries on the Shulhan Arukh and who, according to Sebaoun’s reading, had been characterized by Anqawa as “imposters masquerading as scholars.” Particularly noteworthy were Sebaoun’s numerous warnings against those (like Anqawa) who considered themselves, halakhically speaking, to be in an advantageous position. The addressees of Sebaoun’s call were rabbis who constituted a halakhic community that claimed to represent, interpret, and maintain the authentic Sephardi tradition, and some members of this trans-​Mediterranean religious elite were called on by Sebaoun to respond to his critique. This they did, by means of the familiar framework of haskamot letters—​yet they came out in support of Anqawa, who later published the haskamot as a supplement to the second edition of Zevaḥim shelemim, along with a very long response of his own to Sebaoun’s text, titled Yutz’a lerabim (cf. Es. 4:3). Our main concern here is not with the value of Sebaoun’s arguments, nor with Anqawa’s scholastic defense. Rather, we are trying to understand what role rabbinic

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”

173

haskamot played in the dramatic local controversy sparked in colonial Oran by Anqawa’s work, and to reflect on the transregional nature of these approbations. Although the practice of haskamot was never really detached from the politicization of the printed Jewish book, it is safe to argue that the Anqawa affair signifies the awareness of that politicization, in that haskamot were used as a means of exercising power both within and beyond the boundaries of the printed halakhic book. Anqawa, it seems, was able to garner support from rabbis as far afield as Livorno, Paris, Tunis, Jerusalem, and Tetuan, who in turn marshaled their expertise and authoritative status (countering Sebaoun’s attempt to ban Anqawa’s work with a threat of their own against Sebaoun) to justify and insure a certain sense of pan-​Sephardi unity. In a “publisher’s note” to Anqawa’s first response to Sebaoun (Taharat hakesef ), written by Eliyahu ben Amozeg, he writes that he had received “a bundle of letters” from Anqawa, who sought to have them all printed in unedited form. Amozeg, however, essentially censored the letters by deleting some of the more vituperative sections.40 The following letters were printed: • A letter, in a form of a rabbinic ordinance (takanah), written in Judeo-​Arabic on behalf of rabbis of Oran, signed by Ya’akov al-​‘Asri (or Jacob Lasry as he came to be known in French Algeria),41 a prominent merchant and the president of the consistoire in Oran. • A letter (igeret) on behalf of the rabbis of Algiers, signed on August 1858/​Elul 5618 by seven rabbis, with an attachment signed by the grand rabbin of Algiers, the French-​born Michel Aaron Weill (1814–​1889).42 • A copy of a brief letter sent to Weill from Tetuan, signed by R. Yizhaq ben Walid, but addressed to Anqawa. • Another letter from Tetuan, signed by Issac Nehon, dated November 1858 /​ Kislev 5619. • A copy of a letter from Tunis, addressed to Weill and his colleagues in Algiers, signed by seven “young scholars.” • A  letter sent to the consistoire of Oran, signed by seven “young scholars” from Tunis. • A copy of a letter from Jerusalem to Oran, dated November 1858 /​ Kislev 5619, signed by the Rishon letziyon (chief Sephardi rabbi) R. Haim Abul‘afiah (1795–​ 1861), as well as six other rabbis. • A letter from the grand rabbin of Paris, Shelomoh Zalman Ulman (d. 1863) who was affiliated with the Consistoire central israélite de France. In addition, the book included the publisher’s note and a legal statement offered by a local scribe and proofreader, Abraham Barukh Pipereno, signed on January 25/​Shevat 5620.43 Although the publisher of the haskamot printed this “bundle of letters” under the apologetic title “these are the responses of the rabbis to Moshe Sebaoun’s inquires, [written] after he had showed them his written notes,” their style and content suggest they were written for Anqawa, most likely at his request. Thus, Anqawa’s briefs about the violent reception of his book in Oran functioned as templates upon which the approbators based their judgment. For example, a number of letters described how

174 

Yigal S. Nizri

pages of Zevaḥim shelemim had been torn and then used as fans or as a wrapping for meat fillings or for cigarettes. The letter sent by the “young scholars” from Tunis to Oran hinted that there was more to the disputation than a mere matter of wrong semantics, alluding to a greater controversy over halakhic issues between the Moroccan rabbi and his Algerian colleagues. All of the letters advocated condemnation of those who “despise a scholar”;44 such people, it was written, should be stigmatized as transgressors. Anqawa’s written response to Sebaoun explores the public dimension of Sebaoun’s actions. Sebaoun, he claimed, continued to belittle the book and its author even after he was asked by local rabbis to desist. Anqawa knew how to leverage the power of networking and community support to attain his restorationist halakhic project. His introduction to Zevaḥim shelemim records more than 300 names of “notables and individuals” from cities and towns in colonial Algeria (Constantine, Tlemcen, Mascara, Mostaganem, Saïda, Tiaret, and Frenda), as well as from the Moroccan city of Tetuan—​an unprecedented use of the book as a public domain by a Moroccan scholar (see Fig. 10.1). Anqawa’s networking efforts reveal a scholar who was well-​ connected among both elite and non-​elite families, as well as among consistoire members (such as Ya’akov al-​‘Asri) who represented the French authorities. As shown by the Anqawa affair, the printed halakhic book, though not the only means by which rabbinic knowledge could be acquired or disseminated, became not merely an emblem of scholastic attainment but also a necessary means for rendering certain ideas about the binding tradition and its legitimate practitioners. In this regard, the haskamot institution functioned in similar ways to the practice of legal and cultural consecrations.45

“On the Loss of the First Tablets” In 1891, seventy years after the author’s death, the responsa compilation Mishpatim yesharim,46 by R. Raphael ben Mordechai Berdugo of Meknes,47 was published. This is one of many examples of widespread editorializing and anthologizing activity that took place in late 19th-​century Morocco, alongside the rise of a “library awareness.”48 Berdugo, whose scholarly production included biblical commentaries, sermons, and responsa, is considered one of the most important rabbinic figures of his time, though none of his many texts were published during his lifetime.49 Mishpatim yesharim begins with three haskamot and five introductions written by local Meknesi rabbis and adjudicators. Each of the three haskamot opens on a congratulatory note celebrating the moment of “sacrificing” a manuscript on the altar of print and making use of such phrases as “great light,” “visions of God,” and “good tidings.” The approbators of the main haskamah, R. Raphael ibn Zur and R. Shemuel ‘Amar,50 situate Berdugo’s halakhic project as the culmination of previous Moroccan traditions, the work of an adjudicator who had provided an enduring halakhic monument (halakhah ledorot).51 Given Berdugo’s reputation —​his fame, they wrote, had reached all the cities of Morocco, both near and far—​his responsa, which derived

Fig. 10.1  Names of “notables and individuals” (excerpt), from introduction to R. Avraham ben Mordechai Anqawa, Zevaḥim shelemim (1858).

176 

Yigal S. Nizri

from his scholastic engagement with contemporaneous and past Moroccan rabbis, were to be regarded as unimpeachable sources. It seems that, as members of the local rabbinical circle of Meknes, the approbators were aware of the weight of their own authority when they issued a call for other rabbinical courts to lean on Berdugo’s “great tree,” a common trope referring to reliance on a higher authority by means of citing a well-​respected source. In a pun on Exodus 34:1, where Moses is told to chisel two stone tablets “like the first ones” (kari­ shonim), the signatories lamented the loss of the Torah of their ancestors—​that is, the rishonim—​whose written work “was lost and swept away by terrors” (Ps. 73:19). This lamentation over the loss of halakhic manuscripts of past scholars is expressed in conjunction with a strongly worded call for communal redemption and spiritual renewal, as encapsulated in the publication of Berdugo’s printed work. In other words, if we read the approbators’ remarks not merely as justificatory reflections on the past, but also as the expression of a new phase of print consciousness, the haskamah becomes a valuable document in the process of tracing this phenomenon. In this light, invoking rabbinic dictums such as “a scholar is better than a prophet,”52 and “scholars [tzaddikim, righteous people] in their death are called living,”53 the haskamah authors are justifying and actualizing their own authorizing practices as well as their place in the chain of knowledge transmission. As we shall see, these commonly repeated ideas will become a pattern through which one can discern the outlines of an emerging discourse of authorship. The first introduction out of the five was penned by R. Shalom ‘Amar. Divided into four parts in correspondence with the canonized, four-​part structure first employed in R. Ya’akov ben Asher’s monumental 14th-​century work, the Tur (this structure is followed as well in the main text of Mishpatim yesharim), the introduction functions as a programmatic statement concerning both the emergence of a new form of knowledge production and the potential community it constitutes. Invoking Aristotelian theses regarding the “four causes” (as mediated through Maimonides, or better, the Hebrew translations of his work by Moses ibn Tibbon),54 the four parts of ‘Amar’s introduction bear the titles “matter” (ḥomer), “form” (tzurah), “agency” (pe’ulah), and “final purpose” (takhlit).55 ‘Amar examines the printed form of a halakhic scholar’s work according to this “classic” structural typology, while at the same time providing ideal definitions, motivations, and justifications for emerging rabbinic anthologizing activities and practices. Thus, after delineating the quiddity of the ideal scholar—​“a very reliable and refined man” who finds himself “in a desert land and in the howling wilderness,” and who, after being “carried away by the flow of time,” falls into “an enclosed garden” of wisdom—​‘Amar turns to the second and more important section that places the application of his parable in the context of Maghrebi knowledge transmission. ‘He writes: Such is the fate of the garden of wisdom of those who came before us,56 [who were] like angels in the cities of [Morocco] in which they nurtured their saplings [cf. Ps. 144:12]. The eye was not sated with viewing these offspring of great men, rabbis, and geniuses—​ children in whom there was no blemish [Eccles. 1:8; Dan. 1:4], holy fruit who were an offering of praise [Lev. 19:24]. For God gave these children knowledge and skill in all fields of learning and wisdom [Dan. 1:17]. Indeed, the flow of time swept them away,

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”

177

and [their days] ended without hope [Job 7:6]. . . . Some of [their work] was lost in troubled times [Dan. 9:25] because of our sins, some became food for moth and worm [cf. Is. 51:8]. Indeed, the cruel moth and the rot girded the last of their strength to destroy what was pleasant to the eye; [these manuscripts] were their meat [cf. Lam. 2:4, 4:10]. ... How great is the desolation of this country [Morocco], where the light of contemporary enlightenment has not shone at her palaces, and where the vision of print has not gone forth. What an exalted and joyful day this is ... in which the spark of the light of print has broken through our darkness to spread in Israel a bright light, which is this eminent book.

It is important to note that Hebrew printing was not yet available in Morocco when this text was printed in Krakow in 1891. “The spark of the light of print” is related therefore to the awareness of the potential of print that guided local agents such as ‘Amar. Building on such awareness in the following “cause,” ‘Amar presents an active call for a volunteer effort to collect manuscripts of rabbinic work, which were apparently scattered throughout Morocco, in order to save them from destruction.57 Around the same time as R. Raphael Aharon ben Shimon’s first attempts to establish a printing society in Fes, a similar call was made in Meknes, although it is unclear to what extent this call was an act of an organized body. It is most likely that the relatively small community of Meknes, in comparison to Fes, was eager to be recognized for its intellectual and cultural leadership;58 in any event, it was only in 1938 that R. Shalom Mesas established a printing society in Meknes. The final section of the introduction deals with the “end purpose” for adding haskamot to rabbinic books “in the openings of the gates, at the entry of the city” (Prov. 1:21, 8:3), and throughout every generation. After enumerating what he considered to be the four basic purposes of the haskamot institution, namely, praising the author, praising the printed work, prohibiting reprinting for some time, and encouraging the purchase of the book, ‘Amar dismisses the notion altogether and, given the nature of Berdugo’s book, labels such reasoning as “insignificant.” In what can be seen as a gentle refutation of the authorizing practices of the approbators of this book (one of them is ‘Amar’s father, Shemuel), ‘Amar places the name of the donor, Don Raphael,59 who gave a “vein for the silver” (Job 28:1), at the fore, while at the same time downplaying his own position within the hierarchical order imposed by the haskamot.

Conclusion: The Approbation as Superfluous Document The preceding brief outline of the politics of the haskamot makes it clear that this institution was practiced, and indeed was the norm, throughout the entire corpus of the printed Maghrebi halakhic literature. Critiques of the haskamot were very uncommon in the literary rabbinic production of the Sephardi world of the 19th century. However, there were a few individuals who offered comments, couched in halakhic terms, against the authorizing practices of approbation, and more specifically against the inflated use of honorifics.60 In this final section, I focus on critiques made by two prominent 20th-​century Moroccan rabbinic figures.

178 

Yigal S. Nizri

The first was R. Raphael Anqawa61 (1848–​1935), who left behind an interesting note against the practice of approbation, which appeared in Tofa’ot reem (Casablanca, 1930), the last of his books that he lived to see published.62 Unlike virtually all rabbinic works that were printed at the time, this book has no haskamot, and Anqawa’s explanation of why he decided to have his work printed without them reveals not only how deeply rooted was the authoritative mechanism of the approbation institution, but also how conscious the approbators may have been with regard to the rhetorical and legal status of their texts.63 Toward the end of his introduction Anqawa declared, in a moda’a leorayta (a call to honor the Torah), that the approbation institution should be minimized or even abolished. In so doing, he criticized the accepted regulatory and authoritative mechanism of the haskamot in his own time. “All of those random authors,”64 he wrote, “have made it their practice to ask the local rabbis to evaluate their work based on the Torah” (la’asot lo semukhin deorayta). Anqawa justified his demand to limit approbations on three main grounds: personal, rhetorical, and political. With regard to the first, he wrote that many individuals had already provided haskamot to two previously published halakhic works of his, and this was sufficient, since the haskamah was essentially a declaration of an author’s halakhic capability rather than an endorsement of any specific written work. Second, the haskamah was no more than “an extra,” a superfluous document. According to Anqawa, if the author’s ideas were “appropriate and reasonable” there was no need to officially support them, and if not—​that is, if the book in question was not sufficiently worthy—​praises would do nothing to change that fact. Originally, he added, the organizing principle of the haskamot in the time of the rishonim was to encourage donations to help defray the cost of publication, rather than to celebrate the author. Unlike his contemporaries, he wrote, he did not need financial support, and in fact had been giving out copies of his books for free. Anqawa’s final point was that a responsa collection, by definition, was a product of multiple cities and social circumstances. Put somewhat differently, such work was a product of many “authors,” and its practical nature placed it beyond the approbation institution. The second rabbi to critique the practice of haskamot was R.  Yosef Meshash65 of Meknes, then serving as the rabbi of Tlemcen, who in February 1937/​Adar 5697 penned a text titled “a letter on the approbations,” in which he criticized the haskamot institution as a whole. He included this text in the opening pages of his book Ner mitzvah (Fes, 1939), a combination of responsa, poetry, and essays about Hanukah (as alluded to in the title) and other subjects. From this letter we learn that Meshash was approached by “a wise man” who wanted to write an approbation to Meshash’s current work, and in fact did so, using flowery and euphemistic language to describe a book he had not actually read; nonetheless, he insisted upon being recognized publicly as an approbator. Meshash’s critical letter offers several reasons as to why this self-​invited approbator’s request could not be fulfilled, while at the same time calling for a reconsideration of the entire practice. His five basic arguments were as follows: 1) Haskamot were a means of self-​promotion on the part of authors, as these texts served to glorify their name with praise, both justified and unjustified.66

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”

179

2) In similar fashion, haskamot were a means of self-​promotion on the part of the approbators, whose own names were introduced with glorifying adjectives and often fictitious titles. To be sure, in the specific case of Meshash’s work, the self-​invited approbator had actually asked not to be honored with any title—​yet this expression of humility was itself problematic, since it opened the question of how to publicly present notions of hierarchy and acknowledgment among scholars. 3) In the specific case at hand, the writer of the proposed haskamah acknowledged that he had not read Ner mitzvah, but rather assumed that his colleague had written a fine book. Such an assumption, according to Meshash, was apt to lead to a halakhic “mishap” (takalah) if the approbation turned out to be unreliable; he criticized the preconceived notion, grounded in talmudic discussion, that rabbis are protected from “mishap.”67 4) The neo-​biblical language of the haskamah texts was apt to perplex and overwhelm readers (ironically, Meshash’s criticism is voiced in language very similar to the flowery language he deplores; he, too, uses descriptive adjectives and literary devices such as alliteration and rhyming). 5) The placement of haskamot can lead to dilemmas regarding authorial hierarchy—​ namely, which approbators receive precedence over others. Meshash, after noting that many were interested in honoring him and his book, explains that he cannot include one approbator at the expense of ignoring others, and to include everyone would result in “great expenditures.” This text provides profound insights into the workings of the institution of haskamot and the ways in which it became a contested arena in which ideas about authority, credibility, and validity could be presented, examined, and acted upon. Meshash’s sophisticated Hebrew prose in this public “letter,” and his use of literary devices such as alliteration and rhyming, which were used in many haskamot and other related hagiographic texts constitutive of the Moroccan rabbinic canon, reveals his intimate familiarity with the praising conventions and boundaries within which he wrote. Meshash’s text is therefore simultaneously conforming and critical, a position that can be read as an explication of his own sense of self, on the one hand, and as a certain reflection on the question of authority and authorship among Moroccan rabbis at the time, on the other.

180 

Yigal S. Nizri

Appendix Moroccan Printed Rabbinical Works, Published 1803–​1969 Date of Publication

Author’s Name

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

1803 1812 1838 1839 1839 1854 1858 1860 1861 1862 1864 1869 1869 1871 1876

Moshe Toledano Avraham Coriat Habib Toledano Yehudah Coriat Avraham ben Mordechai Anqawa Yosef ben ‘Ayush Elmaliah Avraham ben Mordechai Anqawa Avraham ben Mordechai Anqawa Habib Toledano Avraham ben Yehudah Coriat Shelomo ben Mas‘oud Adhan Eliyahu Hayun Avraham ben Mordechai Anqawa Avraham ben Mordechai Anqawa Yitzhak ben Walid

16 17 18

1884 1884 1885

19

1887

20 21 22 23

1891 1892 1892 1894

24 25 26 27 28 29

1896 1897 1897 1901 1902 1903

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

1905 1907 1908 1909 1909 1910 1910 1910

38

1911

Title of Work

‫מלאכת הקדש‬ ‫זכות אבות‬ ‫פה ישרים‬ ‫מאור ושמש‬ ‫זכור לאברהם‬ ‫תקפו של יוסף‬ ‫זבחים שלמים‬ ‫טהרת הכסף‬ ‫תרומת הקדש‬ ‫ברית אבות‬ ‫בנאות דשא‬ ‫טוב לישראל‬ ‫כרם חמר ח"א‬ ‫כרם חמר ח"ב‬ ​/‫ויאמר יצחק ח"א‬ ‫ח"ב‬ Yosef Knafo ‫אות ברית קדש‬ Ya’akov Abuhasera ‫בגדי השרד‬ Ya’akov Abuhasera ‫יורו משפטיך‬ ‫ליעקב‬ Raphael El’azar Halevi ibn Tobo ‫פקודת אלעזר‬ ‫ח"א‬ Raphael Berdugo ‫משפטים ישרים‬ Ya’akov Abuhasera ‫מחשף הלבן‬ Raphael El’azar Halevi ibn Tobo ‫פקודת אלעזר ח"ב‬ Ya’akov ibn Zur ‫משפט וצדקה‬ ‫ביעקב ח"א‬ Eliyahu Iluz ‫פתח אליהו ח"א‬ Raphael ben Haim Ohana ‫טובת מראה‬ Yosef ben Adhan ‫שופריא דיוסף‬ Raphael Moshe Elbaz ‫הלכה למשה‬ Yitzhak ben Shemuel ibn Danan ‫ליצחק ריח‬ Ya’akov ibn Zur ‫משפט וצדקה‬ ‫ביעקב ח"א‬ Shelomo ibn Danan ‫אשר לשלמה‬ Yosef ben Walid ‫שמו יוסף‬ Vidal Hatzarfati ‫תורת כהנים‬ Yosef ben Avraham Almosnino ‫שרשי המצות‬ Eliyahu Iluz ‫יש מאין‬ Raphael Anqawa ‫קרני רא"ם‬ Raphael El’azar Halevi ibn Tobo ‫פקודת אלעזר ח"ג‬ Raphael Haim Moshe ibn Naim ‫שו"ת רחמים‬ ‫פשוטים‬ Eliyahu Elmaliah ‫בקע לגלגלת‬

Date of Place of Author’s Death Printing 1773 1806 1870 1733 1891 1823 1891 1891 1870 1845 1770 1867 1891 1891 1870

Livorno Pisa Livorno Livorno Livorno Livorno Livorno Livorno Livorno Livorno Lviv Jerusalem Livorno Livorno Livorno

1900 1880 1880

Livorno Jerusalem Jerusalem

1885

Jerusalem

1821 1880 1885 1752

Krakow Jerusalem Jerusalem Alexandria

1929 1902 1820 1896 1900 1752

Jerusalem Jerusalem Alexandria Jerusalem Livorno Alexandria

1929 1906 1619 c. 1600 1929 1935 1885 1920

Jerusalem Jerusalem Husiatyn Jerusalem Jerusalem Jerusalem Jerusalem Tunis

1908

Jerusalem

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print” Date of Publication

Author’s Name

39

1912

Raphael Haim Moshe ibn Naim

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

1912 1914 1919 1922 1925 1925 1927 1927 1928

49 50 51

1929 1929 1929

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

1930 1930 1931 1931 1933 1933 1934 1935 1935

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

1935 1937 1938 1939 1939 1939 1940 1940 1940 1940 1940 1941 1942 1943 1945 1945 1947 1949 1950 1950 1952 1952 1952

181 Title of Work

‫קול תחנה קול‬ ‫טחנה‬ Raphael Anqawa ‫פעמוני זהב‬ Raphael ben Haim Ohana ‫מראה הילדים‬ David Haim Tzebah ‫משכיל לדוד‬ Yosef Berdugo ‫כתונת יוסף ח"א‬ Moshe Meir Hai Elyakim ‫ספר מלחמת המגן‬ Hanania Habib Azoulay ‫מגן הדת‬ Shemuel Ajayani ‫רמת שמואל‬ Yosef ben Harush ‫גביע יוסף‬ Makhluf ben Yitzhak Amsalem ‫תפוחי זהב‬ ‫במשכיות כסף‬ Raphael Aaron Monsonigo ‫מי השלח‬ Shemuel Elbaz ‫ויאמר שמואל‬ Shelomo Hacohen Atsban ​/‫ויחל שלמה‬ ‫ויאסוף שלמה‬ Shelomo ibn Danan ‫בקש שלמה‬ Raphael Anqawa ‫תועפות ראם ח"א‬ Haim Toledano ‫חק ומשפט‬ Yaacov Moshe Toledano ‫ים הגדול‬ Haim Ben Moshe ben ‘Atar ‫ארץ החיים‬ David Asabag ‫לקט עני‬ Yosef Meshash ‫מים חיים‬ Yosef Berdugo ‫כתונת יוסף ח"ב‬ Shaul Yeshua Abitbul ‫אבני שיש ח"א‬ ‫ח"ב‬ Yehudah ibn Danan ‫מנחת יהודה‬ Shelomo Hacohen Atsban ‫לך שלמה‬ Petahyah Mordekhai Berdugo ‫נפת צופים‬ Raphael Berdugo ‫תורת אמת‬ Moshe Toledano ‫השמים החדשים‬ Yosef Meshash ‫נר מצוה‬ Yehudah ben ‘Atar ‫מנחת יהודה‬ Raphael Moshe Elbaz ‫עדן מקדם‬ Raphael Moshe Elbaz ‫עטרת פז‬ Raphael Moshe Elbaz ‫מיני מתיקה‬ Shemuel ‘Amar ‫דבר שמואל‬ Maimon Berdugo ‫לב מבי"ן‬ Raphael Moshe Elbaz ‫ארבעה שומרים‬ Yosef Berdugo ‫כתונת יוסף ח"ג‬ Yosef Hacohen ‫שופריה דיוסף‬ Shalom Meshash ‫דברי שלו"ם‬ Mordechai ben Yosef Berdugo ‫דברי מרדכי‬ Amram ben Yehuda Elbaz ‫חיי עמרם‬ Shelomo ben Maimon Abitbul ‫מנחת העומר‬ Avraham David Revah ‫ויען אברהם‬ Yedidya Monsonigo ‫דבר אמת‬ Yeshuah Shimon Haim Ovadyah ‫תורה וחיים‬ Yeshuah Shimon Haim Ovadyah ‫ישמ"ח לבב‬

Date of Place of Author’s Death Printing 1920

Jerusalem

1935 1902 1858 1845 1948 c. 1955 c. 1900 c. 1956 1928

Jerusalem Jerusalem Tunis Tiberias Casablanca Djerba Jerusalem Sousse Jerusalem

c. 1840 1749 1949

Casablanca Casablanca Casablanca

1929 1935 1749 1960 1743 c. 1955 1974 1845 1809

Casablanca Casablanca Fes Cairo Vienna Meknes Fes Casablanca Jerusalem

1961 1949 1820 1821 1773 1974 1733 1896 1896 1896 1830 1824 1896 1845 c. 1930 1974 1762 1857 1815 1938 1867 1952 1952

Fes Casablanca Casablanca Meknes Casablanca Fes Meknes Fes Fes Fes Casablanca Meknes Fes Meknes Casablanca Meknes Meknes Meknes Djerba Djerba Fes Djerba Djerba

182 

84 85 86 87 88

Yigal S. Nizri

Date of Publication

Author’s Name

Title of Work

Date of Place of Author’s Death Printing

1955 1959 1960 1962 1969

Raphael Ya’akov ben Simhon Shaul ibn Danan Aharon ben Hassin Shalom Meshash Raphael Berdugo

‫בת רבים‬ ‫הגם שאול‬ ‫מטה אהרן‬ ‫מזרח שמ"ש‬ ‫רב פנינים‬

1857 1973 1792 2003 1821

Djerba Fes Jerusalem Casablanca Casablanca

Notes 1.  This frequently used term in Hebrew texts, transliterated as rabanei haaltribunal rabinikh, combines a French word with the Arabic definite article ‘al as well as the Hebrew definite article ha. It appears in the halakhic literary production of state-​appointed rabbis and jurists, beginning in 1918. 2. See item no.  13 in Joseph Tedghi, Le livre et l’imprimerie hébraïques à Fès (Jerusalem: 1994), 112–​113. Activities related to Hebrew publishing in Fes were renewed in the 1920s. On Mas‘oud Sharvit and Amram Hazzan (the owners of the printing press in Fes), and on the Hebrew print revolution in Morocco at the time, see ibid., 90–​97. See also a review by Aharon Maman, “Letoledot hasefer vehadefus ha’ivri beFas,” Pe’amim 63 (Spring 1995), 160–​162. 3. Throughout this essay, I  use the terms haskamah and approbation interchangeably. Haskamah (pl. haskamot, and often written askamah/​azkamot) translates both as “agreement” and “approbation,” the latter deriving from the Latin approbationem, meaning approval, endorsement, and permission. See also the first definition of the term haskamah by Moshe Carmilly-​Weinberger: “Rabbinic approval and approbation of the legal decisions of colleagues, usually attached to the original legal decision and circulated with it. These haskamot sometimes amplify the original, by including additional sources and pointing out implications” (Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., 9:444). Note that the term haskamah has another halakhic meaning. According to Haïm Zafrani: “La haskamah est l’accord des dirigeants d’une communauté sur la réception d’une taqqanah.” See idem, “Le Droit Rabbinique et son Évolution,” in idem, Études et Recherches sur la Vie Intellectuelle Juive au Maroc, vol. 1 (Paris: 1972), 18. 4.  What is today called “Morocco” came into existence through a long process that started in the early modern period. From 1553 to 1912 (the beginning of French control), Morocco was ruled by Sharifan dynasties. The term “Sharifan” (or “Sherifian”) refers to that which pertains to shurafa’, descendants of the Prophet Mohammed, but more particularly to the Sa‘dian and ‘Alawite dynasties and their governments. The present dynasty, the ‘Alawi, came to power in the 17th century and has governed ever since. 5.  By “diasporicity,” I do not intend to assume or give privilege to a single place of origin, nor do I claim to speak in the name of a particular geography. As the suffix itself suggests, the term seeks to capture a state or condition that is inevitably a product of multiple places of origin and destinations, of “multiple diasporas” (such as “Sepharad,” “Jerusalem,” or “the cities of the Maghreb,” itself a site of multiple diasporas), which have had a temporal dimension as well. With regard to the Moroccan rabbinic literati elite (well into the late 19th century), this notion of diasporicity had multiple layers and temporalities. Thus, the common self-​referential trope of rabbis as “sages, sons of the west [Maghreb]” was borrowed from the way in which Babylonian sages referred to the Palestinian sages whose work constituted the Jerusalem (Palestinian) Talmud; geographically, Jerusalem is located west of Babylon. The identification of Moroccans outside of the Maghreb through geographical categories such as “Western (Maghrebi) Jews,” which was based on Islamic cartographies, also carried another layer of meaning, as these geographical concepts have halakhic significance, pointing to specific traditions and practices.

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”

183

6.  In recent years the study of paratexts has been developed by scholars in fields such as history of the book. The term “paratext” refers to certain textual features and conventions such as blurbs, prefaces, and notes by the publisher that surround the “main text.” It was coined by the French literary theorist Gerard Genette in his book Palimpsestes:  la Littérature au second degré (Paris: 1982) and was later developed in his Seuils (Paris: 1987), translated as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: 1997). According to Genette, paratext is characterized by “authorial intention and assumption of responsibility.” See the introduction of Paratext and Megatext as Channels of Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. August den Hollander, Ulrich Schmid, and Willem Smelik (Leiden: 2003), vii–​xiii. On the relevancy of paratextuality to the study of books, see Robert Darnton, “ ‘What is the History of Books?’ Revisited,” in Modern Intellectual History, vol. 4, no. 3 (2007), 495–​508. For a richly evocative usage of the paratextual methodology in the study of the Jewish book, see Shlomo Berger, Producing Redemption in Amsterdam:  Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective (Leiden: 2003), esp. ch. 1. 7.  The historian and bibliographer Shalom Bar-​Asher notes that, between 1860 and 1880, about 90 different halakhic tracts were composed in Morocco, most of them responsa literature, alongside 13 books in the field of talmudic commentary and a number of philosophy books. See his Hasifrut harabanit bitzfon afrikah: hishtalshelut hasifrut harabanit bashanim 1700–​1948 (Jerusalem: 1998). 8.  See the chapter titled “Yaḥasam shel ḥakhmei maroko leḥibur hesefarim” in Tedghi, Le livre et l'imprimerie hébraïques à Fes. 9.  Using “altar” as a metaphor for a printing press, as in the Hebrew phrase “leha’alot ’al mizbeaḥ hadefus” (sacrifice on the altar of print), was not unique to rabbinic approaches to this technology in the Sephardi context. A  quick search on the digital database of Bar-​ Ilan University, the Responsa Project, reveals the popularity of this expression in dozens of Ashkenazi and Sephardi rabbinic sources, mainly from the 19th century. Although most of the paratexts (where one might expect a reflective voice on the act of printing) have been removed from the legitimate searchable rabbinic texts, this information, as gleaned from the halakhic texts themselves, is still valuable. It seems that the expression was first used by a Moroccan rabbi, R. Hayim ibn ‘Attar, in the introduction to his popular commentary of the Pentateuch, Or haḥayim (Venice: 1742). If the altar metaphor suggests that halakhic books were offered to God in the sense of their fulfilling a religious duty, we later, in the 19th century, find the expression “meshabeaḥ hadefus,” which carries positive meanings of improvement, enhancement, and appreciation. Nonetheless, these two expressions predated the term makhbesh (press), a medieval word (see Rashi on BT Shabbat, 141a: “makhbesh shekovsin bo”), which in the late 19th century became the most common term used by Hebrew maskilim to denote the printing press. 10.  Before “altar of print” became a popular metaphor, the term leha’alot ’al was in circulation among rabbinic authors who considered their halakhic treatises “fit to be brought to the table of kings.” See, for example, R. Moshe Toledano’s third introduction to his work Melekhet hakodesh (Livorno: 1803). 11.  This concept appears in midrashim, the Babylonian Talmud (Yebamot 97a; Bekhorot 31b; Sanhedrin 90b), the Zohar, and much medieval exegesis. “Dovevei siftei yeshenim” was a commonly used phrase on the part of those promoting the printing of halakhic works in late 19th-​century Morocco. 12.  See n. 3 (the first definition of the term haskamah by Carmilly-​Weinberger). 13.  See Adrian Johns, “Introduction: The Book of Nature and the Nature of the Book,” in idem, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: 2000), 1–​57. 14.  Ludwig Blau, “The Pope, the Father of Jewish Approbations,” Jewish Quarterly Review 10, no. 1 (October 1897), 175–​176. 15.  While the scope of censorship in early modern Europe is a matter of scholarly debate, it has been widely recognized that this institution shaped the legal and cultural landscapes of the period. In Blau’s words: “Every literary product was to find the recognition which it merited from its own intrinsic worth. There was no previous approbation, just as little as there was a previous censure. Censure and approbation are twin sisters, children of the same kind of protective spirit. The approbation is, like the censure, a product of the art of printing” (ibid., 175).

184 

Yigal S. Nizri

In the entry “Approbation or Recommendation,” written for The Jewish Encyclopedia, Jeremias Meijer Hillesum (J.M.H.), who served as librarian of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana in Amsterdam for four decades, took Ludwig Blau’s suggestive claims one step further. He wrote: “The Approbation is not of Jewish origin any more than the censorship. [...] It was the Christian clergy, anxious concerning the influence which might be exerted by certain thoughts and ideas over the multitude, who called both Approbation and censure into existence...” See The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: 1902), 2:27–​29. 16.  Amnon Raz-​Krakotzkin, The Censor, the Editor, and the Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century (Philadelphia: 2007), 117–​119. For more recent research, see Gigliola Fragnitor (ed.), Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge:  2011). See also Joseph R.  Hacker, “Sixteenth-​Century Jewish Internal Censorship of Hebrew Books,” in The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy, ed. Joseph R. Hacker and Adam Shear (Philadelphia: 2011), 107–​120, and Federica Francesconi, ‘ “This Passage Can Also Be Read Differently...:’ How Jews and Christians Censored Hebrew Texts in Early Modern Modena,” Jewish History 26, nos. 1–​2 (2012), 139–​160. 17.  Raz-​Krakotzkin, The Censor, the Editor, and the Text, 117–​119. On June 21, 1554/​ 21 Tammuz 5314, fourteen northern Italian rabbis and consensual community leaders (ha­morshim behaskamah) from the communities of Rome, Ferrara, Mantua, Romagna, Bologna, Reggio, Modena, and Venice gathered in Ferrara in order to come up with a document that would be legally binding for “all the Jews of Italy.” Their eight new enactments were written down by R. Meir Katzenellenbogen (also known as the Maharam of Padua), the delegate from Venice. Only in October 1878 did R. Yitzhak Baruch Halevi of Padua made these enactments available in print, first in the form of the weekly Hebrew periodical ’Ivri anokhi and later as an independent pamphlet. In the wake of the completion of the Italian unification process (Risorgimento), it is easy to see why Halevi and others found these enactments relevant. 18.  See David Kaufmann, “The First Approbation of Hebrew Books,” Jewish Quarterly Review 10, no. 2 (January 1898), 383–​384. 19.  Among the few studies of haskamot as a literary genre and as a political institution, see Meir Benayahu, Haskamot vereshut bidfusei Venetziyah: hasefer ha’ivri me’et havato lidfus ve’ad tzeto laor (Jerusalem: 1971). See also the rabbinic thesis by Mark Hurvitz, “The Rabbinic Perception of Printing as Depicted in Haskamot and Responsa” (Hebrew Union College–​ Jewish Institute of Religion, 1978). For a study regarding copyright and Jewish law that contains a valuable introduction to the study of haskamot, see the second part of Nahum Rakover, Zekhut hayotzrim bamekorot yehudiyim (Jerusalem: 1991), 123–​443. For haskamot in the context of the polemics of anti-​Sabbateanism, see Moshe Carmilly-​Weinberger, Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Jewish History: Great Ideological and Literary Conflicts in Judaism from Antiquity to Modern Times (New York: 1977), 59–​105. For a theoretical account of haskamot in late 20th-​century Israel, see Aaron Ahrend, “Haskamot lesifrei kodesh bedoreinu,” Alei sefer 18 (1995), 157–​170. These works, especially those of Hurvitz and Rakover, deal with the legal and literary aspects of haskamot literature itself. The haskamot of Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–​1935) were collected and printed in one volume, Haskamot haRaayah: kovetz haskamot, ed. Binyamin Zeev Kahana and Yohanan Menahem Yismah (Jerusalem: 1988). The use of haskamot as a historical source for writing the legal and intellectual histories of Jews in the early modern and modern eras is too broad to be summarized here. 20.  A new edition of this volume was published recently with an English translation of its foreword by Shlomo Eidelberg. See Index Approbationum (New Jersey: 2008). The most prominent supplier of approbations in the 19th century was R.  Joseph Saul Nathansohn, the rabbi of Lemberg in East Europe. Because of the vast number of haskamot he wrote, he was sometimes referred to as “the minister of approbations” (sar hamaskim, a pun on the biblical phrase sar hamashkim, the chief of butlers, in Gen. 40: 2). The many hundreds of approbations he wrote give a fascinating picture of this prominent rabbi, who not only took the trouble to read a great many books but also included corrections and comments to their authors in his approbations. See Zeev Gries, The Book in the Jewish World 1700–​1900 (Oxford: 2007), 117.

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”

185

21.  Zeev Gries, an expert in the history of the Jewish book, recently devoted an essay to Ya’ari, who indeed regarded the haskamot as an integral part of any study of the social and cultural history of East European Jewry. After reviewing Ya’ari’s close reading of several approbations originating in late-​17th-​century Poland, Gries issues a cri de coeur: “[W]‌hat lessons can we learn from this? Certainly that approbations contain precious gems for the study of Jewish history, and that they are ignored today just as they were then, in the early 1930s, when Ya’ari began his work” (ibid., 161). In fact, a growing number of scholars have been considering haskamot as historical sources, and such texts have been included in textbooks and anthologies. For example, in the context of Sephardi studies, haskamot were included in the “sources” section written by Yosef Tobi, Jacob Barnai, and Shalom Bar-​Asher, which appears in Toledot hayehudim bearatzot haislam: ha’et haḥadashah ’ad emtzah hameah ha-​19, ed. Shmuel Ettinger (Jerusalem: 1981), 281–​326. 22. Arabic printing with movable type was developed in Italy in the early 16th century. Printing in the Muslim world itself originated within the non-​Muslim communities (Hebrew, Armenian, Syriac, Greek, and roman types were in use); typography in the Arabic script of the Muslim majority was not used in the Muslim world until the 18th century. See Geoffrey Roper, “Arabic Printing: Printing Culture in the Islamic Context,” in Houari Touati (ed.), online Encyclopedia of Mediterranean Humanism (Spring 2014); online at:  encyclopedie-​humanisme.com/​?Arabic-​printing (accessed 9 January 2019). Scholarship on the transmission from scribal to print culture in the Ottoman context is vast. See, for example, Muhsin Mahdi, “From the Manuscript Age to the Age of Printed Books,” in The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East, ed. George Nicholas Atiyeh (Albany: 1995), 1–​ 15; Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu and Hatice Aynur, “The Birth of the Tradition of Printed Books in the Ottoman Empire: Transition from Manuscript to Print (1729–​1848),” Archivum Ottomanicum vol. 24 (2007), 165–​196. 23.  For a recent study of Jewish texts in the Ottoman context, see ch. 2, “Print and the Vernacular:  The Emergence of Ladino Reading Culture,” in Matthias B.  Lehmann, Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture (Bloomington: 2005), 31–​48. 24.  The practice of writing endorsements for newly published works in the Islamic context is commonly known as taqriz (pl. taqariz, taqrizat), from the Arabic root q-​r-​z (or q-​r-​d, to praise). The endorsement is usually brief (between several lines to a few folios), and its content and poetic style may vary. Taqariz were written in poetry and prose and their content ranged from praises to the author, intervention on his behalf or, in some cases, nuanced criticism. See Guy Burak, “Reflections on Censorship, Canonization and the Ottoman Practices of Imza and Tabriz,” online at:  academia.edu/​36812819/​Reflections_​on_​Censorship_​Canonization_​and_​ the_​Ottoman_​Practices_​of_​Imza_​and_​Takriz (accessed 13 March  2019). For one of the first modern studies of the taqriz, an examination of a taqariz collection from 14th-​century Cairo, see Franz Rosenthal, “ ‘Blurbs’ (taqrîẓ) from Fourteenth-​Century Egypt,” Oriens 27/​28 (1981), 177–​196. 25.  The bibliographical information was gathered from the titles themselves and from the following lexical works: Moshe Bar-​Asher (ed.), Sefer hamekorot lesifrut ha’ivrit bitzfon afrikah mishnat 1391 ve’ad hayom (2 vols.; pilot ed.) (Jerusalem: 2001); Bar-​Asher, Hasifrut harabanit bitzfon afrikah; Tedghi, La livre et l’imprimerie hébraïques à Fès. 26. Unlike trade and educational networks that are crucial to the study of Jews in the modern Maghreb, the scope and importance of scholars’ networks are largely undertheorized. For studies on early modern Jewish Mediterranean commercial networks, see Jonathan Irvine Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-​Jews and the World of Maritime Empires (1540–​1740) (Leiden: 2002); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-​Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: 2008). On the intersection of scholars and philanthropic Jewish networks in the Mediterranean, see Matthias B. Lehman, “Rabbinic Emissaries from Palestine and the Making of a Modern Jewish Diaspora:  A Philanthropic Network in the Eighteenth Century,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Ra’anan S. Boustan, Klaus Herrmann, Reimund Leicht, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and Giuseppe Veltri, vol. 2 (Tübingen: 2014), 1229–​1246. On the changing notions of the term “Sephardi”

186 

Yigal S. Nizri

in the wake of the Sephardi networks of the 18th and 19th centuries, see Matthias B. Lehmann, “Rethinking Sephardi Identity:  Jews and Other Jews in Ottoman Palestine,” Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 1 (2008), 81–​109. 27.  For example, Melekhet hakodesh (Livorno:  1803) includes haskamot from rabbis in Livorno, Meknes, Salé, Gibraltar, and Tangier; Peh yesharim (Livorno: 1838) includes haskamot from rabbis in Tunis and Livorno; Meor veshemesh (Livorno: 1839) includes haskamot from rabbis in Livorno, Tripoli, Mogador, and Tiberias; Berit avot (Livorno: 1862) includes paratexts by rabbis in Mogador, Tunis, and Livorno; Kerem ḥemar (Livorno: 1869, part 1) includes haskamot from rabbis in Mascara, Tunis, Safed, Mostaganem, and Meknes. For books printed in Jerusalem, see for example, Petaḥ Eliyahu (Jerusalem: 1896), which includes paratexts from rabbis in Tiberias and Fes; Bigdei haserad (Jerusalem: 1884), which includes haskamot from rabbis in Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias; and Yoru mispatekhah leYa’akov (Jerusalem: 1885), which includes haskamot from rabbis in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed. 28.  R. Yosef ben Walid, Shemo Yosef (Jerusalem: 1907), (no pagination). In similar fashion, the Maghrebi R. Nachman Betito, who became the Sephardi chief rabbi of Palestine, wrote in his haskamah to Eliyahu Elmaliah’s Beka’ lagulgolet (Jerusalem:  1911) that he “greatly enjoyed” the author’s company. 29. See Jessica M.  Marglin, “The Two Lives of Mas‘ud Amoyal:  Pseudo-​Algerians in Morocco, 1830–​1912,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 4 (2012), 651–​ 670. See also ch. 2, “Jews Northern and Southern: The French Annexation of the Mzab and the Boundaries of Colonial Law,” in Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Chicago: 2014), 41–​56. See also Simon Schwarzfuchs, “Ha’aliyah mitzfon afrikah leaḥar kibush algeriyah biydei tzorfat,” Pe’amim 38 (1989), 109–​123. 30.  See Shalom Bar-​Asher, “Anqāwa (Al-​Naqawa), Abraham,” Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, online (by subscription) at https://​referenceworks.brillonline.com/​entries/​ encyclopedia-​of-​jews-​in-​the-​islamic-​world/​anqawa-​al-​naqawa-​abraham-​SIM_​0001980?s. num=92&s.rows=50&s.start=60 (accessed 13 January 2019). 31.  For an analysis of the rabbinic elite in Algeria during the first decades of French control and its relationship with other Jewish centers in the Ottoman Empire, see Yossef Charvit, Toledot yehudei algeriyah be’idan hatzarfati:1830–​1962 (Tel Aviv: 2010), 60–​82; idem, La France, l’élite rabbinique d’Algérie et de la Terre Sainte au XIXème siècle: tradition et modernité (Paris: 2005), 97–​183. 32.  Treifah (literally “torn,” by a beast) is a technical halakhic term referring to a puncture or a defect in any organ of an animal, which is therefore considered to be in a dying condition. The specific pathologies rendering animals treifah vary from organ to organ; in any event, such an animal, even if slaughtered according to the rules governing sheḥitah, cannot be eaten. The meaning and implementation of the term treifah and its centrality in Jewish slaughtering laws evolved through different phases of the history of halakhah. 33.  The notion regarding “practicality” of halakhic books in North Africa seems to have gained prominence around the mid-​19th century and was expanded to include women’s education. Avraham Laredo’s Sefer da’at Yehudit (Livorno: 1827), which focuses on religious precepts of special relevance to women such as those concerning ritual purity (niddah), was translated by Ya‘acoub Anqawa from Judezmo to Judeo-​Arabic and printed in Algiers as Sefer da’at Yehudit bela‘arabiyeh (Algiers: 1855). On genres of literature published in Judeo-​ Arabic at the time, see Yosef Tobi, “Judeo-​Arabic Literature in North Africa,” in Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture, ed. Harvey E. Goldberg (Bloomington: 1996), 213–​225. 34.  This process culminated in Anqawa’s most important work, Kerem ḥemar (Livorno: 1869–​1871), a two-​volume compilation of 196 halakhic rulings and responsa by 18th-​and 19th-​ century rabbis of Morocco. The second volume contained a collection of rabbinical ordinances (takanot) enacted by the rabbis of Castile and Fes from the 15th to the 18th century, as well as an abridgment of these takanot by R. Raphael ben Mordechai Berdugo. See Shalom Bar-​Asher, Takanot yehudei maroko (Jerusalem: 1977). 35.  In the opening section of the introduction to Zevaḥim shelemim, Anqawa writes:

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”

187

The rishonim and poskim [halakhic arbiters] formulated Jewish laws of slaughter . . . [which were meticulously codified and elaborated by] Maran and Moses Isserles. [To this body of knowledge] were added various customs as decreed by the exiled [rabbis] of Castile, whose rulings are like sparks and burning embers. The [rabbis] of Fes and Meknes then added their own practices [minhagim], which became the abiding tradition in the Maghreb, whether for leniency or for stringency. And even if one finds that many of their laws are contrary to the decisions of Maran, they are nonetheless correct. [Meanwhile,] there has been an increase in those engaged in ritual slaughter, and most of them have insufficient knowledge concerning all the laws . . . [yet] whenever they are faced with something new, they rely on their own opinion . . . . Therefore, I have labored to collect and provide references to all the halakhic opinions, [relying] on a manuscript sent to me by God called Zivḥ̣ei ratzon by R. Shelomo ibn Tzur, who preceded me in gathering these laws. 36.  See Ya’akov Moshe Toledano, Ner hama’arav (Jerusalem: 1911), 194. 37.  The text makes use of the term ’arelim (uncircumcised), which is generally used as a derogatory reference to Christians. 38.  For a discussion of Moroccan meat markets as a realm of interfaith interaction in the precolonial period, see Stacy Holden, “Muslim and Jewish Interaction in Moroccan Meat Markets, 1873–​1912,” in Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, ed. Daniel Schroeter and Emily Gottreich (Bloomington: 2011), 150–​167. 39.  My assumption is that Moshe Sebaoun was a descendent of the Castilian rabbi Avraham Sab’a (1440–​1508), who lived through the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and whose granddaughter married R. Yosef Karo. If this assumption is correct, and because familial genealogies no less than scholastic achievements were dominant in shaping identities of Sephardi scholars, there is a possibility that Sebaoun’s judgment was also personal. 40. Given the relationship between local French authorities and the Jews, the decision made in Livorno to censor the letters had a political dimension in Algeria as well, and many Moroccan Jews who had migrated to this region were affected by it. See Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick: 2010), 104–​ 108, which includes the perspective of local French colonial authorities on the affair, along with a discussion of the conflicting roles of the rabbinic French consistoire and local Jews in Oran (among them, Moshe Karsenty and Mordechai Darmon). See also Bar-​Asher, Hasifrut harabanit bitzfon afrikah, 101–​103. 41.  On Ya’akov al-​‘Asri, see Joshua Schreier, “From Mediterranean Merchant to French Civilizer: Jacob Lasry and the Economy of Conquest in Early Colonial Algeria,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 (2012), 631–​649. 42.  It is possible that, in supporting Anqawa’s cause, the Metz-​educated Weill was trying to garner local support. As a French-​appointed rabbi, Weill’s position in Algiers was met with continuous local Jewish resistance. See Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith,  42–​43. 43.  Pipereno (d. 1863)  was also one of the signatories on an introduction to Anqawa’s Zevaḥim shelemim two years earlier. 44.  Based on the Talmudic dictum (Shabbat 119b):  “he who despises a scholar has no remedy for his wounds.” 45.  The notion of “agencies of consecration” is borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu’s essay “The Market of Symbolic Goods” in idem, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randall Johnson (New  York:  1993), 112–​141 (originally published in French: “Le marché des biens symboliques” in L’année sociologique, 22 [1971], 49–​126). 46.  Note the title in Latin letters: “Mischputim Jeschurim, Druok von Josef Fisoher, Krakau, Grodgasse 62. Verlag von A. Faust. Buchhandlung Krakau. 1891.” As far as I know, this is the only book by a Maghrebi scholar that was printed in the Austrian-​dominated parts of Poland (Galicia). Joseph Fischer (1878–​1914) was a print entrepreneur of Hebrew and Yiddish belle

188 

Yigal S. Nizri

lettres; he was among the more established commissioned printers in the region. See Hayim Dov Friedberg, Toledot hadefus ha’ivri bepolanyah (Antwep: 1932), 38–​39. 47.  The name “Meknes” appears on the first page as Meknasa (the Berber pronunciation). It is likely that several years passed before the printing was fully completed. The haskamot were written almost a decade earlier, and the text on the front page bears the date March 1894/​ Adar 5654. 48.  I borrow the term “library awareness” from Avriel Bar-​Levav, who discusses the amorphic notion of libraries as central in the history of Jewish mentalité and culture. See Avriel Bar-​ Levav, "Bein toda’at hasifriyah lerepublikah hasifrutit hayehudit," in Sifriyot veosfei sefarim, ed. Yosef Kaplan and Moshe Sluhovsky (Jerusalem: 2006), 201–​224. 49.  Among Berdugo’s published works are Torat emet (Meknes: 1939), Sharvit hazahav, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: 1975, 1978); Mei menuḥot, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: 1900; Djerba: 1942), and Mesamḥei lev (Jerusalem: 1990). His Arabic commentary on twenty biblical books, Lashon limudim, was published in four volumes by Moshe Bar-​Asher in 2001. On Berdugo and his overall literary work, see Moshe Bar-​Asher, Commentaire biblique Leshon limmudim de Rabbi Raphaʼel Berdugo, vol. 1 (Jerusalem:  2001), 3–​20. See also idem, “’Al yetzirato shel rabi Raphael Berdugo,” Pe'amim 91 (Spring 2002), 181–​187. 50.  An essay about R. Shemuel ‘Amar’s life and activities (written by his great-​grandson, Meir ‘Amar) was included in the introductions to his halakhic work Devar Shemuel (Casablanca: 1940). ‘Amar (1830–​1889) was both a merchant (sugar and wheat) and a halakhic adjudicator (dayan), a combination not uncommon in the political life of Moroccan Jews in the precolonial period. He was also an antiquarian enthusiast. 51.  The term halakhah ledorot itself belongs to an early discursive tradition about halakhic authority. See, for example, Tosefta Berakhot 5:2. Zvi Zohar was first to identify the problematics regarding halakhic precedents in the work of modern Middle Eastern rabbis. See Zohar, ’Atzmaut haposek bahoveh kelapei hapiskah be’avar,” in Bein samkhut leotonomiyah bamasoret yisrael, ed. Ze’ev Safrai and Avi Sagi (Tel Aviv: 1997), 304–​320. See also the chapter “The Sephardic Halakhic Ethos according to Iraqi Rabbinic leaders” in Zohar, Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East (New York: 2013), 63–​89. 52.  Bava batra 12a. 53.  Based on Brachot 18b, and Ḥulin 7b. 54.  The four causes model appeared in Judeo-​Arabic in Maimonides’ early essay Treatise on Logic, as well as in his later work, Guide for the Perplexed. 55. This quadrangular construction will appear later in a work authored by R.  Yosef Meshash, Sefer mayim ḥayim (Fes: 1934). 56. This is a clear allusion to the classical rabbinic “decline of generations” (yeridat hadorot) discourse that developed in the Talmud. According to this concept, each generation of halakhic scholars is inevitably inferior to that of the past. According to the talmudic dictum, “if our ancestors (rishonim) were the sons of angels we are the children of men, and if the rishonim were the children of men, we are like donkeys” (Shabbat 112b). The question of the extent to which Jews are bound to accept the opinions and pronouncements of past halakhic authorities has been a critical juncture in the history of Jewish knowledge. For example, Moses Maimonides, a leading medieval legist and philosopher, offered a critical engagement with the notion of “the decline of the generations.” Maimonides did not accept the superiority/​inferiority binary that defined the relationship between “moderns” and the “ancients,” but rather called for the inherent equality of the two. See Menachem Kellner, Maimonides on the “Decline of the Generations” and the Nature of Rabbinic Authority (Albany: 1996). 57.  Half a century after ‘Amar’s death, his grandson, Meir ‘Amar, described him as more educated than his contemporaries in Meknes, a mara deatra (rabbinic authority) who was involved in communal Jewish politics and commerce and also, like his father, an antiquarian enthusiast. This description sheds light on R. Shalom ‘Amar’s call for rescuing rare manuscripts that had been destined for oblivion. See the introduction to ‘Amar’s Devar Shemuel. 58. The haskamot were also instrumental in creating and maintaining particular local identities. The approbators indicate the fact that Berdugo was a native of their own city (from the

“Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print”

189

introduction of R. Ya‘acov Berdugo), or a yeshiva teacher (from the haskamah of R. Moshe Berdugo). 59.  Probably a reference to Raphael Piamenta, who is also mentioned in the haskamot and on the front page. Piamenta paid for the copying of the manuscript in memory of his Tangier-​ born father, Shelomo. 60.  One example was the Iraqi rabbi and kabbalist Eliyahu Saliman Mani (1818–​1899), a chief rabbi of Hebron in the 1860s, who vehemently protested the use of honorifics and titles. See idem, Kise Eliyahu (Jerusalem: 1865), 76–​77. Nevertheless, Mani co-​signed a traditional haskamah to R. Ya’akov Abuhasera’s Bigdei haserad (Jerusalem: 1884). 61.  I use the transcription that appears in his 1910 book. Other transcriptions of the name include Al-​Naqawa, Encaoua, and Ankaoua. Anqawa (1848–​1935) was a pupil of R. Issachar Assaraf, the chief rabbi of Salé, whose daughter he married. At the age of 32, he was appointed dayan in Salé. His reputation for judicial acumen spread his name throughout Morocco. See Norman A. Stillman, “Anqāwa (Al-​Naqawa), Raphael,” in Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (Leiden: 2010) (also online). From the 16th century, members of the Anqawa family served in numerous communal positions in cities such as Tlemcen, Livorno, and Tunis, as well as in various cities in Morocco. For Anqawa’s biography, see Avraham Elmaliah, Doar hayom (6 September 1935), and the introductions to the new edition of his work, Ahavat shalom (Jerusalem: 2000). 62.  Reem (Heb. for oryx, and a symbol of divine power) is also the acrostic of the author's name, Raphael ben Mordechai Anqawa. The title of this book is based on Numbers 23:22. This work has since been reprinted several times in Israel. 63.  R. Anqawa kept his criticism to himself for two decades. Twice in this text he indicates that he was waiting for the appropriate moment, which reflects an awareness of his authoritative position. 64.  This description later becomes a blunt critique of the accepted popular norms among Jews of naming people “rabbis” and praising them in a way that “could reach their shoulders” (as in Bava kama 95b), that is, beyond proportion. 65.  Quintessentially a product of the 20th century, Meshash (written also Mesas) (1892–​ 1974) lived through major historical moments that shaped the lives of Moroccan Jews and changed them in unprecedented ways, namely, French colonialism, the urbanization of Moroccan cities, the advent of Jewish nationalism in Morocco, the rise of Moroccan nationalism and, most importantly, the migratory movement of Jews outside of the Maghreb. Back in 1912 he was instrumental in the efforts by Zeev Wolff Halperin, an Ashkenazi entrepreneur who appeared that year in the mellah of Meknes, to establish a rabbinical training school in Meknes. After serving as the rabbi of Tlemcen (1924–​1940), Meshash returned to Morocco and served as a dayan in a post he retained until 1964, when he moved to Israel and was elected chief rabbi of Haifa, a position he held until his death in 1974. Aside from his halakhic works, his views about Jewish history, theology, and communal and political affairs were preserved in the form of correspondence. Letters that he wrote between 1907 and 1967 were published in three volumes as Otzar hamikhtavim (Jerusalem: 1968–​1975). For a very detailed analysis of the name “Meshash,” see the author’s introduction to Mayim ḥayim. The work of Meshash as a whole has been rediscovered by scholars and educators in Israel in the past decade and has become an object of academic study. See, for example, David Bitton, “Hadin, hasekhel vehazeman:  harav Yosef Meshash, posek be’idan shel temurot” (master's thesis, Hebrew University, 2002). 66.  Meshash mentions that his previously printed work, Mayim ḥ̣ayim, did include two haskamot (one by the chief rabbi of Morocco, Raphael Anqawa of Salé; the other haskamah, in a form of a poem, was penned by Issac Morali, a maskil from Algiers). At the time, he wrote, he considered this an honor, but he was no longer in need of such recognition; on the contrary, it now repulses him. 67. Meshash refers to the Talmudic contention (Gitin 7a) that God protects the righteous from accidental sin and judicial errors. This rule does not always apply, Meshash says,

190 

Yigal S. Nizri

following Tosafot on that segment, which tackles the problem by distinguishing between eating non-​kosher food and other sins, as it is shameful for a social figure such as the rabbi to eat forbidden food by error. Meshash adds that such “protection” of the righteous was limited to the time of the rishonim, and it already happened that a known rabbi ate a forbidden food by mistake.

Transferring Jewish Knowledge: F.A. Brockhaus as a Publisher of Judaica and Orientalia Arndt Engelhardt (LEIBNIZ INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE—​SIMON DUBNOW )

One of the best-​known publications of the publishing house founded by Salman Schocken is the series known as Schocken-​Bücherei (Schocken Library), published in Germany between 1933 and 1938. This series comprised 83 volumes on Jewish history and culture dating from antiquity until the modern era, including works by such disparate figures as Philo of Alexandria, Maimonides, Heinrich Heine, and Franz Kafka. The reasonably priced volumes had average sales of 4,000–​5,000 copies, with the most popular works selling up to 10,000 copies: this was the most successful series put out by Schocken. At a time when the rights of Jews in Germany were being curtailed and Jews were being expelled from German culture, Schocken-​Bücherei marked the lasting value of Jewish culture.1 Among the authors appearing in this series were several non-​ Jews:  Johann Gottfried Herder, Theodor Mommsen, Annette von Droste-​Hülshoff,2 and Ferdinand Gregorovius. The last was a well-​known German historian of his time whose travelogue “Der Ghetto und die Juden in Rom” was originally published in 1856 by F.A. Brockhaus.3 Specializing in reference works, this Leipzig-​based publisher, especially in the era preceding the revolution of 1848, was a center of enlightened liberalism, not only taking stands against censorship and in favor of a free press but also integrating Jewish authors and scholars into its publishing ventures. Leopold Zunz, for instance, worked as an editor and author for the Brockhaus Conversations-​Lexikon in its 8th to 10th editions between 1835 and 1853.4 In addition, articles for the Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (Universal Encyclopedia of Sciences and Arts), the largest-​scale (albeit never completed) German encyclopedia of the 19th century, were written by scholars associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism) movement.5 In 1891, Brockhaus began looking into the possibility of collaborating in the production of a Jewish encyclopedia, the Allgemeine Encyclopädie für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums (Universal Encyclopedia for the History and Science of Judaism), which eventually became the basis for the Jewish Encyclopedia published by Funk and Wagnalls in New York between 1901 and 1906.6 Arndt Engelhardt, Transferring Jewish Knowledge In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0011

192 

Arndt Engelhardt

Brockhaus’ varied public, scholarly, and encyclopedic projects manifested the Enlightenment-​era drive to collect, collate, and classify knowledge about the world. During the long 19th century, textual knowledge became imperative to grasping a world beyond the individual’s reach: the world was now fast becoming accessible via printed books and materials.7 Hence, there came into being a “republic of letters,” a special culture of exchange among Jewish (and other) scholars who mediated between textual traditionalism and modern claims of scholarship and for whom, according to one thesis, the creation of critical editions of texts with the tools of modern philology became a special vocation.8

A Social and Material History of Jewish Publishing Cultures In cultural-​historical research on publishing and book production, growing emphasis has been placed in recent decades on what might be termed the “social and cultural history of communication through the printed word” and on the central role of publishers as go-​betweens.9 Building on this, I seek to investigate the activity and impact of Jewish publishing firms in the German-​speaking countries against the backdrop of political and social processes of modernization in the era of emancipation. With regard to the history of Jewish publishing and the Jewish press, scholars have analyzed the function of Jewish book publishers in the German-​speaking lands in the 19th and 20th centuries.10 Frequently this has involved an effort to determine their specific contribution to the surrounding majority society. Jewish journalism as a central medium for Jewish identity and self-​understanding, as well as the importance of Jewish periodicals for genres of Jewish literature developing from the traditional canon of Jewish writing, have been investigated in social-​historical and literary-​analytical studies, and in transnational research on the history of the press.11 In addition, several comprehensive projects have looked in depth at German Jewish literature for children and young adults. Their lines of development, literary and linguistic transformations, and their central role in education for Jewish youth from the time of the Haskalah have been studied; here, too, there have been repeated references to the book as a central medium for the emergence of modern Jewish material cultures.12 In this connection, the history of Jewish publishing houses has been conceptualized as a field for the historicizing of communication as shaped and determined by modern technologies and formations of knowledge, and as a means of better understanding both German Jewish cultural history and the formation of a middle-​class Jewish public sphere during the 19th century.13 More recently, these approaches, in a more refined methodological form, have been applied to research dealing with the transformation of East European Jewish culture.14 A fundamental assumption is that the culture of reading, language, and communication among European Jews underwent profound change as a result of social shifts beginning in the latter part of the 18th century, in particular, the increasing levels of secularization among Jews. In this process, German was accorded a special function in Central and Eastern Europe as the “imperial” language of emancipation, acculturation, and the sciences.15 In what follows, I examine the transnational and European character of Jewish literature and scholarship in German in the 19th century and its ongoing reception into

Transferring Jewish Knowledge

193

the 20th century.16 In doing this, I run counter to the common practice of drawing a distinction between “Jewish publishing houses” in the narrow sense—​that is, publishers dealing mainly with Jewish religion, history, and culture—​and the activity of Jews in the far broader general book industry.17 My own approach attempts to investigate more comprehensively the forms of transfer in which knowledge of and about Jews in various constellations was established and disseminated, as illustrated in several examples from the 19th century. My focus is on the Brockhaus publishing firm, a “universal” publishing house that “would prove to be one of the most influential publishers of both scientific and popular Orientalistik”18 in addition to its being heavily involved (at least, in the second half of the 19th century) in the publication of Judaica. During this period, the notion of a “corpus of knowledge” was still in the process of dynamic constitution, and there was a wide-​ranging conception of what constituted Jewish literature. Moritz Steinschneider, for instance, in his programmatic preface to the Hebräische Bibliographie. Blätter für neuere und ältere Literatur des Judenthums, which he edited from 1858 to 1882, noted that his bibliography would, as far as possible, list all new literature published in the respective years: What belongs here is everything by Jews and non-​Jews, published in the book trade or elsewhere, that has as its subject Judaism (in the broadest sense) or Jews, or which occasionally addresses this topic in a significant way. Well aware of the considerable associated difficulty inherent in such a conceptual definition of scope, we must leave it to ongoing experience to render our norm more precise, and now and then we will also devote several articles to clarifying the focal subject matter of the bibliography.19

This was an ample and encompassing concept of Jewish literature, intended to break free from traditional, especially religiously grounded, restrictions: “For many it is unnecessary to mention this, but it must be stated explicitly once and for all time: nowhere is our standpoint religious or theological, but rather always and only literary. In this regard, we do not hesitate to apply the term ‘national’ to characterize the body of literature of the Jews, and shall on occasion seek to justify this.”20 Steinschneider’s successors at the end of the 19th century, Heinrich Brody and Aron Freimann, concurred with these formulations of their esteemed mentor, and presented their own bibliographic venture as the “central organ for all Jewish literature.”21 This was also the approach Freimann adopted in the early 1930s for the Judaica catalog of the Frankfurt Municipal Library, which remains a basic bibliographical tool.22 As also evidenced below, the 19th century was a period of transition among Jews from religion to the more modern realm of religious affiliation, Konfessionalität, which was marked by the direct attempt to participate in a German-​speaking culture that was conceived, at least initially (before the formation of the nation and the state), to be progressive, open, and malleable.

The Judaic and Orientalist Projects of F.A. Brockhaus Established in Amsterdam in 1805 (it relocated to Leipzig in 1817), Brockhaus evolved into one of the largest firms in the 19th-​century book trade and publishing industry, with branches both in several European cities and in New York. Its renown was

194 

Arndt Engelhardt

based to no small degree on its Conversations-​Lexikon, a popular encyclopedia edited by the firm’s founder, Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, which was launched in 1809 in several different editions and expanded by numerous supplements over the years, in addition to being translated into many languages.23 The Brockhaus enterprise combined all the important sub-​areas of book production under one corporate umbrella, from type foundry, typesetting unit, and printing press to bindery. As early as 1826, it made use of the cylinder printing press developed by Friedrich König, and from the 1830s, steam was increasingly used to power its rapid presses; in 1899, the firm had a total of 46 such machines in operation, capable annually of producing up to 80 million printed pages.24 The development of Brockhaus was thus closely bound up with industrialization, namely, the development of innovative procedures in the printing trade and new channels of distribution for the book trade, all of which accelerated intellectual activity and the production of knowledge.25 Although “Brockhaus” was often a stand-​in for the popular reference works the company produced well into the second half of the 19th century, the publisher dealt with a wide variety of genres, including academic scholarship.26 It published and distributed foreign-​language literature, dictionaries, and text books alongside bibliographic aids and publishers’ and antiquarian catalogs. In addition, it brought out selected volumes of poetry, fiction, and travelogues. Finally, as noted, the publisher devoted considerable attention both to Judaica and to Orientalist works. Among its many offerings in the former field was a seven-​volume, posthumous edition of the collected works of Moses Mendelssohn. According to an article written years later by the Budapest-​based rabbi and scholar Moritz Kayserling, F.A. Brockhaus himself contacted Mendelssohn’s grandson, the composer Felix Mendelssohn-​Bartholdy, for the rights to undertake a new, corrected edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s works, which would constitute a “monument for the impact of the Jewish philosopher on German culture.”27 The volumes were published between 1843–​1845 and included an introduction to the life and work of Mendelssohn that was written by another of his grandsons, Georg Benjamin Mendelssohn, a well-​known historian and geographer. Among the topics dealt with at length was Mendelssohn’s 1780 translation of the Bible into German. According to the introduction: “The Bible in this translation became the main [focus of] study for Jewish youth, and following this, the traditional Talmud schools were less visited [causing] a betterment of the[ir] manners. By this means, too, the path was paved for Jewish youth to read German literature, and arts and sciences were made accessible.”28 The collected works came out in a second edition in 1863, and as with the first edition, the intended audience included both Jews and non-​Jews.

Three Jewish Encyclopedists: Moritz Steinschneider, David Cassel, Leopold Zunz In 1831, Brockhaus acquired the rights to an ongoing scholarly project known as the Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, edited by two scholars, Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber, and often referred to popularly as “the Ersch/​Gruber.”29 In the truest sense of early modern universal learning, this

Transferring Jewish Knowledge

195

project was based on the reception and transmission of the entire system of contemporary scholarship. Comprising almost 80,000 pages, the encyclopedia contained a number of essays on Jewish history written by Selig (Paulus) Cassel; his brother David, along with Moritz Steinschneider, contributed pieces on Jewish literature. It is likely that the inclusion of Jewish authors, particularly those of the second generation of Wissenschaft des Judentums, can be traced back to the efforts of one of the encyclopedia’s co-​ editors, the theologian and Orientalist Andreas Gottlieb Hoffmann. As a compendium of enlightened scholarship, the encyclopedia evinced a great interest in “non-​Protestant” theology. Of course, it was primarily to be understood as a “German [teutsche] encyclopedia” and as a sum of all erudition at the beginning of the 19th century, and it was also meant “[not] to blush in the face of any of its foreign sisters.”30 Both of its editors saw themselves clearly in the tradition of the Enlightenment and were keen to emphasize that the encyclopedia was to be presented as an interdenominational forum. In the preface, they therefore expressly mentioned their efforts to find “contributors from amongst Catholic scholars,” thereby “to obviate complaints about the biased treatment of the Catholic system of theology.”31 Jews, in contrast, were specified in the programmatic introduction to the second part of the encyclopedia in the more general context of religious tolerance: “And since the Eternal created Christians and Jews, Turks and heathens, and all parties and sects among them as humans, how dare any state make human rights dependent on creed, thereby to forestall the Eternal in a court of law that He has reserved unto Himself?”32 In another demonstration of its liberal orientation, Brockhaus had noted in its prospectus for the encyclopedia that a well-​known Jewish scholar, David Fränkel, was to be one of its contributors. Fränkel was the director of the Franzschule, a Jewish school in Dessau, and also the publisher of the first German-​language journal for Jews, issued from 1806 under the title Sulamith. Eine Zeitschrift zur Beförderung der Kultur und Humanität unter der jüdischen Nation (Sulamith: A Journal for the Advancement of Culture and Humanity among the Jewish Nation). Fränkel’s future area of involvement in the encyclopedia was cited as “contributions to the knowledge of Judaism.”33 A further indicator for the reception of Wissenschaft des Judentums, excluded as it was from the academic establishment, was the growing number of Jewish scholars who were brought on as collaborators and authors for the famous Brockhaus Conversations-​Lexikon, a more popular reference work. From the 1840s onwards, Leopold Zunz, Isaak Markus Jost, David Cassel, and Moritz Steinschneider, who were among the leading exponents of Wissenschaft des Judentums, were given the opportunity to contribute to general encyclopedias, featured alongside (and sometimes in competition with) non-​Jewish scholars. The Allgemeine Encyclopädie contained two lengthy essays by Steinschneider and David Cassel, one (co-​authored) dealing with Jewish typography and Jewish publishing,34 and the other (written by Steinschneider) titled “Jüdische Literatur.”35 The latter offered for the first time a comprehensive overview of Jewish literature from Ezra to Mendelssohn, listing some 1,600 Jewish writers on 114 quarto pages. Steinschneider here defined Jewish literature independent of its sacred tradition: “The literature of the Jews in the broadest sense actually incorporates everything that Jews wrote from the most ancient times until the present, without regard to contents,

196 

Arndt Engelhardt

language, or fatherland.” In particular, he rejected any equation of “Jewish” literature with Jewish theology: Jewish literature can just as little as Arabic or Chinese literature be reduced simply to the theological, and knowledge thereof can therefore not simply be regarded as an ancillary discipline to theology, just because interest therein has hitherto concerned itself above all with biblical scholarship and polemics. Jewish literature is moreover not the special preserve of actual rabbis, meaning those holding office.

With this disentanglement of literature from theology, Steinschneider made a decisive contribution toward opening the German-​language Wissenschaft des Judentums to philology while simultaneously distancing himself from scholars such as Abraham Geiger, who, despite their profound philological knowledge, were more interested in providing a theological base for the future of Judaism. Steinschneider’s conception of literature incorporated all writings handed down by the Jewish people from the past to the present, and thereby also multiple manifestations of its life. He referred to Jewish literature as a “continuous organism insofar as its carriers form an idiosyncratic whole.” At the same time, he argued, Jews over the centuries could not “exhaustively be described by the term ‘religious community,’ and only approximately with the term ‘nationality.’ ”36 Steinschneider considerably underestimated the amount of research necessary for writing this essay. At the outset, he estimated a working period of only four months, to conclude in July 1846. In the end, the work was finished only in January 1848.37 In private correspondence with his fiancée, Auguste Auerbach, he discussed the reasons for his agreement to work on the encyclopedia articles and what he hoped to accomplish. Steinschneider emphasized that he saw his work as an unprecedented opportunity “to elucidate for myself and for others the entirety of this great phenomenon [Jewish literature] as something organic.”38 Steinschneider submitted “Jüdische Literatur” as a doctoral thesis to the eminent Orientalist Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer at the University of Leipzig, under whom he had studied in the summer semester in 1839 and with whom he remained in contact until shortly before Fleischer’s death in 1888.39 On April 19, 1851, he received his doctorate on the basis of this work. In his commendatory evaluation of the thesis, Fleischer wrote that “of the living Jewish literati, only Zunz and [Solomon Judah] Rapoport and, apart from them, maybe Fürst and Geiger, too, could have offered such an overview through their own means.”40 Steinschneider viewed his article as pointing the way for his future research: “In the ensuing years, this article steered [ . . . ] my research toward the scholarly literature of Europe that was elaborated by Jews, an area that has otherwise only been touched upon by Zunz and has to this day not been fully exploited for cultural history.”41 “Jüdische Literatur” was the basis for Steinschneider’s scholarly reputation. Within only a few years after its publication in the encyclopedia, a revised English translation emerged, followed by a Hebrew translation several decades later.42 The article “Jüdische Typographie und Buchhandel” was originally intended to be a part of “Jüdische Literatur,” but because of its length and the delay in publication, it

Transferring Jewish Knowledge

197

was eventually included in the following volume of the Allgemeine Encyclopädie.43 Steinschneider and Cassel regarded their appraisal of the history of Jewish printing and of Jewish publishing as a “substantial supplement to the history of Jewish literature” and a “significant element of Jewish cultural history itself.”44 In a preliminary overview, they described the characteristics of Jewish printing, its terminology, typefaces, printer’s marks, print color, and paper, as well as hallmarks of title pages, adornments, and illustrations. They also analyzed the known printers and their places of printing, as well as the peculiarities of censorship, printing licenses, and dedications. The bulk of the article comprised a historical overview, organized by period and locality, of typography in the period spanning from 1475 to 1740, which was accompanied by an index of approximately 150 places of printing in Europe, from “Adrianople to Zurich.” It was said of Steinschneider that he had a critical attitude toward popularized forms of scholarship and felt committed to elitist scholarly aspirations. Kayserling, for example, wrote a dedication to Steinschneider on the occasion of his 80th birthday, which, on the one hand, provided an overview of his impressive professional career while, on the other hand, criticizing his scholarly convictions. Steinschneider’s achievement, Kayserling wrote, lay in his introducing “individual disciplines of Jewish literature into general scholarship” following the “foundations” laid by Leopold Zunz for Wissenschaft des Judentums, and in having investigated the connections between Jewish and general culture. However, he had not been “particularly favorable” toward “works of popular scholarship,” nor had he written “for a general audience.”45 David Cassel took a different route and popularized knowledge in his Lehrbuch der jüdischen Geschichte und Literatur (Manual of Jewish History and Literature), which was published by Brockhaus in 1879. This textbook contained a definition of contemporary Jewish history differing from the ideas put forth put forth by Steinschneider in the 1840s: With the entry of the Jews into civil and state society as well as into the cultural endeavors of the present day, the obligation of Jewish history and literature to record events and spiritual achievements not pertaining to Judaism also ceases. That Jews are being voted into communal and parliamentary representative bodies, and that in most civilized countries the limitations oppressing the Jews have been lifted, does less honor to the Jews than to those governments and representative bodies which thereby announce the renunciation of baseless prejudices and, at long last, the recognition of inalienable human rights. Privileges and special protections do not simply contradict the essence of the modern state, [but were also] borne unwillingly by the Jews since they corresponded to limitations and exclusions.46

Cassel’s positive vision of the acculturation of European Jews (at least in the “civilized countries”) at a time when the issue was beginning to be widely discussed in German society was coupled with his support for the widespread dissemination of knowledge.47 This was a growing tendency of the time. Alongside university research, the aim was to pursue the Bildung (edification and cultivation) of the bourgeois population as well as to provide society at large with a wider range of information on the

198 

Arndt Engelhardt

history and the culture of the Jews. This tendency did not necessarily have to be apologist, even if some of the Jews who were interested in scholarly questions saw it as their responsibility to advocate on behalf of Jewish concerns. In fact, many Jewish scholars in the 19th century converted to Christianity as a result of the enormous pressure to conform.48 The translation of Hebrew texts was one way of contending with the marginal position to which postbiblical Jewish history and literature had been consigned by German scholarship in the 19th century. Another was securing Jewish coverage in Germany’s most widely read encyclopedia—​the Brockhaus Conversations-​Lexikon, a multivolume encyclopedia designed to appeal to a popular understanding of knowledge. This encyclopedia was sold in some 60,000 copies in six separate editions, at a time when German books rarely sold more than 750 copies. By the eighth edition (1833–​1837), Leopold Zunz had taken over the task of editing and writing the articles with Jewish content, and until the tenth edition of 1851–​1855, he remained the sole Jewish contributor among the hundreds listed, apart from Moritz Veit.49 Thus Brockhaus provided a unique platform on which to popularize Jewish knowledge in a succinct form, which in turn promoted the message that Jewish history, culture, and literature should be integrated into the contemporary canon of knowledge.

Brockhaus and Oriental Studies Over the course of the long 19th century, the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft [DMG]), established in 1845, had a longstanding and, to some extent, symbiotic relationship with Brockhaus. The society was founded in the context of growing diversification of scientific disciplines and the rediscovery of the Orient as an historical and cultural region. As a former auxiliary field of theology and its philological branch, Oriental studies in Europe attained their academic independence in the course of the 19th century, although the realm of Hebrew and Bible studies continued to be dominated by Protestant-​influenced scholars or theologians. Moreover, because German Oriental studies were oriented more toward philological rather than everyday politics, Jewish scholars in the field encountered relatively less prejudice and enjoyed more favorable conditions for professional advancement and publication than did Jews in other areas of academia.50 The links between Brockhaus and the German Oriental Society were both personal and professional. The society was established by two Leipzig-​based professors, Fleischer and Hermann Brockhaus—​the latter, the son of Friedrich August Brockhaus (and also the brother-​in-​law of the composer Richard Wagner). Following the death of his father, Brockhaus had studied Semitic languages, Sanskrit, and philology in Leipzig, Göttingen, and Bonn, after which he lived for some time in Copenhagen, London, and Oxford. In 1839, he became an associate professor of Oriental languages in Jena; two years later, he became a full professor at the University of Leipzig. He was one of the first to promote the idea of making non-​European works more accessible to European readers by means of translation or transliteration. In a monograph titled Ueber den Druck sanskritischer Werke mit Lateinischen Buchstaben (On the

Transferring Jewish Knowledge

199

Printing of Sanskrit Works with Latin Letters), Brockhaus offered an idealistic understanding of world literature and the “Oriental gaze”: Everyday the Orient moves closer to us. Europe now has the high assignment of breathing new life into the ossifying East. But for the Orient to . . . regenerate itself from its own inner cores, stimulated by [Europe’s] higher and more developed intelligence, it needs to be researched and recognized from its own sources. Herein lies the true meaning and value of Oriental studies. In order to understand and grasp the monuments of Oriental spirit, one must open the way to the languages of the Orient through grammars and dictionaries, and by domesticating its most important and significant literary products . . . by [means of] publishing the originals via translations and adaptations.51

In the early 1840s, at the request of his brother Heinrich, who had taken charge of the family business, Hermann joined the editorial department of the 10th edition of the Conversations-​Lexikon and became one of the editors of the monumental Allgemeine Encyclopädie. In the meantime, the Brockhaus publishing company was administering the German Oriental Society’s membership fees and marketing its monographs. In 1847, it began publishing the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, the flagship publication of the German Oriental Society. This, in turn, became an important forum for exchange between general Oriental research and the science of Judaism, with the result that ancient and medieval Judaism, previously excluded from the canon of classical antiquity and philosophy, found an academic home under the rubric of Oriental studies.52 Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft regularly published essays and studies by Jewish scholars, among them Abraham Geiger, Ignaz Goldziher, Richard Gottheil, Samuel Kohn, and Moritz Steinschneider. That the society was part of an international network of scholars and librarians is evident from its membership list, which included translators such as Joseph von Hammer-​Purgstall and Friedrich Rückert, with Steinschneider, Zunz, Julius Fürst, Adolf Jellinek, and Michael Sachs listed as members from the first year of the society.53 From the 1850s on, the Brockhaus publishing house also produced textbooks and works of Jewish religious instruction, such as the Kleine Schul-​und Haus-​Bibel, issued until 1895 in numerous printings, which was edited by the Frankfurt-​based Jewish educator Jakob Auerbach. Another didactic work edited by Auerbach was a collection of biblical tales.54 In 1882, an Orientalist and associate at the Munich State Library, Max Grünbaum, published with Brockhaus an extensive collection of Jewish German texts, the Jüdischdeutsche Chrestomathie.55

The Jewish Encyclopedia as “The True Essence of Judaism” In September 1891, the editor Ludwig Philippson announced in his Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums the future publication of an “Allgemeine Encyclopädie für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums” to be compiled by the Paris-​based journalist Isidore Singer. The proposed editorial committee, comprising Jewish scholars from England, France, and Germany, would mirror the transnational nature

200 

Arndt Engelhardt

of Jewish scholarship at the time. The project was directed equally at Jews and at Christians who wished to discover “the true essence of Judaism.” Arranged in alphabetical order, it would provide “sound information about all the questions relevant to Judaism with the swiftness demanded by our feverish era.” It was further noted that Singer’s aim was to acquaint the acculturated Jews of Western Europe with their cultural tradition in order to “revive the study of Jewish literature and science, which has been so very neglected within Judaism, and to heighten and strengthen the self-​ awareness of our coreligionists in this critical transitional period that we must undertake from the old into the new era.”56 Once his plan for the encyclopedia had been outlined, Singer was obliged to turn to the practical work of drumming up support for his project in various places in Europe. Among those he turned to was the Brockhaus publishing office in Leipzig, with which he exchanged a number of letters.57 Singer was asked to elaborate a prospectus for the “introduction of subscription with the public,” which was to state the final title, envisaged scope, planned form of publication, and sales price of the encyclopedia. The publisher readily acknowledged “that an ‘Encyclopedia for the History and the Science of Judaism’ ” would be “in a certain sense provocative,” but wished to ensure that the articles for such a collaborative project would “not be of an aggressive nature.”58 At the same time, from Brockhaus’ point of view, several arguments supported Leipzig as the place of publication—​in particular, the fact that the encyclopedia would be in German, and Leipzig was the “center of the book trade.” The company thus was willing, on a commission basis, to take on the printing and distribution of the work: I will not go into detail today about a range of equally important questions concerning the distribution of the manuscript among the individual collaborators, the form of layout of the articles, and the illustrations. However, I can tell you right away that I will give you some advice in this respect which should convince you that you run a great risk for the work with the form of development currently intended, through which, for example, a range of encyclopedias that attempted to compete with my Conversations-​Lexikon failed. Regardless of my advice in this respect, you can nevertheless provisionally begin with the acquisition of collaborators and their assignment in the manner which you have indicated.59

Brockhaus repeatedly urged Singer, who was bursting with enthusiasm, to first secure the financing for his encyclopedic plan and to garner the necessary support from leading scholars and jurists. As a renowned publisher, Brockhaus was not willing to begin “such a large undertaking, which is as yet without capital, . . . with a single individual.” The numbers that Singer mentioned on numerous occasions were “provisionally up in the air,” and even if the publisher was not applying “standard business measures” to the “great work” of a Jewish encyclopedia, it nevertheless implored Singer to “listen to legal, literary, and financial experts” before pushing the project forward with public announcements.60 Shortly thereafter, Singer sent letters to a number of individuals in which he outlined the project and invited their collaboration. Among them were several scholars, such as Kayserling, whose works had been published by Brockhaus. Kayserling wrote his own letter of enquiry to Brockhaus; in response, the publisher, unable “to offer

Transferring Jewish Knowledge

201

any clarification,” despite its being willing to assist the project, referred him back to Singer.61 For his part, Singer also contacted Sigmund Maybaum, a rabbi and teacher of homiletics at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, informing him of the planned composition of the editorial board and describing the scope of the work as a total of 12 volumes, with the “format and magnitude of Brockhaus’ Conversations-​Lexikon.” The contributors would come from “Jewish and Christian scholarly circles of German, Austrian, French, English, and Dutch universities,” with the encyclopedia being “kept strictly scientific and avoiding all religious polemics.” Finally, while it would treat “antiquity and the Middle Ages” with the “appropriate detail,” the “main focus” was to be on the “post-​Mendelssohnian era.”62 Singer disseminated a circular concerning the encyclopedia among rabbis, journalists, and renowned Jewish personalities, in which he requested their support for the project. He then placed corresponding notices in the Jewish press, in which he justified the chronological orientation of the encyclopedia toward contemporary developments within Judaism by noting that the modern age was to a great degree characterized by the “intervention of the Jews in various national literatures and their participation in the social and political lives of the nations.” The encyclopedia was not meant to be merely a “compendium of Jewish scholarship for scholars” but was also to serve as a “useful guide” for “Jewish and Christian audiences who wish to educate themselves about the true essence of Judaism.” The members of the “Directions-​Comité” named in the circular included British Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler; Abraham Berliner (the editor of the Magazin für die Wissenschaft des Judentums); David Cassel; the French orientalist Joseph Derenbourg and his son, Hartwig Derenbourg; the Viennese writer Ludwig August Frankl; the German literary historian Ludwig Geiger, who was also the editor of Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland; the Viennese rabbi and cultural historian Moritz Güdemann and his Viennese rabbinical colleague, Adolf Jellinek; Zadoc Kahn, the French chief rabbi; Gustav Karpeles, a German literary historian and editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums; the German philosopher Moritz Lazarus, who had founded a branch of research he termed “Völkerpsychologie” (national psychology); and Theodore Reinach, a French historian of religion.63 Shortly before his death in September 1891, Heinrich Graetz, the most renowned Jewish historian at the time, expressed his “great sympathy” for the project and declared his willingness to collaborate.64 At about the same time, in order to spark enthusiasm for the project among transatlantic scholars, not least in order to be able to market the encyclopedia in the United States as well as in Europe, Singer placed a short notice in American newspapers, in which Alexander Kohut, the rabbi of the Ahavath Chesed congregation and a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, described the Jewish encyclopedia as a “project as praiseworthy as it is difficult.”65 The correspondence between Singer and Brockhaus faltered for some time, resuming only in the summer of 1892. In the meantime, Singer had changed the conception of the encyclopedia insofar as he now expected a greatly expanded scope. At this stage, it had still not been established what role, if any, Brockhaus would be taking in the production of the Enzyklopädie des Judenthums. In its “capacity as a publisher of encyclopedic works,” Brockhaus offered Singer advice and repeatedly alerted him to the fact “that one cannot begin an encyclopedic project if the guarantees

202 

Arndt Engelhardt

for its completion up to ZZ have not been made.” This, in its view, was still not the case.66 Several days later (in a letter that appears never to have been sent), Brockhaus voiced fundamental doubts about the suitability of its being the publisher of the work: As you know, I have to be considerate of my Christian Conversations-​Lexikon; so I can certainly take care of the printing, the sales, and the administration of your company in the same manner as if the work were my own publishing property, but I cannot appear as its actual publisher or commissioned publisher for this work without damaging my own historic business in the eyes of its Christian consumers. You know that I am not an antisemite, so that the dispute above is born out of a purely objective and real consideration which I have to take into account.67

Notwithstanding, Brockhaus was interested in the actual printing and marketing of the encyclopedia, as detailed at length in two draft contracts, stored in the Brockhaus inventory. “I guarantee that I as printer will produce your work with all the aid of modern technology . . . and please be ensured moreover that I am inclined to take over the sales as your bookselling commissioner as though the work were my own, and so I am convinced that this encompasses everything that you could wish for in any way in the interests of this matter.” According to Brockhaus, the encyclopedia had great potential: “If the project is conducted in such a manner that the first volumes demonstrate that a real need is met in an impeccable literary form, then considerable sales will follow in the book trade.”68 In the meantime, a number of scholars had already begun work on the content-​ based conception of the encyclopedia, compiling a thematic list of articles. In the autumn of 1892, Singer turned to St. Petersburg and attempted to persuade the heads of the Jewish Historical and Ethnographical Commission, Maksim M. Vinaver and Vassili L. Berman, to take charge of a proposed section dealing with the “History and Present of the Russian Jews.”69 The historian Simon Dubnow expressed his willingness to compile an index of articles for the historical part of this section.70 In the end, however, Singer did not succeed in raising the necessary means for the encyclopedia in Europe; he departed for America in 1894, heading for New York City, where the project finally succeeded in being published more than a decade later, in twelve volumes, as The Jewish Encyclopedia.71 A second modern Jewish encyclopedia published before the First World War oriented itself according to the model of the Jewish Encyclopedia: this was the Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, published between 1908 and 1913.72 This 16-​volume work was a joint venture of the Russian-​Jewish Society for Scholarly Jewish Publications and the Brockhaus–Efron publishing house of St. Petersburg, receiving as well considerable support from Baron David Günzburg, an Orientalist.73 Ilya Abramovich Efron had previously become well known in Imperial Russia through a general encyclopedia he had published in 86 volumes in cooperation with Brockhaus, the Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ F.A. Brokgauza i I. A. Efrona (1890–​1907).74 The transnational cooperation of the two publishers and the adaption of the encyclopedic texts proved to be successful enough for some 25,000 copies of the work to be sold. Two volumes dealing more specifically with Russia appeared in an edition of 35,000 copies.75

Transferring Jewish Knowledge

203

Epilogue Until the mid-​1930s, Jewish and non-​Jewish Orientalists who were members of the German Oriental Society, or who had their works published by the society, cooperated with each other in a largely unbiased and collegial manner. With the rise of the Nazi regime, this relationship changed fundamentally: Jewish scholars were expelled from their professorships, their publication possibilities were increasingly restricted, and they were ultimately forced into exile in order to survive. In this fashion, the mutual exchange of ideas and joint historical and philological work that had begun back in the 19th century was brutally truncated. Universities and research institutes that had flourished during the Weimar Republic, along with scientific and general publishing houses and the mainstream press, were now subject to relentless scrutiny and regulation. On July 14, 1941, the treasurer of the German Oriental Society, who signed his correspondence as “F.A. Brockhaus,” contacted Helmuth Scheel, an Oriental scholar and Turkologist who was serving both as director of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin and as executive secretary of the German Oriental Society. Appended to the letter was a six-​page typewritten list of all publications of the German Oriental Society (from this time of its founding) that were still in stock. Brockhaus asked Scheel to indicate which of the listed authors were “non-​Aryan authors,” since distribution of their works abroad was only permitted under special conditions, and special permission was necessary merely to keep their articles in print.76 Two weeks later, Brockhaus again wrote to Scheel, explaining that he, “as a publisher[,]‌was only allowed to store and sell the works of Jewish authors with special permission of the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.”77 Responding to Brockhaus’ first letter, Scheel stressed the serial nature of the German Oriental Society’s publications, their scientific significance—​especially abroad—​and the fact that many of the longer monographs were in widespread use as textbooks. “If . . . a demand for destruction [of any work] is made by any authority,” Scheel added, “I would ask you to inform me immediately, and I will then contact the Reich Minister of Science.”78 Scheel’s interest as trustee of a once proud tradition was to keep intact the scholarly summaries that had been developed as a collective effort during the 19th century. His efforts were successful, and thus publications of the German Oriental Society were preserved in those dark times as recognized standard works of “German scholarship.” By 1941, however, many of Brockhaus’ Jewish authors had already died, and those still alive who had not yet found a safe haven were forced to flee or else be threatened with extermination.

Notes 1.  On the history of the Schocken Library, see Stefanie Mahrer, “A Microcosm of Jewish Culture:  The Schocken Library Series,” in New Types:  Three Pioneers of Hebrew Graphic Design, ed. Ada Wardi (Jerusalem: 2016), 108–​127; Hans-​Peter Bayerdörfer, “Die Aneignung des Eigenen—​Buchprogramme für den deutsch-​jüdischen Leser. Überlegungen zur ‘Schocken-​ Bücherei’ und ihren Vorgängern,” in Populäres Judentum. Medien, Debatten, Lesestoffe,

204 

Arndt Engelhardt

ed. Christine Haug, Franziska Mayer, and Madleen Podewski (Tübingen:  2009), 191–​208; Antony Skinner, “German-​Jewish Identity and the ‘Schocken Bücherei,’ ” in Arche Noah. Die Idee der ‘Kultur’ im deutsch-​jüdischen Diskurs, ed. Bernhard Greiner and Christoph Schmidt (Freiburg: 2002), 289–​303. 2.  Von Droste-​Hülshoff’s novella, Die Judenbuche (1842), was republished by Schocken in 1936. However, it was regarded by the Nazi regime as a cultural and political provocation; by order of the President of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (16 April 1937), it was withdrawn from distribution. 3. Ferdinand Gregorovius, “Der Ghetto und die Juden in Rom,” in idem, Figuren. Geschichte, Leben und Scenerie aus Italien (Leipzig: 1856), 57–​138. The text was reprinted in 1864 as vol. 1 of his Wanderjahre in Italien, with nine editions until 1905. 4.  See Gregor Pelger, “Zwischen jüdischen und anderen Enzyklopädien. Leopold Zunz und das universale Projekt der Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 9 (2010), 475–​503, esp. 493–​499. The correspondence between Zunz and F.A. Brockhaus covering the years 1833 until 1872 can be found in the Leopold Zunz Archive, National Library of Israel (NLI), ARC 4 792/​G9-​96.4. The archive also contains receipts and accounts pertaining to encyclopedia articles in the 9th edition of the Brockhaus Conversations-​Lexicon (1843–​1849). 5. On Wissenschaft des Judentums, see Kerstin von der Krone and Mirjam Thulin, “Wissenschaft in Context:  A Research Essay on the Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 58 (2013), 249–​280; Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover:  1994); Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton: 2010). 6. See Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America:  The Publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia (Cincinnati: 1991). 7.  See B. Venkat Mani, Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (New York: 2017); Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton 2014); Tuska Benes, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-​Century Germany (Detroit: 2008). 8.  On the “republic of letters,” see Anthony Grafton, “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters,” in idem, Worlds Made by Words:  Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge:  2009), 9–​34; Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.:  2004); Avriel Bar-​Levav, “Amsterdam and the Inception of the Jewish Republic of Letters,” in The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: 2008), 225–​237. 9.  Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus (Summer 1982), 65–​83; idem, “ ‘What Is the History of Books?’ Revisited,” Modern Intellectual History 4, no.  3 (November 2007), 495–​508. 10. See Siegmund Kaznelson, “Verlag und Buchhandel,” in Juden im deutschen Kulturbereich. Ein Sammelwerk, ed. Siegmund Kaznelson (Berlin:  1962), 131–​146; Jacob Toury, Die Jüdische Presse im Österreichischen Kaiserreich. Ein Beitrag zur Problematik der Akkulturation 1802–​1918 (Tübingen:  1983); Kurt Koszyk, “Der jüdische Beitrag zum deutschen Presse-​und Verlagswesen,” in Jüdische Unternehmer in Deutschland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Werner E. Mosse and Hans Pohl (Stuttgart: 1992), 196–​217. 11.  See, for instance, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: 2004); Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur. Die Literaturkritik der “Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judentums” (1837–​1922) (Frankfurt:  1985); Itta Shedletzky, “Literaturdiskussion und Belletristik in den jüdischen Zeitschriften in Deutschland, 1837–​1918” (Ph.D.  thesis, The Hebrew University, 1986). 12.  See Shmuel Feiner, Zohar Shavit, Natalie Naimark-​Goldberg, and Tal Kogman (eds.), Hasifriyah shel tenu’at hahaskalah: yetziratah shel republikat hasefarim baḥevrah hayehudit bemerḥav hadover germanit (Tel Aviv: 2014); Annegret Völpel and Zohar Shavit together with Ran HaCohen, Deutsch-​jüdische Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur. Ein literaturgeschichtlicher Grundriss (Stuttgart: 2002); Zohar Shavit and Hans-​Heino Ewers together with Annegret

Transferring Jewish Knowledge

205

Völpel, Ran HaCohen, and Dieter Richter, Deutsch-​jüdische Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur von der Haskala bis 1945. Die deutsch-​und hebräischsprachigen Schriften des deutschsprachigen Raums. Ein bibliographisches Handbuch, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: 1996). 13.  See Kathrin Wittler, “Towards a Bookish History of German Jewish Culture: Travelling Images and Orientalist Knowledge in Philippson’s ‘Israelitische Bibel’ (1839–​ 1854),” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 62 (2017), 151–​177, and the articles in Lynne Tatlock (ed.), Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century (Rochester:  2010); Jonathan M.  Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-​Jewish Identity (Stanford: 2010); on the formation of a Jewish middle-​class public sphere, see the special issue of Jewish History 14, no. 1 (2000) (“The Press and the Jewish Public Sphere”), 3–​107; Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: 2004). 14.  See Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington: 2009); Kenneth B.  Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: 2009). 15.  Dan Diner, “Imperiale Residuen. Zur paradigmatischen Bedeutung transterritorialer jüdischer Erfahrung für eine gesamteuropäische Geschichte,” in Figuren des Europäischen. Kulturgeschichtliche Perspektiven, ed. Daniel Weidner (Munich: 2006), 259–​274, esp. 270–​ 272; Stephan Braese, Eine europäische Sprache. Deutsche Sprachkultur von Juden 1760–​ 1930 (Göttingen: 2010); Arndt Engelhardt and Susanne Zepp (ed.), Sprache, Erkenntnis und Bedeutung. Deutsch in der jüdischen Wissenskultur (Leipzig: 2015). 16. See Nitsa Ben-​ Ari, Romanze mit der Vergangenheit. Der deutsch-​ jüdische historische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts und seine Bedeutung für die Entstehung einer jüdischen Nationalliteratur (Tübingen:  2006); Na’ama Sheffi, Vom Deutschen ins Hebräische. Übersetzungen aus dem Deutschen im jüdischen Palästina 1882–​1948 (Göttingen: 2011). 17.  See Gabriele von Glasenapp, “From Text to Edition: Processes of Scholarly Thinking in German-​Jewish Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness:  Identities, Encounters, Perspectives, ed. Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese (Leiden:  2007), 368–​388; idem, “ ‘Die Meisterwerke der Poesie und Wissenschaft den Massen zugänglich machen.’ Brandeis’ Jüdische Universal-​Bibliothek. Geschichte, Programm und Profil einer Prager Verlagsreihe,” Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte 19 (2010), 117–​171. From the time of the Napoleonic wars, the book trade was a sphere of professional activity that required, along with a gift for commerce, a broad education. It thus offered an opportunity for Jews who endeavored to seek out new paths, turning away from the customary occupations practiced for generations. If some of these Jews had studied law, philosophy, or philology at university with a certain enthusiasm, they nonetheless were soon to discover that most of the “independent professions” or positions in government administration were closed to them. Moreover, within traditional Jewish communities, their chances for professional employment as teachers or rabbis were slim, since university graduates were often viewed as exponents of Jewish Reform. Up until the 1848 revolution, the only professions open to Jews were medicine and journalism. See Jacob Toury, “Jüdische Buchhändler und Verleger in Deutschland vor 1860,” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 9 (1960), 58–​69, esp. 58 f. 18.  Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: 2009), 97. 19. Moritz Steinschneider, “Programm,” Ha’maskir [The Secretary]. Hebräische Bibliographie. Blätter für neuere und ältere Literatur des Judenthums 1 (1858). On Steinschneider’s conception of scholarship, see Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal (eds.), Studies on Steinschneider: Moritz Steinschneider and the Emergence of the Science of Judaism in Nineteenth-​Century Germany (Leiden: 2012); see also vol. 129 of Pa’amim (Fall 2011), titled “Moshe Steinschneider vehatarbut ha’aravit-​hayehudit.” 20.  Steinschneider, “Programm.” 21.  Heinrich Brody, “Einführung,” Zeitschrift für Hebräische Bibliographie 1 (1896), 1–​3, here 1 f. (italics slightly spaced out in original).

206 

Arndt Engelhardt

22.  Aron Freimann, Katalog der Judaica und Hebraica. Stadtbibliothek Frankfurt am Main. Erster Band Judaica (Frankfurt: 1932). On Freimann, see Rachel Heuberger, Aron Freimann und die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Tübingen: 2004). 23.  See, for instance, Kirsten Belgum, “Translated Knowledge in the Early Nineteenth Century: Jews and Judaism in Brockhaus’ ‘Conversations-​Lexikon’ and the ‘Encyclopaedia Americana,’ ” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 9 (2010), 303–​322. 24.  See Thomas Keiderling, “Innovationen im Leipziger Buchhandel und Buchgewerbe 1800–​1914,” in Leipzigs Wirtschaft in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Akteure, Handlungsspielräume, Wirkungen (1400–​2011), ed. Susanne Schötz (Leipzig:  2012), 221–​ 242, here 228. 25. There is a vast amount of research on this important publisher. See, for instance, Heinrich Eduard Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus. Sein Leben und Wirken nach Briefen und andern Aufzeichnungen geschildert, 3  vols. (Leipzig:  1872–​1881); Arthur Hübscher, Hundertfünfzig Jahre F.A. Brockhaus 1805–​1955 (Wiesbaden:  1955); Hans Dietrich, “Der Verlag F.A. Brockhaus als ein geistiges Zentrum des liberalen deutschen Bürgertums im 19. Jahrhundert” (Ph.D. thesis, Karl-​Marx-​Universität Leipzig, 1985); Thomas Keiderling (ed.), F.A. Brockhaus 1905–​2005 (Leipzig: 2005); see also Ines Prodöhl, Die Politik des Wissens. Allgemeine deutsche Enzyklopädien zwischen 1928 und 1956 (Berlin: 2011), 4–​16, which discusses main trends in existing research. 26.  The Brockhaus publishing program can be reconstructed on the basis of its publishing lists. See Heinrich Brockhaus (ed.), F.A. Brockhaus in Leipzig. Vollständiges Verzeichniss der von der Firma F.A. Brockhaus in Leipzig seit ihrer Gründung durch Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus im Jahre 1805 bis zu dessen hundertjährigem Geburtstage im Jahre 1872 verlegten Werke. In chronologischer Folge mit biographischen und literarhistorischen Notizen (Leipzig: 1872–​1875); F.A. Brockhaus in Leipzig. Vollständiges Verzeichnis der von der Firma F.A. Brockhaus in Leipzig seit dem Jahre 1873 bis zu ihrem hundertjährigen Jubiläum im Jahre 1905 verlegten Werke. In alphabetischer Folge mit biographischen und literarhistorischen Notizen (Leipzig: 1905). 27.  M[oritz Meyer] Kayserling, “Moses Mendelssohn-​Denkmal,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 50 (1 January 1886), 3–​5. 28.  Moses Mendelssohn’s gesammelte Schriften. Nach den Originaldrucken und Handschriften, ed. Georg Benjamin Mendelssohn, 7 vols. (Leipzig: 1843–​1845); quote appears in introduction to vol. 1 (“Moses Mendelssohn’s Lebensgeschichte”), 27. 29.  Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (Leipzig: 1818–​1891). The project was originally begun by another Leipzig publisher, Johann Friedrich Gleditsch, but then ran into financial difficulties. Published in alphabetically arranged volumes (“parts”) and in three sections, it was never completed: it eventually totaled 167 volumes that were edited by a number of other editors in addition to Ersch and Gruber. Had this monumental work ever reached its end, it would have comprised some 295 volumes with about 400 double-​columned quarto pages each. Reprinted numerous times and later microfilmed, the encyclopedia is available through the State and University Library Göttingen, online at: http://​resolver.sub.uni-​goettingen.de/​purl?PPN345284054 (accessed 6 May 2019). See also the richly documented study by Bettina Rüdiger, “Der ‘Ersch/​Gruber.’ Konzeption, Drucklegung und Wirkungsgeschichte der Allgemeinen Enzyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste,” Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte 14 (2005), 11–​78. 30.  Johann Samuel Ersch, preface, in Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, section 1, part 2: xii. 31.  Ibid., x. As confirmation of this toleration, the first volume included two articles on the topic of the Abendmahl (Eucharist) from, respectively, a Protestant and a Catholic perspective. See Reinhard Markner, “Johann Gottfried Gruber oder Die Ordnung des Wissens,” in Zwischen Narretei und Weisheit. Biographische Skizzen und Konturen alter Gelehrsamkeit, ed. Gerald Hartung and Wolf Peter Klein (Hildesheim: 1997), 288–​318 and 356–​358, here 312. 32. Johann Gottfried Gruber, “Ueber encyclopädisches Studium,” in Allgemeine Encyclopädie, section 1, part 2, i–​lii, here xxvi.

Transferring Jewish Knowledge

207

33.  Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, Probe-​Heft, nebst dem Plane des Werks, und Verzeichnissen der Mitarbeiter (Leipzig:  1817), supplement A, 2.  See also Werner Grossert, “ ‘Sulamith,’ die Friedliebende aus Dessau (1806–​1848). Die erste jüdische Zeitschrift in deutscher Sprache und deutscher Schrift,” in Jüdische Bildung und Kultur in Sachsen-​Anhalt von der Aufklärung bis zum Nationalsozialismus, ed. Giuseppe Veltri and Christian Wiese (Berlin: 2009), 133–​146. 34. Moritz Steinschneider and David Cassel, “Jüdische Typographie und jüdischer Buchhandel,” in Allgemeine Encyclopädie, section 2, part 28, 21–​94. 35.  Moritz Steinschneider, “Jüdische Literatur,” in Allgemeine Encyclopädie, section 2, part 27, § 1, 357. See also Arthur Biram, “Moritz Steinschneider” [obituary], Ost und West 6 (1906), no. 4, cols. 261–​268, here 265 f. 36.  Steinschneider, “Jüdische Literatur.” 37.  See Moritz Steinschneider, Briefwechsel mit seiner Verlobten Auguste Auerbach 1845–​ 1849. Ein Beitrag zu jüdischer Wissenschaft und Emanzipation, ed. Renate Heuer and Marie Louise Steinschneider (Frankfurt: 1995), 108 (letter to Auguste Auerbach, 16 May 1846); 263 (letter to Auguste Auerbach, 13 February 1848). 38.  Ibid., 114 (letter to Auguste Auerbach, 2 June 1846, emphasis in original). 39. Holger Preissler, “Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer. Ein Leipziger Orientalist, seine jüdischen Studenten, Promovenden und Kollegen,” in Bausteine einer jüdischen Geschichte der Universität Leipzig, ed. Stephan Wendehorst (Leipzig: 2006), 245–​268, here 253; Ismar Schorsch, “Converging Cognates: The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth Century Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 55 (2010), 3–​36. 40. University Archive Leipzig, inventory of doctorate dossiers, Phil. Fak. Prom. 251, Steinschneider, Moritz, back of page  1 (emphasis in original). On Fleischer and the institutionalization of Oriental studies, see Holger Preissler, “Die Anfänge der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 145 (1995), 2, 241–​327. 41.  Moritz Steinschneider, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Gelehrten-​Geschichte (Berlin: 1925), xxi. 42. Moritz Steinschneider, Jewish Literature from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century: With an Introduction on Talmud and Midrash (translator not named) (London: 1857). The English text was translated into Hebrew by Zvi Malter as Sifrut yisrael (Warsaw: 1897). 43.  The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, ARC 108, (Steinschneider papers), microfilm reel 2 (correspondence:  Benzian–​ Chwolsohn), F.A. Brockhaus to Steinschneider (23 November 1850): “I will in fact finish this volume on quire 59 with the article ‘Jüdische Literatur’ and begin the next volume with the special title ‘Jüdische Typographie und jüdischer Buchhandel.’ ” 44.  Steinschneider and Cassel, “Jüdische Typographie und jüdischer Buchhandel,” 21. 45.  M[oritz] Kayserling, “Moritz Steinschneider,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 60, no. 13 (27 March 1896), 150–​151. 46.  David Cassel, Lehrbuch der jüdischen Geschichte und Literatur (Leipzig: 1879), 528. See the positive review by H[ermann L.] Str[ack] in Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland 1 (4 January 1879), cols. 7–​10. 47. Two seminal studies of forms of popularization are those of Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert. Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit 1848–​1914, 2nd revised ed. (Munich: 2002) and of Ulrike Spree, Das Streben nach Wissen. Eine vergleichende Gattungsgeschichte der populären Enzyklopädie in Deutschland und Grossbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: 2000). 48.  This group included Selig Paulus Cassel, David Cassel’s brother and the editor of the Erfurter Zeitung, who converted in 1855. Thereafter, he worked as a librarian in the Königliche Bibliothek and as secretary of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Erfurt. By the 1860s, he was a conservative member of the Landtag of Prussia and a preacher in Christuskirche in Berlin. His activity was directed above all against burgeoning antisemitism, so, for example, he took a stand against Heinrich von Treitschke and penned the essay Die Antisemiten und die evangelische

208 

Arndt Engelhardt

Kirche. Sendschreiben an einen evangelischen Geistlichen (Berlin:  1881). He also engaged in biblical scholarship throughout his life. See Christian Wiese, “The Divergent Path of Two Brothers: The Jewish Scholar David Cassel and the Protestant Missionary Paulus Cassel,” in Converts of Conviction: Faith and Scepticism in Nineteenth Century European Jewish Society, ed. David B. Ruderman (Berlin: 2017), 55–​96. 49.  On Zunz, see Ismar Schorsch, Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity (Philadelphia: 2016), 78. On Veit, a scholar who, after being denied an academic position, became an important bookseller and publisher, see Arndt Engelhardt, “Bildung und Teilhabe. Moritz Veit als Verleger im Zeitalter der Emanzipation,” in “Meine Sprache ist Deutsch.” Deutsche Sprachkultur von Juden und die Geisteswissenschaften 1870–​1970, ed. Stephan Braese and Daniel Weidner (Berlin: 2015), 107–​128. 50. See Schorsch, “Converging Cognates”; Preissler, “Die Anfänge der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft.” 51. Hermann Brockhaus, Ueber den Druck sanskritischer Werke mit Lateinischen Buchstaben (Leipzig: 1841), 5, cited in Mani, Recoding World Literature, 113 f. 52.  Among the authors whose monographs were published by the German Oriental Society in conjunction with F.A. Brockhaus were Alexander Kohut, Ueber die jüdische Angelogie und Daemonologie in ihrer Abhängigkeit vom Parsismus (1866); Ignaz Goldziher, Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwickelung. Untersuchungen zur Mythologie und Religionswissenschaft (1876); Moritz Steinschneider, Polemische und apologetische Literatur in arabischer Sprache zwischen Muslimen, Christen und Juden, nebst Anhängen verwandten Inhalts (1877), and Wilhelm Bacher, Die Anfänge der hebräischen Grammatik (1895). 53. See “Verzeichniss der Mitglieder der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 2 (1848), 505–​515. 54. Jakob Auerbach (ed.), Kleine Schul-​und Hausbibel. Geschichten und erbauliche Lesestücke aus den Heiligen Schriften der Israeliten nebst einer Auswahl aus den Apokryphen und der Spruchweisheit der nachbiblischen Zeit, 2 vols. (Leipzig: 1854); idem (ed.), Biblische Erzählungen für die israelitische Jugend, 2 vols. (Leipzig: 1873). 55.  Max Grünbaum, Jüdischdeutsche Chrestomathie. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Kunde der hebräischen Literatur (Leipzig: 1882). 56. “Eine jüdische Encyklopädie,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 55, no.  37 (11 September 1891), 434 f. 57.  It is not entirely clear who answered these letters. There were up to six authorized officers at Brockhaus writing letters, and usually letters were stamped “F.A. Brockhaus, Leipzig.” 58.  Sächsisches Staatsarchiv (Leipzig), inventory 21083 (Verlag F.A. Brockhaus, Leipzig [1805–​1948 (1966)]), record 359 (Singer, Isidor 1891–​1902); hereafter: F.A. Brockhaus/​Singer inventory, letter from Brockhaus Publishing to Singer (Paris), 15 June 1891. 59. Ibid. 60.  Letter from Brockhaus to Singer (Paris), 16 July 1891, ibid. 61.  Letter from Brockhaus to Kayserling (Budapest), 8 August 1891, ibid. 62.  Copy of a letter from Singer to Maybaum (Carlsbad), 9 August 1891, ibid. 63.  “Circular,” “Paris, im September 1891,” ibid. 64.  Singer, “Henry [sic] Graetz” (obituary), Archives israélites. Recueil politique et religieux 52 (1891), 38 (17 September 1891). 65.  F.A. Brockhaus/​Singer inventory (newspaper clipping with no indication of source, 77). 66.  Undated draft of a letter from Brockhaus to Singer (Paris), sometime after 8 August 1892, ibid. 67.  Letter from Brockhaus to Singer (Paris), 12 August 1892 (with handwritten comment: “undelivered”), ibid. 68. Ibid. 69.  See Brian Horowitz, “The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of the St. Petersburg Russian Jewish Intelligentsia, 1893–​1905,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 19, Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 2003), 195–​213; Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire, 229–​282.

Transferring Jewish Knowledge

209

70. Simon Dubnow, Buch des Lebens. Erinnerungen und Gedanken. Materialien zur Geschichte meiner Zeit, ed. Verena Dohrn, 3 vols. (Göttingen: 2004–​2005), 1:297. 71.  The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 12  vols. (New York: 1901–​1906). 72.  Evreiskaia entsiklopediia. Svod znanii o evreistve i ego kul’ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 16 vols. (St. Petersburg: 1908–​1913). 73.  See Jeffrey Veidlinger, “ ‘Emancipation. See Anti-​Semitism’:  The Evreiskaia entsiklopediia and Jewish Public Culture,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 9 (2010), 405–​426. 74.  See Marianne Seydoux, “Les encyclopédies générales russes. Essai bibliographique,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 6 (1965), 245–​263; Tamara Nikolaevna Rumjanceva, “Die Firma F.A. Brockhaus und ihre Verbindungen nach Russland. Zur Geschichte der russisch-​deutschen Beziehungen auf dem Gebiet des Buchwesens um die Jahrhundertwende,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 102 (1988), 491–​496. 75.  See Heinrich Eduard Brockhaus, Die Firma F.A. Brockhaus von der Begründung bis zum hundertjährigen Jubiläum, 1805–​1905 (Leipzig: 1905), 366–​368; Erhard Hexelschneider, “Vom deutschen ‘Conversations-​Lexikon’ zum russischen ‘Enzyklopädischen Wörterbuch.’ Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Brockhaus/​Jefron,” in Figuren und Strukturen. Historische Essays für Hartmut Zwahr zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Manfred Hettling, Uwe Schirmer, and Susanne Schölz (Munich: 2002), 663–​677, here 676. 76.  University Archive Halle-​Wittenberg, 90/​938, letter from F.A. Brockhaus (Leipzig) to Prof. Dr. Hellmuth Scheel (Berlin), 14 July1941. 77.  Ibid., letter from F.A. Brockhaus (Leipzig) to Prof. Dr. Hellmuth Scheel (Berlin), 30 July 1941. 78.  Ibid., letter from Prof. Dr. Hellmuth Scheel (Berlin) to F.A. Brockhaus (Leipzig), 17 July 1941.

Knowledge and the Making of a Jewish Nation: Encyclopedia, Historical Narrative, and the Epistemic Origins of Zionism Dan Tsahor (NEW YORK UNIVERSITY)

For more than fifty years, the national subject has been in decline as a category of study in the humanities. Mid-​20th-​century structuralists and post-​structuralists have promoted interdisciplinary approaches to the study of national collectives, whereas historians have increasingly shifted their focus to global, transnational, or regional concerns.1 A few leading scholars have warned of the political implications of this process and have attempted to rehabilitate the study of a broad collective subject.2 In this regard, an examination of bodies of knowledge that enjoy broad social acceptance for presenting objective truths—​among them, encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, and various types of lexicons—​may have particular appeal. In one recent study, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison investigated the links between the epistemological approach of encyclopedias and those who use them. In their analysis of visual representations in scientific atlases and encyclopedias, they narrate a long history of the scientific subject.3 In my own search for a methodological tool to portray the early history of Jewish nationalism, I have drawn upon their work. However, rather than presenting a long history of the collective subject, I focus on a rather short period at the end of the 19th century when Jewish nationalism emerged among a small community of intellectuals in Poland and Russia. During this time, Jewish intellectuals in Eastern Europe employed a number of epistemological formats in an effort to “design” a Jewish nation. Scholars and writers in Central and Eastern Europe debated the possibility of Jewish nationalism throughout the last quarter of the 19th century. First expressed in the form of polemical pieces on the editorial and literary pages of Jewish newspapers, the idea gained momentum as small national associations (most of them under the umbrella of the Hibbat Zion movement) were established in Europe and North America. Although this movement did not have clear political objectives, its members mainly regarded the attempt to emancipate European Jewry as a failure, and they consequently supported a degree of social and cultural seclusion from their surroundings. Beyond this, the goals of the national movement varied considerably, ranging from “autonomists” who advocated for the creation of Jewish cultural autonomy in Europe Dan Tsahor, Knowledge and the Making of a Jewish Nation In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0012

Knowledge and the Making of a Jewish Nation

211

to “Palestinophils” who sought to establish a national center in Palestine. The former wanted to defend individual and collective political rights and to enhance the social cooperation among Jewish communities in Europe; the latter wished to establish a national center outside of Europe. At first, Jewish national associations were limited in their scope and influence, in part because the extent and character of Jewish national identity had yet to be defined. However, by the time the Zionist Organization was established in 1897, there was a clear distinction between Palestinophils and cultural autonomists, not only in terms of their political inclinations but also in the language they used and the knowledge they consumed. In what follows, I seek to demonstrate this distinction by means of examining the varied forms of non-​fictional literary material produced by different political factions that aimed to consolidate Jews into a cohesive national body. The Palestinophils of Hibbat Zion and their Zionist successors, on the one hand, and the advocates of cultural autonomy, on the other hand, presented very different interpretations of national knowledge. The first group promoted Jewish encyclopedias—​multivolume publications that sought to present knowledge covering all aspects of Jewish society and culture. The second group, in contrast, focused on the dissemination of long narratives portraying the history of the Jews from antiquity on. There was also a third option that was championed by Warsaw-​based advocates of emancipation and the proponents of the Polish Positivism movement, namely, an all-​inclusive Hebrew encyclopedia aimed at enhancing Jews’ assimilation within the larger society. Despite their differences of opinion regarding content and purpose, the producers of the three genres shared the assumption that the dissemination of knowledge was a key factor in forming (or reforming) the Jewish collective. Hence, their perception that epistemology—​the ways in which knowledge is displayed—​was a crucial political matter. As will be seen, by the first two decades of the 20th century, the Jewish encyclopedia became the dominant genre representing the national Jewish body of knowledge.

The All-​Inclusive Encyclopedia In 1888, Isaac Goldman, a publisher from Warsaw, presented a prospectus for a Hebrew encyclopedia that would be “a useful tool and ‘a book of books’ to our nation.”4 His name for the project was Haeshkol (The Cluster) because, like a cluster, the encyclopedia would hold “all the educational, practical, and academic wisdoms [together] with all scientific knowledge and discoveries and all the things and matters that ever occurred in this world.”5 In the prospectus, Goldman presented Haeshkol as a “general” encyclopedia that would present both scientific knowledge of various fields and Jewish knowledge. Like other Jewish scholars who made their career after the January Uprising (1863) against tsarist rule over Poland, Goldman was influenced by a literary movement known as Polish Positivism, which advocated the abandonment of romantic poetic and national patriotism in favor of the exercise of reason and the practice of science.6 To achieve these goals, Goldman published popular science books, dictionaries, lexicons, and other reference books, along with a small catalog

212 

Dan Tsahor

of religious books. He sought to use scientific knowledge to induce Jews to integrate within the larger society and to elevate them from what he perceived to be a backward state. In that sense, Goldman published books on popular science with the intention of creating a lingua franca—​a universal body of knowledge—​that would enable its users to operate freely within the Christian world. The enactment of the May Laws of 1882, which limited Jews’ political rights and their ability to integrate within Russian and Polish societies, damaged the emancipatory dream of Warsaw-​based Jewish intellectuals. In consequence, their artistic and intellectual gaze turned inward to explore Jews and Judaism, and there was a flourishing of literary production in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Publishers of non-​fiction books focused on what can be broadly defined as Jewish knowledge: Jewish history, ethnography, and Jewish theology. Goldman, however, sought to appeal to all readers of Hebrew, regardless of whether they were advocates of emancipation, proponents of cultural autonomy, or even yeshiva students. He planned to combine the old and new trends by introducing an encyclopedia that would be simultaneously an old-​fashioned popular science work and a book about Judaism. Yet soon after he assembled the editorial board, Goldman realized that the task of combining the two types of knowledge was more difficult than he had expected. After failing to recruit contributors to write entries on the natural sciences, he reached an agreement with the publisher of the renowned German encyclopedia Brockhaus Enzyklopädie to obtain translated articles on the sciences. When rumors regarding the agreement became widespread, critics demanded to have more content dedicated to Jewish knowledge.7 In response, Goldman expanded the editorial board by hiring experts in rabbinical literature and Jewish history. The result was a hodgepodge, a publication that presented concise entries on the natural sciences alongside cumbersome articles on halakhah and other Jewish topics.8 Although the model was that of an alphabetically organized German encyclopedia, the size differences of the articles and the emphasis on some themes while ignoring others gave the impression of mediocrity. In addition, the editors of Haeshkol failed to employ a language that would make the encyclopedia an accessible reference tool for everyday use. Notwithstanding more than a century of gradual changes in scientific language, Hebrew was not ready for a project of this magnitude. The editors presented new terms either through neologisms or by means of transliteration (for instance, the Greek mythical figure Adonis was presented as “Adanis” (‫ )אדניס‬and the title of the entry about the Norwegian philologist Ivar Aasen was written in the Yiddish format (‫ אאעזן‬instead of the Hebrew ‫)אוסן‬. This meant that, while the encyclopedia was ordered alphabetically, it was often difficult to locate entries on specific scientific topics.9 The main problem with Haeshkol was connected neither with language nor with terminology, but rather with its thematic content. Despite the publishers’ stated commitment to dedicate much of the encyclopedia’s content to Jewish national themes that reflected a Jewish collective subject, they gave scant attention to Jewish social organizations or political institutions. Within the 766 printed columns of the encyclopedia, the geography and history of Palestine were mentioned in a mere handful of articles. Although the editors included comprehensive entries about small villages in Western Europe and European colonies in Africa—​among these were Uttoxeter (a small market town in the West Midlands, England) and Usambara (a region in

Knowledge and the Making of a Jewish Nation

213

present-​day Tanzania)—​entries about Palestine comprised no more than one or two sentences.10 Nearly all of the geographical information was based on the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie and, as such, reflected German readers’ understanding of their national habitat and its vicinity. Thus, most of the geographical entries dealt with Central and Western Europe as well as with German colonial interests in Africa (Usambara was, for a short while, under the control of German East Africa). In addition, whereas the geographical material taken from Brockhaus focused in the main on current geological, climatic, and social conditions and contained detailed quantitative data, the entries about sites in Palestine relied exclusively on the Bible and other Jewish religious texts. Other entries on Jewish matters were mostly short biographies of biblical figures and leading exegetes, which were largely based on pre-​modern lexicons and religious sources. By emphasizing the endeavors of individuals rather than Jewish social organizations, Haeshkol did not present a distinct collective subject but rather was thematically in line with the way in which rabbinic literature presented Judaism as a religion.11 In this sense, Goldman’s vision of an encyclopedia that would appeal to a collective and encompass all political and denominational strands of East European Jewish society was a failure. To be sure, it seemed at first that Haeshkol would be a commercial success, as only a month after the publication of the first booklet, the encyclopedia had more than 1,800 subscribers, among them intellectuals from Warsaw, members of Hibbat Zion, and leading yeshivas.12 However, critics from different camps attacked as incoherent the attempt to present different linguistic modes instead of a unified epistemology. In late December 1888, after the number of subscribers slightly dwindled, the publisher announced the termination of the project after six booklets had been produced (a seventh booklet had yet to be sent to agents and subscribers).13 Haeshkol had been the first attempt to produce national knowledge for a varied range of Jewish readers. In the wake of its failure, the creators of national knowledge attempted to reach a more clearly defined readership to whom they would present more narrowly defined content.

The Book of History At the time that Goldman presented his prospectus for Haeshkol, another multivolume publication had already achieved success and approbation within Jewish national circles in Eastern Europe.14 The eleven volumes of Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews, written originally in German for Central European readers, presented a long narrative that began with the Bible and continued through mid-​19th-​century German Jewish scholarship. Most of the volumes were translated into Hebrew in the 1880s by Haeshkol’s senior editor. As “national literature,” translated works of history had several advantages over encyclopedias. First, the writing of historical narratives in Hebrew did not require the creation of new terminology and could be based on registers and a range of rhetorical devices that were developed throughout a century of Hebrew historiography. Second, in the particular context of Jewish nationalism—​a form of nationalism that Anthony Smith calls “perennial,” in the sense that an “old”

214 

Dan Tsahor

nation “re-​established” itself by adopting attributes such as those of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, or Greeks that linked the present to the past15—​the straightforward narrative of the history book was seen as more useful than a random collection of encyclopedic entries. Nonetheless, Graetz’s historiography was limited as national literature. Although the book, according to its title, claimed to follow the history of the Jews, Graetz portrayed a history mostly of mainstream Jewish theology and culture. To a large extent, this was a history of the rabbinical establishment; consequently, movements, practices, or beliefs that he deemed to be on the “fringes” received scant attention or else were dismissed. In his words:  “Judaism—​as any human phenomenon—​should be comprehended through the totality of its many historical manifestations and not by observing a single dimension or a limited perspective that was arbitrarily separated from the chain of reincarnations.”16 In addition, the History of the Jews was more a biography of Judaism, that is, a long and linear narrative that portrayed only a single event at a time. As such, it did not convey a sense of a broad society, or what Benedict Anderson describes as a collective “conception of simultaneity.”17 Simon Dubnow, an essayist and editor of Russian periodicals, sought to change this reality by broadening the historical perspective to include cultural and social aspects of Jewish life. Influenced by Graetz, Dubnow saw the importance of historiography for creating a collective identity. Nonetheless, in his reviews published in the Russian journal Voskhod, Dubnow criticized what he regarded as the apologetic tone of Central European Jewish historiographers who attempted to rationalize Jewish theology. In his first work of history, Dubnow studied the hasidic movement, which was largely ignored by historians, such as Graetz, who considered it a deviation from rational Judaism. In 1892, Dubnow outlined a plan to write a broader story of Russian Jewry by means of narrating a long history of the different religious sects and communities. Having initially described the plan in a series of articles in Voskhod, he wanted to collaborate with Jewish intellectuals throughout Russia and Poland; he therefore published, in Hebrew, a call to join his historical society and to send archival materials and rare books to it.18 Although the appeal did not result in the immediate growth of historical writing, it established the foundation for historical and ethnographic scholarship in Petersburg, and also for Autonomism, a political movement that called for creating a national collective identity in the diaspora that was based on culture and history rather than on territory. The task of Jewish history, according to Dubnow’s essay “What is Jewish History?” (written shortly after he began his historical research), was twofold: to create the cultural foundations of a cohesive national collectivity, and to transform the Jews from a nation of believers to a nation of thinkers.19 In this essay he cast himself and his ­associated historians in different political terms than did the Positivists of Warsaw. He asserted that the proponents of Positivism and science, who rejected nationalism and advocated the dissemination of scientific knowledge, did not offer a feasible solution for elevating the Jews of the Pale, given that the political and social environment in Russia was not welcoming to educated Jews. Dubnow, for his part, presented Jewish historical knowledge as a substitute both for traditional rabbinic literature and for the science taught at academic institutes.20 In so doing, he hoped that Jews would reclaim autonomy as a political and cultural subject.

Knowledge and the Making of a Jewish Nation

215

The notion that knowledge was the key for constituting a collective identity was shared as well by members of Hibbat Zion, who, by the end of the century, would be known as “cultural Zionists.” The founder and most prominent member of the cultural Zionist movement was Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg), an editor of Hebrew periodicals and a close friend of Dubnow. The two men—​both of whom led hasidic-​like courts of followers—​held similar views regarding the cultural revival of Jewish nationalism and the importance of knowledge as a crucial first step in creating a substantial Jewish national movement. However, Ahad Ha’am, who was a member of Hibbat Zion and who was known as a Hebraist and a Palestinophil, rejected Dubnow’s call to invest the greatest efforts on the establishment of national autonomy in Europe. Despite their friendship, the two men attacked each other’s political stances in literary reviews and opinion pieces.21 Dubnow would later describe the debate between them as a fight between the Eastern and Western camps of Jewish nationalism. This debate, he claimed, made an important contribution to East European Jewish political thought.22 Ahad Ha’am critiqued Dubnow’s assertion that history alone could fulfil the task of reviving a dormant Jewish nation. In his essay “Past and Future,” he criticized what he perceived to be the Jewish intelligentsia’s overenthusiastic zeal in studying the history of the nation. He blamed historians for producing knowledge “of pleasant memories to sweeten the last moments of the [national] self,” which, by itself, could not serve as the foundation of a new national identity; his claim was that national identity was a compound of past memories and hopes for the future. According to Ahad Ha’am, Jews needed to set political goals for the future rather than dwelling exclusively on the past.23 In an article in Voskhod, an anonymous author replied to Ahad Ha’am, claiming that the deepest essence of Judaism could be revealed only through historical analysis. “Historical consciousness,” the anonymous author wrote, “is no mere aspiring to achieve a special practical goal, but rather [a form of] self-​understanding.” In addition, historical writing was not a sign of decrepitude, as Ahad Ha’am had claimed, but rather sought to establish “a full spiritual life, strengthening our national organism with the water of life that still flows from our multigenerational tree of history.”24 For Dubnow, history was not only a tool for illuminating a common past of the Jews but an instrument that revealed the hidden persona of the nation. Like Graetz, Dubnow presented the “Jewish nation” as a stable unit that withstood the test of time; every period of time, community, or center of Jewish thought was a synecdoche of the totality of the Jewish self. He connected the seemingly separate events and geographies of Jewish history through a long, linear narrative. In that sense, history according to Dubnow had a purpose similar to that of a bronze monument of a national hero, which, on the one hand, signifies a “real” historical object, and, on the other hand, portrays the essentialist qualities of the entire nation. As noted in another context by Paul de Man, the historical object in Dubnow’s narratives is “a symbol founded on an intimate unity between the image that rises up before the senses and the supersensory totality that the image suggests.”25 The long sequence of historical events, the unbound narrative, and the multitude of historical actors delineate a totality of a single collective self with unchanging characteristics. The current Jewish subject and the objects of history are, in Dubnow’s sense of history, an inseparable unity.

216 

Dan Tsahor

The Jewish Encyclopedia Shortly after his literary skirmish with Dubnow, in August 1894, Ahad Ha’am published a plan for a project that, in many aspects, was antithetical to Dubnow’s grand narrative. The project, which he named Otzar hayahadut, was a multivolume Jewish encyclopedia in Hebrew. In its prospectus, Ahad Ha’am devoted only a fraction of the encyclopedia’s massive scope to Jewish history, a single subsection out of fifteen. Unlike the narrated synecdoche of Dubnow, it would not present a linear narrative but would rather separate Jewish knowledge into thousands of independent entries. Such fragmentation would offer only an abstract notion of a collective national subject. Moreover, the encyclopedia’s mechanical (alphabetic) organization would prevent the hierarchical arrangement of knowledge. In his prospectus, Ahad Ha’am presented two main novelties of the encyclopedia. First, its purpose was to create a new national identity. Unlike traditional Jewish knowledge, which, according to Ahad Ha’am, served the needs of political and clerical authorities to reinforce their power, the knowledge transmitted by the encyclopedia would create a common culture: “If our Sages said: ‘study is greater, for it leads to practice,’ we argue that ‘study is greater, for it leads to love’ ”—​in other words, the act of knowing would constitute the new focus of concern and would enable solidarity among members of the nation.26 Second, this knowledge would be accessible to all members of the Jewish national movement. To foster the establishment of a nation of “knowers,” Ahad Ha’am sought to produce and disseminate knowledge in all Jewish communities. In contrast to Goldman’s attempt to “elevate” the nation by means of exposing it to scientific knowledge, Ahad Ha’am claimed that only knowledge, in Hebrew, “about the characteristics of the nation’s spirit” would spark “the love for our nation.”27 To be sure, Ahad Ha’am did not invent the idea of a national encyclopedia. While for most of the 18th century the main objective of encyclopedias was to popularize scientific knowledge, the purpose of 19th-​century encyclopedias shifted to national indoctrination.28 Many editors perceived the encyclopedia as an educational tool that could convey national symbols and political agendas, thus creating a bond between readers and national movements. In addition, they regarded an encyclopedia as signifying the autonomy of a given national culture. When the Elsevier publishing house, for instance, began, in 1870, to publish Winkler Prins, a 16-​volume all-​inclusive encyclopedia in Dutch, it sought to present Holland as a nation independent of foreign influences: if Dutch scholars were able to produce knowledge in all fields and present it in Dutch, this meant that Dutch science, art, and education no longer depended on French, German, and English cultures. In the last quarter of the 19th century, this literary trend was warmly embraced by publishers in Eastern Europe as national encyclopedias were published in Warsaw, Lemberg, Budapest, and Petersburg. Editors of many of the East European encyclopedias translated entries on the natural sciences and geography from leading German encyclopedias, whereas entries about the local culture, national symbols, and national movements were produced by in-​house contributors. Ahad Ha’am, however, rejected this pattern, as he sought to present only knowledge about Jews and Judaism, to be produced entirely by in-​house writers. He also

Knowledge and the Making of a Jewish Nation

217

offered a genuine model for organizing encyclopedic knowledge that was different from other national encyclopedias of his time—​namely, a middle way between Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (which had influenced Jewish scholarship as well as most European encyclopedias) and Encyclopaedia Britannica, which had gained prominence in the English-​speaking world. Whereas Brockhaus presented a wide collection of small entries that covered a broad spectrum of knowledge, Britannica had fewer entries, but each was broader in scope, more comprehensive, and included several references to other entries. The two approaches also differed in the type of editorial work they required. According to the Brockhaus model, the writers of the entries were the highest authorities, and each entry had an independent status. Brockhaus, therefore, contained different and often contradictory approaches and views. In contrast, the Britannica model necessitated rigorous editing in order to make the product unified in its epistemology and ideology. Ahad Ha’am sought to combine the advantages of the two encyclopedic paradigms by displaying comprehensive entries about ideas and concepts, along with smaller biographical entries.29 In fact, it was Encyclopaedia Britannica’s tight supervision over the production of knowledge that better suited his goals. However, this model called for enormous intellectual and financial efforts that were beyond Ahad Ha’am’s reach. The plan for Otzar hayahadut, therefore, was a compromise between his ambitious vision and his meager resources. Ahad Ha’am sought to reveal what he described as the “spirit of the nation,” an ethical code that enabled Jewish existence throughout history. The Jewish spirit was not only an ethical schema that framed the performances of historical actors, but also a historical actor in its own merit.30 In fact, the long history of the Jews—​as Ahad Ha’am presented it in his prospectus—​was the history of the Jewish spirit. The important, tragic events that had punctuated Jewish history and separated it into historical eras (for example, the destruction of the Second Temple and the expulsion of Iberian Jewry) had severely damaged this spirit, and redemptive endeavors of scholars (as, for instance, the creation of works such as the Mishnah and the Shulḥan arukh), were only partially successful in healing its wounds. In Ahad Ha’am’s view, “the spirit” was an unstable category that might one day disappear. In order to heal it and to change the course of Jewish history, the entire nation needed to consume a vast but fragmented body of knowledge that had been produced throughout the long history of Judaism. The fragmented encyclopedia would serve what Walter Benjamin would later describe as a system of allegorical signs, a “renunciation of the idea of harmonious totality” that was promised by the grand historical narratives.31 The encyclopedia could not offer a symbolic unity between past and present but, rather, a disharmonious composition of a multitude of entries, an allegory that did not reject the temporality of the subject but rather emphasized the finitude of object and subject alike. In the months following the initial presentation of his prospectus, Ahad Ha’am continued to develop the project. The Russian tea magnate Kalonymos Wissotzky agreed to cover preliminary expenses; the Warsaw-​based Ahiasaf publishing house took responsibility for the editorial work; and the Hebrew journal Hamelitz promoted the idea in several editorials. Ahad Ha’am developed the prospectus in a series of articles appearing in Hamelitz, in which he described the type of knowledge that would be displayed, the rhetorical tools of representation, and the general guidelines for the editorial work. But despite the financial and technical support it received, the project

218 

Dan Tsahor

never materialized, partly in consequence of a blistering attack in Voskhod, which argued that Otzar hayahadut would be written from the perspective of the ivory tower and would have no value as an educational tool.32 The anonymous writer added that the prospectus followed the tradition of rabbinic literature, as it overemphasized halakhah and Jewish ethics while neglecting history. In light of the Voskhod’s harsh review (as well as attacks by other scholars), Ahad Ha’am decided to shelve the project. Nevertheless, the prospectus of Otzar hayahadut had a considerable influence on most Hebrew and Jewish encyclopedias to come. In the following three decades, several attempts to publish encyclopedias in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and Russian were based on the model that Ahad Ha’am had presented in his prospectus, including the acclaimed American Jewish Encyclopedia, which was the first complete encyclopedia dedicated to Jewish knowledge; the influential Russian Evreiskaia entsiklopedia; and the German Encyclopaedia Judaica. At the same time, the publication of Jewish encyclopedias in languages other than Hebrew or Yiddish could not fulfil Ahad Ha’am’s goal of attracting Jews from all corners of the diaspora to the national movement. The success of the American encyclopedia motivated Ahad Ha’am and Ahiasaf to an additional attempt to publish Otzar hayahadut. Ahad Ha’am, who held a steady job at the Wissotsky Tea Company, agreed only to serve as an external adviser; thus, two young scholars, Joseph Klausner and David Neumark, were appointed as chief editors. In late 1903, Ahiasaf opened offices in Berlin and Warsaw and recruited hundreds of contributors and editors for the project. Despite delays and technical problems caused by the Revolution of 1905, the publishers insisted on continuing as planned and sought to distribute a sample booklet to demonstrate their serious intentions. This, however, proved to be a grave mistake. The booklet, which was hastily edited, was criticized by all the major Jewish journals in Europe, Palestine, and North America. The main target of attack was Neumark’s entry “The Jewish Dogma,” in which he questioned the autonomy of Judaism as a social and religious category, claiming that Jewish theological doctrine was, in many aspects, similar to that of the Catholic dogma. This claim drew fire from national intellectuals, who argued that, by blurring theological boundaries with Christianity, Neumark had produced an apologetic article that rationalized Judaism and supported assimilation.33 The scandal was, to a large degree, a result of the intellectuals’ growing sensitivity to issues concerning the national self. During the decade following the initial prospectus of Otzar hayahadut, the World Zionist Organization had been established, and the particular attributes of the national subject had become a central concern of policymakers and scholars. During this time, the Zionist debate over culture was at its peak, and arguments about the characteristics of the national culture were given great attention at the Zionist congresses and in literary journals. “Culture” was the order of the day, and all political movements dedicated efforts to developing educational systems and knowledge that would highlight the particular character of Jewish arts, folklore, and literature.34 Yet this character was no longer the all-​encompassing subject that Isaac Goldman and Ahad Ha’am had sought to represent. From this point on, the cultural differences between Zionists and Autonomists became more obvious, as each of the national movements invested in its own unique art and knowledge. Even Dubnow sought to

Knowledge and the Making of a Jewish Nation

219

expand the Autonomist production of knowledge to territories that the grand narratives had not covered, by means of issuing a Jewish encyclopedia in Russian. Together with Yehuda Katzenelson, he edited the first volume of Evreiskaia entsiklopedia, which was, by and large, a modified version of the American Jewish Encyclopedia, with additional entries about Russian Jewry. The idea was to produce knowledge that would help to consolidate a Russian Jewish collective identity. Dubnow, however, resigned after the first volume was published, claiming that the historical inquiries were not rigorous enough.35 In 1913, some of the editors and writers of the Russian encyclopedia assembled a new editorial team to make another attempt to publish the Hebrew Otzar hayahadut. The initiators were historians from Petersburg, among them Dober Markon (the proposed editor) and Daniel Pasmanick. They devoted much of their prospectus, unlike the original plan of Ahad Ha’am, to Jewish history in the diaspora and, in particular, to Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.36 Although Pasmanick, who described the encyclopedia in a lengthy article, claimed that the new Otzar hayahadut would highlight Jewish history, he nevertheless stressed that the encyclopedia’s main objective was to present “a full and comprehensive picture of our present life.”37 Pasmanick and Markon were members of the religious Zionist movement Hamizrachi, yet they believed that the Zionist Organization should devote at least part of its efforts to the struggle for political rights for Jews in the diaspora and for the development of Jewish cultural initiatives in Russia.38 Their encyclopedia would be the cultural extension of an idea first outlined by proponents of what was known as “’avodat hahoveh” (work in the here-​and-​now), which was presented at a conference held in Helsinki in 1906.39 At about the same time, a group of Zionist intellectuals affiliated with Ahad Ha’am initiated a similar project. Their prospectus included an impressive list of contributors and editors, most of whom were writers, poets, and publicists, among them Yehuda Leib Katzenelson (the proposed editor), Haim Nahman Bialik, and Shaul Tchernichovsky; as with Ahad Ha’am’s original plan, it allocated only minimal space to Jewish history.40 Katzenelson raised the significant sum of 35,000 rubles from Jewish philanthropists in Moscow and Petersburg and reached an agreement with the largest publishing company in Russia to cover all the administrative and printing expenses.41 Following publication of the two prospectuses, the rivals mutually attacked one another in the Hebrew press. The turmoil subsided only after Ahad Ha’am and other leading scholars called on the two sides to merge. David Neumark, the co-​editor of the previous attempt to publish Otzar hayahadut, argued that it was “necessary and even possible that Mr. Katzenelson and Mr. Markon would make peace,” adding that, a decade before, a similar skirmish had led to the failure of the project.42 The call to unite led Katzenelson and Markon to discuss a merger, and in early 1914 they registered a new publishing company and began to recruit editors. Due to the deteriorating health of Katzenelson and the outbreak of the First World War, the project never materialized.43 In the 26 years between the initiation of Haeshkol and the attempt of Markon and Katzenelson to publish Otzar hayahadut, the content and epistemology of Jewish national knowledge had dramatically changed. At the beginning, the project of crafting

220 

Dan Tsahor

a national Jewish body of knowledge was characterized by trial and error, as publishers in Eastern Europe set to define the characteristics of the elusive national subject. However, once the political lines between Autonomism and Zionism had been institutionalized, there was a much clearer demarcation of potential readers. Autonomism embraced the historical narratives for emphasizing the regional and binding the past to the present, whereas the Zionist movement favored the Jewish encyclopedia with its multitude of themes. Encyclopedias continued to be the most successful genre in Hebrew literature for more than five decades. In contrast, the grand historical narrative that portrayed the story of a collective Jewish subject never gained a substantial foothold in Hebrew historiography.

Notes 1.  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New  York:  1970), xxiv; Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism (Amherst: 1990), 68–​ 121; Robert M.  Strozier, Foucault, Subjectivity, and Identity:  Historical Constructions of Subject and Self (Detroit: 2002), 51–​78. 2.  See, for instance, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.:  1989); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life:  The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: 1979). 3.  Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: 2007). 4.  Isaac Goldman, Haeshkol, vol. 1, ḥovrot 1–​6 (Warsaw: 1888). The prospectus appears as a preface to the volume. 5.  Ibid., 3. 6.  Polish Positivism (also known as Pozytywizm warszawski) had considerable influence through the turn of the 20th century. The movement rejected the poetics and political visions of previous Romantic writers such as Adam Mickiewicz, who had called for an end to foreign rule and the establishment of a coherent and autonomic national culture. Instead, writers such ́ as Bolesław Prus and Aleksander Swiętochowski urged abandoning hope for uniting Poland through political and militaristic actions, and instead promoted the notion of a cultural resurrection. See Czeslaw Milosz, The History of Polish Literature (New York: 1969). 7.  “Bina bisfarim,” Hamelitz (16 December 1887); B.D. Politon, “Mikhtavei masa,” ibid. (25 December 1892). 8.  According to the plan, subscribers would receive a booklet of Haeshkol every month. At the end of six months, they would receive a cover that could bind six or seven booklets into a single volume. 9.  An anonymous reviewer had considerable problems with the terminology applied by the editors of Haeshkol. See “Kiryat sefer: Haeshkol,” Hatzefirah (6 April 1888), 3. 10.  See, for instance, “Ono,” Haeshkol, 596; “Adar,” ibid., 419. 11.  In some instances, however, the editors presented a certain degree of bonding among members of the religious Jewish community who shared a common belief in the veracity of religious symbols and myths (cf. Eric Hobsbawm, Nation and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality [London: 1992], 46–​79). In this sense, the editors of Haeshkol were in line with Henri Rousseau’s understanding of religion as a social order, with solidarity as the main foundation of the order. In rare instances, the editors “stretched” the concept of Judaism as a religious category by including entries about historical figures who were heretics or who had been excommunicated. The common denominator linking individual Jews to a Jewish collectivity was biology. For instance, in an entry about the philosopher Alfonso Burgensis de Valladolid (known as “Avner” in Jewish tradition), the claim was made that Avner remained Jewish even after he publicly renounced his faith in Judaism (see Haeshkol, 197–​198).

Knowledge and the Making of a Jewish Nation

221

12.  According to a report in the Hebrew daily Hatzefirah, even the head of the influential yeshiva of Volozhin, R. Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, supported the use of the encyclopedia in the yeshiva. See “Ma ne’esah lesifrutenu,” Hatzefirah (21 August 1894), 2. 13.  “Ma’asim bekhol yom” Hamelitz (25 December 1888), 5. After the project was shelved, the remaining booklets of Haeshkol were sold as a bound book. 14.  In Central Europe, Graetz’s books were somewhat more controversial because of their critical standpoint with regard to the Reform movement 15.  Anthony Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: 1998), 159. 16.  Quoted in Shlomo Avineri, Hara’ayon hatziyoni ligvanav (Tel Aviv: 1980), 30. 17.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: 2006), 24. 18.  Shimon Dubnow, Naḥpesah venaḥkorah: kol kore el hanevonim ba’am hamitnadvim leesof ḥomer levinyan toledot benei yisrael befolin uverusyah (Odessa: 1892). 19.  Simon Dubnow, “What is Jewish History?” in Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism by Simon Dubnow, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (Philadelphia: 1958), 253–​324. 20.  Robert Seltzer, “Coming Home:  The Personal Basis of Simon Dubnow’s Ideology,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 1 (1976), 283–​301; esp. 296–​297. 21. See Steven Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet:  Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: 1993),  73–​74. 22.  Ibid., 69. 23.  Ahad Ha’am, “’Avar ve’atid,” in idem, Kol kitvei Aḥad Ha’am (Tel Aviv: 1947), 91. 24. Cited in Yehuda Slutsky, Ha’itonut hayehudit-​ rusit bameah hatesha’ ’esrei (Jerusalem:  1970), 289. According to Slutsky, Dubnow was the author of this response to Ahad Ha’am. 25.  Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: 1978), 189. 26. Ahad Ha’am, “Otzar hayahadut, maamar sheni,” Hamelitz (1 August 1894), quoting from BT Kiddushin: 40b. 27. Ibid. 28.  In his study about the second edition of the renowned Encyclopédie, Robert Darnton pointed to one of the early occurrences of this phenomenon. See Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment:  A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–​ 1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1979). 29.  See Arndt Engelhardt and Ines Prodöhl, “Kaleidoscopic Knowledge: On Jewish and Other Encyclopedias,” trans. William Templer and Mark R. Stoneman, Jahrbuch des Simon-​ Dubnow-​Instituts 9 (2010), 233–​245. 30.  Ahad Ha’am, “Lo zeh haderekh,” in idem, Kol kitvei Aḥad Ha’am,  11–​16. 31.  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: 2002), 330. 32.  “Obzor yevereyskoy pechati,” Voskhod 27 (3 July 1894). 33. David Neumark, Otzar hayahadut:  ḥoveret ledugmah (Warsaw:  1906); Chaim Tchernowitz, “Ḥoveret ledugmah, bikoret,” Hashiloaḥ 16 (Odessa:1907), 381–​386, 562–​571; Ahad Ha’am, cited in Shulamit Laskov, Ḥayei Aḥad Ha’am: pesifas mitokh ketavav ukhetavim aḥerim (Jerusalem: 2006), 230. 34.  Shmuel Almog, Tziyonut vehistoriyah (Jerusalem: 1982), 61–​129. 35.  Ahad Ha’am, Igrot Aḥad Ha’am, vol. 4 (Tel Aviv: 1958), 77; Simon Rawidowicz, Sefer Shimon Dubnov: maamarim, igrot (London: 1954), 259–​260. 36.  Hatzefirah (27 September 1913), 1; Daniel Pasmanick, “Habonim el hasotrim,” Hazeman (14 February 1913), 2. 37.  Pasmanick, “Habonim el hasotrim,” 2. 38.  Pasmanick and Ze’ev Jabotinsky were the most vocal voices at the Seventh Zionist Congress, and their efforts later led to the Helsingfors (Helsinki) Resolution. In his autobiography, Jabotinsky described Pasmanick’s characteristics and their cooperation in Helsinki. See Vladimir [Zeev] Jabotinsky, “Sipur yamai,” Jabotinsky Institute Archive, M94/​3; also available online at https://​benyehuda.org/​zhabotinsky/​sipur_​yamay_​no_​nikkud.html or at

222 

Dan Tsahor

infocenters.co.il/​jabo/​jabo_​multimedia/​Files/​linked/​%D7%901%20-​6_​10_​2.PDF (accessed 26 November 2019). 39.  ’Avodat hahoveh had its origins in the Hibbat Zion movement, whose influence grew in the wake of Theodor Herzl’s failure to attain a charter for the colonization of Palestine. See Y. Rabinovich, “Even veeven,” Hazeman (7 February 1912), 2. The term “’avodat hahoveh” was originally coined by Martin Buber and Berthold Feiwel in 1901, in their call to the Zionist movement to develop a concrete plan of action, rather than immersing itself in polemics and endless ideological discussion. See Sh[muel] Hugo Bergmann, “Berthold Feiwel ve’avodat hahoveh,” in idem, Berthold Feiwel: haish ufo’alo (Jerusalem: 1959), 64. 40.  Yehuda Leib Katzenelson, Mah sherau ’einai veshame’u oznai: zikhronot mimei ḥayai (Jerusalem: 1947), 265. 41.  Yehuda Leib Katzenelson, “Bidvar haentziklopediyah ha’ivrit,” Hatzefirah (25 February 1913), 2. 42.  David Neumark, “Shapa’at kalgasim,” Hatzefirah (12 May 1913), 10; B.Z. Katz, “’Od ’al devar Otzar hayahadut,” Hazeman (11 May 1913), 3. 43. Katzenelson, Mah sherau ’einai veshame’u oznai, 262–​265.

Essay

Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus: The Pragmatic Binationalism of D.W. Senator (1930–​1949) Adi Livny (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

In March 1948, David Werner Senator, the administrative director of the Hebrew University, wrote a letter to a colleague, Akiba Ernst Simon, who was in New York at the time. After describing the mounting level of violence between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Senator noted: [I am] afraid that it may be too late for the salvation of Palestinian Jewry if things take their logical course. My only advice and request to you is to do quickly whatever you can do and try to organize powerful opposition against the Jewish Agency executive of today which has brought the present disaster upon the Jewish people and which, if allowed to continue, will bring still great[er] disasters upon us.1

From the very beginning of the disturbances that would soon escalate into full-​ blown warfare, Senator was faced with the disruption of the university’s ongoing activity. Yet above all else, he was concerned about the general political situation in Palestine. He and Simon, to whom he wrote frequently about current affairs, belonged to an association known as Ihud (Unity), which opposed the partition of Palestine and advocated the founding of an Arab-​Jewish binational state that would be a part of a Middle Eastern federation. The group included a number of well-​known figures, among them Martin Buber and Hugo Bergman; its founder was the American-​born Judah Leon Magnes, a Reform rabbi and outspoken pacifist, one of the founders of the Hebrew University and its president at the time.2 Senator, one of the less familiar names in the group, was a highly experienced administrator at the Hebrew University who had also held a number of senior executive positions with the Jewish Agency, among them, treasurer and head of the immigration department.3 By March 1948, he had become pessimistic with regard to the future of the Yishuv, noting that, for a man who “has connected his life with Zionism for 35 years and with Palestine for the last 24 years, these are tragic days.”4 Less than a year later, however, the tenor of his feelings had changed. “From the practical point of view,” he wrote in February Adi Livny, Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus In: Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Edited by: Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0013

226 

Adi Livny

1949 to Max Steinbock, an American labor activist and a supporter of Ihud, “the policy advocated by us at the time has failed and has been proven ‘wrong,’ at least for the moment.”5 Furthermore, he now praised David Ben-​Gurion, whom he had previously denounced as a leader who followed a path of “national fascism.”6 Senator noted: “Ben-​Gurion’s policy which we fought so bitterly seems to have succeeded. He was more clear-​sighted in his estimation of Jewish and Arab relative strength.” Indeed, in Senator’s markedly altered estimation, Ben-​Gurion was “a victorious leader” who “has shown much political wisdom, moderation, [and] feeling for human, moral and political responsibility during these last months.”7 What accounts for the transformation in Senator’s outlook over the course of the period between March 1948 and February 1949? How can one explain his transition from fierce criticism of the Jewish Agency’s executive and attempts to foil the partition plan to his enthusiastic acceptance, just a few months later, of the state of Israel—​and, as will be seen, to a fundamental opposition to the return of Palestinian Arab refugees? As noted, Senator was by no means the best known of Ihud’s members; in contrast to individuals such as Magnes, Bergman, and Buber, he was, as Zalman Shazar foresaw, “a classic candidate for oblivion.”8 Yet the key roles he performed within the institutions of Palestine Jewish society during the 1930s, his part in the absorption and settlement of German immigrants, and no less important, his involvement in the fate of the Hebrew University in 1948, turn his story into a chapter of history that merits revisiting. By following Senator during his “Palestine period”—​during his incumbency on the Jewish Agency executive, and in particular in those dramatic moments in 1948—​I argue that what appears to be a genuine reversal of outlook is but the natural outcome of Senator’s particularistic worldview that regarded “binationalism” as a means rather than an end. Moreover, Senator’s pragmatism was intrinsically connected to his long career in executive positions and to his “morality of responsibility,” as defined by Max Weber. It was this characteristic that distinguished him from most of his friends in Ihud; further, Senator’s “pragmatic binationalism” is yet another indication of the broad range of political positions existing within the Jewish community in Palestine at the time, which complicates a monolithic perception of binationalism.

The “Non-Zionist” Zionist on the Jewish Agency Executive Senator was born in Berlin in 1896. Son of a civil engineer and grandson of an East Prussian landowner, he was the product of a typical German Jewish secular and bourgeois family.9 Perhaps less typical was his early interest in the Zionist movement, which he joined, by his own testimony, in 1913, at the age of 17.10 Senator began his career of Jewish activism with philanthropic work among East European Jewry. In 1916, he joined the staff of the Jüdisches Volksheim (The Jewish People’s Home) in Berlin,11 which was established by the educator Siegfried Lehmann.12 During the First World War, following a brief period of service as an officer in the Imperial German Army,13 he was sent by the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to Lithuania, where he helped establish a center for Jews in need, including assistance for refugees. Through these encounters, he developed a profound interest in East European Jewish culture and gained an excellent command of Yiddish.14

Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus

227

Senator studied at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Freiburg. He was awarded a doctorate in 1919, with his thesis focusing on land-​law problems in Palestine.15 Over the course of the 1920s, he worked in a variety of positions that made use of his background in economics and Jewish philanthropic work. In 1921–​1922, he served as a secretary and then general secretary of the Welfare Office of Jewish Organizations in Germany (Arbeiterfürsorge Amt).16 He then started his decade-​long engagement with the JDC in Europe, working first as the deputy manager of the JDC’s refugee department (1922–​1924). In 1924, he immigrated—​for the first time—​to Palestine and took a position on the executive of Hamashbir, a consumer cooperative. Professional disagreements led him to resign his post and to return to Europe, where, between 1925 and 1930, he served as general secretary of the JDC in Europe.17 Through his work at the JDC, Senator gained the trust of American Jewish leaders, and he was thus approached by the banker Felix Warburg following the establishment of the “enlarged” Jewish Agency in Jerusalem in 1929; at this time, the organization was expanded to include both Zionists and non-​Zionists, a move that reflected the latter’s increased financial support for the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. Since the non-​Zionists were not prepared to move to Palestine, they were willing to settle for trustworthy Zionists such as Senator, who agreed—​yet again—​to move to Palestine, where he would serve on the executive as their representative.18 Alongside the controversial views he subsequently expressed in the executive, it was perhaps this role, which he filled from 1930 to 1945, that generated the mistaken identification of Senator as a “non-​Zionist.”19 During the 1930s, Senator also held a number of senior posts in the Jewish Agency administration, through which he played a part in key events affecting the Yishuv. As head of the aliyah department, he tackled the complex—​and critical—​issue of how to distribute immigration certificates to applicants from the various diasporas;20 in parallel, together with Georg Landauer, he ran the Agency’s German department, which, upon its establishment, was allocated the task of handling the exodus of migrants from Germany.21 In addition, as representative of the Jewish Agency executive, Senator served as chairman of the board of the Ha’avarah company, which, from 1935 until the outbreak of the Second World War, acted as the Palestine arm of the body engaging in the transfer of German Jewish property to Palestine under a controversial arrangement concluded with the Nazi regime.22 These issues, as well as the decisions he was required to make while working at the Jewish Agency, were doubtless a source of concern and deliberation for Senator. Nevertheless, the major question that occupied him, and with which he persistently engaged throughout his years at the Agency and also thereafter, belonged to a different sphere. It was what was known at the time as “the Arab problem.”

Resolving the Arab Problem As early as 1930, shortly after settling in Palestine, Senator took an active role in the activities of the Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) association. One of his first activities in Brit Shalom was to participate in the writing of a memorandum submitted to the Jewish Agency executive and to the Jewish National Council (Hava’ad Haleumi)

228 

Adi Livny

that suggested various forms of economic, municipal, and educational cooperation between Arabs and Jews.23 From its inception, the members of Brit Shalom were divided over the question of the association’s very purpose. A “radical circle” represented by Hugo Bergman and Hans Kohn pushed for it to play an active political role, whereas its founder, Arthur Ruppin, insisted on its original (and exclusive) designation as a policy research group.24 Despite this ambiguity, there was one core conviction shared by the group: the Arab problem must be confronted. In his years in the executive, Senator became a dedicated proponent of this view. In May 1930, in one of his first meetings as an executive member, Senator proclaimed that “we must immediately determine the active political position of the executive toward the Arabs and toward the government.”25 A few weeks later, he argued that a “radical solution should be pursued in a realistic manner.”26 Though Brit Shalom would formally cease to exist in 1933 (some of its members continued to meet until 1935), the belief that the implementation of Zionism depended on reaching agreements with the Arabs continued to be espoused by Senator throughout the 1930s, and, in fact, during all his years as a member of the executive.27 He continually lamented the Agency’s lack of a conceptual plan for the “Arab problem,”28 stressing the need for an “active and constructive policy.”29 Senator found it increasingly difficult to square his standpoint on the Arab question with his membership in the Jewish Agency executive following the Zionist adoption of the Biltmore program, which included for the first time an explicit demand to establish a “Jewish Commonwealth”—​that is, a sovereign state in Palestine.30 First adopted at a conference of American Zionists in the Biltmore Hotel in New  York in May 1942, the program was soon endorsed by the Jewish Agency’s executive in Jerusalem as well, in November 1942. Both in the preceding discussions and following its approval, Senator was one of the program’s fiercest opponents, believing it to be a fatal mistake that would set the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine on a collision course with both the British and the Arabs. As time passed, he became ever more isolated on the executive,31 all the more so after Arthur Ruppin, the only other member who voted against the adoption of the Biltmore program, died in January 1943.32 It was in this context that Magnes established the Ihud association, the “binationalist response to the Biltmore decision.”33 Some former members of Brit Shalom, especially those concentrated around the Hebrew University, also joined Ihud.34 Discarding the ambiguity that surrounded Brit Shalom’s purpose, Ihud saw itself as a political force offering an alternative to the Zionist leadership’s vision for the postwar order. Ihud’s program called for the establishment of a binational state on the basis of full equality between the two nations in Palestine. This state would be part of a regional federation with the surrounding Arab countries, under the auspices of some form of Anglo-​American union that they expected to emerge after the Second World War.35 From the moment Ihud was founded in September 1942, Senator felt obliged to defend its very legitimacy before the members of the executive, and to repel accusations that it was misappropriating the Zionist idea. The executive’s members regarded Ihud—​and, in particular, Magnes—​as excessively isolationist or perhaps insufficiently Zionist. During a discussion held by the executive, one of the members of the General Zionists faction, Emil Schmorak, proposed that the association be excluded from the

Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus

229

Zionist movement; another General Zionist, Yitzhak Gruenbaum, offered the more moderate proposal that Magnes be removed from any post “that lends him prestige.”36 Senator, for his part, defended Ihud by arguing that it had no desire to undermine the authority of the Agency’s leadership or to enter into separate negotiations with the British or the Arabs, and he rebuffed accusations that Ihud’s members were not Zionists.37 Senator finally decided to resign from the Agency’s executive in December 1945. He was no longer prepared to bear responsibility for a path he believed to be “very dangerous and destructive,” as he declared in the letter of resignation he addressed to Chaim Weizmann. Here he was referring to what he considered to be the intransigent stand taken by the executive toward the British government. He believed that the Mandate government’s policy, which was widely criticized in the Yishuv, was the direct consequence of the Biltmore resolution. The members of the Agency’s executive, Senator wrote to Weizmann, “are leading our people and our cause toward an abyss,” adding that “only history will show who is right.” 38 The weighing of outcomes played a major role in Senator’s worldview. What was politically “moral,” in his view, should be measured not merely by how appropriate it was as an action, but also—​and perhaps principally—​by its probable consequences. With respect to the Arab question, the consequential element was no less dominant than a commitment to humane and universal principles. The latter underlay the approach adopted by many of Senator’s colleagues both in Brit Shalom and in Ihud, and these values were also a part of his own worldview. However, he was in large measure motivated by long-​term considerations, and these led him to conclude that failure to address the Arab question was a recipe for disaster. Borrowing from Max Weber, Senator’s worldview is better characterized as an “ethics of responsibility” (Verantwortungsethik), a concept that focuses on the likely consequences of the political act, rather than as an “ethics of conviction” (Gesinnungsethik), which defines the moral act according to the purpose it seeks to serve.39 Thus, the Biltmore resolution aroused Senator’s fierce opposition not because he objected to the purpose it sought to achieve—​the founding of a Jewish state—​but because of the probable repercussions of any attempt to realize it. Senator openly declared that, unlike some of Ihud’s members, he was not opposed in principle to a Jewish state: To me, the Jewish state in itself is not a nightmare. On the contrary—​I would be overjoyed if a state were to give the Jewish people the opportunity to develop an independent existence in the area of culture, economy, and politics. . . . I am unsure whether we would already be prepared and mature enough for this, but I would happily participate in founding and improving such a state.40

At the same time, he asserted, one must separate this “desire” for a Jewish state from the question of the possible repercussions of an attempt to achieve it. At a meeting of the executive committee he stated clearly that he, too, “like everyone else” (apart from, admittedly, some of the prominent members of Ihud), desired a Jewish state, but added that he was convinced that this was not a practical proposition, since existing circumstances proved that there was no place in the world for “midget states.” Senator maintained further that the world war still raging at the time proved to him that the

230 

Adi Livny

aspiration toward sovereignty on the part of every small nation was liable to drag the world into nothing less than devastation. On the strength of this experience, he concluded that the founding of a Jewish state would inevitably lead to war between Jews and Arabs, and it was this outcome that Ihud sought to preempt.41 A similar kind of argumentation led Senator to declare the Biltmore program disastrous.42 The program, he assumed, could be achieved only by partitioning the country, and this, he foresaw, could be implemented only through the partial transfer of Palestine’s Arab population. Such an idea had received a certain legitimacy in the aftermath of the 1937 report prepared by the British Royal Commission (known as the Peel Commission), which suggested a “population exchange” in the framework of its recommendation for partition.43 The idea continued surfacing, in various forms, in the years preceding the Second World War.44 On different occasions, Senator had rejected the notion of transfer not necessarily because it was immoral but simply because it was impractical. In his view, morality, too, depended on the general context: “One may say that it is immoral, one may say that it is moral; we live in a time of such unusual occurrences,”45 he remarked on the notion of transfer in October 1939, in a discussion of Menachem Ussishkin’s initiative with regard to a population exchange between the Arabs of Palestine and Iraqi and Syrian Jews.46 Yet Senator did ultimately reject the idea of transfer, on the grounds that it was impracticable: “Just because Germany, and even Turkey and Greece can do it, doesn’t mean that we can do it.”47 Such a plan, he thought, was beyond the existing Zionist leadership, since it would involve approaching the Arabs in a “proper” manner, a willingness to bear the heavy costs of the move and of developing the entire region, and a readiness to join a federation of Middle Eastern or Arab countries. Senator explicitly ruled out the idea of forced transfer, warning his colleagues at the Agency against “adopting totalitarian standards such as enslavement of the Arabs or removing them from the land.”48 In other words, even his theoretical support of the transfer idea depended on certain conditions, among which were humanist considerations, and once he decided that these could not be put into place he declared the entire idea to be irrelevant. More feasible, he thought, was the establishment of a binational state that would become part of a regional federation.49 Although Senator was as committed as others to the vision of Ihud, the whiff of realpolitik emanating from his comments regarding transfer set him apart from most of the group’s members (first and foremost, its spiritual mentor, Martin Buber). Senator set out the fundamental elements of his position in 1945, in a lengthy article carrying the suggestive title “Are These Heretical Reflections?” which appeared in a publication put out by Ihud.50 In it, he declared that while he concurred with the political conclusions drawn by many of his associates (“in fact perhaps the most extreme among us”), he wondered whether the sources of their common position might be different. Contrary to some of them, he declared, he did not agree that the Jews had less right to the land than the Arabs, or that the Jews’ coming to the land was an immoral act, a wrongdoing that must be righted: In the real world there is no absolute “justice.” There is some justice as well as injustice in almost every action we take. We all remain silent about the immeasurable injustice done every day throughout the world, on the correct awareness that to live means to do as little

Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus

231

injustice as possible. . . for it would be entirely impossible to live were every injustice to be prohibited. . . .51

On the strength of these assumptions, Senator argued that Ihud should conduct itself according to considerations of realpolitik, which dictated that steps should be taken to ameliorate the Arabs’ opposition, or at least to avoid arousing their gratuitous resistance. The separation between morality and politics implied in these words is explicitly manifested in a sentence that echoes the fate of Europe’s Jews. “Were we to introduce moral considerations to political debate,” he stated, “there is, it seems to me, no doubt that these would certainly require an extreme pro-​Jewish solution.” Furthermore, again driven by consequential considerations, Senator asserted that if one were to weigh the injustice done to Arabs should the country be turned into a “Jewish-​Arab or even a Jewish state,” and the personal damage that might be inflicted on some tens of thousands of Arabs against the advantages to be gained by transforming the country’s economic structure (which would be developed thanks to an influx of Jewish immigration), then the latter should take precedence. And in general, “Zionist problems” should be examined “not from a static stance, but from a position of constant development. . . and by adapting [ideas] to the changing circumstances of time and of world events.”52 Notwithstanding Senator’s “heretical reflections,” his position vis-​à-​vis the desirable solution to the question of sovereignty over the land was identical to that of his Ihud comrades. In 1946, Magnes, Buber, and Moshe Smilansky testified on behalf of Ihud before the Anglo-​American Committee of Inquiry, which was sent to examine the situation in Palestine while taking into consideration the problem of displaced Jewish refugees in the aftermath of the Second World War. During its visit to Palestine, the committee heard the testimonies of various representatives from the two communities. Contrary to the sentiment of the Agency executive and its recommendations to the committee, the Ihud representatives proposed that a binational state be founded in Palestine. Such a state would initially be placed under British protection, would later be supervised by the United Nations, and would finally achieve independence and join a regional federative entity. In the spirit of these suggestions, the committee recommended instituting a trusteeship regime in Palestine and preventing the country from becoming either a Jewish or an Arab state, a proposal that was welcomed by neither of the parties.53 Even after the committee’s conclusions were no longer considered to constitute a viable political option, Senator continued to view them as the most desirable and feasible solution to the question of the country’s future. “Palestine essentially is a binational country which must find its place in the larger Arab and Near East orbit,” he wrote in early 1947, and “the Jews must prepare themselves to live in this orbit, to be part and parcel of it and at the same time to make their great contribution to the Western development which is taking place in that part of the world.”54 The members of Ihud continued to promote the binational solution during 1947. It was in this vein that Magnes, as the Ihud representative, testified before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which, following the failure to implement the recommendations of previous committees, was appointed by the UN in May 1947 to address the question of Palestine’s future.55 Contrary to the Anglo-​ American committee that preceded it, UNSCOP was not convinced that Magnes’

232 

Adi Livny

solutions were feasible. Instead, the committee decided to recommend partition of the country. On the strength of these recommendations, the partition proposal was finally drafted in November 1947. It was fiercely opposed by those affiliated with Ihud, including Senator, and even after the plan was adopted by the UN later that month, the Ihud membership persisted in trying to thwart it.

“War Psychosis” In 1937, Senator had left his position as head of the aliyah department to become administrative director of the Hebrew University. Established on Mount Scopus in 1925 and gradually growing throughout the years of the Mandate, the university was still small in size: about 1,000 students and an academic faculty of 200, among whom no more than 50 were professors.56 Operating within the university’s centralized structure, Senator had broad responsibilities. During most of the period of the 1948 siege of Jerusalem, he was the most senior university administrator to remain in Jerusalem, and this accorded him a key role in determining the fate of Mount Scopus during the course of the war. From his seat in Jerusalem, Senator assiduously kept in touch with those of his colleagues who were abroad at the time, informing them about events both outside and at the university. Beginning in December 1947, the university’s regular activity was disrupted by the growing hostility between Arabs and Jews in the wake of the UN partition resolution adopted the previous month.57 The road to Mount Scopus passed through the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, and on several occasions, vehicles were fired upon, causing injuries to employees both of the university and of nearby Hadassah Hospital. “We cannot bear responsibility [for the safe arrival to Mount Scopus],” Senator wrote to Bergman (at the time in Sweden) in January 1948.58 Lectures and research work in most of the departments were gradually transferred to the city center.59 Although Senator came up with a number of ambitious proposals to improve access to Mount Scopus, these met with a cool reception on the part of British Mandate officials.60 “Despite all the friendly words,” he wrote resentfully to Bergman, “the meetings that Magnes and I held with the regime and the military have yielded no positive results, so that we basically remain dependent on our own means of defence.”61 Indeed, those who remained on Mount Scopus were not relying on the British. Because it overlooked much of Jerusalem, the area had strategic importance, and from the outbreak of disturbances, workers of the university and of the hospital joined forces with members of the Haganah to fortify and defend it. Employees—​among them, Senator—​performed regular guard duty.62 In addition, Senator had no compunctions about intervening directly in security matters. In March 1948, for instance, he implored the communications officer to recruit additional manpower to defend Mount Scopus, requesting, moreover, that the individuals be adequately trained, with “some concept” of the university’s scientific nature and of how to treat its assets.63 At the same time, Senator had a personal dilemma with regard to his participation in the war effort. Writing to the People’s Service Command Center in response to a call to

Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus

233

former officers to volunteer in defense of the Yishuv, he made it clear that he was not prepared to participate in “indiscriminate” actions: I am not a pacifist and do not set myself apart from the people, and both these things place me in a very difficult moral predicament. For with all my heart I wish to be one of the people... I am prepared to defend myself when attacked... but nevertheless I am not at ease, not at ease at all. Our struggle is pure and is pure today as well in its ideological objective: the liberation of the Hebrew people from enslavement...but I am not entirely convinced that the practical political goal of a Jewish state and partition of the land are compatible with this ideological objective.64

Sometime after Senator’s death, Gershom Scholem, a fellow member of Brit Shalom and of the university staff, would describe him as a “militant pacifist.”65 In light of the above, this was obviously not an accurate observation. Senator was guided not by abhorrence of violence, but rather by his opposition to the very cause of the war. For him, establishing a Jewish state in a partitioned country was not an end in itself, but in fact only a possible means for securing a Jewish community in Palestine, and could just as easily be detrimental to the goal. Indeed, even during those early months of the events leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel, Senator remained steadfast in his opposition to the partition plan. In January 1948, he wrote to Felix Rosenblüth (Rosen), a friend from his days in the Zionist movement in Germany who, a few months hence, would be a signatory to Israel’s declaration of independence, and subsequently its first minister of justice. Senator hoped that Rosenblüth, in his capacity as leader of the ’Aliyah ḥadashah (New Immigration) party, would bring his influence to bear in attempting to alter the Jewish Agency executive’s policy. In his letter, Senator leveled a number of serious accusations against the executive, among them its adoption of the Biltmore program, its failure to confront “militant groups” (the Irgun [IZL] and Lehi) that did not submit to the Agency’s authority,66 and numerous diplomatic opportunities that it had, to his mind, squandered. Worst of all was its support of the partition resolution and its continued adherence to the illusion that the founding of a Jewish state—​entailing war against the British and the Arabs—​was at all feasible. Senator feared that the entire Zionist enterprise, for which he, Rosenblüth, and many others had worked so hard, would be lost forever. No less than the physical danger, he envisioned a spiritual danger in the form of corruption of the young on the part of the political leadership: Our young people . . . who probably have no equal anywhere in the world, are being and will be led astray and educated in the spirit of nationalism, which in retrospect justifies all of Hitler’s evil deeds: when the end justifies the means and when the nation’s “Lebensraum” requires it, a mood of decline and closing of the ranks [Gleichschaltung] among the intelligentsia and the youth is inevitable.67

Senator was likewise concerned about the general atmosphere that prevailed in the Yishuv, within which his views and those of his associates were considered to be beyond the pale. One manifestation of this, he believed, was the Palestine Post’s refusal to publish a public statement drafted by Magnes, Buber, and Senator titled “An End to

234 

Adi Livny

War Psychosis,” in which they entreated the Jewish public to refrain from indiscriminate killings of innocent people, on the grounds that this constituted a “Quisling-​like position” and a “stab in the back.” This “innocuous letter” that subsequently appeared in other newspapers, Senator reported to Bergman, continued to reverberate within the university as well, sparking antagonism on the part of some university staff toward the signatories.68 Ever aware of 20th-​century German history,69 Senator was particularly preoccupied with the role of intellectuals at “the most critical period in Jewish history in Palestine for 1900 years.”70 In a letter written to Bergman in January 1948, he asked: “Are we not called upon to do more than did the German intellectuals?”71 A month later, he wrote: “Now I understand better than in the past what ‘collective guilt’ means.”72 The manner in which he reflected on the end of the current conflict was likewise framed by the historical imagination he had acquired from German history. “Gather all your strength,” he implored Rosenblüth in the same letter at the end of January 1948, “to grant us a new life, like that which the Germans were given in 1918, and so that we should not find ourselves in a similar situation to the misery of 1945.”73 “The situation here is going from bad to worse,” he wrote to his friend Norman Bentwich at the end of February, as violent incidents in Jerusalem became more frequent.74 “If no miracle occurs,” he wrote to him a month later, “the civil war now in its beginnings will flare up and Palestine [will] become a second and worse Spain.”75 On March 20, Senator wrote to Albert Hourani, head of the Arab office in Jerusalem and subsequently a well-​known historian of the Middle East at Oxford University. He found consolation, he told Hourani, in the fact that, even during this time, “so far away from peace and understanding,” personal relationships remained intact. Those who believed in the peaceful existence of both peoples alongside each other, he added, must now cling to each other more than ever. This, despite the fact that the situation would probably have to deteriorate before it could improve: “Perhaps these last months of unjustified and unjustifiable bloodshed were necessary to bring people to reason; perhaps they had to learn the bitter experience of civil war in order to understand what is at stake.”76 Senator concluded this letter by asking Hourani to maintain their contacts with one another. Unfortunately, no documentation of further contact between the two has been found, and it is unclear whether Senator’s wish was indeed granted. Perhaps no less than Magnes, who is remembered for his attempts to hinder the establishment of the Jewish state in these first months of 1948,77 Senator also invested indefatigable efforts in that “last hour” before the withdrawal of the British. He, too, explored alternatives to partition that might prevent war from erupting between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. At the same time, both he and Magnes were working to keep Mount Scopus from the line of fire, trying unsuccessfully to have the area declared a territory under Red Cross protection.78 In March 1948, Senator approached Jewish leaders in the United States and England, urging them to put pressure on their governments and on the Jewish Agency “before it will be too late to save the situation and to save Jerusalem from going up in flames.”79 “Where are all the Samuels, the Montagues and the Rothschilds . . . ?” Senator wondered reprovingly in a letter to London to Robert Weltsch, a journalist and fellow binationalist who shared Senator’s pessimistic outlook. Who, Senator

Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus

235

wondered, might still be spurred into action?80 He also entreated Bentwich and Ernst Simon to do all in their power to muster opposition “against the suicidal policy of the Jewish Agency executive,” which “has brought the present disaster upon the Jewish people.”81 In his letter to Bentwich, Senator noted that the Agency’s responsibility notwithstanding, he was certainly aware of the crimes committed by the American and British governments; he refrained from mentioning the Arabs. After some deliberation, Senator wrote to Chaim Weizmann as well, having last contacted him in December 1945, when he resigned his post on the Agency executive. Senator implored Weizmann to take a stand and to gather around him those who had not yet succumbed to “war psychosis” and “insanity.”82 Even before deciding to approach Weizmann, Senator admitted that his appeal was unlikely to reap any practical benefit; it would, however, constitute an “historical political document.” Writing to an Ihud supporter in Haifa, Senator warned that the Yishuv was courting disaster, and that it was their responsibility to do everything in their power to prevent it. 83 On April 13, 1948, a few days after the Deir Yassin massacre,84 a convoy making its way to Mount Scopus was attacked. Seventy-​seven people were killed, many of them employees of the university and of Hadassah Hospital. Following this shocking event, traffic to Mount Scopus all but ceased.85 Senator, who was in Tel Aviv at the time, was able to return to Jerusalem only three days later; it was then that he learned the true extent of the disaster and the circumstances in which it had occurred. According to survivors, the British had stood by for hours without intervening, and many of the passengers were burned alive.86 “I need not tell you how terribly depressed we all are,” Senator wrote to Bentwich on April 21.87 As with Magnes, who conducted an angry correspondence with the local British commander, Brigadier C.P Jones, Senator’s trust in the British was now eroded. 88

“An Important Chapter Full of Heroism” Shortly after the convoy disaster, Magnes left for the United States in a last-​ditch attempt to prevent the implementation of the partition plan.89 Magnes sought to influence the UN discussions held at Lake Success and to promote the initiative calling for the establishment of a trusteeship in Palestine following the ending of the British mandate, even if this were to be only a temporary arrangement. The United States had proposed such a trusteeship at the UN in March, after opponents of partition within the State Department had managed to bring about a reversal of the American policy supporting the partition plan.90 Received in the Yishuv with bitter disappointment, this initiative raised the hopes of Ihud’s members, who published a petition in support of the trusteeship plan, which Senator signed as well.91 By the end of April, a few weeks prior to the scheduled British withdrawal, Haganah forces had achieved a series of victories, including the capture of Haifa. Senator expressed his wonderment in a letter to Walter Zander, who was active in the Association of Friends of the Hebrew University in England. “Their achievements are truly remarkable at this stage,” Senator wrote. However, he also expressed his deep aversion both to “the tone of the military bulletins” and to “the mass evacuations,” and

236 

Adi Livny

he continued to exude pessimism regarding the final outcome: “How can people be so blind as not to see that the inevitable result will be a more ferocious and possibly more prolonged war not only with the Arabs of Palestine but with the Arab States?” he wondered.92 Although Senator took greater care than did Magnes to keep his administrative role at the university separate from his political activity, this became more of a challenge during the siege of Jerusalem in 1948. From the early stages of the intercommunal war in November 1947, and almost up until the British departure and the subsequent establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948, he consistently sought to recruit the staff of the university or its friends around the world to assist in bringing about a change in the political situation. Most of all, so it would seem, he found it difficult at that time to separate the attempt, on the one hand, to secure international intervention that would remove Mount Scopus, along with its cultural and spiritual assets, from the sphere of battle, and the overall endeavor, on the other hand, to enlist the world powers in putting an end to the bloodshed, whether by means of installing an international trusteeship regime or by some other means. Such efforts were regarded with impatience by Sir Leon Simon, chairman of the university’s executive committee, who resided in London during the greater part of 1948 and whom Senator replaced in his absence. “The reason why people are so bitter about the line taken by you and Magnes,” wrote Simon, is, I believe, that they realize that in effect you are preaching submission, though you manage by some mental gymnastics of which the ordinary man is incapable, to persuade yourself that it is possible to square the circle, i.e., to obtain the voluntary agreement of the Arabs to some arrangement which directly contradicts their first principle [namely, that Palestine was an Arab country].93

Neither this rebuke nor the marked changes in the balance of power between the opposing forces (by the beginning of May, Haganah forces had captured Jaffa and the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem in addition to Haifa) dampened Senator’s efforts to alter the political reality. On May 10, for example, a matter of days before the imminent British departure, he reported in a secret memorandum to his comrades in Ihud on information he had received regarding the possibility of contacting Arabs who opposed the Husseinis.94 Nevertheless, the changing circumstances left an impression on him as well: “[T]‌here is no doubt,” Senator wrote to Magnes in New York that same day, “that from a military point of view the Jewish situation has improved considerably in the course of the last three weeks. It appears that the Arabs, the British and I  think a great part of the Jews, including ourselves, have underestimated the strength and the efficiency of the Haganah forces, or perhaps on the contrary—​have exaggerated in their assessment of the strength of the Arab forces and their willingness to fight.”95 While Senator hastily qualified this assertion by saying that these developments did not fundamentally alter the situation, one cannot but sense a change in tone. Contrary to the numerous letters he had penned during the initial months of the hostilities, in which he vented his anger mostly against the Jewish Agency executive, he now directed the brunt of his criticism against the British. For instance, he wrote to Bentwich in London the same day, urging British Jewry to rebel against the

Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus

237

Agency executive, but quickly admitted that at the present time such action seemed less appropriate.96 In fact, it was not just Senator’s tone that had changed. His letter to Magnes reveals that he now had second thoughts about his stern opposition to the partition plan. In a vein that betrayed his amazement, he noted that the Jewish side’s administrative infrastructure, including that of the Jewish sector of Jerusalem, had developed to a marked degree, in a process “that could hardly be undone.” The best solution, as he saw it, would be for the UN to pass a resolution prior to May 15 (the state was slated to be declared on May 16) that would turn Palestine into a territory under its control. It was now too late to effect this, he concluded; consequently, Ihud should continue promoting the idea of a federation, as this was still a feasible option.97 In fact, Senator maintained this position even after the state of Israel had become a fait accompli.98 The changes that occurred on Mount Scopus during May 1948 were rather less encouraging. On May 19, a few days after the British departure, the Arab Legion captured the adjacent Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and began an artillery attack on Mount Scopus.99 The university and Hadassah Hospital were cut off from Jerusalem altogether, and the sole communication with Mount Scopus was conducted by wireless. The legion’s bombardment, which continued on May 20 and 21, severely damaged the university’s buildings.100 Senator placed responsibility for the attack squarely on the British, as they had established the legion and still controlled it to some extent. On May 21, he phoned the British consulate to dictate a strongly worded letter of protest with regard to the bombardment.101 “England,” he wrote in late May in an article titled “We Still Need a Political Solution,” “has begun to wage war against the state of Israel. . . by means of King Abdullah’s Arab Legion.” Calling for an end to the fighting as soon as possible, since any extension of hostilities would add more unnecessary victims, Senator also urged Israel to extend a hand toward the Arabs, “who are now suffering in Palestine more than we are.” He also, however, struck a note of great pathos in declaring that “the events of the past week, the first week of the official war waged by the Arab nations against the state of Israel, have proved once again the enormous moral and practical strength of the Jewish resistance. . . . [W]‌e are currently in a revolutionary situation of a nation resolutely struggling for its freedom through mass mobilization.”102 Magnes, for his part, was less enthusiastic about the changed circumstances. “The more the war goes on,” he wrote to Senator on May 21, “the more impossible does it become to reconcile the existence of a Jewish state on the one hand, and peace and understanding on the other.”103 The future status of Mount Scopus was another matter on which Senator was more inclined than Magnes to adhere to the official Israeli position. On May 22, King Abdullah of Jordan conveyed through the UN consular committee a proposal calling for the buildings on Mount Scopus to be handed over to the Arab Legion; in return, he would personally guarantee the safekeeping of buildings and property owned by Jewish institutions.104 Believing the proposal, if adopted, would mean “handing Mount Scopus over to the Arabs,” the Jewish Agency’s political department rejected it out of hand.105 When Magnes learned that Abdullah’s proposal had been rejected, he was outspoken in his criticism.106 Senator, in comparison, was willing to admit that some of the counterarguments offered by Israel officials “actually sounded convincing.” He agreed, for example, that at present, in the midst of the battle for

238 

Adi Livny

Jerusalem, it should be made clear to the Arabs that the Jews had no intention of relinquishing any territory without the fiercest resistance. He also agreed that there was no guarantee that Abdullah would indeed provide effective protection of the Hebrew University or of Hadassah Hospital.107 Eventually, Mount Scopus became a demilitarized zone; on July 7, 1948, an agreement signed between representatives of Jordan and Israel placed the area under the protection of the United Nations.108 “I feel obliged to express to you and through you to the Israeli army our deep appreciation and gratitude for protecting Mount Scopus during this difficult period prior to the truce,” Senator wrote the same day to David Shaltiel, commander of the Jerusalem district. “The demilitarization of Mount Scopus honorably concludes an important chapter full of heroism of the defense of Jerusalem.”109

On the Refugee Problem The demilitarization agreement did not, however, conclude all open questions concerning the status of Mount Scopus.110 One such question concerned the fate of residents of Issawiya, a village located directly below the site of the Hebrew University. As the scope of hostilities on Mount Scopus intensified at the end of May, residents of Issawiya had abandoned the village. Now, in July 1948, Shaltiel was asked by UN personnel to facilitate the villagers’ return. This step was in contravention of the demilitarization agreement, which stipulated that only those residents of Issawiya who were present in the village when the agreement was signed would be allowed to remain in the demilitarized zone.111 In what seems to be an internal university memorandum, Senator concluded that, since the village was empty at that time, Israel was not obliged to allow its residents to return. Nonetheless, he wrote, “[w]‌e are interested for two reasons in a peaceful settlement of this question.” First, relations between the university and the village had always been good, such that that it was preferable to permit the residents to return rather than have strangers replace them in future. Second, this step could serve as a bargaining chip—​in the not distant future, Senator noted, the university would need to renew its access to Mount Scopus and gain permission for a larger contingent of men to be stationed there, so that work could commence on restoring the buildings. “The whole problem should be therefore dealt with from a broader point of view and in the light of our future requirements,” Senator wrote.112 It is difficult to assess to what extent Senator’s intervention influenced the eventual decision to allow the residents of Issawiya to return to their homes.113 His standpoint on the fundamental issue of the return of the refugees was, however, rather different—​ and also differed from the official position of Ihud. Referring to the “the mass exodus of the refugees,” the association’s fundamental position was to recognize the right of return of those refugees who wished to do so. While one should not place sole responsibility on Israel for the refugee problem, the association stressed, it should absorb those who were willing to become loyal and equal citizens.114 Senator, in comparison, used less vague terms, acknowledging that the Arabs of Palestine did not only flee, but

Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus

239

were also expelled. He regarded their departure, as he wrote to Robert Weltsch in July 1948, as one of the most surprising results of the war.115 And yet, in contrast to Ihud’s position, he argued that one “should not at present consider a mass return of refugees.” As he explained in an article published in the Ihud publication Be’ayot hazeman in September 1948: “It is most doubtful that in the present circumstances anyone would be able to take political, military, and moral responsibility for such a step.” To be sure, goodwill should be shown by means of permitting selected residents of locations such as Jerusalem and Haifa—​in which peaceful relations were maintained between Arabs and Jews even after the outbreak of hostilities in December 1947—​to return to their homes. Yet even this gesture of goodwill was weighed according to its consequences: “[I]‌t may be assumed that the positive consequences of this action will outweigh the difficulties and obstacles that should not be discounted.”116 In his letter to Weltsch, Senator had noted that, in considering the desirable solution to the refugee problem, one should also take account of the situation of Jews of Iraq and Egypt.117 It will be recalled that, back in 1939, Senator had dismissed the notion of a population exchange between the Arabs of Palestine and the Jews of Arab countries as being unfeasible. Now, however, this previously imagined suggestion had become a real possibility, and therefore, according to Senator, it was worthy of consideration.

Conclusion: A Pragmatic Binationalism The first paragraph of a position paper publicized by Ihud immediately after the war declared that “the state of Israel is a fact to which the Arabs should reconcile themselves.”118 Indeed, most of Ihud’s members—​some sooner than others—​became reconciled and accustomed to the fact that the state had come into existence. Among those members living in Israel, none dared to suggest that the new Jewish state should instead become a binational state.119 According to historian Joseph Heller, Senator was “the first person in Ihud to recognise the legitimacy of the young state,” and was the only one, apart from Kurt Blumenfeld, who was willing to acknowledge expressly that Ben-​Gurion’s way had indeed prevailed. In Heller’s view, the key to understanding Senator’s “willingness . . . to undergo so far-​reaching an ideological and political reversal” is to be found in “the difference between someone who was deeply involved in decision-​making and someone who had never assumed an active role and was therefore destined to remain among those on the losing side.”120 Heller alludes here to Martin Buber, who indeed accepted the state’s legitimacy in the long run, but whose immediate response to its establishment was much more ambivalent than Senator’s, as when he announced his fear that “the victory of the Jews means the defeat of Zionism.”121 It comes as no surprise that these two personalities, the one a philosopher and the other a man of policy, had such differing perspectives. Senator’s deep involvement in the fate of Mount Scopus certainly contributed to his increased identification with the Jewish side in the war. Yet it would be a mistake to view the transformation that Senator underwent as an “ideological reversal.” Admittedly, only a few months earlier,

240 

Adi Livny

he had regarded the partition plan as a “catastrophe” and as a “recipe for devastation,” and yet, as noted, his opposition to the Jewish state had never been a matter of principle. Weber’s ethics of responsibility, we may remember, focuses on the probable outcomes of the political act. One may thus conclude that Senator’s radical position at the beginning of the war was merely a faulty prediction. His prophecy of destruction did not come to pass. I have endeavored to demonstrate that Senator’s pragmatism does not betray an ideological inconsistency. In his case, the ultimate purpose—​sustaining a Jewish community in Palestine, or, in his flowery language, “the liberation of the Hebrew people from enslavement”122—​remained constant, whereas the means—​including the idea of sovereignty—​were subject to change. Thus, what appears so dramatic a transition between two poles: between total opposition to the partition plan, on the one hand, and admiration of the new state and opposition to the return of the refugees, on the other, is in fact part of a consistent approach. While the goal remained constant, the means were adapted to the prevailing circumstances. This conclusion is liable to create the impression that Senator’s pragmatism was no more than a stand-​in for Machiavellianism: a situation in which any means that facilitated the purpose of sustaining a political and cultural Jewish community in Palestine were justified. Yet such an interpretation would likewise misconstrue the figure of Senator, who was indeed, in Moshe Kol’s somewhat archaic Hebrew, a “humanistan.”123 The element of humanism in his worldview remained strong, both in the early stages of the war and after the alleged transformation in his position had taken place. Thus, for example, he wrote to David Shaltiel in June 1948 upon hearing about instances of looting of Arab property in neighborhoods captured by Haganah forces; in denouncing such acts, he was at pains to differentiate them from “essential” measures of appropriation for military purposes.124 In June 1949, he co-​authored (with Martin Buber, Ernst Simon, and Leon Roth) a letter to Ben-​Gurion, asking him not to settle new immigrants on the ruins of Deir Yassin village, at least not “until the wounds had had a chance to heal” after an event that had constituted a “black stain on the honour of the Hebrew nation.”125 Moreover, once the war had ended and it had become clear to him that the path taken by Ihud had been mistaken, Senator doggedly insisted on the importance of the association’s continued existence. Even though the group now wielded no influence, Senator believed that, given the political, economic, and social problems faced by the new state, its existence was vital. “We must however understand,” he clarified, “that as we have said in the past, we should reconsider the problems in light of new situations.”126 In this essay, I have sought to restore Senator to history and the ideology of binationalism to its original context, as it was articulated during the 1940s. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in “roads not taken” in the annals of 20th-​century Jewish nationalism. Scholars argue that the Zionist landscape included different political programs that diverged from the idea of a Jewish sovereign nation state, which were overshadowed and eventually forgotten following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.127 Perhaps the most central among them is the ideology of binationalism. However, much like other concepts, political programs, and ideas in the history of the conflict, binationalism is not a static idea; it wore different forms, and it was based on different motives. As Senator’s example shows, support for binationalism

Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus

241

could emanate from a particularistic-​Zionist worldview rather than a universalist one.128 His endeavor to realize this idea was intended to serve the supreme purpose of securing the Jewish community in Palestine.

Notes This work was funded by the ISF (Israeli Science Foundation) grant 633/​12; the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities; and Da’at Hamakom: Center for the Study of Cultures of Place in the Modern Jewish World. I am especially grateful to Yfaat Weiss for her support of this project. I would like to thank David De Vries, Yaniv Feller, Ron Makleff, Or Pitusi, and the participants of the HU’s Middle Eastern writing group for their useful comments on earlier versions of the text. 1. Werner Senator to Ernst Simon (25 March 1948), Central Zionist Archives (hereafter: CZA), AK100/​1. 2. Among the extensive literature on Magnes, his worldview, and his politics, see, for example, Norman Bentwich, For Zion’s Sake:  A Biography of Judah L.  Magnes, First Chancellor and First President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (London:  1954); Joseph Heller, MiBrit Shalom leIḥud: Yehudah Leib Magnes vehamaavak limdinah du-​leumit (Jerusalem: 2003); Daniel P. Kotzin, Judah L. Magnes: An American Jewish Nonconformist (Syracuse: 2010); William M. Brinner and Moses Rischin (eds.), Like All the Nations? The Life and Legacy of Judah L. Magnes (Albany: 2012); Hedva Ben-​Israel, “Bi-​Nationalism versus Nationalism:  The Case of Judah Magnes,” Israel Studies 23, no.  1 (2018), 86–​105; David Barak-​Gorodetsky, Yermiyahu betzion:  dat ufolitikah be’olamo shel Yehudah Leib Magnes (Sdeh Boker: 2018). 3.  On Senator’s positions in the Jewish Agency, see Zalman Shazar, Or ishim: divrei masa vezikaron ’al pegishot shetamu, vol. 2 (Jerusalem:  1973), 224. On Senator’s administrative positions at the Hebrew University, see Uri Cohen, Hahar vehagiv’ah: hauniversitah ha’ivrit bitkufat terom ha’atzmaut vereshit hamedinah (Tel Aviv: 2006), 94; Assaf Selzer, The History of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Who’s Who prior to Statehood: Founders, Designers, Pioneers (Jerusalem: 2015), 72–​73. 4.  Werner Senator to Mordecai Kaplan (7 March 1948), CZA, AK100/​1. 5. Senator to [Max] Steinbock (1 February 1949), National Library of Israel (hereafter: NLI), The Martin Buber Archives, Ms.Var. 350 06.5.16. 6.  Meeting of the Jewish Agency executive (8 April 1940), CZA, S100 (regarding “national fascism”); quoted also in Heller, MiBrit Shalom leIḥud, 127. 7.  Senator to Steinbock (1 February 1949). 8. Shazar, Or ishim, 224. 9.  Senator to the Consulate General for the U.S.A. (8 January 1951), Central Archive of the Hebrew University (hereafter: CAHU), David Werner Senator: personal file II. 10.  “Hebräische Universität: Dr. Senator wurde 50 Jahre alt,” ibid., personal file I. 11. Shazar, Or ishim, 218; Gershom Scholem, Devarim bego: pirkei morashah utḥiyah (Tel Aviv: 1976), 497. On the Volksheim, see Shalom Adler-​Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1880–​ 1940, vol. 1 (Tübingen: 1959), 51–​56. On the urban context of this experience, see Arthur Tilo Alt, “Yiddish and Berlin’s Scheunenviertel,” Shofar 9, no. 2 (1991), 29–​43. 12.  Lehmann, who later established the youth village of Ben Shemen, would remain a life-​ long friend of Senator; the latter would continue to support his educational work, serving as chairman of the village’s board of directors. Shazar, Or ishim, 224. 13.  Sir John Shaw, “Dr. D.W. Senator,” The London Times (11 November 1953). 14. Shazar, Or ishim, 220; Selzer, The History of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 70. 15.  CAHU, Senator: personal file I. 16.  Adler-​Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 73.

242 

Adi Livny

17. CAHU, Senator:  personal files II, III; see also Selzer, The History of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem,  70–​72. 18. Naomi Wiener Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism, 1897–​ 1948 (Hanover, N.H.: 2003), 118; Shazar, Or ishim, 221. 19.  For example, Maurice Friedman refers to Senator as the “non-​Zionist” among the group of pacifists in Brit Shalom (though, as will be seen, Senator was not a pacifist). See Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work (Detroit: 1988), 10. 20.  On Senator’s experience as the head of the aliyah department, see Aviva Halamish, Bemeirotz kaful neged hazeman:  mediniyut ha’aliyah hatziyonit bishnot hasheloshim (Jerusalem: 2006),  73–​82. 21.  Yoav Gelber, Moledet ḥadashah: ’aliyat yehudei merkaz eiropah uklitatam, 1933–​1948 (Jerusalem: 1990),  21–​22. 22.  On the Ha’avarah agreement and its implementation, see Werner Feilchenfeld, Dolf Michaelis, and Ludwig Pinner, Ha-​’avara-​ Transfer nach Palästina und Einwanderung deutscher Juden 1933–​1939 (Tübingen:  1972), 42–​43; Gelber, Moledet ḥadashah, 78–​92; Adam Hofri-​Winogradow, “The Legal Structure of the Ha’avara (Transfer) Agreement: Design and Operation,” in National Economies:  Volks-​ Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe between the Wars (1918–​1939/​45), ed. Michael Wildt and Moshe Zimmermann (Newcastle: 2015), 97–​107. 23.  Haïm Margaliot-​Kalvarisky, Edwin Samuel, and Werner Senator, “Practical Proposals by the ‘Brit Shalom’ Society for Cooperation between Jews and Arabs” (25 June 1930), CZA, S49/​415. On Brit Shalom, see, for example, Aharon Kedar, “Letoldotehah shel ‘Brit Shalom’ bashanim 1925–​1928,” in Pirkei meḥkar betoledot hatziyonut, ed. Yehuda Bauer, Moshe Davis, and Israel Kolatt (Jerusalem: 1976), 224–​285; Hagit Lavsky, “Ḥidat ḥotamah shel ‘Brit Shalom’:  ’al hapulmus hatziyoni bizmanah uleaḥar zemanah,” Hatziyonut 19 (1995), 167–​181; Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brith Shalom, 1925–​1933 (Boston:  2002); Adi Gordon (ed.), “Brit Shalom” vehatziyonut hadu-​ leumit: ‘hasheelah ha’aravit’ kesheelah yehudit (Jerusalem: 2008); Dimitry Shumsky, “Brith Shalom’s Uniqueness Reconsidered: Hans Kohn and Autonomist Zionism,” Jewish History 25, no. 3 (2011), 339–​353. 24. Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism, xii; on Kohn and Bergman’s world views, see Zohar Maor, “Moderation from Right to Left: The Hidden Roots of Brit Shalom,” Jewish Social Studies 19, no.  2 (2013), 79–​108. On Kohn’s eventual departure from Palestine and Zionism, see Adi Gordon, Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn (Waltham: 2017); Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (Bloomington: 2010), 135–​177. 25.  Meeting of the Jewish Agency executive (18 May 1930), CZA, S100. 26.  Ibid. (11 June 1930). 27.  Such a view in consistent with what Anja Siegemund termed “Verständigungszionismus” (“Zionism of Consent”). See her essay,“Robert Weltsch kemeyatzeg ra’ayon ha‘haskama’ bein yehudim le’aravim,” in Gordon (ed.), “Brit Shalom” vehatziyonut hadu-​leumit, 225–​249. 28.  Meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive (26 April 1934; 7 October 1934), CZA, S 100. 29.  Ibid. (29 October 1936). 30.  David H.  Shapiro, From Philanthropy to Activism:  The Political Transformation of American Zionism in the Holocaust Years 1933–​1945 (Oxford: 1994), 98–​101. 31.  On Senator’s isolation, see Werner Senator to Maurice B. Hexter (2 June 1943), National Archives (UK), FO 921/​59. This letter, which described the inner dynamics of the Agency’s executive, was passed on by the censor to the Foreign Office, where it aroused great interest. 32.  Meeting of the Jewish Agency executive (8 November 1942), CZA, S100. Along with Senator, Ruppin at that time represented the non-​Zionists on the Jewish Agency executive. Within Brit Shalom as well, Senator was regarded as being closer to the pragmatic Ruppin’s position than to those of the “radical camp,” although, unlike Ruppin, he did not despair with regard to the Arab question, and he did not relinquish the binational vision. On Ruppin’s attitude toward the “Arab question,” see Yfaat Weiss, “Central European Ethnonationalism and Zionist Binationalism,” Jewish Social Studies 11, no.  1 (2004), 105–​110; Ran Greenstein,

Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus

243

“The Bi-​Nationalist Perspective in Israel/​Palestine during the British Mandate, 1917–​1948,” in idem, Zionism and Its Discontents:  A Century of Radical Dissent in Israel/​Palestine (London: 2014),  8–​10. 33.  Ben-​Israel, “Bi-​Nationalism versus Nationalism,” 98. See also Meir Margalit, “Hakamat haIḥud utguvat hayishuv lenokhaḥ hitargenutam hameḥudeshet shel yotzei Brit Shalom,” Hatziyonut 20 (1996), 157. 34.  For a list of Ihud’s members from June 1, 1943, see Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (Jerusalem), P3/​2543. 35. Greenstein, “The Bi-​ Nationalist Perspective in Israel/​ Palestine during the British Mandate, 1917–​1948,” 18–​19; Tamar Hermann, “Tenu’at shalom bemivḥan haesh: Iḥud 1947–​ 1949,” Medinah, mimshal veyaḥasim beinleumiyim 33 (1990), 55. Although Ihud advocated the founding of a binational state within a federative framework, the two ideas of binationalism and federalism do not necessarily go hand in hand; see Gil Rubin, “From Federalism to Binationalism: Hannah Arendt’s Shifting Zionism,” Contemporary European History 24, no. 3 (2015), 393–​414. 36.  Meeting of the Jewish Agency executive (22 October 1939), CZA, S100, 6. 37.  Ibid. (6 September 1942; 15 September 1942). See also Margalit, “Hakamat haIḥud utguvat hayishuv lenokhaḥ hitargenutam hameḥudeshet shel yotzei Brit Shalom,” 157. 38.  The letter was later published in Ihud’s periodical; see D.W. Senator, “Mipnei mah hitpatarti: mikhtav el Dr. C. Weizmann,” Be’ayot: bamah ḥodshit leḥayei tzibur 3 (1945), 238–​239. 39. Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, ed. David S.  Owen and Tracy B.  Strong (Indianapolis: 2004),  84–​85. 40.  D.W. Senator, “Haim ele hirhurim apikorsiyim?” Be’ayot 2 (1945), 105. 41.  Minutes of the executive committee of the Zionist Organization (9 September 1942), quoted in Margalit, “Hakamat haIḥud utguvat hayishuv lenokhaḥ hitargenutam hameḥudeshet shel yotzei Brit Shalom,” 161. On the preemptive nature of Brit Shalom and Ihud’s ideology, see Tamar Hermann, “The Bi-​National Idea in Israel/​Palestine: Past and Present,” Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 3 (2005), 385. 42.  Senator, “Mipnei mah hitpatarti.” 43.  Report of the Palestine Royal Commission (London: 1937), ch. 32, 389–​391. 44.  For a history of the debate on transfer in the Zionist movement, see Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: 2004), 39–​64. See also Nimrod Lin, “The Arithmetic of Rights:  Zionist Intellectuals Imagining the Arab Minority May–​July 1938,” Middle Eastern Studies 54, no. 6 (November 2018), 948–​964. 45. Meeting of the Jewish Agency executive (22 October 1939), CZA, S100/​28b, 12. Senator presented a similar stand when the topic was reintroduced in the executive on May 7, 1944. See Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,  54–​55. 46.  On Ussishkin’s position, see Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs 1882–​1948: A Study of Ideology (Oxford: 1987), 271–​272. 47.  Meeting of the Jewish Agency executive (22 October 1939), CZA, S100/​28b, 12. 48.  Quoted in Heller, MiBrit Shalom leIḥud, 120. 49.  Meeting of the Jewish Agency executive (22 October 1939), CZA, S100/​28b, 13–​14. 50.  D.W. Senator, “Haim eileh hirhurim apikorsiyim?” 51.  Ibid., 104. 52.  Ibid., 103. 53.  Susan Lee Hattis, The Bi-​National Idea in Palestine during Mandatory Times (Haifa: 1970), 287. 54.  Senator to Martin (21 January 1947), Leo Baeck Institute Archives (hereafter: LBI), Robert Weltsch Collection, Series II/​I: online at: http://​www.archive.org/​stream/​robertweltsch_​ 03_​reel03#page/​n410/​mode/​1up (accessed 19 February  2019). 55. Hattis, The Bi-​National Idea in Palestine during Mandatory Times, 308. 56.  Yfaat Weiss, “Ribonut biz’ir anpin: muvla’at har hatzofim 1948–​1967,” Zion 83, no. 2 (2018), 161. 57.  Senator, “The Hebrew University during 7 Months of War” (14 July 1948), CAHU, 06/​ 04/​48.

244 

Adi Livny

58.  Senator to Hugo Bergman (11 January 1948), NLI, ARC. 4*, 1502/​01 2119. My thanks to Enrico Lucca for making materials from the Hugo Bergman archive available to me. 59.  Minutes of the 7th meeting of the executive committee of the Hebrew University (21 January 1948), CAHU, 130/​48. 60.  David Werner Senator, “Conversation with Mr. Pollock, District Commissioner” (29 January 1948), CAHU, 06/​01/​48. 61.  Senator to Bergman (11 January 1948). 62. Moshe Ehrnvald, Matzor betokh matzor:  har hatzofim bemilḥemet ha’atzmaut (Jerusalem: 2010), 22–​30; Dov Levin, Yoman mimilḥemet ha’atzmaut (Tel Aviv: 2007), 233 (entry from 21 March 1948). 63.  Senator to the Communications Officer, Naaman Stavsky (14 March 1948), CAHU, 06/​ 01/​48. 64.  Senator to the People’s Service Command Center (27 February 1948), CZA, AK100/​1. 65. Scholem, Devarim bego, 499. 66.  On these two groups, also known as the “porshim” (dissidents), see Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–​1948 (Palo Alto: 1999); on the British approach to dealing with these groups, see Motti Golani, Palestine between Politics and Terror, 1945–​ 1947 (Waltham: 2013). 67.  Senator to Felix Rosenblüth (31 January 1948), CZA, AK100/​1. 68.  Senator to Bergman (13 February 1948), NLI, ARC. 4*, 1502/​01 2119. 69.  Senator frequently resorted to using a vocabulary borrowed from 20th-​century German history (such as Lebensraum and Gleichschaltung) when addressing the Jewish-​Arab dispute. See, for example, Senator to Rosenblüth (31 January 1948). Others in his circle shared this tendency. See, for example, Robert Weltsch to Senator (23 March 1948), CZA, AK100/​2. 70.  Senator to Harold A. Smith-​Masters (22 April 1948), CZA, AK100/​2. 71.  Senator to Bergman (11 January 1948). 72.  Senator to Bergman (13 February 1948). 73.  Senator to Rosenblüth (31 January 1948). 74.  Senator to Bentwich (27 February 1948), CAHU, 06/​01/​48. 75.  Senator to Bentwich (25 March 1948), CZA, AKA100/​1. 76.  Senator to Albert Hourani (20 March 1948), CZA, AKA100/​2. 77. Heller, MiBrit Shalom leIḥud, 369–​372. 78. Ehrnvald, Matzor betokh matzor, 128–​132; see also CAHU, 06/​01/​48. 79.  Senator to Leonard Stein (23 March 1948), Senator to Hexter (20 March 1948), CZA, AK100/​1. 80.  Senator to Robert Weltsch (14 March 1948), CZA, AK100/​1. 81. Senator to Ernst Simon (25 March 1948); Senator to Bentwich (25 March 1948). In an earlier letter, Senator criticized Bentwich for traveling on a mission to the immigrant camps in Aden instead of addressing the matter of Palestine. “You may not be able to achieve much,” Senator wrote to Bentwich, “or even anything, but I feel that anywhere—​in Jerusalem, London or New York—​you might be more useful than as an observer at this inquiry.” Senator to Bentwich (27 February 1948). 82.  Senator to Chaim Weizmann (14 March 1948), CZA, AK100/​1. 83.  Senator to Dr. F. Millner (22 February 1948), ibid. 84.  Deir Yassin is known for the atrocities carried out against civilians by IZL and Lehi fighters during the conquest of the village, located in the western outskirts of Jerusalem, on April 9, 1948. The number of casualties is estimated at 100–​120, but was rumored at the time to be much higher. It is considered a key moment in the events of 1948, since rumors of a massacre has been listed among the determining factors in the flight of Palestinian Arabs during the war. See Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-​Israeli War (New Haven: 2008), 125–​128. 85. Ehrnvald, Matzor betokh matzor, 133–​192. 86.  Senator to Sir Leon Simon (20 April 1948), CAHU, 06/​02/​48. 87.  Senator to Bentwich (21 April 1948), CAHU, 06/​02/​48.

Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus

245

88. On the influence of the convoy disaster on Magnes, see Heller, MiBrit Shalom leIḥud, 367. 89.  Ibid., 369. Magnes’ decision to leave the country at that particular juncture may have been influenced in part by the prevailing sentiment in the Yishuv, and especially within the university, toward his standpoint. Following the convoy disaster, Magnes faced increasing criticism on the part of the university’s staff, relating in particular to the manner in which he employed the name of the university in his political declarations. This protest came to a head in the attempt to depose him from his position as president of the university in his absence, which was eventually foiled by the institution’s senate. See Uri Cohen, “Conflict in Academia: The Hebrew University during the War of Independence, 1947–​49,” The Journal of Israeli History 22, no. 2 (2003), 108–​111. 90.  Zvi Ganin, “The Limits of American Jewish Political Power: America’s Retreat from Partition, November 1947–March 1948,” Jewish Social Studies 39, no.  1/​2 (1977), 20–​22; Steven L.  Spiegel, The Other Arab-​Israeli Conflict:  Making America’s Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan (Chicago:  1986), 16–​ 49; Menahem Kaufman, An Ambiguous Partnership: Non-​Zionists and Zionists in America, 1939–​1948 (Detroit: 1991), 312–​358. 91.  “Statement Issued by the Ihud Association, Jerusalem” (28 March 1948), CZA, AK100/​ 2; Senator to Bergman (28 March 1948), ibid. 92.  Senator to Walter Zander (24 April 1948), ibid. 93.  Sir Leon Simon to Senator (1 May 1948), CAHU, 06/​03/​48. 94.  Senator, “Memorandum” (10 May 1948), CZA, AK100/​2. On the struggle between the Husseinis and the opposition, see Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,  21–​24. 95.  Senator to Magnes (10 May 1948), CZA, AK100/​2 (emphasis added). 96.  Senator to Bentwich (10 May 1948), ibid. 97.  Senator to Magnes (10 May 1948). 98.  D.W. Senator, “Lo dai benitzḥonot,” Be’ayot hazeman 7, no. 6 (6 May 1948); idem, “Gam hayom darush pitaron politi,” ibid., no. 8 (27 May 1948). 99. Morris, 1948, 214–​217. 100.  “The Hadassah Medical Organization in the Battle of Jerusalem” (extracts from the siege diary of Dr. Eli Davis), CZA, J113/​7859. 101.  The letter was also signed by Daniel Auster, the Jewish mayor of Jerusalem, Dr. Eli Davis from Hadassah, and Prof. Michael Fekete from the Hebrew University. See Ehrnvald, Matzor betokh matzor, 299. 102.  Senator, “Gam hayom darush pitaron politi.” 103.  Magnes to Senator (21 May 1948), CAHU, 06/​03/​48. 104. Ehrnvald, Matzor betokh matzor, 300. 105.  Beaumont to Foreign Office (31 May 1948), National Archives, FO 371/​68509/​E7279. 106.  Magnes to Senator (undated; received on 27 May 1948), CAHU, 06/​03/​48. 107.  Senator to Magnes (27 May 1948). 108.  Agreement for the demilitarization of Mt. Scopus (7 July 1948), CAHU, 06/​04/​48. 109.  Senator to David Shaltiel (10 July 1948), ibid. 110.  On the status of the institutions on Mount Scopus during the years (1948–​1967) that Mount Scopus was an enclave under UN supervision, see Yair Paz, “’Olim veyordim bo’: hazikah hasimlit lehar hatzofim ulekampus hauniversitah ha’ivrit bitkufat hamuvla’at, 1948–​1967,” Cathedra 163 (2017), 69–​104; Weiss, “Ribonut biz’ir anpin,” 151–​174. 111.  Agreement for the demilitarization of Mt. Scopus (7 July 1948). 112.  Senator, memorandum following a meeting with David Shaltiel (16 July 1948), Israel Defense Forces (IDF) archive, 146–5254/1949. 113.  The return of Issawiya’s residents was facilitated through an agreement reached between David Shaltiel and Abdullah El-​Tell, commander of the Arab Legion. The lack of clarity of the agreement, which was not put into writing, would subsequently lead to an acrimonious dispute between Israel and Jordan regarding the permitted size of Issawiya’s population according to the demilitarization agreement and its appendices. See Lieut. General Riley, “Report on the Results of the Inspection held in the Demilitarized Zone of Mount Scopus on 28/​30 April

246 

Adi Livny

1953,” UN Security Council Document S/​3015, online at https://​unispal.un.org/​DPA/​DPR/​unispal.nsf/​0/​A94C67BA20F5828385257B79006C29EB (accessed 17 March 2019). 114.  “Giluy da’at shel Iḥud,” Be’ayot hazeman 7, no. 17 (13 August 1948). 115.  Senator to Weltsch (27 July 1948), LBI, Robert Weltsch Collection, online at archive. org/​stream/​robertweltsch_​03_​reel03#page/​n492/​mode/​1up (accessed 13 February  2019). 116. D.W. Senator, “Live’ayat haplitim ha’aravim,” Be’ayot hazeman 7, no.  21 (10 September 1948). 117.  Senator to Robert Weltsch (27 July 1948). 118.  Quoted in Heller, MiBrit Shalom leIḥud, 382. 119.  Ibid., 373. On the different reactions within Ihud to the establishment of the state of Israel, and its positions in the period that followed, see ibid., 373–​404. 120.  Ibid., 400–​401. 121.  Martin Buber, “Tziyonut ve‘tziyonut,’ ” Be’ayot hazeman 7, no. 8 (27 May 1948). 122.  Senator to the People’s Service Command Center (27 February 1948). 123.  Moshe Kol, “David Werner Senator,” Morim veḥaverim, vol. 3 (Jerusalem:  1968), 134–135. 124.  Senator to Shaltiel (3 June 1948), CZA, S25/​9186. 125.  Tom Segev, The First Israelis (New  York:  1986), 87–​89; Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 412. 126.  Senator to Robert Weltsch (27 July 1948). 127.  See, for example, David N. Myers, Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (Waltham: 2008); Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken; Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-​State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-​Gurion (New Haven: 2018). 128.  On this point, I follow Uri Ram in his recent book about another member of Ihud—​ Martin Buber. Ram seeks to restore Buber’s thought to its original context, stressing that Buber was above all a romantic nationalist who rejected modernity, and only secondly the antiwar dove he is nowadays made out to be. See Uri Ram, Shuvo shel Martin Buber: hamaḥshavah haleumit vehaḥevratit beyisrael meBuber ’ad haBuberianim haḥadashim (Tel Aviv: 2015), 14. Other scholars have also highlighted the particularistic elements in the worldviews of some of the adherents of binationalism. See Stefan Vogt, “Robert Weltsch and the Paradoxes of Anti-​Nationalist Nationalism,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 3 (2010), 85–​115; and on Arthur Ruppin Greenstein, “The Bi-​Nationalist Perspective,” 8–​10.

Book Reviews

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen (eds.), Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-​Holocaust Decades. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. xviii + 374 pp.

This anthology stems from a 2014 conference at the University of Maryland, which focused on how American Jews provided material aid to Holocaust refugees during and after the Holocaust, and also how they began to cope with the catastrophe. This coping involved both an imagining and a re-​imagining of “the old country,” a reevaluation of the places American Jews had left behind in more or less normal circumstances before the First World War but in increasingly desperate circumstances after 1918 and, again, after 1939. American Jews who had come to the United States before the 1920s maintained ties with their former communities in Central and Eastern Europe, ties that were fostered by efforts to remain in touch with family and friends and, more generally, with the world’s most populous Jewish communities. Those efforts were aided by the landsmanshaftn, the associations formed for immigrants who came from the same villages, towns, and regions, and by increasingly strong communal organizations that provided relief to European Jews and worked very closely with them. For those refugees from the 1930s and 1940s, the connection to the old country had been brutally severed, but the attachment, or certainly the need to memorialize, remained. The essays collected here by Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen document how writers, historians, intellectuals, and others shaped the recent past according to their memories and inclinations. For some, the interpretation of that past led to activism to determine the future of the Jewish community both in the United States and, to some extent, in the old country as well. Though somewhat limited in scope, this is a rich volume of compelling essays. A  preface by Hasia Diner offers a starting point for a conversation that encompasses the work of 14 scholars from the realms of history, art history, and literature (in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew). The editors’ introduction begins with a perceptive close reading of Philip Roth’s 1958 short story “Eli, the Fanatic.” Adler and Jelen contend that, in this story of conflict between refugee and native-​born Jews, Roth “was rewriting a relatively cooperative and collaborative early relationship between American Jews and post-​Holocaust immigrants as a satire on the emptiness of American Jewish culture” (p. 9). Their introduction sets the stage for a volume of texts that are primarily about Jews producing culture for Jews—​essentially, trying to teach themselves what to think about where they came from and where they are now.

Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0014

250 

Book Reviews

Eli Lederhendler offers a helpful review of postwar historiography of East European Jewry, highlighting the differences between refugee scholars writing in the United States and those working in Israel. David Slucki documents the 1943 publication of The Black Book of Polish Jewry, suggesting that this publication privileged “the local over the universal suffering of Europe’s Jews” (p. 45). Markus Krah examines three influential publications, Partisan Review, Commentary, and Judaism. Like Gennady Estraikh in his essay on the increased acceptance of religious expression in the secular Forverts, Krah identifies how many postwar American Jews strove to reconcile tensions between the secular and the religious. Adler’s original approach to the yizker-​bikher (memorial books) emphasizes the use of maps in these sources as a way of locating, literally and figuratively, where American Jews placed themselves on the map of the old country. Jelen reviews Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s A Treasury of Yiddish Stories and argues that the shtetlakh presented in the selected stories (perhaps like those in Adler’s yizker-​bikher) are “empty, dead, evacuated” (p. 148). Other essays on literature highlight less common sources. Gil Ribak discusses the work of Yiddish memoirists as a contrast to nostalgia. Holli Levitsky’s presentation of Reuben Wallenrod’s novel Dusk in the Catskills, which appeared first in Hebrew between 1941 and 1944, offers a poignant glimpse of how American Jews grieved their loss even as the events of the war were continuing. Ellen Kellman’s article on secular children’s literature in Yiddish and English draws attention to the work of translators and illustrators. Samantha Baskind’s keen and well-​illustrated analysis of the depiction of muscular Judaism in Leon Uris’ Mila 18 similarly highlights the work of illustrators and offers a clear example of how some postwar Jews used the history of the war to influence contemporary views. The interdisciplinary approach will keep readers engaged. The essays focusing on politics extend the discussion from specific sources to a broader examination of communal trends. Rachel Deblinger chronicles how American Jews employed American motifs and holidays in their philanthropic appeals to aid Holocaust survivors. Three other essays demonstrate the volume’s diversity. Ann Komaromi tells the intriguing tale of the Canadian Communist J.B. Salsberg and his growing involvement in the Soviet Jewish movement. Both David Jünger and Rachel Rothstein make the old country more specific: Jünger suggests that the involvement of Rabbi Joachim Prinz in the civil rights movement was directly related to his experiences of persecution in 1930s Germany, whereas Rothstein examines the American Jewish communal response to the 1968 expulsion of Jews from Poland, showing how American Jewish leaders evaluated the political situation sensitively and worked to influence Polish-​ American relations. The strength of this volume is its emphasis on the significance of the old country for American Jews. This topic is certainly present in American Jewish literature and has also been covered elsewhere in work on the phenomenon of Fiddler on the Roof and the growth of YIVO. But the originality of the volume’s authors suggests that there are many new sources yet to be explored and topics to be developed. For example, nearly all the essays share a focus on the production of Jewish culture, but few authors make any effort to address questions of reception. Researchers might also grapple with the

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

251

issue of relations with other immigrant groups from the old country—​their former neighbors with whom they share a geographical tie, if not the same experience of genocide. Adler and Jelen have edited an engaging volume that scholars in many fields will find useful. More significantly, they have offered us an excellent model of collaborative work and, not least, have shown us what the old country signified for postwar American Jews. Sean Martin Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland

Eugene M. Avrutin, Jonathan Dekel-​Chen, and Robert Weinberg (eds.), Ritual Murder in  Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond. Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2017. 292 pp.

The ritual murder (or blood libel) continues to exert enormous fascination on scholarly and lay communities alike. Perhaps the most perplexing question is why it enjoyed its heyday in the late-​19th and early-​20th centuries. Originating in England and Germany in the 12th and 13th centuries, there may have been fewer than fifty such accusations in Central Europe before 1881, whereas there were well in excess of a hundred ritual murder or blood libel episodes in Europe (including Eastern Europe) between 1881 and the Beilis trial of 1913. A well-​known argument holds that the blood libel died out more or less with the Protestant Reformation in Central Europe but then moved east, with the Counter-​Reformation, to Poland. Later, with the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, it came to infect Russia (in the 19th century). Although most of these accusations did not come to trial, many did—​six in Germany and the Habsburg Empire, and at least that many in Russia. In the collection under review, an essay by Magda Teter demonstrates this translation of the blood libel from west to east. She shows how the 18th-​century images of ritual murder in Poland’s Sandomierz church were drawn directly from the earlier iconography of Simon of Trent, found in a blood libel from 1475. The essays in this book focus primarily on the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. One feature of the Russian ritual murder accusations that was not present in areas further west was its close association with pogroms, starting in Elizavetgrad in 1881 and, most notably, in Kishinev in 1903. Pogroms also took place at the end of the Second World War in Lviv and Kielce as the result of blood libels. Such accusations seemed more likely to stir mob violence against the Jews when they occurred in Eastern Europe, even when there were judicial processes. Michael Ostling gives some useful early modern background to the ritual murder accusation in Poland by comparing it with witchcraft trials. Between 1547 and 1787, there were 82 ritual murder trials, as a result of which 76 Jews died, whereas there were 867 witch trials, resulting in 558 executions or death under torture. In sum,

252 

Book Reviews

accusations of witchcraft—​which were obviously closely related to demonic beliefs about the Jews—​were far more prevalent. The difference was that whole Jewish communities could be persecuted as a result of ritual murder accusations, while there was no community of witches that might be targeted. Eugene Avrutin, Andrew Reed, and Darius Staliunas offer micro-​histories of three ritual murder accusations: in Velizh and Saratov (in Russia), and in Lithuania. These cases demonstrate the importance of local conditions in shaping the outcome of the cases, but also how one case might influence its successors. In addition to age-​old antisemitic beliefs about demonic Jewish practices, a new tradition of accusations in the 19th century created its own dynamic. In what is one of the most original essays in the volume, Marina Mogilner argues that the new popularity of ethnography in late-​19th-​century Russia fostered interest in exotic practices of minority groups (not only Jews), an interest that could turn lethal when the practices were identified as “human sacrifices.” This ethnography introduced a new element into old belief systems. It also served the interests of nation-​ building by identifying who did and who did not belong to “the folk.” Unfortunately, Mogilner goes off track in claiming that similar beliefs about blood sacrifices in the service of the nation infected Zionism. Did the Jewish victims of blood libel really adopt exactly the same language as their persecutors? Harriet Murav offers an equally original essay on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vasilii Rozanov, and Isaac Babel that shows how the antisemitic belief that Jews are bloodthirsty has to be understood in context. Dostoyevsky, for example, depicted the Jews as predatory because of his concern for Russian vitality. Rozanov had the same concern and thought that Jewish sexuality threatened Russia because the Russians were not sufficiently carnal. In the hands of Babel, Jewish vitalism, connected in part with the blood of circumcision, had both negative and positive associations: while the Jews needed to give up their medieval religion, they still possessed a vitality as “children of the sun,” presumably due to their Mediterranean origin. Murav connects the ideas of these three writers with the Beilis affair (Dostoyevsky died long before it in 1881, but Murav believes that he helped shape the atmosphere of the accusation). Robert Weinberg and Jonathan Dekel-​Chen address the affair directly, believing, as does Murav, that it was the watershed event in terms of public notoriety and later memory. Weinberg shows convincingly how ritual murder had come to be associated with a secret kabbalistic cabal (the latter word deriving from the former). The very wounds on the victim could be read as Hebrew letters or astrological signs. The Beilis trial, which found the accused innocent but affirmed that Jews practice ritual murder, thus gave judicial expression to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Kishinev a decade earlier. In brief, the alleged secret Jewish conspiracy to control the world also involved ritual murder. Dekel-​Chen looks at Jewish transnational intervention in the Beilis affair. Starting with the Damascus blood libel, Jews in Western countries began to agitate politically on behalf of their coreligionists elsewhere. This kind of intervention reached a crescendo with the Kishinev pogrom, as Steven Zipperstein has shown, and it did not abate through the October Revolution of 1905 and the Beilis affair. Just how much the last event changed these interventions is not clear from this essay. Dekel-​Chen also offers an unconvincing speculation, namely, that when Mendel Beilis himself became

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

253

a charity case in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, the frustration of Jewish social work agencies that were trying to work with this difficult, erstwhile victim may have predisposed them not to fight immigration restrictions. The Beilis case continued to resonate in the Soviet Union, as Gennady Estraikh shows in an analysis of a case from Moscow in 1922. The Soviet authorities felt compelled to squash any signs that blood libel was still alive. However, during and immediately after the Second World War, Elisa Bemporad writes, the Nazi occupation of Lviv opened the floodgates of traditional antisemitism, including blood libel. The very real cannibalism that some were forced to practice because of starvation prompted accusations against the Jews concerning ritual murder. After the war, Stalin failed to continue earlier Soviet efforts against blood libel. On the contrary, as Jeffrey Veidlinger shows, the “doctors’ plot” (the fabricated claim that Jewish doctors were plotting to poison Soviet leaders), while devoid of any religious dimension, shared much with earlier ritual murder cases. Veidlinger makes resourceful use of the arguments of Gavin Langmuir and Alan Dundes about the medieval blood libel. Just as medieval Christians assuaged their doubts and perhaps their guilt about the Eucharist by projecting onto the Jews what they themselves were doing, so the Soviet leadership (and not just Stalin) may have projected their guilt about their millions of murders during the Great Terror onto an international Jewish conspiracy. To return to the question with which we began, why the resurgence of the ritual murder canard in the modern period? In his essay on Central European (German, Czech and Hungarian) blood libels, Hillel Kieval (like Mogilner) points to the importance of pseudoscientific, medical, and ethnographic expertise in putting this age-​old belief on a new footing. The “social knowledge” of popular culture, as Kieval calls it, combined with these new forms of knowledge. Other of the contributors here argue for the persistence of medieval folklore in many strata of modern Russian society. All of these arguments are convincing, since many factors undoubtedly came into play in the intense revival of the blood libel at the end of the 19th century. Perhaps in addition to modern “expert” knowledge and stubbornly persistent medieval attitudes, the renewal of ritual murder accusations points to a new form of modernity that was both conspiratorial and mythological. The modern world, we must now acknowledge, not only produced secular rationality but also its opposite. David Biale University of California, Davis

Batya Brutin, Hayerushah:  hashoah biytzirotehem shel omanim yisreelim benei hador hasheni (The Inheritance: The Holocaust in the Artworks of Second Generation Israeli Artists). Jerusalem: Magnes, 2015. 349 pp.

When she turned thirty, the artist Anat Massad decided that she wanted to have the number A22761, which had been branded on her mother’s forearm in Auschwitz, tattooed on her own arm. However, as members of her family were unequivocally

254 

Book Reviews

opposed, she dropped the idea:  instead, the number began to emerge in her art. Massad’s relationship with the number on her mother’s arm reflects the coping strategies and the sense of identification among the second generation of Holocaust survivors whose works Batya Brutin seeks to examine. These works, like a tattoo, have an enduring presence as an act of intimate memorialization—​of people, of narrative, and of personal experience. It is surprising that a comprehensive study of the role of the Holocaust in the works of second-​generation artists has only now been published. The Holocaust and its place in the lives of this generation occupy a central position in Israel’s culture of memory. To date, however, the Holocaust’s influence on Israeli artists of the second generation has not received sufficient attention. This volume, based on the doctoral thesis Brutin wrote under the guidance of Ziva Meislish, seeks to address this lacuna.1 The author’s profound knowledge of her field (she herself is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor), and the in-​depth interviews she has conducted with the artists, enable her to discern a shared visual vocabulary and to enumerate its characteristics. Her formidable research brings together, for the first time, a corpus of great importance. As defined by Brutin, second-​generation artists are the children of at least one parent who lived under the Nazi occupation. The point of origin for Brutin’s research is the psychology of personal memory; thus, she not only outlines the artists’ family narratives but also emphasizes the manner in which art is a therapeutic tool. The book is divided thematically into a number of main topics, which allow discussion of the common denominators shared by the dozens of artists—​some of them well-​known, and others whose work is outside the current Israeli canon. The first chapter itemizes representations of the dead: figures, shadows, faceless eyes, and relentlessly haunting representations of family members who perished. All of these trouble the minds of the living. Brutin describes the artists’ prolonged imaginary dialogues with the dead, whose presence they feel despite their being absent. The second chapter deals with a more direct use of familiar symbols of the Holocaust: the tattooed number on the arm and the striped uniform. Apart from being items that obliterate identity, these are objects whose tangible substance is transformed into the personal memory of a father or mother. Artists such as Haim Maor, Yossi Lemel, and Anat Massad engrave, draw, stamp, and photograph the Auschwitz number repetitively, even obsessively. In addition, the striped uniform is highly charged with intimations of survival and laden with allusions to the biblical story of Joseph and the crucified figure of Jesus, functioning as a symbol of sanctified victimhood. In the third chapter, Brutin looks at the use of documentary materials familiar to us from museums and memorial sites: piles of hair and clothes, photographs of the dead, heaped-​up corpses and other iconic representations in the collective consciousness of Holocaust memory. The artists use the photos and archival language in their art in an attempt to provide these anonymous survivors with an identity. The fourth chapter, which is the one most profoundly rooted in psychology, describes how some of these artists, in an act of total identification, put themselves in the victims’ place. This, understandably, is especially the case with artists who have been named after family members who perished (Brutin herself bears the name of her mother’s dead sister). But even those who have not been named for the dead similarly strive to actualize a

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

255

dread or a desire to go back in time and “be there,” putting themselves in the victim’s shoes and treading the boundary between fantasy and horror. The final chapter offers a surprising and controversial portrayal of identification with the role of perpetrator. Brutin begins by describing works in which the artists deal with issues related to Israeli society, which has moved from a condition of victimhood to one of aggression. A number of other works require the observer to experience the dialectic between victim and aggressor in universal terms. Brutin discusses each of these instances in the light of the artists’ life experiences, with questions related to absolution, reconciliation, and evil inclinations hinted at between the lines. The volume’s wealth of visual expression and variety of topics demonstrate the complexity of Holocaust-​related imagery. Brutin not only traces the evolution of the visual imagery of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of the second generation but also endows the reader with the ability to identify additional patterns and themes that are not explicitly described, such as brutality in depictions of Nazi perpetrators, the place of femininity and sexual violence as part of the memory process, or childhood experiences during the Holocaust. Total identification with the experience of previous generations is an inseparable part of the work of the artists described in this book. The philosopher Avishai Margalit, author of The Ethics of Memory, addresses the importance of memory as a basis for the formation of interpersonal ties (or, as he terms it, “thick relations”). According to Margalit: “Memory is the cement that holds thick relations together” —​a view that accords with Brutin’s description of the inherent power of memory wherever family is concerned. Margalit adds, however: “Communities of memory are the obvious habitat for thick relations,”2 thus stressing the role of community and society as an active part of the expression of personal memory. From this point of view, questions arise as to the place of the “community of memory” in the life and work of these artists. Brutin would appear consciously to focus on personal experience, while leaving the broader context aside (in an interview conducted in January 2008, she noted: “There is no such thing as the Holocaust, there is a Holocaust for each individual”).3 Thus her research underscores the common language and connections among this group of second-​generation artists, while only implicitly touching upon the tension between individual and collective memory, and between memory’s personal versus public manifestations. Brutin omits discussion of the place of the Holocaust as national and cultural ethos in order to emphasis its psychological aspects, and she makes only passing reference to the numerous studies on patterns of collective memory. Furthermore, there is hardly any discussion on artists’ response or criticism toward collective memory strategies in Israel. This last omission is evident in view of similar research that has been undertaken with regard to cinema, for example, and which frequently presents the work of the second generation as an inseparable part of Israeli politics, culture, and education.4 Such omissions notwithstanding, Brutin has performed a major service in putting together this anthology of material, which should greatly aid in future research on second-​and third-​generation artists. Tamara Abramovitch The Hebrew University

256 

Book Reviews

Notes 1.  Brutin, who curated the Layers of Memory exhibition at the Ghetto Fighters’ House in 2008 together with Irit Levin, directs the program for Holocaust teaching in Israeli society at Beit Berl Academic College. 2.  Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: 2002), 8. 3. Interview in Haaretz (15 January 2008), online at:  haaretz.co.il/​ gallery/​ 1.1300951 (accessed 12 June 2018). 4. See, for instance, Moshe Zimmermann, Al tig’u li bashoah:  hashpa’at hashoah ’al hakolno’a vehaḥevrah beyisrael (Haifa:  2002); Liat Steir-​ Livny, “Hagalut hameshuleshet:  dimuyah shel nitzolet hashoah bakolno’a ha’alilati hayisreeli,” in Migdar beyisrael: meḥkarim ḥadashim ’al migdar bayishuv uvamdinah, ed. Margalit Shilo and Gideon Katz (2 vols.) (Beersheva: 2011), 2:497-​520.

Diana Dumitru, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of  Romania and the  Soviet Union. New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2016. xiv + 268 pp.

This study by Moldovian historian Diana Dumitru focuses on Jewish-​Gentile relations in Bessarabia and Transnistria from the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 to the liberation of these areas by the Red Army in 1944. Her book is based on material gleaned from a wide range of sources (archival, secondary, periodicals, oral testimonies) from Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, the United States, and Israel, and its six chapters cover three chronological periods: late tsarist Russia, interwar Romania and the U.S.S.R., and the Holocaust years. During the 19th century, Bessarabia and Transnistria were part of the tsarist empire. However, in 1918, Bessarabia became a part of Romania and went through an accelerated process of Romanization. According to the Romanian census of 1930, there were almost 2.9  million Bessarabians, of whom approximately 56  percent were Romanians; among the remainder, 12 percent were Russians; 11 percent were Ukrainians; and 7 percent were Jews. Over a period of time in the 1920s, Transnistrian territory became part of the Soviet Union (more precisely, its borderline districts became the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which was incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). The population of Transnistria constituted “human material” for Stalin’s social experiment that sought to create the first socialist egalitarian internationalist society; this, unlike Romanian ethno-​ authoritarianism, victimized entire groups by social rather than ethnic criteria. In 1940, Romania withdrew from Bessarabia following a Soviet ultimatum; most of the “liberated” territory became the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Shortly thereafter, however, between 1941–​1944, Axis-​aligned Romania occupied both Bessarabia and Transnistria. Bessarabia thus “returned to the bosom of the motherland,” as the popular terminology had it. In contrast, the Transnistria Governorate was a “consolation prize” offered to Romania by Nazi Germany, meant to compensate for territories lost to Hungary and Bulgaria in 1940. It was, in essence, a colony containing an alien population—​Ukrainians comprised approximately

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

257

three-​quarters of the total population, whereas Romanians constituted a mere 7.5 percent (and Jews, less than 1 percent). Once in control, the Romanians exploited the labor force of Transnistria and also brought in approximately 170,000 Jews, deported mainly from Bessarabia and Bukovina. The deportations were designed to be an ethnic cleansing of Romanian territories, with Jews in Transnistria concentrated in camps and ghettos. Dumitru’s research centers on the differences in civilian behavior of the Gentiles toward the Jews: Bessarabian Romanians/​Moldovans were significantly crueler to the Jews than were the (mainly Ukrainian and Russian) Transnistrians. The author univocally explains this peculiarity as being rooted in Soviet internationalism. As she explains, the Soviet systems of education and propaganda emphasized the internationalist essence of the regime and socio-​political integration of the Jews and thus promoted inter​ethnic cooperation and a struggle against antisemitism. Thus, during the interwar period, “the Soviet state designed a plethora of new legal measures punishing antisemitic behavior, combating popular antisemitic stereotypes, and integrating Jews through a broad policy of affirmative action” (p. 236). Unfortunately, single-​cause explanations are often problematic, and Dumitru’s work is not an exception. For one thing, while the civilian level is of great importance, people operate under certain circumstances in a manner formulated by various decision-​makers. In this case, Dumitru’s excessive focus on the civilian level minimizes the roles of political actors such as state authorities, political leaders, religious institutions, the police, and the military (both Romanian and German). Furthermore, in contrast to the Soviet Union, a multiparty political system existed in Romania in the 1920s–​1930s. Thus, antisemitic propaganda—​not necessarily initiated by state authorities—​played a significant role in Romania’s interwar politics:  among other things, King Carol II was targeted for his having a mistress, Elena (Magda) Lupescu, whose parents were converted Jews. Overall, Romania is more comparable with other interwar East-​Central European countries than with the Soviet Union. Second, although Dumitru documents numerous examples of a positive attitude on the part of Gentiles toward the Jews in Transnistiria, she does not consider a number of questions. For instance, if Transnistrians were educated in the spirit of Soviet internationalism, why is it that the less “Sovietized” strata (such as the elderly, the rural population, priests, and families of victims of the Stalin’s purges) were also relatively hospitable to the Jews (pp. 203–​205, 217)? And why did ex-​Soviet Ukrainians and Russians living east of Transnistria behave in an opposite manner? What made the Slavic population of Kamianets-​Podilskyi, Vynnitsia, Nemyriv, Haisyn, or Mykolaiv (all of them located in Nazi-​controlled Reichskommissariat Ukraine) more brutal than their compatriots from Braslav, Tulchyn, Bershad, Holta, or Odesa (Transnistria)? After all, the people of Transnistria and of neighboring areas in Reichskommissariat Ukraine had been equally exposed to Soviet education/​propaganda, and they had equally suffered from the Stalinist regime. Third, the author completely ignores the fact that the mostly Slavic Transnistrians had no hope for their national aspirations under Romanian rule. Subject either to Romanization or deportation, they were more naturally inclined to extend aid to those who were already being persecuted rather than devoting their energy to the cause

258 

Book Reviews

of România Mare (Greater Romania). In November 1941, for instance, Ukrainian peasant women in Shargorod physically blocked the road to hinder a convey carrying Jewish deportees (p. 192). In contrast, the Romanian-​speaking population of Bessarabia considered the events of 1941 to be a second reunification of România Mare—​namely, an opportunity to bring about ethnic homogeneity by means of deporting “foreign ele­ments,” to improve its economy at the expense of the oppressed Jews, and to upgrade its social status vis-​à-​vis Transnistria’s Slavic majority. Dumitru is disinclined to ­explain collaboration on the part of Romanian Bessarabians as a form of revenge for alleged “crimes of Judeo-​Communism” (such as forced collectivization, anti-​religious campaigns, and Stalinist purges). In consequence, despite her claim that “[t]‌his present story is in no way an ode to the Soviet system” (p. 17), its portrayal of the Soviet social experiment is in fact quite positive, especially given Dumitru’s failure to compare Jewish-​Gentile relations in territories occupied by Romania with those in areas in Ukraine that were occupied by the Germans. It seems clear that Gentiles’ willingness to save Jews as opposed to collaborating with those who sought to harm them cannot be ascribed exclusively to factors such as Soviet internationalist propaganda (which, in Dumitru’s view, promoted sympathetic views vis-​à-​vis Jews) or to Romanian nationalism (which worked in the opposite direction). Otherwise, how can one explain the well-​known facts concerning the local population’s willingness to assist the Jews in places such as Denmark, Norway, Albania, or Italy? We can only regret that this work on Jewish-​Gentile relations before and during the Holocaust—​though making use of a rich and extensive range of sources—​fails to provide the necessary broad historical perspective, relying instead on a single-​cause explanation of the phenomenon it explores. Samuel Barnai The Hebrew University Ben-Gurion University

Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann (eds.), Shelter from  the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. 306 pp.

The enormous literature on the Holocaust has not exhausted itself. At first, the focus was largely on the “perpetrators,” dealing with how and why this enormous crime was committed by one of the most educated and sophisticated nations in the world. Recently, scholars, novelists, and popular historians have moved to the victims, survivors, and their descendants (the “second” and even “third” generations), collaborators with the Nazis, parallel genocides against Roma and Sinti, persecution of homosexuals, “displaced persons,” anti-​Jewish activities in North Africa, and more theoretical treatises. Academically fashionable “memory studies” have found a fertile field for exploration not only in the Holocaust itself but in the way it has been “remembered” and used politically by journalists, scholars, and politicians.

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

259

This collection uncovers for English readers another aspect of the Shoah, that pertaining to evacuees and deportees to the Soviet interior. Three main categories of Jews wound up largely in the Urals, Central Asia, and Siberia during the war: Polish Jews who fled or were deported by the Soviets; Soviet Jews who fled on their own on trains, on foot, on trucks, or on carts; or Soviet Jews who were moved with their factories, institutions, or government entities that had been given priority in getting beyond the reach of the enemy. Wartime chaos and people moving back and forth across borders—​which themselves shifted between 1939 and 1944—​made accurate record-​keeping impossible. Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik assiduously sift through the evidence. They conclude that of approximately 1,448,000 Polish Jews who became Soviet citizens as a result of the Soviet annexation of “West Belorussia” and “West Ukraine” in 1939–​1940, 23,600 were arrested by the Soviets, usually because they were “bourgeois” business owners, clergy, or members of non-​Communist political parties (p. 104). Some of them were deported to the Soviet interior, an act that inadvertently saved their lives. Mordechai Altshuler was among the first to point out that there was no Soviet policy to evacuate Jews, though Soviet authorities and at least some Soviet Jews knew of Nazi anti-​Jewish policies.1 Ethnicity did play a role in Soviet evacuation policy, but only as punishment, not salvation. Thus, many (non-​ Jewish) Ukrainians, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, most of whom were “freshly baked” Soviet citizens in 1939, were deported because they were suspected of being anti-​Soviet. John Goldlust estimates that by “December 1941 at least 10 million Soviet citizens had been relocated from ‘European’ into ‘Asian’ areas of the USSR” (p. 57). Among them, Edele and Warlik conclude, were some 68,000–​71,000 Polish Jews who were deported before June 22, 1941, the day the Germans invaded the USSR. “Perhaps 10,000–​21,000 were drafted into the Red Army,” and 40,000–​53,000 volunteered to work in the USSR. Including the figure of Polish Jews who were arrested by the Soviet authorities, the total number of those who were saved from the Nazis in these various ways was at least 141,600 and perhaps as many as 168,600. In addition, a larger number—​“perhaps 210,000”—​evacuated or fled east after the Germans attacked (p. 15). Thus, Goldlust writes, by early 1940, “as many as 300,000 Jews from the German-​occupied sections of Poland” had moved into the Soviet-​controlled areas of eastern Poland (p. 36). Finally, “between 1.2 and 1.6 million Soviet Jews . . . escape[d]‌ the . . . Nazis through evacuation and flight” (Edele and Warlik, 111). Thus, many lives were saved, at least initially, although the harsh conditions of exile led to many “unnatural” deaths. Other authors deal with intricacies of changing Polish-​Soviet relations and the complicated consequences for the life-​determining status of Polish Jews; relations between displaced Polish and Soviet Jews; and oral testimonies of those who experienced the evacuations and deportations; with regard to the last, Eliyana Adler correctly points to serious flaws in the way some of the interviews were conducted by volunteers for the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. A thoughtful essay by Atinna Grossman puts the story in the broader context of Jews’ escapes to other countries and how international politics directly affected their fate.

260 

Book Reviews

Unfortunately, the memoirs, diaries, and oral testimonies of the Jewish evacuees and deportees, who settled mainly in Israel, the United States, Australia, Canada, and France, are inaccessible to those who do not know Yiddish or Hebrew, and this includes most of the contributors to this volume. Some authors seem to regard Yiddish as a “dead” or “exotic” language that no one—​including those who study the largely Yiddish-​speaking population murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices—​is expected to know. None of the contributors makes mention of Yosef Litvak’s excellent 1988 study of the evacuation of Polish Jews, which remains untranslated from Hebrew.2 Moreover, although most of the contributors have written first-​rate, sober analyses, some seem to be unfamiliar with the realities of Soviet life, despite the fact that at least two essayists are Soviet specialists. For instance, in the introduction written by the three editors, mention is made of “Jews from Bukhara”; the correct term is “Bukharan Jews,” as most of them lived in Tashkent, Samarkand, and other cities in Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. The introduction also notes that survivors who had been evacuated or deported have not been eligible for reparations. In fact, since 1991, they have been eligible for at least symbolic compensation. Thanks to efforts on the part of the Conference on Material Claims against Germany, successive German governments have expanded the categories of people eligible for compensation to include those who were displaced from their homes, surviving as forced laborers or as strangers in areas where the wartime economy was severely strained, housing difficult to find, and political and social suspicion rife. The editors also claim that the Jewish Anti-​Fascist Committee “acted as a forceful and influential lobbyist for Jewish interests” (p. 16). In truth, it was a “transmission belt” from the Soviet leadership to foreign Jews and, as its archives reveal, it was very skittish about asserting Jewish interests lest it be accused of Jewish nationalism. Finally, the distinguished scholar of Soviet history, Sheila Fitzpatrick, writes: “The Jewishness of the Bolshevik party and its leadership in the first forty years of the twentieth century has often been underestimated” (p. 135). In reality, it has been grossly overestimated to serve the “Zydokomuna” myth (there were fewer than a thousand Jewish Bolsheviks before 1917). One hopes that this fine collective work will stimulate work on still neglected subjects such as the relations between the Ashkenazi migrants and autochthonous Central Asian Jews, cultural life among the migrants, and their experiences of return after 1944. Zvi Gitelman University of Michigan

Notes 1.  Mordechai Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation of Soviet Jews at the Time of the Nazi Invasion: Policies and Realities,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey Gurock (Armonk: 1993), 77–​104. 2.  Yosef Litvak, Plitim yehudim mipolin bivrit hamoetzot, 1939–​1946 (Jerusalem: 1988).

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

261

Amir Goldstein, Derekh rabat panim:  tziyonuto shel Zeev Jabotinsky lenokhaḥ haantishemiyut (Zionism and Anti-​ Semitism in  the Thought and Action of  Ze’ev Jabotinsky). Sdeh Boker:  The Ben-​Gurion Institute for  the Study of Israel and Zionism, 2015, 496 pp. No matter how much has been written about Zeev Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist movement, his persona and writings continue to fascinate scholars. Recently, it seems, there has been a tendency to examine Jabotinsky’s early thinking and activity in subject-​focused contexts.1 Amir Goldstein’s book takes a more classical path: by probing Jabotinsky’s attitude toward antisemitism, he proposes to shed light on Jabotinsky’s Zionist patterns of thinking throughout his lifetime. The outcome is an important book that enhances the corpus of research on Jabotinsky. It offers refreshing insights on Jabotinsky’s place in regard to cultural/​ spiritual Zionism (Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis have already marched in similar directions in their new translation of Jabotinsky’s autobiography),2 and it offers a brief survey of Jabotinsky’s publications in the course of examining various historical episodes. Even though the author does not read Russian—​a language in which Jabotinsky did much writing, particularly in the prewar period—​he consults a well-​ populated list of sources against which to test his analyses. Jabotinsky, Goldstein claims, established his singularity by fusing Herzl’s political Zionism, which regarded antisemitism as an acute socioeconomic problem that entailed Jewish nationalism, and Ahad Ha’am’s spiritual Zionism, which viewed antisemitism as a manifestation of negation of the historical singularity of the Jewish tradition. (Ahad Ha’am sought to refrain from defining antisemitism as the compelling factor in Jewish nationalism, since such a perspective would justify the national movement by means of negation.) Goldstein’s point of departure is that Jabotinsky had a systematic and comprehensive take on the antisemitism issue. The conclusion that one draws at the end of the reading, however, is slightly different. Specifically in regard to antisemitism, Jabotinsky theorized a somewhat simplistic dichotomy between the “antisemitism of things” and the “antisemitism of men.” The latter originates in prejudice and is imparted by political interests and human malevolence, whereas the former stems from the circumstances of Jewish life in exile. Jabotinsky offers a similar remedy for both illnesses: a Zionism that would instigate a renewal of Jewish culture and introduce sovereign Jewish life in the land of Israel, cleansed of ghetto perceptions and suspicion of the “goyim.” The problem with Jabotinsky’s differentiation is its binary nature. After all, many shades of antisemitism and many possible ways of coping with it—​philosophical, psychological, and so on—​rest between “antisemitism of things” and “antisemitism of men.” Jabotinsky, according to Goldstein, found one political solution called Zionism. An interesting counterexample is offered in Ofer Shiff’s biography of Abba Hillel Silver; the latter suggested celebrating the “pillars of humanism and democracy” in the United States instead of cultivating “feelings of anxiety and suspicion,” as the latter could result in Jews living in a “spiritual ghetto.”3 In this context of non-​political references to the topic of antisemitism, a weakness of Goldstein’s book becomes apparent, namely, its lack of a systematic introduction that ponders the

262 

Book Reviews

question of how to characterize the phenomenon. Many fine thinkers have written on the matter; Jean Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and Philip Roth are three of many examples that come to mind. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined the term allosemitism to designate a stance positing Jews as separate from the rest of humanity. Allosemitism is neither a positive or negative view of Jews but rather a conception containing the seeds of both.4 In any event, the allosemitic discourse assumes that relations vis-​à-​vis the Jews are always somehow exceptional. A preliminary discussion of this kind might have helped Goldstein to find more diversity in Jabotinsky’s grasp of antisemitism. Goldstein focuses mainly on the tension between Jabotinsky’s wish not to treat antisemitism as of central importance for the necessity of Zionism and his dire predictions in the 1930s about the cataclysm that antisemitism was about to bring upon European Jewry. The tension stems from two elements in Jabotinsky: the biographical and the ideological. In the course of his youth, Jabotinsky, according to Goldstein, “hadn’t experienced Jewish otherness” (p. 45); moreover, from the ideological perspective, he was desirous, as a matter of principle, to set Zionism on positive foundations. In 1926, for example, Jabotinsky criticized the Jews’ suspicious attitude toward Gentiles and noted the need to draw sustenance from non-​Jewish cultures: “The collective name of the goy,” he stated, “is Socrates and Plato, Wilson and Balfour, and if the Jews are cultured people today, they should thank the goy for it” (p. 312). At the same time, however, he did not hesitate to cry “antisemitism!” even when no real grounds existed for doing so. As early as 1918, he stated that “Palestine has become the arena of an overtly antisemitic policy” (p. 242). Goldstein explains the celerity with which Jabotinsky brought antisemitic suspicions against Britain as the fruit of momentary “frustration.” But the ability to invoke the antisemitism charge so quickly may also indicate something about what antisemitism is and how it should be defined. That is to say, how can we know when anti-​Zionism is antisemitism? What is the difference between being “anti” something as opposed to being “against” something? And are we talking about race or religion when we make use of the term? Indeed, religion has been used to define race throughout history, as evidenced by the fact that antisemitism is associated with Jews rather than Arabs. It is noteworthy that Jabotinsky himself internalized several antisemitic motifs pertaining to the Jews. In his article “Dr. Herzl,” he wrote that since “the zhid is ugly, sickly, and undignified, let us invest the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty, tall stature, mighty shoulders, and vigorous movement” (p. 69). This notion, which he termed hadar, was an attempt to construct a new Jew—​one that ran counter to antisemitic stereotypes. Although aware of this issue, Goldstein does not dwell on it. Instead, he claims, in defense of Jabotinsky, that in contrast to antisemites who find essentialist traits in the Jew, Jabotinsky believed that the negative “Jew type” would be able to remake himself once national life in the homeland was restored (p. 71). To sum up, this impressive book has contemporary relevance. For those who wish to understand why the Revisionist movement differs from today’s Likud, it suffices to reflect on the greater complexity of Jabotinsky’s coping with antisemitism as opposed to the approach of his successor, Menachem Begin. Jabotinsky’s support for the Helsingfors program, which proposed Jewish autonomy in Europe after the wave of pogroms in 1905, indicates that he considered Jews capable of coexisting with

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

263

Gentiles and did not regard antisemitism as deterministic (p. 110). Begin, in contrast, derived his viewpoint from the lessons of the Holocaust, which effectively corroborated his early fundamental perception that relations between Jews and Gentiles were typified by an antisemitic dimension. In concluding this book, one feels more and more strongly that the leaders of today’s Likud are the successors of Begin and not of the founding father. Avi Shilon New York University

Notes 1.  See, for example, Svetlana Natkovich, Be’ananei zohar: yetzirato shel Vladimir (Zeev) Zhabotinski baheksher haḥevrati (Jerusalem:  2015); Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-​Wing Zionism (Princeton: 2017); Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-​State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-​Gurion, trans. Itamar Haritan (New Haven: 2018). 2. Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Story of My Life (Detroit: 2015). 3.  Ofer Shiff, Hatziyonut shel hamenutzaḥim: hamasa’ shel Abba Hillel Silver el me’ever laleumiyut (Tel Aviv: 2010), 145. 4. Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism:  Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture, and ‘the Jew’, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Stanford:1998), 143–​157.

Patrizia Guarnieri, Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism: From Florence to  Jerusalem and New  York. Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xv + 275 pp.

Fascism exerted multiple, complex, and often perverse influences on Italian society and on the lives of Italian Jews in particular. The better-​known outcomes of Italian Fascism are the development of a dictatorial regime grounded on the cult of personality, the bloody repression of political opposition, delirious imperialist adventures, the legal codification of anti-​Jewish persecution, the late military alliance with Nazi Germany, and a catastrophic defeat in the Second World War. But Fascism also played a paramount role in conceiving new patterns of rural and urban development, industrial management, state and church relations, and educational reform, some of whose legacies have long outlasted the pernicious regime. Some public works, among them the embankments of the Tiber River and other aspects of urban renovation in Rome, and land reclamation in the central-​southern regions of Italy, quite amazingly were not much developed beyond the regime’s endeavors in the 1920s and 1930s. Likewise, at least until recently, much of the public education system in the country—​compulsory as well as academic—​was regulated by principles laid down during “the infamous twenty years.” Those far-​reaching influences have deeply affected Italy’s university

264 

Book Reviews

system and several of the disciplines inherently related to scientific research, teaching, and the training of intellectual and professional elites. Patrizia Guarnieri is a professor of cultural and social history at the University of Florence. She has extensively researched the history of scientific thought, and much of her work has been devoted to reconstructing the development of psychology and psychoanalytical practices in Italy. This volume investigates the origins and growth of psychology—​what she terms “the Cinderella of sciences”—​in Italy. Guarnieri focuses on the major figures that animated the field, their competitions and alliances, and their diverse contributions to the study of the human mind in Italy during the first half of the 20th century. Her work relies on a broad and strong command of the fundamentals of specialized discourse within and across different schools of thought. But no less significantly, it builds upon patient reconstruction across several decades of the fine mechanisms of academic life—​in the teaching halls, corridors, private studios and laboratories, and secretarial offices, alongside publications, student and academic personnel registers, and subterranean archives. In Italy, psychology as an independent discipline, and psychoanalysis as a related though separate field, were caught between the narrow spaces left by the idealistic philosophical and anti-​empirical views of highly charismatic and influential thinkers such as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, and practices embedded in the physical sciences that were already present in some of the hospitals specializing in the cure of “madness” at the beginning of the 20th century. A crucial actor was the Fascist regime, which—​albeit indirectly—​was in tight control of appointment procedures for the very few academic chairs that were available in Italian universities. Here, characteristically, academic dynasties, frictions, personal incompatibilities, and cliques played a crucial role in the development of careers and in the allocation of chairs and, consequently, academic power. A certain amount of communication existed between Italian academicians and the international scientific community, but those external influences were far weaker than discourse and practices that occurred inside Italy. Freudian ideas, for instance, were anathema, not only to Mussolini but to the church as well. With regard to the latter, one of the major figures was Father Professor Agostino Gemelli, who was the Catholic authority on psychological matters, the chief editor of Civiltà Cattolica, and, in addition, a fervent antisemite. Another dominant academic, Francesco De Sarlo of the University of Florence—​probably the leading Italian authority on psychology by contemporary international standards—​could not, or would not, take an active part in the intrigues surrounding academic appointments in the field. The most compelling aspect of this book is its focus on the small but influential group of young Jewish scholars and practitioners who prominently participated in this saga. Guarnieri shows where these individuals were positioned in the struggles between different schools of thought. In addition, however, she examines the interaction of Fascism with the profession at large and its growing interference with the lives of its Jewish actors. After first taking an overall look at the development of psychology in Italy and how it was affected by Fascism, she turns to illustrating the matter by means of case studies centered, respectively, on Enzo Bonaventura and Renata Calabresi—​ two prominent figures whose fate turned out to be very different.

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

265

Enzo Bonaventura, one of the chief assistants to De Sarlo at the University of Florence, was both a leading exponent of psychological research in Italy and among the pioneers of Italian psychoanalysis. By many accounts he was considered to be De Sarlo’s natural successor. However, in 1938, following a census of Jewish academics ordered by the minister of education, Giuseppe Bottai, in anticipation of the Fascist racial laws, Bonaventura—​along with tens of others—​was expelled from the university. Prior to this, in the early 1930s, he had already been passed over for promotion, most likely because of his declared Jewishness. Bonaventura belonged to a tiny but highly educated and idealistic group of young Jewish intellectuals inspired by the Zionist idea, and for this reason, when he left Italy, he fled to Jerusalem. There he was welcomed into the faculty of the Hebrew University, where he was instrumental in laying the foundations of the department of psychology. Following the Second World War, when Bonaventura cautiously explored the possibility of being reintegrated in the Italian academy, he was given to understand that his university track in Florence had been taken by others. Back in Jerusalem, at the peak of his academic flourishing, Bonaventura, along with more than seventy others, was killed in a terrorist attack carried out in April 1948 against a convoy of academics, students, doctors, and nurses who were traveling to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. At the University of Florence, a low-​key and politically correct commemoration was held in the wake of his death. At the time of Fascist anti-​Jewish sanctions, Renata Calabresi was younger than Bonaventura and thus less prominent in the field. She completed her doctorate in 1935, and four years later she fled to the United States, where with much effort she gradually succeeded in securing respectable professional employment. Calabresi was fortunate in that she was able to make connections with several prominent Italian Jewish intellectuals who had already found refuge in the country as well as with the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars (ECADFS), which assisted Jewish academic immigrants to the United States. She also encountered antisemitism, as when she was looking for housing in the New York area and a neighbor reassured her: “This is a good neighborhood: there aren’t so many Jews here.” When she returned to Italy after the war in order to get her diploma in hand, she was informed by the Magnificent Rector of Rome University, Giuseppe Ugo Papi, that he “had sent the document to her Rome address by regular mail, but the mail had been returned to sender because the addressee was unavailable” (p. 196). Papi himself was a political economist appointed in 1938–​1939 to one of the chairs vacated by senior Jewish faculty who had been expelled. It is difficult to say how and to what extent psychology and psychoanalysis would have been further advanced in Italy—​and in Israel, too, for that matter—​had Jewish academics such as Bonaventura and Calabresi been given their chance to grow and practice normally. This breathtaking book is a tribute to what was lost, to the many who did not return, and to those numerous individuals whose memory has been quite totally removed from contemporary civic consciousness. Sergio DellaPergola The Hebrew University

Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion Ken Frieden, Travels in Translation:  Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016. 389 pp.

Hayim Nahman Bialik, the great modernist Hebrew poet, is purported to have compared learning Hebrew through translation to kissing a woman through a veil. Travels in Translation, Ken Frieden’s marvelous, creative, and erudite book on the signal role played by heretofore neglected Hebrew and Yiddish “translations” of sea journeys—​ and their shipwrecks—​in the origins of modern Hebrew literary history, proves the master wrong. These works, both formal translations from one written text into another and informal “translations” or adaptations of oral material into a new, written form, are a full-​fledged literary, cultural, ideological, and religious love affair. En route through the artistry of Nathan Sternharz (Nahman of Bratslav’s secretary), Isaac Euchel, Moses Mendelsohn-​Frankfurt, and Frieden’s hero, Mendel Lefin of Satanów, Frieden rewrites the beginnings of modern Hebrew prose. He shows how Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovich), long credited as the founding father of the revolution in modernizing Hebrew, had precursors in hasidic sea journeys and Haskalah translations, both of which had an intimate relationship to Yiddish, and the latter with a debt to German travelogues. Along the way, Frieden, in a deliberate post-​Zionist move, redirects our attention to the vitality of postbiblical Hebrew in the diaspora. Although interested in reorienting Hebrew literary history, Frieden pays attention to the lived reality of his protagonists, showing their rootedness in Eastern Europe, specifically in Polish Podolia and Austrian Galicia, the heartland of Polish Hasidism and the most densely settled Jewish geographic space of the period. Frieden calls his method “textual referentialism” (pp. xix, 260–​261); because classic literary studies often separated literary meaning from “mundane reality,” Frieden presses his demand for interpreting these texts in their historical context as a key to understanding their significance. Travels in Translation begins with biblical and postbiblical representations of sea travel, showing how premodern writers perceived seafarers’ experience of benevolent sunny days and fair winds, as well as their encounters with dangerous storms and natural disasters, as an expression of God’s will. Controlling the natural world, God parted the Red Sea and cast Jonah into the mouth of the big fish; the fate of His people at sea depended on their upholding His covenant. Frieden introduces readers to the travel narratives of Meshullam of Volterra, Ovadia of Bertinoro, Moshe Basola, and Eliahu of Pesaro, who thought in Italian but wrote in Hebrew; because they lacked a natural Hebrew vocabulary, they often reverted to biblical phrases from the book of Jonah and from Psalms when they described the tempests at sea. Innovation occurred Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0021

Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion

267

when a writer unshackled himself from melitzah, a style that stitched together biblical phrases, and dared to describe nature with new phrases, new vocabulary, and the use of transliterated Italian. In Frieden’s words, “Hebrew writing that strung together biblical quotations was like a gradually changing ship in a bottle. By itself, the ancient Hebrew ship was inert; the language of the Bible was powerless to represent modern life in Europe” (p. 46). Only through these creative new kinds of “translation,” which encouraged the vernacularization of the holy tongue, could European Jewish writers vivify Hebrew. Turning next to hasidic writing in Hebrew that derived from Yiddish oral teachings, Frieden examines “Seder hanesi’ah shelo leeretz yisrael” (Order of His Journey to the Land of Israel) and “Nesi’ato leeretz yisrael” (His Journey to the Land of Israel), Nathan Sternharz’s two accounts of Nahman of Bratslav’s journey to the land of Israel from 1798 to 1799. Frieden compares them to Nathan’s retelling of his own pilgrimage 24 years after Nahman’s, and he concludes that Nathan’s “translations” of Nahman’s words and his own prose made a significant step toward naturalistic Hebrew writing. Although Nahman’s purpose in his pilgrimage tales was to use the life-​threatening storms to convey mystical allegories to his readers—​and Nathan, too, remained faithful to sacred time and concerns—​the language moved away from the Bible, in great part because they were thinking in Yiddish even as their published works appeared in Hebrew. That hasidim wrote down their sermons, commentaries, and travelogues—​spoken in Yiddish—​into Hebrew makes their books a form of implicit translation, and an intrinsic component in the development of modern Hebrew prose. They did not write in isolation. Despite fierce polemics against the hasidim by both mitnagdim and East European maskilim (among the latter were Lefin and his brilliant disciple, Joseph Perl) who pointed to their grammatically improper Yiddish and Hebrew as symbols of their resistance to modernity and of their cultural backwardness, hasidic prose writing deeply influenced maskilic writing in both languages. Translations became part of the literary Kulturkampf that rocked East European Jewish society at the end of the 18th century. As Frieden observes, “the maskilim, the mitnagdim, and the Hasidim all inhabited the same cultural space, notwithstanding their geographical spread and mutual animosities” (pp. 107–​108). The influence of hasidic writing on maskilic writing derived from the two ideologies’ competition for the hearts and minds of the Jewish community. The average yeshiva boy, who was the target of both hasidic and maskilic works, was more likely familiar with the popular hasidic and moralistic chapbooks of the period than with the highbrow early maskilic works, which assumed literacy in the layers of the Hebrew language from the Bible through its postbiblical varieties. For instance, whereas East European maskilim, hasidim, and mitnagdim alike wrote about the “seaworthy” verses of Psalm 107:24–​25 (“Those who go down in ships, making it their trade in vast seas/​They have seen God’s works and His wonders in the depths”), they differed with regard to the question of salvation. From where would salvation come if a ship were threatened by terrifying swells and a deluge? For the hasidim, the savior was God, of course; for the maskilim, rationality, knowledge of nature, human preparedness—​with some help from the Divine—​would stabilize their vessel in the turbulent sea.

268 

Book Reviews

Notwithstanding their embrace of modernizing ideologies, the Berlin maskilim arrested to a large extent the potential literary revolution by their obsession with the written biblical text, which they viewed as the zenith of Jewish classical culture. Distancing themselves from postbiblical Hebrew and rejecting Yiddish—​the despised “jargon” of their fellow Ashkenazim—​most of the Berlin writers limited their range of expression. Isaac Euchel and Moses Mendelsohn-​Frankfurt made steps to innovate Hebrew prose through travelogues, but Euchel’s ardor for Spanish Jewish culture and German classicism stymied his efforts. Euchel’s “Letters of Meshullam ben Uriah the Eshtonite,” a Sephardic travelogue that he published in Hame’asef, was mostly a patchwork of passages from Genesis, Jonah, Psalms, and Proverbs, leaving little room for any naturalistic descriptions of what it meant to be at sea. Mendelsohn-​Frankfurt was more successful because his works were translations of contemporary German travelogues. Turning to Joachim Heinrich Campe’s adaptation of “The Discovery of America” to broaden the geographic horizons of his fellow Jews, Mendelsohn-​ Frankfurt moved the Hebrew language forward, creating a glossary of difficult nautical terms and shaping new idioms (p. 162), although he did not completely dispense with biblical phrases. The huge literary leap in modernizing Hebrew came, however, with the maskil Mendel Lefin, who for too long was considered a secondary figure of the Haskalah. In Frieden’s analysis, Lefin emerges as the most important Hebrew stylist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries (full disclaimer: Lefin was the subject of my first book).1 Moving away from melitzah, Lefin shaped a Hebrew prose that was flexible, direct, and clear, evidencing a “sharp edged naturalism” (p. 206). Apart from translating German sea journeys into Hebrew, Lefin also translated biblical texts into Yiddish, Swiss medical texts into Hebrew, and retranslated Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed into a mishnaic style; additionally, he wrote original anti-​hasidic satires, a French essay for the last Polish parliament, and adapted a technique of moral self-​reform from Benjamin Franklin’s French memoirs into Hebrew. His literary innovations were ideologically driven; Lefin wanted to make universalist non-​Jewish writings and rationally oriented Jewish texts accessible to East European Jewish youths tempted by hasidism, which he considered obscurantist, anti-​modern, and a subversion of traditional rabbinic culture. In his introduction to Mase’ot hayam (Sea Voyages, 1818), Lefin juxtaposed the sailors’ reliance on preparedness and skill—​ alongside faith in a reasonable God—​with the hasidic (probably Nahman’s) reliance on a nes mevurar (clear miracle). Faith in the power of prayer to alter nature had no place in the worldview of enlightened Jews. Travels in Translation contains long excerpts of many original texts in Hebrew and German, alongside Frieden’s translations into English, as well as the reprinting of Lefin’s important introduction to his translation of Mase’ot hayam, preserved by Perl in his archive, which Frieden first published in 2009. The book is also enhanced by maps of the sea journeys, frontispieces of little-​known, late 18th-​century Hebrew, Dutch, and German texts, and by charming anchor icons to separate sections within chapters. Paying homage to Dan Miron’s A Traveler Disguised in its title, and drawing on the scholarship of Dov Sadan, Shmuel Werses, Moshe Pelli, Naomi Seidman, and Seth Wolitz, Travels in Translation places translation at the center of modern Jewish

Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion

269

culture. In so doing, it brilliantly shows the limitations of the criticism of “cultural appropriation”; without the ardor of East European maskilim for non-​Jewish travel writings as a vehicle to transform their culture, without their courage to buck the arrogance of Berlin’s fidelity to melitzah, and without their intimate relationship to Yiddish—​even when they disparaged it—​Hebrew writing would have been stuck in the archaisms of the biblical text for most of the 19th century and beyond. In Frieden’s words, “The elite German Jewish writers—​Berlin maskilim—​missed the boat, so to speak” (p. 262). We all would have been—​and will be—​poorer in a world without translation. Long live the East European Jewish armchair explorers of the late 18th century! Nancy Sinkoff Rutgers University

Note 1. Nancy Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl:  Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Providence: 2004).

Sarah Hammerschlag, Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 272 pp.

Over the past three decades, growing scholarly attention has been paid to the place of Judaism in Jacques Derrida’s thought. Such attention is certainly justified, given that, from the second half of the 1980s, religion in general—​and Judaism, in particular—​ became one of Derrida’s central concerns. Derrida’s writings on Judaism and on religious themes are often interpreted as part of the turn in his thought from texts dealing with questions of language, literature, and the history of philosophy to those focusing in the main on ethics, politics, and religion. Moreover, this turn is often interpreted as a move on the part of Derrida toward Emmanuel Levinas, following his early critique of the latter in an essay titled “Violence and Metaphysics.” In Broken Tablets, Sarah Hammerschlag challenges these two positions. She rejects the idea that there is a turn in Derrida’s position, and she believes that, even in his later writings, Derrida maintained his distance from Levinas’ thought. In her words, the relationship between the two can be described as “a friendship which is demonstrated by betrayal” (p. 3). At the center of her interpretation is the connection between religion and literature in Derrida’s thought, with special emphasis on his examination of the question: “In what way does literature descend from Abraham?”1 In examining the links drawn by Derrida between religion and literature, Hammerschlag ties Derrida’s so-​called “later” thought with earlier preoccupations—​namely, the distinction between fictional and non-​fictional language and the related distinction between philosophy and literature. This interpretation of Derrida’s thought also helps to clarify

270 

Book Reviews

the distance between Levinas and Derrida, since Levinas maintains a clear distinction between literature and philosophical thinking, even though he often uses examples from literature to exemplify his philosophical position. Broken Tablets has five chapters. The first discusses encounters between Levinas and Derrida, with special attention paid to their participation in a meeting of the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française in 1965 and to Levinas’ remark concerning the distinction between a “Protestant-​Jew” and a “Catholic-​Jew,” which was later recalled by Derrida in a eulogy he wrote for Levinas. The eulogy not only demonstrates the close ties between Derrida and Levinas, but also emphasizes the Jewish dimension of their friendship. In the following chapter, Hammerschlag explores Levinas’ thought—​in particular, his approach concerning the relationship between religion and literature. In her view, Levinas sought to maintain a separation between the two, believing that the choice between religion and literature was essentially a choice between justice and freedom. Further, Levinas’ conception of religion was based specifically on Judaism. From here, Hammerschlag turns to “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida’s essay on Levinas’ Totality and Infinity (1961). Hammerschlag argues that literature plays a central role in this essay, and that it should be read together with another of Derrida’s essays, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book.”2 In that essay, Derrida makes use of the image of the broken tablets (as presented by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra)—​according to Hammerschlag, the broken tablets are a metaphor for the situation of Judaism after the Shoah, in that they indicate a continued link with Jewish law, even if this link is not one of simple obedience. The fourth chapter discusses the relationship between literature, ethics, and politics in Derrida’s thought. Hammerschlag argues that, for Derrida, literature is a necessary component in political freedom, as it reveals the problematic relationship between the universality of the law and the singularity of each individual’s responsibility to the law. According to Derrida, the universal law of ethics cannot be grounded in the singular subject. For Levinas, in contrast, the universal law of justice is grounded in the responsibility of the subject toward the other, and this responsibility is grounded in Judaism. This explains the difference in the two philosophers’ attitude toward Israel. The privileged place of Judaism in Levinas’ thought prevents him from criticizing Israel as a Jewish state, whereas for Derrida, since the singular can be related to Judaism—​but need not be—​there is no hindrance to making such a critique. In her concluding chapter, Hammerschlag uses her discussion concerning the links between politics and religion to criticize some current approaches regarding the political-​theological nexus, mainly those of Judith Butler and Alain Badiou. Butler is especially relevant since she uses Levinas’ ethics in order to criticize his attitude toward Israel. Against Butler’s claim, Hammerschlag argues that Levinas’ ethics cannot be separated from his attitude toward Judaism in general and Israel in particular. Broken Tablets offers an original and important contribution to the literature on Levinas and Derrida. Its main achievement is to show how Derrida’s thoughts on literature are a guiding thread in understanding his views on ethics, politics, and religion, and as such are the basis for understanding how his thought relates to that of Levinas. In addition, the book offers an illuminating comparison of views of literature as expressed by other philosophers, in particular Jean-​Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot,

Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion

271

and Georges Baitaille. Its more problematic aspect is Hammerschlag’s attempt to read all of Derrida’s thought via his relationship with Levinas, and this relationship via the prism of Judaism. For instance, while the comparison between “Violence and Metaphysics” and Derrida’s articles on Jabès is very interesting, it overlooks the fact that the main reference points in “Violence and Metaphysics” are Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. From reading Broken Tablets, it would appear that philosophy, and phenomenology, in particular, was not really important for Levinas and Derrida. A similar problem concerns the place of Levinas in Derrida’s thought in the 1960s. In this early phase, Derrida read Levinas from a larger context (language, phenomenology, literature, Judaism), whereas by the 1990s, Levinas’ thought is often a main reference point from which other thinkers are read. This difference, however, is blurred by Hammerschlag. Nevertheless, she has made a significant contribution to understanding the Levinas-​Derrida nexus and important aspects of Derrida’s thought in general; anyone interested in these subjects will find Broken Tablets a work of great value. Michael Roubach The Hebrew University

Notes 1.  Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (2nd ed.) & Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago: 2008), 156. 2. Both essays appear in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: 1978).

Vivian Liska, German-​ Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife:  A Tenuous Legacy. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017. 203 pp.

Through the good offices of the European Enlightenment and its ideals of tolerance and personal freedom, the walls of the ghetto, which had restricted the Jews not only to residential enclosures but also to cultural and spiritual seclusion, were torn down. As the denizens of the ghetto rushed to embrace the opportunities afforded them by their liberation from the degradation of enforced isolation, they adopted European secular culture. Despite the extraordinary exuberance they often displayed for their new culture, they did not enter modern European society, as had their Christian sponsors, “in a long process of ‘endogenous’ gestation and growth, but they rather plunged into it as the ghetto walls were being breached, with a bang, though not without prolonged whimpers.”1 The “oy veys” intermingled with the Hallelujahs. The Jewish narrative of secularization is thus a profoundly ambivalent one; its legacy is, indeed, “tenuous,” as Vivian Liska notes in her elegantly crafted and challenging analysis of postmodernist appropriations of 20th-​century German Jewish thought.

272 

Book Reviews

The ambiguous fortunes of Jewish emancipation may be analyzed from the perspective of three parallel tracts: the integration of the Jews in modern German society was not only political but also manifest in their attunement to its cognitive culture and governing axio-​normative social codes. Though they may overlap, each of these dimensions of the process of integration is distinct. The story, of course, actually began before the Jews’ formal emancipation, which, alas, turned out to be a far more protracted affair than simply dismantling the ghetto. The emancipation proceeded incrementally, with many false starts, and was frequently contested. Accordingly, the political and social integration of the Jews lagged considerably behind their cognitive integration. Under the tutelage of Aufklärer such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jews adopted the cognitive culture of the Enlightenment while they were still confined to the ghetto. Led by the likes of Lessing’s protégé and later most intimate friend, Moses Mendelssohn, Jews hastened to participate in the then unfolding culture of the Enlightenment and the Republic of Reason, in which citizenship would be determined by intellect alone. There was a hitch, of course; admission to this Republic was to be acquired at a far-​reaching price. For the cognitive universe sponsored by the Enlightenment posited the elimination of divine revelation as a source of knowledge. The epistemic dignity of Scripture and of the traditions grounded in the revealed Word of God were transferred to reason and secular experience alone. Cognitive integration thus required the jettisoning of Torah and rabbinic wisdom as the ultimate arbiter of truth and of what constitutes a spiritually meaningful life. Political and social integration did not always follow suit, at least not in an utterly unambiguous fashion. Even before they crossed the threshold of the ghetto’s gate, the Jews were apprised that political and social acceptance would be conditioned on their Verbesserung, or self-​reformation. Not only were they expected to shorn the beards and sidelocks enjoined by biblical injunctions, but they were also to adjust their values and social codes to conform with modern European aesthetic and normative sensibilities. Even their best friends, those passionate advocates of extending to them human rights, assaulted them with negative images of their “Asiatic religion.” Kant, who proudly cultivated Jewish disciples, scathingly criticized Judaism as Afterdienst, a pseudo-​religion, putatively embedded in a spiritually jejune array of heteronomous or legally prescribed rituals. He, accordingly, called for the “euthanasia” of Judaism, advising the Jews “to throw off the garb of [their] ancient cult, which now serves no purpose and even suppresses any true religious attitude.” By discarding their Afterdienst, or at least radically reforming it, they would “quickly call attention” to themselves as “an educated and civilized people who are ready for all the rights of citizenship.”2 Hence, whereas Jewish tradition deemed the observance of the Torah as enhancing one’s humanity, Kant and his intellectual progeny deemed Judasim as debasing one’s ethical and cultural dignity. The conditional acceptance of the Jews as fellow human beings worthy of equal civil and political rights set in motion a dialectic that rendered the experience of modernity unique in the annals of Jewish history. From its biblical origins on, Jewry lived comfortably and creatively with other cultures. As the Hebrew Scripture testifies, the Torah was spawned of diverse cultural influences. Later, the adaptation to Hellenistic culture did not vitiate the spiritual integrity of Judaism. Nor did the rabbis hesitate to incorporate Greek legal terms and concepts into talmudic law. The cultural hybridity

Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion

273

of Judaism was most palpably attested to by Yiddish and Ladino and a dozen or so other hybrid Jewish languages of the diaspora. In the Middle Ages, the discourse with Arabic philosophy engendered an unprecedented flourishing of Jewish religious and mystical thought. For traditional Judaism, acculturation did not lead to assimilation and the loss of self-​esteem and fidelity to the Torah. On the contrary, acculturation often served to deepen and inflect Judaism with new vitality. In post-​Enlightenment Europe, however, acculturation perforce—​so it often seemed—​demanded assimilation, and a consequent deracination and the loss of what Jean-​Jacques Rousseau called amour de soi, which is not dependent on how others might view one. With the quest for acceptance by “enlightened” custodians of the new order, amour de soi was replaced by amour-​propre, a self-​esteem that is contingent on the approval of others. Acculturation qua assimilation, then, was an expectation—​ eine Erwartungs­ horizont—​shared by Jews and non-​Jews alike. It was, however, frustrated by the so-​ called Jewish Question. Votaries of the Enlightenment and the liberal polity, not to mention antisemites of various stripes, tirelessly debated whether Jews were ultimately capable of discarding their allegedly deleterious Jewish traits. The more concerted the efforts at assimilation, the more the Jewish Question was paradoxically deemed ever more intractable, increasingly encouraging thoughts of a Final Solution. German Jewish thought thus took place in the ominous shadow of the Jewish Question. Such was the Sitz im Leben—​the existential ground—​of German Jewish thought, particularly in the wake of the Great War, which gave rise to conduct and attitudes that decisively put the lie to the vision of the Enlightenment and its faith in Reason to secure human dignity and felicity. For Jews, the hopes invested in assimilation were ever more regarded as a delusory chimera. Disillusioned, they found themselves in an existential bind. For though they now questioned the axio-​normative premises of assimilation, they nonetheless remained acculturated German Jews, bound to the cognitive and cultural universe that removed them from Judaism, its spiritual and metaphysical resources. Vivian Liska is alert to the methodological issues attendant to the study of German Jewish authors who found themselves adrift in unchartered waters of post-​ assimilation. She suggests, in effect, that it is the hermeneutic task of the student of German Jewish thought to be attuned to the depth and tenacity of the existential aporia of post-​assimilated Jews, even if expressed but pianissimo. Their reaffirmation of Jewish tradition and identity after having experienced the purgatory of secularization (godless modernity) and assimilation was often voiced as a mere “rumour,” “a sort of theology passed by whispers dealing with matters discredited and obsolete” (Walter Benjamin, cited by Liska, p. 2). In her critical review of contemporary, postmodern appropriations of 20th-​century German Jewish thought, Liska trenchantly notes that they tend to de-​contextualize the existential ground of the writings of the likes of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Kafka—​and thus minimize or distort their Jewish dimension. The bête noir of Liska’s critique is Giorgio Agamben, whom she regards as the most egregious representative of such conceptual eviscerations of the distinctive Jewish concerns of post-​assimilated German Jewish authors. With singular exegetical deftness, Liska thus exposes Agamben’s selective and tendentious reading of Benjamin’s meditations on history and messianism

274 

Book Reviews

so as to “transform crucial elements” of Benjamin’s “approach to history, Judaism and ultimately politics” (p. 105). Read through the prism of Agamben’s neo-​Pauline Christianity, Benjamin advocates the abrogation of the law, and the end of history and the chimerical messianic quest for terrestrial justice (p. 118). Agamben reads Hannah Arendt is a similar vein, calling “for the transformation of history into myth, the very antithesis of those elements of Jewish tradition that inspired Arendt” (p. 38). Agamben is not the only one Liska indicts for misappropriating German Jewish thought. She also singles out the literary theorist Maurice Blanchot for rendering into French and interpreting Benjamin’s texts on translation in such a manner as “to distant himself” and his readers from their theological and a fortiori Jewish dimension (p. 97). In commenting on Agamben’s contorted reading of Kafka as adumbrating a Pauline struggle to overcome the “oppressive effects” of the Law of Moses, Liska gives voice to her own credo: It takes an am haaretz such as [Kafka’s] man of the country [...] to approach the law, to bring the human, creaturely element of the Aggadah to Halakhah in order to point to its limits and subvert it: not by suspending or abrogating it but by marking the necessary complementary of law and narrative, which is itself the notion of justice upheld by Judaism. [...] The law has to be limited by the man from the country, by Aggadah and narrative, because they provide the necessary human dimension that enbables the law to reckon with lived life (p. 65).

A life lived on this, the-​temporal side of the eschaton, in an as yet unredeemed world. As Liska observes in her homage to the late Geoffrey Hartman, aggadic commentary is primed by “struggle” (p. 160), an irresolvable and hence unending struggle grounded in quotidian human realities. Accordingly, Liska endorses what she understands to be Kafka’s ultimate message to resist the temptation of closure. “The Jewish ‘critical modernity’ imagined by Kafka [...] does not consist of overcoming transgressing, or trespassing.” For we are to find the “vitality and living substance” of which Kafka speaks “in building [a]‌forever unfinished dwelling, of which the judicial domain conceived as an endless striving for a just order may be a part” (84 f.). Paul Mendes-​Flohr The Hebrew University

Notes 1. R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, Beyond Tradition and Modernity:  Changing Religions in a Changing World (London: 1976), 42. 2.  Immanuel Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” in idem, Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: 1996), 274f.

Edna Nahshon (ed.), New  York’s Yiddish Theater:  From the  Bowery to  Broadway. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 327 pp.

Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion

275

In 1913, a Russian and Yiddish playwright, Osip Dymow, immigrated to America. That year, his play Eternal Wanderer (Der Eibiger vanderer) was performed by Boris Tomashefsky’s Yiddish theater. In 1917, another play by Dymow, Nju was staged by the Bendbox Theater on Broadway. And then, as he later recounted, “in 1919, I wrote a comedy, From Bleecker Street to Prospect Avenue. Leon Crystal [a prominent American Yiddish journalist] said, ‘An awkward title. You’d better call it Bronx Express.’ It was the best gift I ever received.”1 The retitled play went on stage three years later, at the Astor Theater—​and became the hit of the Broadway season. Thus it was that, Dymow an émigré author who humbly debuted on the Yiddish stage of New York City’s Lower East Side, rose to fame at a major American theater uptown. The history of New York’s Yiddish theater from the 1880s to the 1950s is a similarly fast-​paced story of humble beginnings, stunning success, and long-​lasting legacy. In the words of Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry, who edited an earlier collection of essays, “its history is astonishingly compressed,” with theater artists forced “to reckon with changes that might in other cultures take generations to unfold.”2 To be sure, modern Yiddish theater is a transnational phenomenon. It did not begin on the Bowery, nor was Broadway its final destination. However, while in its heyday, New York’s Yiddish theater set the standard for the global Yiddish stage, and today its story is a major chapter in the history of Yiddish theater, reflecting “the totality of modern Jewish experience in a popular art form.”3 The texts and illustrations comprising “From the Bowery to Broadway” capture that totality. This book, both an exhibition catalog (of an exhibition held at the Museum of the City of New York from March to August 2016) and an edited volume of collected essays, is structured as a dramatic play in eleven acts. Each “act” is a thematic essay in which the authors, including such experts in the history of Yiddish theater as Barbara Henry, Edna Nahshon, and Nahma Sandrow, tackle multiple aspects pertaining to the subject. Nahshon’s opening essay (Overture) sets the stage. Nahshon argues that, from the outset, Yiddish theater was a decidedly Jewish space, a “meeting place and forum of the Jewish community” (p. 10). Theater played a major role in the Jewish immigrant culture of New York’s Lower East Side. The first Yiddish theatrical performance in New York took place in 1882, and by 1925, fourteen Yiddish theaters catered to the New York area’s 300,000 Jewish families. Most of these theaters did not survive the Great Depression or the increasing Americanization of their audience. By 1945, there were only four Yiddish theaters in New York, and all of these were gone by the late 1950s. However, at its prime, New York’s Yiddish theater helped immigrant Jews conduct a conversation with America. In many instances, this was accomplished by means of Yiddish-​language adaptations of American classics such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was played by Yiddish actors “in Maccabean spirit” (p. 29). In other cases, theatrical music—​the “DNA of the Yiddish stage” (p. 24)—​resonated both with mainstream Broadway musicals and, more generally, with popular American culture. Indeed, Yiddish theater was, in many ways, “integral to the genealogy of American theater” (p. 44). As Nahshon notes: “Without the Yiddish Theater, the American stage would simply not be the same” (p. 48). Hasia Diner (Act 1) portrays the New York-​centric dynamic of Jewish migration and settlement in America, explaining why half of America’s Jews lived in New York

276 

Book Reviews

by the early 20th century. As a result, in mainstream American culture, the words “New  York” and “Jewish” became almost synonymous. Diner demonstrates that the epicenter of New York Jewish life and the locus of the vibrant Yiddish theatrical culture—​the Lower East Side—​retained its Jewish aura well into the postwar era. Music was both a significant part of immigrant culture and a key ingredient of modern Yiddish theater, as demonstrated in Nahma Sandrow’s contribution (Act 2). In Eastern Europe, early Yiddish theatrical music built upon cantorial pieces and hasidic melodies, as well as on opera and Slavic and Yiddish folksongs. In New York, it was increasingly influenced both by contemporary European opera and operetta and by American popular music. The music score for the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer synthetized Jewish liturgical and folk melodies with ragtime and jazz. According to Sandrow, music itself played an important role in the movie, showing that the reconciliation of Jewish and American cultures was possible. While the Jewish masses were quite happy with the entertainment provided by musical theater, members of the Jewish intellectual elite of the Lower East Side were concerned with artistic quality, striving to reform the theater of shund (trash) to serious art. One of the pivotal figures in this regard, Jacob Gordin, is brought to the fore by Barbara Henry (Act 3). As she shows, Gordin’s prolific playwriting contributed to the maturation of Yiddish theater to an influential art form. Henry argues that the ultimate sources of Gordin’s success were his knowledge and ability at adapting and modernizing European classics, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy, in a manner that reflected the anxieties and preoccupations of Yiddish-​speaking audiences. In Act 4, Nahshon, Stefanie Halpern, and Joshua S. Walden recount stories of three of the Yiddish theater’s superstars: Jacob Adler, Boris Tomashefsky, and Molly Picon. In addition to their enjoying great success on the stage, these figures left a lasting imprint on mainstream American theater and culture. Adler, one of the great interpreters of Shakespeare—​he was noted by critics for his “entirely Jewish take on the character of Shylock” (p.  106)—​started a theatrical dynasty. His children—​Celia, Luther, and Stella—​made significant contributions to Yiddish and American theater (pp. 110–​116). “Matinee idol” Boris Tomashefsky was also a talented entrepreneur who not only expanded Yiddish theater by mounting Yiddish-​language productions both uptown and in cities outside New York but also founded a Yiddish theatrical syndicate and a Yiddish film studio. Whereas Adler and Tomashefsky were immigrants, the American-​born Picon had to visit Eastern Europe to imbibe the authentic spirit of Yiddish culture and to learn the Yiddish spoken and understood by her New York admirers. A special chapter (Act 5, again by Nahshon) is devoted to Maurice Schwartz, arguably the brightest star of New York’s Yiddish theater. He established and ran the Yiddish Art Theater, the longest-​lasting Yiddish theatrical enterprise, which ran from 1918 until the mid-​1950s. Schwartz envisioned Yiddish theater as a collaboration of cutting-​edge performance and visual arts. He visually revamped the Yiddish stage with pioneering sets designed by the Russian émigré avant-​garde artist, Boris Aronson, whose contribution is discussed in Act 7 by Arnold Aronson. Another institutional effort aimed at the creation of Yiddish art theater—​the Artef (1925–​1940), rooted both in radical leftist politics and in an aesthetic of high culture—​is described by Nahshon in Act 6.

Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion

277

Acts 8 (by Eddy Portnoy), 9 (Nahshon and Judith Thissen), and 10 (Nahshon) explore little-​known facets of New York’s Yiddish theater culture. According to Portnoy, the Yiddish puppet theater Modicut (1925–​1933) “represents a moment when Yiddish culture was at its peak and serves as an example of what was possible within the framework of a greater Yiddish culture” (p. 236). Yiddish vaudeville, a flourishing genre of Yiddish theater, had mostly disappeared by the 1940s. However, vaudeville’s “revue format was transported to early radio, film, and television, leaving its mark on American show business” (p. 244). Also important was the hybrid “Yinglish” entertainment culture of the Catskills Mountains resorts that catered to predominantly Jewish clientele. The careers of such icons of American theater and film as Mel Brooks, Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, and Moss Hart were all launched in the Catskills. The volume’s grand finale, Alisa Solomon’s Act 11, discusses the continuity and ultimate triumph of New  York’s Yiddish theater in an English-​language embodiment, the stunningly successful 1964 Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. In Solomon’s words, “work on Fiddler was a labor of loving rediscovery of their roots” (p. 300)—​referring not only to director Jerome Robbins (a student of Maurice Schwartz), set designer Boris Aronson (a veteran of the Yiddish art theater), and Luther Adler (the son of Jacob Adler, who was Zero Mostel’s replacement as Tevye in the play), but also to many of those in the audience. While the volume’s eleven acts comprise an engaging storyline, the illustrations (more than 200 in number) both complement the story and tell their own. The visual materials are integrated in such a way that a reader can learn from world-​class experts in the field (from the text on the even-​numbered pages) while enjoying high-​quality reproductions from actual exhibits on display at the Museum of the City of New York (on the odd-​numbered pages). Among these, colored lantern slides from the early 1900s that depict Yiddish actors (pp. 140–​149) stand out as a collective portrait of New  York’s Yiddish theater at its prime. Pieces of oral history—​reminiscences of Yiddish actors and their families, such as Eve Kahn’s poignant story about her Uncle Misha, a forgotten star of the Yiddish theater—​complement the articles and visuals. Biographies of key figures in the New York Yiddish theater complete the volume, along with a selected bibliography and index, making From the Bowery to Broadway a useful tool for research and teaching. Theater is an essential part of material culture, and thus its history is preserved and documented by artifacts: playbills, posters, set designs, costumes, newspaper clippings, and photographs. It is therefore no surprise that exhibition catalogs stand out among the major works on the history of Yiddish theater.4 It is no coincidence that the most important of these exhibitions have taken place in New York City. Two of them, at the Guggenheim Museum in 1993 and at the Jewish Museum in 2009, emphasized the artistic significance and global impact of Yiddish theater. From the Bowery to Broadway, the product of the most recent exhibition on the subject, provides a vivid, multifaceted portrayal of Yiddish theater at home, in New York. Vassili Schedrin Queen’s University

278 

Book Reviews

Notes 1.  Osip Dymow, Diary, 15. Unpublished manuscript, found at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 469. 2.  Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry (eds.), Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business (Detroit: 2012), 3-​4. 3.  Ibid., 2. 4. See Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theater (New York: 1992) and Susan Goodman (ed.), Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-​1949 (New Haven: 2008).

Karen E.H. Skinazi, Women of  Valor:  Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in  Contemporary Literature and Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 290 pp.

This lively and readable book opens the window to a rich and vibrant world of Orthodox, or religiously observant, Jewish women who keep kosher and Shabbat while holding jobs, solving crimes, confronting prejudice, and making music. Drawing on memoirs, novels, film, and a graphic novel, Karen Skinazi argues that Jewish women find opportunities for personal empowerment through religious observance, and that their actions within the tradition (and against it) offer opportunities for corrective approaches to the tradition and to its perception by outsiders. The book is structured around selected verses of “Eshet ḥayil”—​“Woman of Valor” (Prov. 31:10–​31)—​an acrostic poem that is sung on Friday nights as part of the Shabbat observance (the term also refers to any woman who is an active public figure). For Skinazi, the initiative, authority, energy, and intelligence ascribed to the woman of valor in the poem offers a counternarrative to mainstream fictional and media depictions of religious observance. The book thus offers itself as a feminist affirmation of religious practice in the post-​secular age as described by German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas and Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. The first chapter, “A G-​d-​Fearing-​Woman, She Should Be Praised,” focuses on narratives by and about women who have rejected Orthodoxy. Among the texts analyzed by Skinazi are memoirs by Deborah Feldman, Leah Vincent, Reva Mann, Leah Lax, and Chaya Deitsch, and fiction by Judy Brown, Anouk Markovits, and Naomi Alderman, all of which position their authors as “still dedicated to the betterment of their (former) communities” (p. 66): “Rather than resigning themselves to condemning Orthodox Judaism as an instrument of women’s oppression, the authors reconceive it as a space of female empowerment and activism” (p. 31). The second chapter, “A Woman of Valor Who Can Find,” focuses on Orthodox Jewish women characters in crime fiction by Faye Kellerman (the Peter Decker/​Rina Lazarus series), with Rochelle Krich’s Blues in the Night and Libi Astaire’s The Disappearing Dowry also mentioned. In portraying the Orthodox woman “who speaks, who does, who teaches—​even as she wipes a dish” (p. 96), these novels fulfil their primary function: to “teach the lessons of Orthodox Judaism” to the reader (p. 97). This dedication and service to the tradition is evident as well in the following chapter, “She Opens her

Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion

279

Mouth with Wisdom,” which highlights Malka Zipora’s collection of short stories, Lekhaim!, the publication of which Skinazi credits with propelling hasidic women to political prominence in Quebec (though she provides no evidence to support this claim). Chapter 4, “She Senses That Her Enterprise Is Good,” addresses representations of Orthodox businesswomen through a reading of Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls (in which one of the characters opens a small shop before being forced to close it by the community’s rabbi). Chapter 5, “She Will Be Praised at the Gates by Her Very Own Deeds,” discusses American filmmakers Tobi Einhorn and Robin Garbose, whose feature films are screened for women only, and the indie rock band Bulletproof Stockings, who performed at women-​only venues between 2011–​2016. This varied context is presented as an extensive rebuttal to what Skinazi describes as mainstream representations of Orthodox Jewish women and girls who, she insists, are consistently featured as “sitting silently in their dun-​colored, floor-​length, appropriately fastened clothing at the back of the bus or locked in their homes, despairing their helpless fate” (p. 20; see also p. 191). This is a powerful image, one that hardly fits the diverse communities and practices featured in this book. Judaism encompasses a continuum of attitudes, practices, and beliefs, and “Orthodox,” Skinazi acknowledges, is “a catchall word that seems to mean both too much and too little” (p. xii). What binds these women is how they are represented: “passive, limited, interpellated subjects in an oppressive patriarchal society” (p. 191). Though this image, and its impact, is never documented by Skinazi, each chapter of Women of Valor is dedicated to demolishing it. The memoirs and novels discussed in Chapter 1 subvert the assumption that women who “have suffered under the weight of their wigs and their wombs [and] watched the suffering of others” must perforce offer a “wholesale denunciation” of the tradition they have rejected (p. 30). Chapter 2 contradicts “the cultural logic that deems Orthodox Judaism a mysterious and therefore potentially dangerous practice” by featuring Orthodox women characters who “[take] charge” (p. 76). The Orthodox woman who “opens her mouth with wisdom” (Chapter 3) assuages fears that “women in minority groups such as the Hasidim were being oppressed and silenced” (p. 117). Orthodox businesswomen in fiction and film (Chapter 4) correct the stereotype that “many people believe that Jewish [ . . . ] women, once they are mothers, don’t work” (p. 151). As one who does not share the assumptions or stereotypes Skinazi attributes to her audience, I wondered about the implied readership of this book. Skinazi includes American, British, Canadian, and Israeli material and emphasizes that the link between women and Orthodoxy cannot be confined by national borders, but Woman of Valor is resolutely American in its emphasis on “mainstream American popular culture and media” (p. 191). And yet, most of Skinazi’s American readers do not need the repeated clarification that “Shabbat” refers to the Jewish Sabbath (p. 5, 32); they might rather benefit from translation of the more esoteric terms (among them, “bursa” [p. 87], “gingi” [p. 89], and “niggun” [p. 144]) that Skinazi leaves unglossed. Despite its flaws, this is a timely book. Recent decades have evidenced a more widespread practice of religious modesty laws by both Muslim and Jewish women for whom the headscarf represents personal empowerment, political affiliation, and critique of gender norms. While readers seeking a feminist affirmation of religious

280 

Book Reviews

practice are likely to be disappointed by Women of Valor (the book can be read as a lament to the extent to which women’s self-​representations have not managed to correct or evade patriarchy), Skinazi’s discussion helps set the stage the stage for 21st-​ century approaches to the religiously observant woman. Naomi Mandel The Hebrew University

Jeffrey Summit, Singing God’s Word:  The Performance of  Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 293 pp.

At the end of the 12th century, a Jewish scholar from the (then) Provençal town of Lunel left his home to embark on a long journey to the towns and yeshivot of southwestern Germany, northern and southern France, the Provence, England, and Spain. The scholar, R. Abraham ben Nathan (Hayarḥi), compiled his learnings with the great teachers of his time, alongside observations of the local communities he visited, into a book that became a rich source for contemporary liturgical and sociological research in the field of Jewish medieval Europe: his Sefer hamanhig, “The Guide.” Ethnomusicologist Jeffrey Summit, it seems, went on a similar—​albeit anthropological rather than halakhic—​journey. Singing God’s Word: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism traces the Jewish American conversation on tradition, experience, and performance of Torah chanting (leyening). Over the course of about a decade, Summit visited select communities in New York, Los Angeles, greater Miami, Cincinnati, and Chicago, conducting 137 interviews, collecting 237 online surveys, and analyzing an additional 250 interviews carried out by his students. He was especially interested in Jews like himself:  well-​educated American Ashkenazim for whom Jewish identity and its specific musical tradition are sources of pride and meaning. These are Jews who have had a bar/​bat mitzvah celebration at some point of their lives, and who, as adults, dedicate time and energy to learning and reclaiming “an authentic performance of Jewish identity” (p. 123). Singing God’s Word is a dense and profound work that deals with an important aspect of Jewish American discourse and custom. Structured as a mix of traditional learning from canonic rabbinical sources and quotes from the interviews Summit and his students conducted, it begins with an overview of the tradition of Torah reading, including an outline of the ritual pattern of a Torah service and a thick-​reading thereof. This is followed by a section describing and analyzing the experience of chanting Torah “in different keys,” in the words of Erving Goffman (whom Summit quotes on p.  10)—​namely, from individual, communal, feminist, and inclusive perspectives. The third section discusses the performance itself, while the final section provides a brief overview of the available online resources for learning the skill of Torah chanting, pointing to the growing democratization (and musical homogeneity) resulting from this availability.

Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion

281

This book, it seems, will be most insightful for those who are not described in it. As a profound description of the nature of the white American Jewish conversation, it is likely to be most useful to readers who come from different backgrounds: non-​ Americans, non-​Ashkenazi Jews, and, simply, readers of the future. Those who are similar to Summit in terms of Jewish education and training are apt to be familiar with the book’s contents, whereas readers who are less Jewishly educated may be frustrated by the fact that details related to traditional learning—​from the theological symbolism of the Torah service to the practical details of the leyening skill itself—​are spread throughout the book and therefore difficult to combine into a cohesive analysis. In short: Singing God’s Word is not about Torah reading. Rather, it is a fascinating inquiry into the spirituality and practice of a large group of American Jews in search of the sacred. Though never stated explicitly, this quest appears to be the guiding theme of the book. Summit attempts to get to the core of Jewish-​American identity: Why do we attend services? Why do we wish to leyen? How do we experience and think about ourselves, about Judaism, about our lives as Jews? In a previous book, The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land (2000), Summit offered an analysis of one way in which American Jews seek to preserve their heritage, community and identity. Here, in describing Torah leyening as a second way, he simultaneously describes American Jews as spiritual seekers who invest great efforts, financial resources, and time, in order to get “a sense of kedushah—​the sacred nature of the experience” (p. 132). Sonja K. Pilz Hebrew Union College–​Jewish Institute of Religion

History, Biography, and Social Science

Matthew Baigell, The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877–​1935. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017. 240 pp. Matthew Baigell, Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art, 1880–​ 1940. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015. 280 pp. Matthew Baigell has accomplished the enviable achievement of juggling two distinguished careers as an art historian. He first came to prominence as a scholar of the arts of the United States, writing both on canonical painters (among them, 19th-​century landscapists Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt) and on 20th-​century artists and movements such as Thomas Hart Benton and the American Scene. More recently, Baigell has established himself as a leading scholar of Jewish American art, often examining non-​canonical artists and imagery, as he does in the two books discussed here. Baigell’s two careers (and identities) most soundly overlap when he takes on the arts, issues, organizations, and politics of the 1930s. While the title Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art 1880–​1940 promises a sixty-​year examination through a series of five related essays, it is actually one specific decade, the 1930s, that pushes to the forefront. Gracing the book’s cover is a strong social realist stone lithograph by Leon Bibel, titled Unemployed Marchers (1938), and Chapter 5, “Artists’ Responses during the 1930s,” is the only decade-​ specific heading in the book. Further, when Baigell considers the works of artists such as Ben Shahn in the post-​Holocaust years, he ties the reaffirmation of religiosity in their work to their earlier, career-​making art of social concern. In fact, much of the volume traces the movement toward the essential 1930s and, from there, artists’ retreat, response, and rethinking of their art, politics, and religiosity (or lack thereof) from that earlier period of time. Despite the recent proliferation of studies dealing with American art and the Left, few authors, Baigell notes, have closely examined the impact of religion on Jewish artists, nor have they connected the artists’ cultural and religious backgrounds with their radicalism. In this light, Baigell’s book can be seen as a corrective to the current literature. Motivated by a decades-​old essay by Maurice Hindus that questioned the connections between Jewish radicalism and religious heritage (published in 1927 in the Menorah Journal), Baigell offers numerous clarifications of the complex relationship between religious heritage, social concern, and radical politics. He ponders, for instance, why, in the years prior to the Second World War, there was such a disproportionate number of Jews among leftist American artists. His claim is that, whereas many artists cast aside religious traditions in favor of secularism or socialism, they Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0027

History, Biography, and Social Science

283

remained more shaped by their religious training than they were willing to admit, either then or thereafter. Baigell argues that, in their turn to radicalism, such Jewish artists drew upon the sense of social concern and communal responsibility that they were schooled in as immigrant children. In addition, with the growth of antisemitism during the 1920s, radicalism provided a means for Jews to combat antisemitic imagery and discrimination. This fight against antisemitism—​through visual culture—​ is the common thread of Baigell’s two volumes. Early on, Baigell offers several important caveats to readers: social concern and responsibility is not exclusively a Jewish element; social concern is not an overall characteristic of Jewish art; and a “specifically Jewish art” does not really exist (p.  12). To make these points clearer, Baigell looks back to the careers of two Protestant radical painters, John Sloan and Robert Henri, to gauge the uniqueness of art created by radical Jews. He shows the commonalities of themes and style between Sloan and Henri and contemporary Jewish artists; no overt differences are apparent. In the future, more cross-​cultural studies would be useful in fleshing out the art and politics and the main actors of these decades, and Baigell’s discussion of such realists as Sloan and Henri in comparison with contemporaneous Jewish artists is a step in the right direction. Unlike standard art history texts that are often replete with color illustrations of fine art Baigell selects his imagery and builds his arguments around objects of visual culture such as cartoons from the popular press and greeting cards. Such widely distributed images reached more of the masses than did singular paintings owned by wealthy individuals. Baigell also looks at publicly funded murals by three key muralists—​Ben Shahn, Joseph Hirsch, and Philip Evergood—​who rose to prominence in the 1930s. While his discussion of the murals and the artists is solid, Baigell (as have other art historians) errs in including Evergood, whose father was Jewish but who did not himself identify as a Jew. The inclusion of additional women artists apart from Selma Freeman would also have enriched the text. The prominence of antisemitism and its use of visual strategies to defame Jews is a common theme of both books by Baigell (also uniting the two volumes is Baigell’s choice of visual culture as the main focus of study). Equal parts fascinating and disturbing, his most recent volume, The Implacable Urge to Defame, centers on the visual stereotyping of Jews through cartoons and caricatures, beginning in the 1870s. Baigell’s close and exacting readings of the images within their original social contexts helps to extract their full meaning. His writing style is quite approachable, and the images he presents are overt and easy to understand; in many cases, they are also abhorrent enough to make a reader pull away. The author acknowledges as much. As he states up front, while the book is scholarly in its intent, its delivery is personal: thus he recounts his own experiences with antisemitism and his reactions to the images and, in a welcome move, dispenses with a cloaked scholarly persona in favor of more openly assertive authorial voice. The timeframe covered by the book, 1877 to 1935, corresponds to two specific events: the first being an incident in which a prominent Jewish businessman, Joseph Seligman, was denied entrance to the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York—​a rejection that cartoonists found humorous and subject to ridicule—​and the second marking the start of the Popular Front alliance between the Communist Party and

284 

Book Reviews

various left-​wing U.S. associations. The majority of early cartoons were aimed at the middle-​class, Protestant readership of popular magazines and newspapers. As Baigell points out, members of every immigrant, racial, and ethnic group were subject to caricature and stereotype; none were exempt. However, Baigell argues, anti-​Jewish images were more pervasive than others, and Jews were the targets of more malleable stereotypes. Starting in the late 1870s, caricature intensified and became more virulent, and it also spread rapidly. In considering why hatred of Jews was so persistent and why it was so often expressed by means of caricature, Baigell (in his second chapter) looks to Freud and other theorists for possible answers, one of which is that Jews constituted the ultimate “Other” in American culture. In Chapter 4, “Art and Politics,” Baigell shifts his focus from the crude caricatures and cartoons of the weekly newspapers to the fine arts and modernist art. He notes that ambivalence toward Jews permeated the art world, especially when Jews began, in the period just before and after the First World War, to assert their presence. With the rise to prominence of Alfred Stieglitz—​a photographer, gallerist, and, most significantly, an early proselytizer of modernist art in America, who promoted such artists as Max Weber and Abraham Walkowitz—​questions arose among Protestant, establishment art critics as to who should decide the character of American art and culture and, in addition, who should not decide its character or challenge traditional Anglo-​ Saxon hegemony. Baigell cites a 1920 issue of The Nation in which critic Mary Austin ridiculed other critics who confused New York with America, singling out Jews as being “unable to interpret America, incapable of developing an American consciousness in the arts, and uncomprehending of the forces of American life” (p. 136). He also discusses the rise of nationalism in art as expressed by prominent critics such as Royal Cortissoz (an arch traditionalist who denounced “Ellis Island art” as infecting American art and society) and Thomas Craven (who dismissed the highly respected Stieglitz as a “Hoboken Jew”). Finally, Baigell puts to good use his expertise on the artist Thomas Hart Benton, in particular his deep knowledge of the artist’s writings, in order to deconstruct the meaning behind Benton’s questionable, stereotypical statements and images of Jews. During the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, many left-​wing Jewish artists in New York were committed to Communist-​controlled organizations such as the John Reed Club and the American Artists’ Congress, and a number of them—​prominent among them, William Gropper—​ caricatured their religious cohorts, alongside Zionists and non-​Communist Jewish leftists. Baigell seeks to understand this phenomenon. In examining hitherto overlooked Jewish aspects of Gropper’s cartoons, he provides a fascinating account of the complexity of Gropper’s identity as Jew, leftist, and artist. As Baigell notes, we lack a scholarly monograph on this artist; perhaps his discussion will inspire one to be written. Baigell concludes his book by bringing us up to the more recent state of affairs, with its cries of “take back America” (from whom?) and the continuation of stereotypes of a wide variety of racial and ethnic groups within America. While acknowledging the virtual lack of antisemitic cartoons within the United States at present, he does point out their use on the global front. Why should we look at these images, if they are so abhorrent? Baigell both asks and answers the question: these images and writings help us understand not only the past but also the present day, thereby sensitizing us to

History, Biography, and Social Science

285

the plight of other minorities within the United States. By helping us to see how such images function, Baigell does important work. I recommend both books highly. Diana L. Linden Claremont, Calif.

Ido Bassok, Teḥiyat hane’urim: mishpaḥah veḥinukh beyahadut polin bein milḥamot ha’olam (Revival of  Youth:  Family and Education among Interwar Polish Jewry). Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2015. 357 pp. ́ Kamil Kijek, Dzieci Modernizmu:  S wiadomoś ć, kultura i socjalizacja polityczna młodzieży żydowskiej w II Rzeczpospolitej (Children of Modernism:  The Consciousness Culture and Political Socialization of Jewish Youth in the Second Polish Republic). Wrocław:  Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2017. 462 pp.

The past few decades have seen a remarkable upsurge in academic research on the history of Polish Jewry, including the history of Polish Jews in the Second Republic. Since the landmark conferences at Oxford (1984), Brandeis (1986), and Jerusalem (1988), academic symposia on the subject have become routine. Journals such as Polin and Gal-​Ed have given scholars unprecedented opportunities to publish their work, while the opening of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews—​as well as never-​ending public controversies about Poland and the Holocaust—​have stimulated public interest in the subject. The fall of Communism has made archival access easier. There are now many well-​ established graduate programs and much new scholarship that examines not only the well-​studied political history of interwar Polish Jewry but also less well-​known yet equally important aspects of social and cultural history. These two books on Jewish youth in interwar Poland, Ido Bassok’s Teḥiyat hane’urim and Kamil Kijek’s Dzieci Modernizmu, are a welcome addition to this growing literature. Among the many problems faced by interwar Polish Jewry, the situation of Jewish youth was especially acute. Many Jewish young people regarded themselves as a “generation without a future,” and it was easy to see why. They were born in a tough time. Very many suffered, either directly or indirectly, from the ravages of the First World War: razed homes and towns; parents forced to become penniless refugees; pogroms; the upending of an old established moral order; economic chaos; lethal epidemics of typhus and influenza; the loss of one or both parents. And once the havoc of war ended, they faced a world that was in many ways quite different from that of their parents. Compared to the prewar years, life was generally difficult. Parents were hard pressed to help their children by putting aside dowries to help them marry, paying tuition, or keeping the family business or workshop going. As more countries shut their doors, the option of emigration became less realistic. The 1930s saw the growing proletarianization of Polish Jewry, which for many meant low-​paid jobs

286 

Book Reviews

in tiny workshops or long hours of piecework at home. All too many young people grew up in homes where parents, worn down by economic worries, showed little understanding or patience for their children’s emotional needs. Of course, this is not the whole picture; many children grew up in loving, caring homes. Overall, however, available sources paint a grim picture. These young people also faced formidable cultural and social challenges. They were the first generation of Jews growing up in a Polish nation-​state whose laws mandated compulsory primary education. The overwhelming majority of these young people would attend Polish state schools where they not only learned the Polish language but also acquired a genuine admiration of Polish history and high culture. Yet those same schools dealt Jews a rude shock in their most formative years by reminding them, in many ways, that the Polish culture and history was not theirs. The pain of rejection, of being unwanted outsiders, shaped an entire generation of Jewish youth. Many of these young people found themselves stranded between two cultures, increasingly likely to speak Polish rather than Yiddish, shaped willy-​nilly by their Polish surroundings, but at the same time, consciously and unambiguously Jewish. Most Jewish youth had to leave school at age 14—​unable to afford high school, much less university. Those lucky few who received a higher education found most doors slammed in their face, victims not only of the refusal of state and municipal institutions to engage Jews but also of the escalating antisemitism of Polish professional organizations. It did not help matters that the interwar Polish economy suffered from chronic depression and unemployment. Excluded from the more dynamic sectors of the economy, young Jews seeking work found themselves trapped in an economic ghetto. On paper, the Polish state promised them equal rights, but in practice they were reminded at every opportunity that they were second-​class citizens. It came as little surprise that many young people found themselves increasingly alienated from the world of their parents, often rejecting their religious values and looking to their own peers for fellowship and guidance. These years were the golden era of Jewish youth movements, which appealed to the entire spectrum of Jewish youth. Even though only 20 percent of the age cohort were active members at any given time, the youth movements played a critical role in providing opportunities for education, artistic expression, and fellowship. They became a home away from home, a place where young people could find emotional refuge and acceptance that was often lacking at home or in Polish schools. Historians who try to study youth culture and generational attitudes always face the problem of finding suitable sources. While there is no lack of material written by adults, what about material written by young people? To be sure, there are many diaries and journals, but how representative are they? Although the Jewish youth movements in interwar Poland produced many ideological manifestos and political broadsides, these, too, do not necessarily shed much light on young Jews’ inner world, emotional struggles, or hopes and dreams. Fortunately, both Kijek and Bassok rely in large part on a unique resource offering remarkable access to the authentic voices of interwar Polish Jewish youth: the YIVO youth autobiographies. In 1932, 1934, and 1939, the Vilna-​based Yiddish Scientific Institute organized competitions to encourage young people between the ages of 16-​ 22 to write their autobiographies, thereby including those born between 1910 and

History, Biography, and Social Science

287

1923. (Indeed, there are unmistakable differences between entries written in 1932 and those written in 1939.) The institute received 627 autobiographies in all, of which 387 survived the war and are available to researchers. Of these, 73 percent were written in Yiddish, 20 percent in Polish, and 5 percent in Hebrew. Works written by women comprised 25 percent of the total and were thus underrepresented. Both Kijak and Bassok chose what they considered to be a representative sample of autobiographies:  the former deals with 100 works and the latter 150. One might object that these autobiographies are a skewed source. After all, YIVO was widely regarded as a Yiddishist, leftist institution that supported diaspora nationalism, despite the best efforts of its director, Max Weinreich, to stand above the political tumult of the Jewish street. Kijek makes a good case for seeing the youth autobiographies as a reliable resource. Notwithstanding YIVO’s reputation as a bastion of diaspora nationalism, for example, 50 percent of the participants supported various brands of Zionism. Kijek underscores the diversity of the group, which comprised religious Jews and Communists, members of the right-​wing revisionist Betar, Polonized young people from Galicia, and here and there the sons and daughters of wealthy Jews. In short, Kijek asserts, “the political, geographical, socioeconomic and cultural diversity of the autobiographies permits one to reach conclusions that are valid for an entire generation. This is especially true because many conclusions offered in these autobiographies were similar despite the social and political differences of the writers” (p. 35). Although Kijek and Bassok deal in general terms with the same subject, there are considerable differences in their books. Kijek advances a thesis that stresses change and even rupture, focusing on the ways in which Jewish youth embraced radical solutions to such myriad challenges of modernization as the erosion of parental authority, secularization, and a loss of faith in liberal, moderate solutions for a system seen as economically dysfunctional and deeply discriminatory. Bassok, using the same sources, is more prepared to argue that, despite indisputable evidence of crisis and rupture, there were also important elements of continuity. To say that Kijek has written an imaginative and exciting book is an understatement. Specialists in Polish Jewish history will recognize Dzieci Modernizmu as one of the most important studies to emerge in many years, a work that seamlessly weaves together suggestive detail with illuminating insights. To begin with, Kijek adopts a sophisticated theoretical framework. From Itamar Even-​Zohar, he borrows the concept of cultural interference to probe hybridity—​the interplay of conflicting influences of Polish and Jewish cultures on this generation. Another key concept used by Kijek is Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, the “socialized subjectivity” reflecting an individual’s internalization of what are the rules of the game. This concept, which takes account of the impact of social structures on individual dispositions and choices, and the fluid interplay of external influences and subjective agency, enables Kijek to look past specific ideological and party differences to explain why young people often flitted from movement to movement, from idea to idea—​acting out of a deep sense of anger and rage, and a deep conviction that the present system had to give way to a better world. Theirs was a habitus that stressed the primacy of the collective, marked by an inclination to seek monistic solutions and an impatience with stopgap, pragmatic reformism. Tellingly, Kijek notes that while many young people from shtetls

288 

Book Reviews

condemned the stagnation and backwardness of their communities, few even mentioned the institutions—​among them, free loan societies—​that were keeping their towns afloat. Following a rich and nuanced introduction, Kijek divides his book into eight sections: tradition; individual aspirations and the world of work; study in state schools; private Jewish schooling; models of cultural participation; symbolic exclusion and antisemitism; political activity; and political consciousness. Each section contains a wealth of detail and insights, drawn largely although not exclusively from the YIVO autobiographies. Regardless of whom he is dealing with—​Communists, religious youth, Zionists—​Kijek always has something new to say, whether concerning elite religious education, the role of youth movements in the shtetl, or the place of Yiddish speakers from poor urban homes in the interwar Communist party. He places the discussion of Jewish youth squarely in the context of wider political and cultural developments of the interwar period:  economic depression, the decline of the political center, the surge of radical movements on the Right and the Left. As noted, an additional and critically important fact is that these young Jews were the first generation to grow up in a Polish nation-​state. Thus, Jewish youth encountered more “othering” of Jews than had their parents; whereas young Polish peasants, for example, were also a first generation to study in primary schools, they were less inclined than their parents to see Jews as natural neighbors rather than as members of an alien ethnic group. Even the minority of Jewish youth who did not attend Polish schools were exposed to a new culture that valorized Polishness. This exaltation of Polish history, of Polish heroism, of the Polish struggle for independence struck a deep chord among many young Jews and thus magnified their frustration and despair when they discovered that Poles would never accept them as equal citizens. Regardless of what the Polish constitution said, the Second Republic was in fact a state based on ethnic Polishness rather than civic citizenship. As Kijek shows, the rejection of Jews encouraged the development of a deep Jewish national identity that, while taking various forms, reflected a common alienation from the surrounding Polish society. He notes, for example, how rarely these young people mentioned Polish political parties in their autobiographical accounts. Both Kijek and Bassok offer important correctives to existing studies on the subject of interwar Polish Jewish youth, including works authored by Marcus Moseley and Moshe Kligsberg.1 For example, they each take issue with the assertions of Moseley and Kligsberg that, to a large degree, serious reading shaped the attitudes of Polish Jewish youth. Although a small minority of young people were indeed voracious readers and looked to the heroes of Jean Rolland and Maxim Gorky for emulation and inspiration, many more either simply couldn’t afford books or were too tired to do much reading in their spare time. In Teḥiyat hane’urim, Bassok covers much of the same ground as Kijek, but from a different perspective. This is a very good book—​an informative study that, while not as intellectually daring as Kijek’s, nonetheless offers an array of important insights based on solid research. Bassok is reluctant to advance an overarching conceptual framework, instead emphasizing the difficulties in generalizing about the problems and experiences of Jewish youth in interwar Poland. He stresses the importance of looking at these young people as individuals whose inner needs and hopes did not

History, Biography, and Social Science

289

always neatly reflect or refract wider social and political trends that, in turn, were hardly unilinear. Stagnation and hide-​bound conservatism existed alongside unprecedented creativity and ferment. Like Kijek, Bassok finds much rebellion among the youth, but he also points to widespread allegiance to religious norms, at least superficially, and some nostalgia for Jewish tradition, evidenced by such practices as attending synagogue on major Jewish holidays or fasting on Yom Kippur. Bassok is less comfortable than Kijek with the use of social theory. Nonetheless, he is keenly aware of how to relate these individual life stories to a larger social framework. His is a “middle position between a positivism that regards this material as a reflection and a function of popular positions and social relationships, on the one hand, and an opposing, equally extreme, solipsistic view that regards the individual as inhabiting an isolated world whose narration of his relations with others, or of his own experience, teaches us only about himself and does not include anything beyond his own self” (p. 293). Thus, even as Bassok recognizes the important differences between the younger generations and that of their parents—​especially in the field of education and youth movements—​he is also inclined (much more so than Kijek) to find elements of continuity and the persistence of traditional patterns. Perhaps for this reason, he underscores the tendency of the Jewish press and of the political parties to exaggerate the tempo of the modernization of Jewish life. Bassok’s book is organized in three basic sections. The first deals with the Jewish family: gender roles; the impact of grandparents; traditional prejudices against sport and physical activity; class distinctions; parents’ attitudes toward milestones in their children’s lives. In this section as in the others, Bassok properly stresses the importance of regional factors in educational patterns and even in family dynamics. For instance, for many various reasons, there was more generational ferment in Congress Poland, and especially in its big cities, than there was in Jewish Lithuania. Bassok’s analysis of the image of grandparents in the youth autobiographies—​in many cases they are portrayed as positive role models—​is especially thought-​provoking. The second section, on education, deals with the primary-​ school experience of Jewish children and youth as well as with the small minority who received secondary schooling. Bassok surveys the large variety of schools, from the Polish public schools that enrolled an ever-​increasing majority of Jewish children, to modernized and less modernized khadorim, Tarbut schools, and Yiddish schools. In the process, he raises many important issues, among them the complex impact of Polish schooling on Jewish children, the importance of class differences, and the reasons why Jewish parents chose certain kinds of schooling over others. Here, too, Bassok is reluctant to reach one-​sided conclusions. Even the largely reviled kheyder found its defenders in some of the youth autobiographies. Many Jewish young people rebelled against Jewish tradition. But there were others who expressed nostalgia for the traditional Jewish world and its example of cultural integrity, even as that world found itself under increasing assault. Like Kijek, Bassok also deals with the painful subject of the favoritism displayed by teachers in all types of Jewish schools, with the exception of the Central Yiddish School Organization (CYSHO), toward children whose parents were better off, and thus more likely to pay full tuition. The third section deals with youth movements and parallel organizations (since the former enrolled only 20 percent of the age cohort, Bassok widened his research

290 

Book Reviews

focus to include other kinds of organizations such as school clubs, sporting groups, and trade unions). One of Bassok’s more daring—​and arguable—​assertions is his belief that, in many ways, these youth organizations reflected deep-​seated continuities in Jewish history. He sees similarities with the hasidic movement, with the traditional kehilla, and with such traditional organizations as the sick-​aid (bikkur khoylim) society. Such phenomena as young people’s courts; the shunning of members who violated the norms of the group; concern for the health of comrades; a felt need to correct the wider failings of existing Jewish institutions—​all these attest, Bassok believes, to the special nature of these youth organizations. In his view, these groups need to be understood not only synchronically but also diachronically, as they demonstrate a certain continuity with traditional Jewish institutions and values. Not surprisingly, Kijek explicitly rejects these comparisons (p. 360) What would have happened to these young people when they grew up? Would they have become less rebellious and more practical? How would the burden of family life and communal responsibilities have changed them? By the same token, what would have happened to what Kijek correctly calls this first generation of “Polish Jews” —​ Jews who not only lived in Polish lands but who internalized many of the norms and symbols of Polishness? In time, might not a “civic Polishness” have developed alongside an exclusive ethnic Polishness, something that might have allayed their sense of alienation? The war, of course, made all these musings moot. Samuel D. Kassow Trinity College

Note 1. Marcus Moseley, “Life, Literature:  Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland,” Jewish Social Studies 7 (2003), 1–​51; Moshe Kligsberg, “Di yidishe yugnt bavegung in poyln tsvishn di beyde velt milkhomes,” in Studies in Polish Jewry, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (New York: 1974), 137–​228.

Shannon L. Fogg, Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942–​1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 197 pp.

Several years ago, Shannon Fogg published an important book, The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France, in which she analyzed the effects of material distress on the range of attitudes toward the Vichy government and its treatment of strangers, showing that pragmatism generally prevailed over ideology. In this new book, Fogg maintains her focus on the problematics of everyday life but moves her spotlight to the victims of this same Vichy government, the Jews, and widens her chronological scope to include the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

History, Biography, and Social Science

291

By focusing on the looting of personal property (her narrative begins in 1942) and the possibilities that were available to the survivors when they attempted to recover their homes and reconstruct a decent environment, she provides an interesting study on the social life of French Jewry at that time. Relying on an impressive number of testimonies as well as documents filed by Jewish survivors who turned to Jewish social organizations for help, or to the state institutions for filing restitution claims, she covers important aspects of daily life that have to date been neglected by historians, such as Maud Mandel, whose interests lie in the political and legal aspects of restitution. Fogg (as with a number of other scholars of late) challenges the once-​prevalent view that, following liberation, Jews had no interest in singling out the specificity of their fate during the occupation years. She convincingly shows that their commitment to French republican values, including in particular the value of equality, was completely in tune with the state’s own commitment. Nonetheless, she argues, Jews based their requests for restitution on the claim that they were the ones who were exclusively targeted for persecution. This central thesis of her book is totally in line with recent works by young scholars such as Daniella Doron and Simon Perego.1 What is new is Fogg’s multilayered analysis. As indicated by the key words in her title (looting, restitution, reconstruction), she examines both the legal measures leading to the looting of Jewish properties and those connected with restitution, providing insights regarding the emotional meaning of particular laws and artifacts and the symbolic aspects of the whole process, well as the overall consequences for Jewish families. Fogg tackles a wide range of subjects, among them furniture and artifacts—​that is, those items that transform a living space into a home (her discussion of this topic is particularly enlightening); the difference between restitution and reparation; the gender difference; and the feelings of disappointment and failure that prevailed among Jewish families in the general context of postwar problems that the French government had to deal with. In addition, she examines the lingering economic and opportunistic antisemitism among a portion of the French people who were apt to lose out in consequence of the restitution process. Fogg concludes that republican values ultimately shaped the decisions made both by Jews and by the institutions to which they turned. In dealing with these disparate topics, Fogg divides her book into two parts, the first chronological and the second thematic. Her analysis is sensitive and based on wide-​ranging scholarship. She does not neglect any of the significant works published in the field, and her use of primary sources is quite extensive. Moreover, Fogg shows how her own research relates to work done by others in the field, among them, Sarah Gensburger, Laura Hobson-​Faure, Laura Jockush, Daniella Doron, and Claire Andrieu. The result is a solid piece of scholarship that adds a significant contribution to our understanding of postwar France, in particular, the lives of postwar Jewish families in France. Renée Poznanski Ben-​Gurion University

292 

Book Reviews

Note 1. See Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity:  Rebuilding Family and Nation, (Bloomington: 2015); Simon Perego, “Pleurons-​les, bénissons leurs noms”: Les commémorations de la Shoah et de la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le monde juif parisien entre 1944 et 1967: rituels, mémoires et identités (Ain: forthcoming).

Zvi Gitelman (ed.), The New Jewish Diaspora: Russian-​Speaking Immigrants in the United States, Israel, and Germany. New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 2016. 319 pp.

This edited collection is a welcome addition to the literature focusing on the migration experiences and global diaspora of Russian-​speaking Jews, following in the wake of my own book, Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration, and Conflict (2007), the collective work Building a Diaspora: Russian Jews in Israel, Germany and the USA (2006) by Eliezer Ben-​Rafael et al., and a dozen smaller volumes, alongside hundreds of journal articles published over the last twenty years in English, Russian, German and Hebrew. In this sense, the book’s title is misleading: the current expansion of the Russian Jewish diaspora may be historically recent (vis-​à-​vis its early beginnings in the late 19th century), but it is certainly not new as a focus of social scientific inquiry. Research in the field started in the early 1990s with a large international conference at Tel Aviv University that explored the then-​novel phenomenon of the mass exodus of ex-​Soviet Jews to Israel and to the West. This current volume is also based on a selection of papers presented at a conference on the contemporary Russian Jewish diaspora held in November 2011 at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. The goal of the conference and its edited proceedings was to take a fresh, multidisciplinary look at the thriving and dynamic phenomenon of the post-​Soviet Russian Jewish diaspora in its four main domiciles: Israel, the United States, Canada, and Germany. The book contains six thematic sections preceded by Gitelman’s introduction, titled “Homelands, Diasporas and the Islands in Between.” Here, Gitelman sketches out the brief history of the mass migration of some 1.6 million Jews and their family members from the crumbling Soviet empire, their global dispersal, and the relations between the newly formed (or expanded) diasporic islands and the (ex-​)Soviet homeland. The following section on the demographics of this exodus opens with an overview by Mark Tolts of the major statistical trends of Soviet Jewish emigration between 1970 (when Soviet authorities first allowed limited aliyah to Israel) and 2009 (when this mass emigration effectively concluded). Tolts pools the data on the numbers, host countries, and demographic profiles of the émigrés, as well as some data on those who subsequently chose to return to the former Soviet Union (FSU), mostly from Israel. The following chapter, by Uzi Rebhun, reports the findings of an online survey conducted in 2010 among Russian Jewish migrants who had started their journey in Israel and later moved to Europe, North America, or back to the FSU (he calls them the “Russian-​speaking

History, Biography, and Social Science

293

Israeli diaspora”). Notwithstanding the selective nature of the online sample, the survey produced some interesting data on Jewish identification and degree of attachment to Israel among this sub-​category of “wandering global Jews.” The last contribution in the section, by cultural anthropologist Marina Sapritsky, zooms in on the phenomenon of return migration from Israel to the FSU. Based on her ethnographic study in Odessa, Sapritsky’s essay sheds light on the motives for return (which, for many, is not a final return, but rather one more move in search of the true home or economic opportunity) and offers her interpretation of the returnees’ narratives. Overall, this section is more informative than others, as it is based on some new research findings. The second section of the book, titled “Transnationalism and Diasporas,” consists of three essays, two of them by social historians—​Jonathan Dekel-​Chen, on the evolving diasporic Russian Jewish identity; and Hannah Pollin-​Galay, on the few remaining “Litvaks” in today’s Lithuania. The section’s concluding essay, by sociologist Steven Gold, summarizes his earlier comparative studies on Israeli and Russian Jewish immigrants in the United States, focusing on economic mobility, family, and gender issues in these two branches of contemporary American Jewry. The section that follows, “Political and Economic Change,” offers three essays based on statistical data and social surveys conducted 10–​15 years ago, which may be perceived as somewhat dated. Political scientist Olena Bagno-​Moldavski compares political outlooks of ex-​Soviet Jews living in Ukraine and in Germany, stressing the continuity of the late Soviet political culture among the émigrés. Yaacov Ro’i reflects on the evolution of the “thin” culture of Soviet Jews (who had long since lost their ties with religion and tradition) in the wake of their move to Israel. Over time, he notes, the new subculture of Russian Israelis, with its own cultural enterprise, media, and niche economy, is fortified and hybridized with Israeli habitus and mentality, with Russianness gradually “thinning” for the younger immigrants. Given the plethora of literature on the subject, Roi’s piece should be regarded mainly as an overview of the field, as it offers no alternative or fresh look at this community. An economist, Gur Offer, reviews several Israeli social surveys conducted in 2002–​2009 on the labor market and income mobilities of Russian Israelis, again offering little that is new. The two subsequent sections of the book present eight contributions on evolving Jewish ethnicity and religious change among Russian Jewish immigrants living in Germany, those remaining in the FSU, and among those participating in global online communities of Russian Jews. This portion of the book is rather uneven, with some essays presenting new data and fresh interpretations (for instance, that of Anna Shternshis on Russian Jewish ba’alei teshuvah  —​“returnees” to Jewish religious observance—​in the blogosphere), and others rehashing older and mostly previously published studies and findings. I found more refreshing the final section of the volume, which deals with diasporic literature written by Russian Jewish émigrés in their new domiciles, in particular the chapters by Mikhail Krutikov and Adrian Wanner on the multiple identities of authors who write either in Russian or in the languages of their adopted homelands. The volume closes with Gitelman’s reflections on the future of the Russian Jewish diaspora. Overall, The New Jewish Diaspora broaches its subject from a variety of perspectives and disciplinary outlooks, which constitutes both a strength and a weakness of the volume. Another failing (reflecting a five-​year gap between the conference and the

294 

Book Reviews

book) is the relatively dated empirical sources of many of the contributions—​in most cases, essays that have previously appeared in print. At the same time, both Gitelman and the various contributors to this volume cover vast ground in their attempt to paint a social portrait of a highly diverse population of Russian-​speaking Jews living in many different countries. Thanks to its versatility, this book will be of interest to a host of scholars studying Russian Soviet Jewry, ethnicity, religion, and global diasporas. Larissa Remennick Bar-​Ilan University

Maxine Jacobson, Modern Orthodoxy in American Judaism: The Era of Rabbi Leo Jung. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016. 250 pp.

The premise of this book, actually based on an article I published in 1982, is that rabbis can serve as indicators of the Orthodoxy they serve. In her examination of a once-​ dominant group within Orthodox Judaism, the so-​called “Modern Orthodox,” Maxine Jacobson focuses on Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, a German Jewish immigrant to America who became a prominent spokesman and exemplar of these Jews. Admitting that a precise definition of Modern Orthodoxy is elusive and that even many of those who came to be associated with this worldview and its allied behaviors were uncomfortable with the term (nor did they all agree on its parameters), Jacobson falls back on metaphor: “The Modern Orthodox Jew has been pulled in two directions” (p. 10). Those two directions are defined by Jacobson as either “not religious enough” or “not modern enough” (p. 10). Effectively, Modern Orthodoxy hoped to harmonize these two opposites, having relationships of respect with non-​Jews and embracing the larger surrounding open culture, while remaining conscientiously observant. In contrast, Jacobson notes, “the Ultra-​Orthodox group seeks to exclude” all that is different from it (p. 11). Nothing new here. The many faces of Orthodoxy have been more or less defined, from almost the first days that Orthodox Jews were subject to critical analysis, by a variety of observers, including myself. It is in the person of Leo Jung that we can see the flesh and bones of the promise of Modern Orthodoxy. At the same time that he embodied the synthesis of cultures and values, he also lamented that, in modern America, “Orthodox rabbis had lost their dominance.” That meant rabbis, at best, could rule through example, charisma, and with the consent of their congregants or students. The Modern Orthodox rabbi who wanted to lead Jewry had to “translate the creed of Judaism into Jewish life” (p. 21). Of course, Jung did not bargain on the fact that, in time, the so-​called ultra-​Orthodox (also known as haredim) would choose increasingly to submit to the authority of patriarchal and radically fundamentalist rabbis—​roshei yeshiva and hasidic rebbes who argued that their Orthodoxy was far more genuine than the Modernist brand. This so-​ called “slide to the Right” of Orthodoxy was marked by an endorsement of extremism as a norm, whereby Modern Orthodoxy’s own admission that it was not sufficiently extreme was used against it, with its very legitimacy called into question.

History, Biography, and Social Science

295

Jung argued that the Jewish contribution to America was valuable, especially that of Jews who were true to their heritage and engaged by their social and religious practices—​as he put it, “the Jew must be a Jew to be American,” but just as significantly, one could be completely Jewish and thoroughly American even if this meant that “changes had to be made that were both acceptable to Orthodoxy and to American culture” (pp. 24–​25). In contrast, Jung’s ultra-​Orthodox counterparts would argue that such a situation was untenable, and that Judaism would lose its way if it tried to be too much like America. In a sense, Jung had more confidence than did the ultra-​Orthodox both in Judaism’s ability to adapt without compromise and in America’s ability to be culturally pluralist. For the latter, America remained a melting pot in which Judaism would be so small an ingredient that it would be swallowed up by the treife whole. They simply did not believe in synthesis and thus overwhelmingly chose to demonize rather than celebrate American secular and non-​Jewish culture, even going so far as to brand all non-​Orthodox Jews as “goyim.” Whereas Jung and other Modern Orthodox rabbis encouraged a university education for Jews in general, and for rabbis to have doctorates, the increasingly influential Orthodox right wing discouraged all forms of higher secular education, in this way effectively depriving its followers of a means of attaining the skills necessary for making it in America. At the beginning of Jung’s rabbinic career in America in the 1920s, Orthodoxy was generally identified as old men’s religion. Indeed, most Orthodox Jews were still in Europe, having heeded the warnings of their rabbis and leaders that this land of promise was a place where Jews might not suffer from pogroms or attacks, but where Judaism would die from a lack of observance and institutional support. Jung, for his part, believed that the American view of Orthodox Judaism was based on its never having truly engaged with it: “American Judaism has never seen what Orthodox Judaism is” (p. 31). Like the first Modern Orthodox Jews, his primary goal was revival and institution-​building. His synagogue in Manhattan, the Jewish Center—​reeling and decimated by the departure of Jung’s predecessor, Mordecai Kaplan, along with many congregants who had turned their back on Orthodoxy—​would have to be reorganized. Ironically, Jung’s initial task was establishing the bona fides of Orthodoxy (an ongoing struggle of the Modern Orthodox from the outset until today). Kaplan and his Reconstructionist views had to be condemned, and Jung was unstinting in these efforts. At the same time, however, Jung needed to create space for his own version of how one could legitimately adapt to modern America, and here, the debates with an emergent Conservative Jewish movement became the essential dilemma for Modern Orthodoxy. Jung and his followers inevitably found themselves caught between the two: the Conservative Jews and those who would ultimately be labeled “haredim.” While more adaptable than their ultra-​Orthodox counterparts, Jung and his followers were not flexible enough for those of the Conservative movement who shared something of the same worldview but whose affiliated members had little patience for the strictures of observance and top-​down authority on which the Orthodox rabbis insisted. Like other Orthodox rabbis, Jung remained committed to the idea that only those who were rabbis could judge which adaptations of Judaism were acceptable and which crossed the line into “epikorsut” heresy. This insistence, of course, meant that those who wanted to delegitimize Modern Orthodoxy would have to attack the

296 

Book Reviews

Modern Orthodox rabbis, and that whoever controlled the institutions that ordained Orthodox rabbis would determine the direction of Orthodoxy. Jung’s dream of an “Orthodox Judaism” that would be “part of the cosmopolitan society and modern culture” (p. 25) increasingly seems to be evaporating in the 21st century. While rabbis like Jung took pulpits for a while, the haredim became the heads of yeshivas and gradually dominated Jewish education and Orthodox rabbinic ordination. Ultimately they would predominate in the pulpits as well. With that, the decline of the influence of people such as Jung, and the Modern Orthodoxy they championed, began. While Jung managed to retain authority and stature in his lifetime, few Modern Orthodox rabbis would claim his position of moral and religious authority in the years after him. Samuel Heilman Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center

Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran (eds.), Writing Jewish Culture:  Paradoxes in Ethnography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. xiv + 411 pp.

This collection focuses on Jews in Europe from the mid-​18th through the mid-​20th centuries. Its subtitle—​highlighting “paradoxes”—​signals its special contribution. Ethnography, a disciplined method of gathering data relevant in fields such as anthropology and folklore, gained recognition in modern times but only lately found its place in Jewish studies. This book, formulating the notion of “ethnoliterature,” reveals that the practice of ethnography has “been around,” and significant, longer than might have been thought. The introduction sets out five spheres of paradox that are pervasive in ethnographic studies of Jews. One sphere relates to defining who, exactly, are the Jews, with answers arrayed along a scale running between “religion” and “peoplehood.” A  second paradox concerns writing. In classic ethnography, whether dealing with “pre-​literate societies” on far distant continents or “nonliterate” rural groups in Europe, a clear line existed between those writing and those being written about. Ethnography among Jews, however, can never disengage from the fact that Jewish life is informed by literate culture. Next comes the question of “where are Jews located?” “Diaspora,” highlighting a situation of Jews being dispersed in many locations, has recently become a commonly used term in the social sciences, but first emerged in relation to Jews in antiquity. Thus, forays into the ethnography of Jews focused on defined locales. Ethnography within specific Jewish communities is still a worthwhile enterprise, but when viewing Jewish life more globally, issues of transnationality, or of grasping what is central and what is peripheral, present unresolved conundrums. A fourth set of questions—​falling under the rubric of “for whom is ethnography produced?”—​queries the identity and position of the ethnographer, envisioned audiences, the ideology informing a specific ethnographic project, or how ethnography is mobilized for the purpose of change. Lastly, the collection raises the question: “How do knowledge and imagination interact?” Clifford Geertz pointed out that fiction

History, Biography, and Social Science

297

derives from a Latin stem implying to form, or to fashion, implying that ethnographic “scientific” reporting includes a creative element. This last theme appears in all the volume’s chapters, whereas the first four provide the basis of its division into parts, each of which is represented here by a single essay. Throughout the 20th century, anthropologists writing in English paid only minimal attention to the topic of cultural diversity (along with the larger question of “nationalities”) within the Soviet Union. Andreas Kilcher shows how complex the matter was, particularly with regard to Jews. His account focuses on Joseph Roth, an Austrian journalist with strong sympathies for Communism, who undertook a journey across Russia from August through late December 1926. Kilcher discusses the evolution of Roth’s ethnographic approach, which drew upon both travel journalism and his novelistic talents. This was a conscious transformation, including critical moments during which he altered his conceptualization of “Russia” as a subject of observation and description. Viewing Russia as “remote,” in particular the “Mountain Jews” in the Caucasus, he also recognized the status and perspectives of East European communities and adopted them as platforms from which Western Europe could be observed. In Roth’s view, these populations could not be “reduced to any national-​cultural model, either linguistically or ethnically” (p.  81). Roth’s understanding of the “Mountain Jews” of the Caucasus, for instance, was quite different from the conception that clearly assigned them to the “Jewish nation,” which resulted in people from this group appearing as representatives in an early Zionist congress. In Part 2, titled “Seeing, Hearing, and Reading Jews,” Gabriella Safran discusses how these three channels fed into ethnography, and how the relationship among them changed decisively in the 19th century. Partially influenced by Russian populists who romanticized the “folk” as icons of national identity, ethnographers honed skills of listening to people who had been culturally overlooked. Some Russian predecessors to Yiddish ethnographers worked by “listening in the dark,” with peasants unaware of their presence. Contact between educated urban dwellers and peasants was uncommon if not socially impossible, and this method aimed to overcome stereotypes and cultural censors that impeded the collection and comprehension of ethnographic data. Certain barriers existed when Jewish folklorists turned to “ordinary Jews” as well, but in their case the “folk,” who in one degree or another shared the same literacy-​infused culture, turned themselves into interlocutors. While engaged in the same sort of investigative project, “a set of distinctive listening practices and ideologies of communication characterized the Yiddish folkloristic endeavor” (p. 121). Alexander Alon’s essay situates ethnography within the Zionist program of gaining knowledge about the “old-​new” homeland in Palestine. Alon highlights the writings of Leo Motzkin and Heinrich York-​Steiner. The former, sent on a mission to the area, produced a report in which “sociopsychological and ethnopsychological impressions” (p. 238) were combined with statistical-​based information. The latter authored a fictional trilogy—​The Talmud-​Peasant—​in which ancient ritual texts found expression in the secular project of Zionist agricultural communities. York-​Steiner’s methodology entailed “a systematic conceptualization of all possible interpersonal relations in Jewish society at the turn of the century . . . [and the possibility of] mutual understanding . . . only if congruent knowledge cultures meet in discussing and practicing the Talmud” (p. 247). While reinforcing the volume’s theme, the notion of

298 

Book Reviews

combining literature and science to fathom society may not be an exclusive property of Zionism. Max Weber’s contemporaneous thesis regarding the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism evinces an obvious nod to Goethe’s novel Elective Affinity, which applied the “chemistry” of the day to human relations.1 Paradoxes of use and context are illustrated in Nathaniel Deutsch’s essay on the ethnography of folk customs, which, he notes, “was generally perceived as the purview of secularized Jews, albeit some with a yeshiva background” (p. 281), and thus typically distanced itself from rabbinic textual sources. Deutsch shows that a partially parallel thrust—​aimed at determining which was the correct practice to follow—​ emerged within ultra-​Orthodoxy. This entailed gleaning and arranging accounts of customs (minhagim) from earlier books rather than recording observed practice. This new type of collection built upon authoritative literature that combined law (halakhah) and custom, which had become increasing accessible with the spread of printing. In the 19th century, Deutsch notes, “both Jewish ethnographers and Haredi thinkers came to see minhag as a defining element of Jewish peoplehood” (p. 287). A reader might wonder why this volume makes no mention of Life is with People, a 1952 work that presented the culture of the shtetl to a wide audience. Part of an anthropological project to study “cultures at a distance” during the Second World War, Life is with People presented a generalized portrait of the “Jewish Little-​town of Eastern Europe”; a common reaction of historians was to criticize it as being idealized and a-​ historical.2 Its timeframe corresponds to the end of the period covered by this volume, and—​paradoxically, one might say —​provides a heuristic contrast to the essays in the current collection. These essays reveal an extensive, diverse, subtle, and dynamic cultural movement, engaging both the researchers and the peopled studied, which should be on the map of anyone interested in the significance of ethnographic writing. Harvey E. Goldberg The Hebrew University

Notes 1. Andrew M.  McKinnon, “Elective Affinities of the Protestant Ethic:  Weber and the Chemistry of Capitalism,” Sociological Theory 28, no. 1 (March 2010), 108–​126. 2.  See Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life is with People:  The Culture of the Shtetl (New York: 1995). This edition has an introduction by Barbara Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett that includes a broad historical view of Jewish life in Yiddish-​speaking Europe and a discussion of what about the book attracted American readers in the generation after the Second World War. Another book that expands the context of Life is with People is a French translation: Olam: Dans le shtetl d’Europe central avant la Shoah (Paris: 1992). This edition includes a review by historian Sylvie Anne Goldberg that features short contributions by nine researchers in various disciplines.

Ber Kotlerman, Broken Heart/​Broken Wholeness: The Post-​Holocaust Plea for Jewish Reconstruction of  the Soviet Yiddish Writer Der Nister. Boston:  Academic Studies Press, 2017. 278 pp.

History, Biography, and Social Science

299

In Moscow in June 1947, the Soviet Yiddish writer known as Der Nister (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, 1884–​1950) boarded a train bound for Birobidzhan. The train, which had originated in the city of Vinnitsa, was carrying about a thousand Jewish survivors from southern Ukraine to their new home in the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East. As Ber Kotlerman notes in his meticulously researched and captivating study of that relatively short but fateful episode, “this trip did not easily fit into Der Nister’s way of life” (p. 8). Even more remarkable, given the historical moment, is the fact that Der Nister took this trip on his own initiative, though he coordinated it with Soviet authorities. Moreover, he was the only prominent Soviet Jewish writer to visit Birobidzhan after the Second World War. During the first two decades of his literary career, Der Nister (lit., “the hidden one”) developed a reputation as one of the most enigmatic and reclusive authors in Yiddish literature. He grew up in a traditional religious environment in Berdichev and became a member of the modernist group of Jewish writers and artists in Kiev around the time of the Russian Revolution. His adopted literary persona reflected his predilection for a symbolist style infused with kabbalistic imagery and motifs, though usually devoid of explicit references to the reality of Jewish life. From 1922–​1926, he lived in Germany before coming back to Soviet Ukraine. In 1929, he was subjected to harsh ideological criticism for his symbolist style; for a few years thereafter, he was unable to publish his fiction. By 1935, however, he had successfully reinvented himself as a realist writer, and between 1939–​1947 he published his masterpiece, the historical novel The Family Mashber. The novel appeared in Moscow and New York and received nearly universal critical acclaim on both sides of the ideological divide. Der Nister spent most of the war years in evacuation in Uzbekistan, where he wrote Holocaust tales based on stories he had heard from Jewish refugees from Nazi-​occupied Poland.1 In 1943, he moved to Moscow to be with his wife, an actress at the Moscow State Jewish Theater, and wrote for the newspaper Eynikayt, which was published by the Jewish Anti-​Fascist Committee. As recounted in the memoirs of the Ukrainian writer Yuri Smolych, who befriended Der Nister in Kharkiv in the 1930s, Der Nister disliked Zionism and had little interest in the Birobidzhan project.2 Although it is possible that Der Nister was not willing to share his thoughts on Zionism with a Ukrainian colleague, his skepticism regarding Birobidzhan was probably genuine, as he believed that the Soviet state provided enough support for Yiddish culture in Ukraine. Evidently, the war and the Holocaust changed his attitude, and in 1947 he came to regard Birobidzhan as a viable option of Jewish reconstruction in the Soviet Union. His three-​week journey, followed by a two-​month stay in Birobidzhan, is the best-​documented period of his life, thanks to the memoirs of a number of other writers who were with him on the train and who met with him in Birobidzhan, and also because of the proceedings of the criminal investigation and trial of the Birobidzhan administrative and cultural elite that took place following his visit. Kotlerman’s book consists of two parts: a reconstruction of Der Nister’s journey, which includes an English translation of his two travelogues, and the records of the investigation of the so-​called “Der Nister affair,” whereby Der Nister’s visit was used as a pretext for arresting the Birobidzhan leadership on charges of “bourgeois nationalist” and anti-​Soviet activity. These archival sources are highly valuable for

300 

Book Reviews

historians of Stalinism, as they present a case study of the Stalinist anti-​Jewish campaign in a particular provincial setting. Kotlerman’s scrupulous analysis of this case study, and of the events surrounding it in the broader Jewish cultural context, reveals a story that has largely been overlooked in the current scholarship of late Stalinism. Der Nister’s transformation from a recluse to a public figure and his active promotion of Jewish cultural and social reconstruction in Birobidzhan vividly demonstrate that the Soviet Yiddish cultural elite was far from a passive victim of the antisemitic repressions. Members of this elite, while remaining loyal to the Soviet state, were not afraid to raise their voices and act on behalf of the Jewish people, despite the attendant political and personal risks (which they probably underestimated). Der Nister was arrested on February 19, 1949; two weeks earlier, as Kotlerman discovered in archival sources, Stalin had received a report on the state of Yiddish literature in which Der Nister’s travelogue was singled out for its “Zionist character” (p. 114). Apparently, Der Nister was not deemed important enough to be sentenced to death, as were his more prominent colleagues, David Bergelson, David Hofshteyn, and Leyb Kvitko. Instead, he was sentenced to ten years in prison; he died a year later in a prison camp in the wake of a botched surgical procedure. Did Der Nister in fact become a Zionist in the aftermath of the Holocaust? To the best of our knowledge, Der Nister, unlike some of his fellow Soviet Yiddish writers (David Hofshteyn, for instance) never expressed any feelings about the creation of the state of Israel. He did, however, speak (in the somewhat vague and lofty tone characteristic of his writing style) of the restoration of a “national building.” His vision is couched in a language that brings to mind Ahad Ha’am’s rhetoric of “spiritual Zionism,” an ideology that was firmly opposed by the Kiev Yiddishists thirty years earlier. Judging by some memoirs written with the hindsight of what followed, after the staged murder of Solomon Mikhoels in Minsk in January 1948, Der Nister no longer had any hope for a Jewish future in the Soviet Union. Among many remarkable documents in Kotlerman’s book, the most striking is a 14-​page set of handwritten notes titled “Birobidzhan,” which has been preserved among Der Nister’s papers in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow. Kotlerman describes this document as “a genuine ‘Birobidzhan manifesto’ of Der Nister’s views and aspirations” (p. 109). Der Nister, Kotlerman further notes, “diligently ignored Stalin’s reservations about Jews being a single unified nation. He did, however, use Stalin’s rhetoric and terminology to good effect, especially his notion of ‘community of territory.’ He used it to give a firm foundation to his own vision of the (Soviet) Jewish people of the future having an indissoluble bond with territory they could call their own” (p. 111). The manifesto appears to be a peculiar blend of territorialism, Marxism, and spiritual Zionism, expressed in a metaphorical language drawing on biblical symbolism. However, its handwritten text with many corrections is barely legible, and Kotlerman made an editorial decision to include its facsimile as an appendix, leaving its more detailed analysis to future scholars. Broken Heart/​Broken Wholeness is an exemplary historical case study that combines meticulous archival research with insightful analysis of an event that had fateful consequences for the Soviet Birobidzhan project. It is also a valuable contribution to Jewish cultural history in the Soviet Union, as it shows how the Soviet Jewish elite

History, Biography, and Social Science

301

sought to play an active role in shaping the reconstruction of Jewish life in the wake of the Second World War. Last but not least, this book tells a dramatic personal story of a Yiddish writer who emerged as a spiritual leader of his people, and who paid for his actions with his life. Mikhail Krutikov University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Notes 1. Three stories written in 1942 were published in a collection titled Korbones, (Moscow: 1943). Stories written in 1943–​1947 were published posthumously in a collection titled Vivervuks (Moscow:  1969). For an English translation, see Regrowth:  Seven Tales of Jewish Life Before, During, and After Occupation, trans. Erik Butler (Evanston: 2011). 2.  Yuri Smolych, “Z ‘zapysiv na skhyli viku,’ ” Prapor 1, no. 9 (September 1990), 160–​175.

Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (eds.), Space and Spatiality in Modern German-​ Jewish History. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. 327 pp.

This volume is a collection of 17 essays originally presented at a workshop at St. Antony’s College, Oxford almost a decade ago. The essays follow an extensive introduction by the two editors that lays out both the theoretical justifications and the methodological advantages of this project, all conceived in the spirit of the so-​called “spatial turn” in historiography. Beginning in the 1990s, interest in concrete places and in real or imaginary spaces became part of the new cultural history, with this topic often considered on its own in an ever-​growing historical research landscape. In this case, promise the editors, the conceptual apparatus developed by the new turn would be applied to the study of minorities, specifically to the Jews in modern times, and in what may be called their German diaspora. Using concepts such as place, space, and boundaries, they explain, is a means of opening new perspectives on the intensively researched field of German Jewish history, while also newly illuminating matters of integration and seclusion, belonging and identity. The book is divided into three parts: “Imaginations,” “Transformations,” and “Practices,” and as one moves from the heavily theoretical introduction to the concrete historical contributions, the potential of this overall approach begins to unravel. The book opens with a truly brilliant piece by Alexandra Binnenkade, titled “On Sounds and Stones,” in which she analyzes what she calls “Jewish-​Christian contact zones” in a Swiss village during the 19th century. Observing concrete buildings and the way they had been set up, the author presents space “as a dialogical category” (p. 24) and combines the analysis of what she calls materiality with clearly immaterial factors such as texts and sounds. There follows a description of “dual-​doors” in

302 

Book Reviews

some village houses, a unique construction through which Jews and Christians apparently entered separately but then immediately stepped into a common space that could only mean living together or at least side by side. I found this article particularly instructive since Binnenkade uses an analysis of “spatiality” together with more conventional types of sources such as local statistics or other data on the social and economic life of this region; she eventually moves to the cultural sphere as well, handling such elements as the sound of a Jewish shofar or the bells of the Christian church and also—​surprisingly—​of the Jewish synagogue. She closes with a short discussion of the function of Jewish itinerant merchants: all in all, a surprising yield from the study of such a small, practically forgotten Jewish settlement. Further on we are provided with a mix of very different research agendas. A few essays deal with what one would immediately expect in a book on Jewish space: the history of the ghetto and its meaning in the public Jewish discourse, or a view of the “Judengasse” in Frankfurt (separate essays by Jürgen Heyde and Michael Meng); an account of synagogue and burial grounds (separate essays by Andreas Gotzmann and Sylvia Necker); or of such proverbially urban Jewish quarters as the Scheunenviertel in Berlin (Anne-​Chistin Sass) or the much less well-​known Möhlstrasse in Munich (Anna Holian). All these clearly fit the spatial paradigm set out by the editors. Likewise, Jewish community centers and, for instance, the Jewish Museum in Munich (Robin Ostow) seem to be obvious choices that are especially pertinent for dealing with more recent years. Intertwined among such contributions, however, are those pieces that seem to be somewhat forced into the spatial category. The Jewish press (Kerstin von der Krone), for instance, is surely an exclusively Jewish domain, yet it is a space—​Jewish or not—​ only as an analogy or a metaphor. Psychoanalysis, too, has often been associated with Jews, but it is less than convincing, I find, to discuss its history in spatial categories, as is done in the essay authored by Anthony D. Kauders. I also think it only marginally productive to apply such categories to Jewish philanthropy (Björn Siegel) even if, as in the case of Baron de Hirsch, such philanthropy was often clearly international in scope. And while Michael Berkowitz, in an interesting discussion, reports that Jews were “at the cutting edge of photography and changed the shape of mass visual culture” (p. 247), and moreover were highly overrepresented among major photographers everywhere in Europe, spatiality can only metaphorically be applied here. In my view, its added value in this context is negligible. The last essay of this collection, contributed by Ruth Ellen Gruber, is perhaps as interesting as the first. In contrast to the restricted space of the small Swiss village handled by Binnenkade, Gruber’s essay moves across the entire European continent. She mainly deals with those locations that had been sites of Jewish life and are today “filled,” as she puts it, by non-​Jews. These “replacements” are sometimes local and sometimes foreign actors, coming from all over the world to document synagogues and cemeteries or to restore and reconstruct once-​Jewish sites—​concretely and/​or virtually. After briefly describing this phenomenon, Gruber then concentrates on the cases of Kazimierz, the once-​Jewish quarter of Krakov, and on the new POLIN museum in Warsaw. Both of these are part of a larger project, she explains, “to reconnect with the past,” especially with the Jewish past. Such efforts sometimes leave a stale

History, Biography, and Social Science

303

taste, but the author here prefers to present their positive, hopeful side; a fitting conclusion indeed, to an originally conceived, interesting volume. Shulamit Volkov Tel Aviv University

Eli Lederhendler, American Jewry: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xxiv + 331 pp.

In composing his important, one-​volume synthesis—​what he calls a “new history of American Jewry”—​Eli Lederhendler has benefited from many of the recent monographic works that have rethought basic themes and issues in this dynamic area of Jewish studies. What makes this discipline exciting is that its historians constantly rethink conceptualizations that once were regnant in the field, offering new understandings of both the sweep and the details of the American Jewish community saga. Lederhendler has a firm grip on these historiographical developments and has adroitly brought much of this provocative scholarship into an erudite and accessible study. Readers also gain from his extensive on-​the-​page notes, which guide those who are interested to the books and articles that informed his observations, and from his learned excurses for future consideration. Lederhendler is keen to interrogate myths and semi-​truths that earlier historians have posited. Throughout the work he remains true to his determination to stay clear of fixation “upon the successes and achievements of notable Jews” (p. xxi). So disposed, worthies such as financier Joseph Seligman (the victim of the most infamous manifestation of late-​19th century antisemitism) and renowned early 20th-​century communal leader Louis Marshall are barely mentioned. In the end, Lederhendler is out for different game. As a scholar with expertise in both American and modern European Jewish history, he wants to illuminate the commonalities and differences in Jewish life transnationally. Though attuned to advances in his discipline, Lederhendler is not slavish to every new idea or trend. Most notably, he positions himself somewhat apart from those who have questioned the exceptional nature of the emancipation of American Jews. Recently, much has been written about how “Port Jews” in Holland, England, and southern France gained their citizenships rapidly and without much rancor. In some sense, it has been argued, these West European merchant communities became freer faster than did their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. Lederhendler calls attention to this point of view but for him, “the American case [is] a contrasting alternative” to European experiences because the Jews of the United States were present in a frontier environment where, for instance, “no apparatus of Jewish self-​government existed such as might require disestablishment prior to the Jews’ naturalization” (pp. 18–​19). Lederhendler is ultimately at his best when he goes beyond synthesizing and evaluating other scholars’ conceptualizations and offers his own new look at crucial issues in the field. His extensive discussion of East European immigrant economic mobility stands

304 

Book Reviews

out, offering a demonstration of how well he understands both American and Old World contexts. Lederhendler argues that certain factors emphasized by others, such as “self-​ employment in the immigrant generation and the boosting of second generation attainments via secondary and higher education” have been largely oversold. He also questions whether the acquisition of industrial skills prior to leaving the old country, or Jewish “traits” and “affinities,” made a crucial impact upon economic advancement. Based on his examination of census reports from the beginning of the 20th century, Lederhendler argues that “for both Jewish and non-​Jewish European migrants, prior work experience had a negligible effect on either earnings or occupational attainments.” More important, it was the “core American urban sector”—​that is, expansion of “industrial branches engaged in manufacture of mass-​produced goods”—​that provided a lift to Jewish workers. Lederhendler also avers that public education contributed to the advancement of immigrants’ children more than to the immigrants themselves (pp. 80–​82). Lederhendler prefers that scholars look more closely at the nature of the Jewish immigrant’s “family and household structure,” including its balanced sex ratio between men and women, which “boosted male immigrants’ motivation to remain permanently in the United States and heightened Jewish immigrant families’ capacity to enter the workforce at several different skill and wage levels simultaneously.” In his view, women “helped to promote quality of life in terms of food consumption, household hygiene and disease control—​all of which also tended to promote job security” (pp. 84–​85). He also notes convincingly that there was a “hidden intangible”—​ namely, the greater secularization of Jewish life as compared to that of Christians who came over on the same boats—​that gave them economic advantages (pp. 94–​95). Finally, while no one-​ volume history is totally comprehensive—​ indeed, Lederhendler devotes limited space to antisemitism in the United States—​this new history does note events and themes that most historians overlook. There is space accorded to Jewish interdenominational cooperation in producing a pocket-​size prayer book for soldiers (pp. 124–​125); to Jewish students at agricultural colleges in the 1920s–1930s (pp. 147–​148); to voluntary transmigration back to Europe, to Canada, or to Palestine (pp. 157–​164). Most interestingly, the book also lists more than a score of academics who were born in displaced persons camps after the Second World War or who are the children of refugees. These professors, Lederhendler notes, have done much to “put American Jewish scholarship in the front ranks of Jewish intellectual endeavor” (p. 181, n. 201). Such contributions are not trivial additions to what is a tightly written work. Rather, they bring depth to a volume that augurs to remain a definitive work in the field for many years to come, or at least until some intrepid future scholar takes up the challenge of synthesizing all the new works that colleagues continue to produce. Jeffrey S. Gurock Yeshiva University

Vladimir Levin, Mimahpekhah lemilḥamah:  hapolitikah hayehudit berusiyah, 1907–​1914 (From Revolution to War: Jewish Politics in Russia, 1907–​1914). Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2016, 432 pp.

History, Biography, and Social Science

305

Russian and East European studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have lately come down in the world. But there was a time, and not long ago, when the hive was buzzing with activity. The staff was full: some twenty professors in the inner circle, graduate students clustered around them, and visitors and the public encircling them. There were conferences, lectures, and meetings; the excitement was funneled into a journal, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, which was the leader in the field. But then, starting sometime in the late 1990s, things began to change. People started to retire and were not replaced; two central pillars, Jonathan Frankel and Ezra Mendelsohn, passed away. It was as if someone at the university had decided that enough attention had been given to the field of Russian Jewish studies, and it was time to move on. Vladimir Levin’s book belongs spiritually to the earlier heyday period of Hebrew University, when a 500-​page tome such as Jonathan Frankel’s Politics and Prophecy was the norm. The leading methodology was empiricism, and one took as a given the author’s encyclopedic knowledge and diligent research among library and archival sources. The thematic pontificating typical of today’s American historical writing, with its emphasis on race, gender, and transgression, was notably absent. In Vladimir Levin’s tour de force we are offered a comprehensive encounter with the political and intellectual life of Russian Jewry in the period from 1907–​ 1914. The book is organized into five sections and 21 chapters. The sections deal with Jewish politics in the Russian parliament; non-​socialist groups and the shift from politics to “organic” work; and Jewish socialists and their collaboration in communal Jewish activities such as local politics, education, philanthropy, work, and other social support. Various chapters cover all the main Jewish political parties of the time: the Bund, Zionist factions, Territorialists, Jewish Kadets, and the Orthodox political groupings. Levin’s book broadens and fills in the narrative of Jewish politics in the Russian Empire in the post-​1905 period. The basic contours of the story are well-​known. Many Jews, especially those who were socialists, joined the 1905 revolution and fought to change the regime in the hope that they would gain rights denied to them by the tsar. Beginning in the summer and continuing into the fall of 1905, hundreds of Jews were attacked in pogroms. After the publication of the tsar’s manifesto in October—​which established a legislative council, elections, the right to assembly, and the formation of legal political parties—​Jews and others hoped that the newly formed legislative council, the Duma, might serve as a peaceful means to change Russia. However, when Nicholas II disbanded the Duma after only 72 days, and the police came around to arrest and, in many cases, summarily execute revolutionaries, it became clear that the revolution had failed. As a result, the majority of Jews involved in politics modified their tactics from a struggle on the ramparts to a focus on “organic work,” that is, working to bring about change within the Jewish community in the realms of education, philanthropy, and culture. Historians usually interpret these years as a period of maturation of the Jewish community in which internal political institutions were established, educational opportunities were pursued, and the community as a whole gained experience in self-​reliance. According to Levin, the turn to “organic work” benefited the bourgeois parties rather than the socialists:

306 

Book Reviews

In order to preserve their place in the political scene and Jewish society, the Jewish socialist parties were forced . . . to search for new paths of activity. Their goal was to avoid a mass dropping out from their ranks, to try to recruit new members and, in whatever way, to strengthen, or at least to preserve, their influence on the workers and the poor elements of the Jewish population. For this reason, the parties were active in three principal arenas: an association to aid professionals [lawyers, engineers, doctors], cultural activity, and participation in communal activities. However, the efforts that they invested in these areas did not bear fruit immediately and the parties became weakened and almost disappeared; only the work of the press had an impact and in the end brought unexpected results (p. 424).

Jonathan Frankel was Levin’s adviser, and Politics and Prophesy, Frankel’s magnum opus, serves as the model for Levin’s Mimahpekhah lemilḥamah. In terms of size and ambition, Levin has reached his teacher’s heights. The two works, however, reflect differing political contexts. Whereas Frankel, who wrote his book during the era of the Cold War, sought to convey the unity of the Jewish people despite their ostensible fragmentation, Levin, living in Israel in the post-​Communist era, accepts and even emphasizes diversity and internecine Jewish struggle. At the same time, both scholars appear to agree that the eclipse of the Socialist Left in modern Jewish history is an anomaly. How could it be that the Bund, the largest Jewish party in Eastern Europe, could disappear and that Zionists, the smaller and weaker group, would triumph? Levin is especially thorough in his discussion of Jewish politics and the Duma. As is known, there were two Jewish representatives in the Third Duma and three in the Fourth (Leopold Nisselovich and Naphtali Friedman were in the third Duma; Friedman was joined by Meir Bomash and Yehezkel Gurevich in the fourth). In particular, these men led a patriotic struggle on behalf of the Jewish people, proposing legislation to expand Jewish rights. Levin accurately depicts their unimpeachable intentions, but one could claim, as critics did at the time, that their isolation and failures only show the extent to which antisemitism and political reaction dominated legislation. Another welcome feature of Levin’s work is his exploration of groups that have generally gone unnoticed, among them the Orthodox Jewish leadership. By revealing antecedents, Levin helps explain the development of politics among Orthodox Jewry. Clearly the Orthodox were far from inept or indifferent to political power. In the Zionist movement, as in the future Agudat Israel party, Orthodox leaders made alliances with forces on the political Right in order to further their own goals of empowerment and relevance in Jewish politics. Here Levin uses little-​known Orthodox journals and archival documentation. The period from 1905–​1914 was paradoxical for Jewish politics. All at once, previously unimaginable opportunities opened up; at the same time, Jews could not win enough representatives to the Duma to make a difference, and they suffered from antisemitism on the part of the government and Russian society. Moreover, the Beilis affair, a notorious blood-​libel trial, signaled new dangers ahead. Democracy, which gave rise to so much hope, proved to be a mirage. Levin’s book, which embodies this paradox and many others, reflects the energy and movement of the time and therefore

History, Biography, and Social Science

307

focuses on the emotional extremes: on the one end, exhilaration, optimism, and hope; on the other, exhaustion, desperation, and failure. In the end, Levin shows many people engaged with many ideas—​and few tangible results. Mimahpekhah lemilḥamah is a monumental work of scholarship. It sends one back to a time when scholars with heavy grey matter in their heads walked the halls of the Hebrew University. With this volume, Vladimir Levin does them proud. Brian Horowitz Tulane University

Jacob Jay Lindenthal, Abi Gezunt:  Explorations into  the Role of  Health and the American Jewish Dream. Brighton, Mass.: Academic Studies Press, 2017. xxix + 187 pp; together with The Lindex: A Companion to Abi Gezunt. xi + 341 pp.

Is there a causal relationship between the remarkable economic success and rapid upward mobility of American Jews and behavioral patterns on their part that promoted health and the prevention of disease? Jacob Jay Lindenthal offers what he terms “a conjectural analysis” (p. xiii) to suggest such a causality, and he supports his argument with an impressive array of medical sources that scholars of American Jewry have rarely utilized. Lindenthal maintains that Jewish “values, beliefs, traditions, attitudes, and behavioral patterns” have all had a crucial effect on Jewish health (p. xv). He highlights such cultural factors among the Jews as awareness of and concern for health; an emphasis on cleanliness as mandated by Jewish law (halakhah); a cohesive family life; the promotion of education; specific childrearing practices (among them, circumcision, breastfeeding, and maintaining longer time intervals between births); a low rate of alcoholism; and communal charitable institutions and solidarity as playing a decisive role in keeping East European Jewish immigrants in America in relative good health. As he notes, Jewish immigrants in early 20th-​century America “were healthier than most other groups upon their arrival” and harbored “a culture of health” (pp. 158–​159). The book’s closing chapters provide ample examples of the correlation between health and the accumulation of wealth, along with the economic value of a preventive health lifestyle. Lindenthal is a sociologist and a public health educator who has worked for decades in the field of psychiatry at the Rutgers–​New Jersey Medical School. Over the years he has compiled a web-​based index—​he calls it the “Lindex”—​which constitutes an accompanying volume to Abi Gezunt. The Lindex, a database of maladies among American Jews from 1874 to 2003, includes more than 2,400 entries representing more than 550 diseases, which Lindenthal and his associates meticulously collected from hospital and communal records, government reports and vital statistics, scientific journals, insurance companies’ records, monographs, and dissertations. Moreover, Abi Gezunt itself includes useful lists of sources that corroborate the

308 

Book Reviews

comparatively low rates of alcoholism, influenza, syphilis, and typhoid among Jews, as well as Jews’ comparatively low rates of mortality associated with measles, scarlet fever, and whooping cough. Lindenthal examines the role of halakhah in fostering disease-​preventing practices; Jewish purity laws, for instance, require high standards of hygiene. He then looks at the ways Jewish immigrants put a premium on education and literacy, which in turn had a positive impact on their health. For instance, Lindenthal quotes studies that show how “the mother’s ability to read and write a language strongly correlates with the good health of the family” (p. 27). In a chapter titled “Charity—​Das Jüdische Herz,” Lindenthal details the network of Jewish mutual aid and charitable institutions: landsmanshaftn (hometown associations); bikur ḥolim societies (for visiting the sick); orphanages; the United Hebrew Charities; and Jewish hospitals, all of which provided an extensive spectrum of medical services to Jewish children and adults alike. He stresses the efforts of Jewish families to deal with health problems head-​ on, including illnesses such as “nervous diseases” and tuberculosis that were often regarded as “Jewish” maladies. A study of the early 1960s concluded that “Jews were far more likely to seek care for a child with ‘serious behavioral difficulties’ compared with Catholics or Protestants” (pp. 68–​69). According to Lindenthal, Jewish immigrants in America “were also less likely to succumb to tuberculosis” than non-​Jews, despite the disease’s high incidence among Jews (p. 145). Abi Gezunt belongs to a historiographical school (another recent and nuanced example is Jerry Z. Muller’s Capitalism and the Jews) that has underlined Jewish cultural traits—​precepts of Jewish law that legitimized material gains, Jewish emphasis on education, above-​average literacy, sobriety, and communal values of social solidarity, among others—​as the root cause of Jewish economic success. Other scholars, such as Eli Lederhendler in his American Jewry: A New History, have suggested structural socioeconomic reasons for Jewish success, that is, factors that do not perpetuate ethnic myths and self-​congratulatory theories. Yet one of the virtues of Lindenthal’s study is that he unapologetically brings back to the fore the cultural/​human capital approach with his focus on Jewish healthful conduct. At the same time, while Lindenthal takes pride “in the accomplishments of my co-​ethnics,” he cautions his readers not to “misinterpret this work as an exercise in ethnocentrism” (p. vii). While there is much to admire in the main thesis and scope of Lindenthal’s endeavor, the book features quite a few exaggerations, inaccuracies, and sloppy editing. American Conservative Judaism was not “founded in America in 1875” (p. 2) but nearly half a century later. Likewise, arguing that Orthodox Jews “profess an immutable faith” (p. 2) in the Torah and Talmud ignores the fact that Orthodox Judaism is in itself a response to modernity and is neither monolithic nor static in its approach. Lindenthal mentions that he has been “trolling through the literature” (p. xv) for many years, yet the paucity of historical scholarship published in the past decade is noticeable. Perhaps a more systematic use of historiography would have prevented him from arguing, for example, that in East European shtetls “all Jews remained bound to each other” (p. 62), which is a highly inaccurate generalization. Finally, though this may be more a matter of the publisher’s carelessness rather than that of the author, the page numbers in the table of contents do not correspond with the pages of the appendixes and the index.

History, Biography, and Social Science

309

Such shortcomings do not diminish Lindenthal’s important contribution to the field of American Jewish history, and to immigration history in general. The book’s footnotes, bibliography, and appendixes—​and the “Lindex”—​include troves of long-​ forgotten studies and very helpful information about immigrants’ (Jews and non-​Jews alike) health and disease, and that data will certainly inform future studies. No less important, Abi Gezunt makes it abundantly clear that Jewish culture and values are relevant factors to be considered in any discussion of Jewish economic success and upward mobility. Gil Ribak University of Arizona

Sean Martin, For the Good of the Nation: Institutions for Jewish Children in Interwar Poland: A Documentary History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. xx + 220 pp.

While not exactly what its title suggests, this book is nonetheless a valuable addition to the rather slim bookshelf of books in English dealing with social welfare in interwar Poland. The title suggests that the book is a broad survey of institutions for Jewish children that operated before the Holocaust in Poland, and that it includes as well primary sources illustrating the ways in which these institutions functioned and the challenges they faced. In fact, it is primary sources that constitute most of the book’s contents; for this reason, Martin is credited on the cover with being editor and translator, rather than author (though he is listed as an author on the copyright page). The overview is provided in an extensive opening chapter based, in part, on a previous essay published by Martin.1 The opening chapter is devoted to the history of CENTOS—​the abbreviation for Centrala Towarzystwa Opieki nad Sierotami (National Society for the Care of Orphans). During and after the First World War, institutions were set up in many Jewish communities to provide food, housing, and education to orphans and homeless children. Many needs could not be met on a purely local basis; regional associations developed to support these institutions. Ultimately, in 1924, the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which funneled funds from American Jews to Poland and elsewhere, recognized the need for centralization and encouraged the establishment of CENTOS to act as a clearinghouse for aiding orphans. Although Martin’s account does not follow a strict chronological order, which somewhat complicates a reader’s understanding of how CENTOS evolved, it is nonetheless an interesting and essential introduction to what follows. The central element in this book are the primary sources, translated here for the first time into English, which describe everyday life in the children’s homes. The first section comprises six primary sources that describe different homes for children (33 pages). The remaining two sections consist of a lengthy passage (47 pages) from the diary of an educator at the home for children in Helenówek (on the outskirts of Lodz)

310 

Book Reviews

and six sources (totaling 63 pages) relating to the home for Jewish disabled children in Otwock. Given the knowledge of what was going to happen shortly after the period described in this book, no reader will expect to find it full of cheer. Nonetheless, the pain, suffering, and poverty are striking. No less notable are the efforts of many Jews in Poland to try to alleviate the terrible conditions of so many children, and the significance of the aid given by the JDC despite its limited resources. Martin raises a point worthy of some consideration in his introduction: namely, the accusations that Chaim Rumkowski, who had administered the children’s home in Helenowek and who later headed the Council of Elders (Judenrat) in the Lodz ghetto, was a sexual predator. He cites a number of relevant sources, notably those by Monika Polit and Michal Unger.2 One of the most cited sources in these works are the memoirs of Lucille Eichengreen; as shown by Kirsty Chatwood, there are several challenges in assessing these memoirs.3 I did my own research on the matter, and with the generous assistance of Inna Gogina, an archivist at the USC Shoah Foundation–​The Institute for Visual History and Education, I was able to locate a recorded testimony of Eichengreen. This testimony contains references to Rumkowski’s predatory behavior; another testimony, by Gina Lifszyc, details Rumkowski’s sexual advances toward her best friend.4 Martin, however, concludes that such accusations are “unsubstantiated” (p. xiv). I am not certain that they are unsubstantiated. For the Good of the Nation lacks a bibliography, which is unfortunate; given Martin’s great knowledge of the topic, it is to be hoped that he will one day prepare an annotated bibliography on Jewish welfare activities in interwar Poland. In the meantime, this book can serve as a powerful introductory text to the study of Polish Jewry in the 20th century, and it certainly adds to our understanding as to how this community responded to the German occupation of Poland. Shaul Stampfer The Hebrew University

Notes 1.  Sean Martin, “How to House a Child: Providing Homes for Jewish Children in Interwar Poland,” East European Jewish Affairs 45, no. 1 (2015), 26–​41. 2. Monika Polit, Moja żydowska dusza nie obawia się dnia sądu. Mordechaj Chaim Rumkowski. Prawda i zmys ́lenie (Warsaw: 2012); Michal Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (Jerusalem: 2004). 3. Kirsty Chatwood, “(Re-​ )interpreting Stories of Sexual Violence:  The Multiple Testimonies of Lucille Eichengreen,” in Life, Death and Sacrifice: Women and Family in the Holocaust, ed. Esther Hertzog (Jerusalem: 2008) 161–​179. 4. USC Shoah Foundation–​The Institute for Visual History and Education, European Holocaust, video testimonies collection, interview code 31586, segment #13 (Lifszyc). See also interview code 10893 (Eichengreen); according to Inna Gogina, this interview “contains the discussion of the interviewee’s awareness—​not the first-​hand experience, to be precise—​of child molestation by Rumkowski in the Jewish orphanage at Helenowek and in the Lodz ghetto, in segments #87–​90” (email correspondence, 27 November 2018). Unger, too, cites testimonies concerning Rumkowski’s predatory behavior (Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, 13).

History, Biography, and Social Science

311

Uzi Rebhun, Jews and the  American Religious Landscape. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2016. x + 236 pp.

Scholars of Judaism in America, as well as interested laypersons, will welcome Uzi Rebhun’s new book, Jews and the American Religious Landscape. A seemingly short volume, it provides a comprehensive study of the latest demographic trends among American Jews and offers a thoroughgoing analysis of the socioeconomic, religious, and political realities in which American Jews live their lives, and in relation to which they make their decisions. As both its starting point and its major source of data, the book utilizes the research carried out by the Religious Landscape Survey sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life in 2008. This survey consisted of telephone interviews with 35,556 adults living in households across the continental United States; since its publication, it has steered much discussion and reflection among American Jewish leaders and scholars. Rebhun’s book offers perhaps the most in-​depth analysis of the survey and its contribution to the understanding of American Jewry at the current time, placing its findings within the larger framework of American religion and society of the last decades. Rebhun opens with a lengthy introduction regarding religious life in America in our generation. He points both to the pluralism that characterizes the American religious landscape and to an almost unparalleled mobility on the part of Americans who move at ease from one religious group to another. More than half of America’s adult population have joined religious groups different from the traditions in which they were raised. Many have felt secure enough to create new religious frameworks, and they often do not shy away from picking and choosing, creating their own tenets of faith and spiritual practices, and following their own preferences with only partial regard for older traditions and ways. From here, Rebhun moves to a discussion concerning the demographics and dynamics of American Jewry. Famously, Jews do not define themselves merely by religious affiliation but also in terms of their ethnicity. Rebhun provides diagrams (pp. 49, 57, and 59) that relate to Jews by religion and by ethnicity as two separate categories. (This is not the case when the same diagrams offer information on members of other religious groups; in their cases, religion is the only category). In his view, the socioeconomic realities of Jews in the last generation have been highly encouraging. Jews have integrated as never before into the American society and economy. They have obtained a higher degree of education and have higher income prospects than do other groups. Rebhun points to the persistence of differences between Jewish and non-​ Jewish patterns in the realm of politics and social involvement. In this, Jewish culture in America follows attitudes evident in previous generations. The Jewish vote does not resemble socioeconomic position as is the case in the larger population. Upper-​ middle-​class Jews, for the most part, prefer liberal or Democratic political candidates, parties, and platforms. In the realm of demography, Rebhun shows, the developments have been less promising. The decline in the number of Jews, and in their percentage in the larger

312 

Book Reviews

American population, points to a grimmer picture. So, too, does the decline in affiliation with Jewish institutions and synagogues. Only one out of every two Jews is a registered synagogue member, and only half that number show up on a more or less regular basis to prayer services (p. 114). Rebhun takes a nonjudgmental view toward one of the most controversial elements in Jewish demographics and culture in the last decades, interfaith marriages, which have increased dramatically during the last half century. Once a marginal phenomenon, they are now almost the norm. The Pew survey revealed that Jews between the ages of 30 and 45, in particular, tend to choose non-​Jewish spouses. Rebhun is aware of an alternative interpretation that views demographic changes in terms of a paradigm shift. Jews have developed new means of relating to Jewish identity, culture, and faith, demonstrating creativity and innovation along those lines. If half a century ago Jews defined themselves as Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform, this division has now weakened considerably, and younger generations have come up with newer modes of worship or involvement with Jewish life. Some developments are missing from Rebhun’s otherwise comprehensive analysis. He overlooks (as have others) the growing presence of non-​Jews in Jewish houses of worship, and the informal conversions that have become a trademark of present liberal synagogues. The book also displays unawareness with regard to the spreading of Jewish rituals, symbols, and teachings to non-​Jewish (mostly Christian) communities and the creation of borderline communities between Judaism and other faiths. This does not diminish from the merits of the book, which include not only astute observations but also accessible language and format. Rebhun does an excellent job in explaining complicated demographic data that could otherwise be unapproachable. His writing is straightforward, and his diagrams and demographic data are easy to decipher. Moreover, he keeps an even, inclusive, and nonsectarian outlook on the various developments he examines. In sum, this is truly a good book, and I highly recommend it. Yaakov Ariel University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jacques Roumani, David Meghnagi, and Judith Roumani (eds.), Jewish Libya: Memory and Identity in Text and Image. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018. xiv + 321 pp.

One can only welcome a publication on Jewish Libya, a field of study that is still quite neglected in comparison with the number of works published on other North African countries, and Morocco in particular. However, whereas the images in this book are abundant, one remains somewhat dissatisfied by the texts. The volume covers a long historical span that ranges from the Jewish revolt against the Romans in Cyrenaica (in eastern Libya) to the pogrom of 1967 and the subsequent departure of the last Jews from the country. The various chapters are a mix of annotated, scholarly research and

History, Biography, and Social Science

313

unreferenced testimonies and reminiscences that might better have been placed in a separate section. Since most of the book is devoted to comparatively recent history, a chapter devoted to the Italian colonization of Libya in the early 20th century, as well as a more analytical chapter dealing with the period following the departure of the Italian colonizers in the late 1940s, and the impact of Italian colonialism on Libyan Jewry, would have been useful. Another important subject that is not adequately covered concerns the very different Jewish communities of Benghazi and Tripoli. The former has a much longer history dating back to the third century BCE; Benghazi Jews were well-​ integrated into the culture of Cyrenaica and spoke mostly Arabic, whereas the Jews of Tripoli spoke mostly Italian and Judeo-​Arabic. A chapter titled “Growing Up Jewish in Benghazi,” featuring an interview with Samuele Zarrugh, whose family later emigrated to Livorno, Italy, hints at these two very different contexts, but the subject is worthy of more thorough treatment. A similar unbalance is evident in the third section of the volume, which contains two essays dealing with women. Rachel Simon’s “Libyan Jewish Women as a Marginalized Vanguard in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” presents a coherent and interesting analysis of the evolution of the status of Jewish women from the late Ottoman period. Some women, she shows, were entirely lacking in formal education, and utilized oral poetry and folk music as a means of expression. Others, whose families had economic and social ties with Europe, received formal education (often in Christian schools); there were also girls who were educated together with their brothers. Social background notwithstanding, all were subject to social pressure or ridicule if they sought to perform functions reserved for men, such as following the service in their prayer books (an indication of their literacy). The second essay, co-​authored by Gheula Canarutto Nemni and Judith Roumani and titled “Libyan Jewish Women in Italy and in Israel Today,” lacks citations and is inadequate in its coverage. The first part of the essay, written by Nemni and dealing with Libyan Jewish women in Italy, is based on interviews with nine women in three different age cohorts (under 50, aged 50–​70, and 70+). The questions asked are very general, and the sample itself is too small to justify the claim that this constitutes a “complete picture” (p. 172). In addition, there is no indication as to the socioeconomic background of the women, or even where their families were from. In the second part of the essay, Judith Roumani offers “portraits” of women without naming anyone in specific and without mentioning how many individuals she has in mind. Her general conclusions seem to pertain to Libyan Jewish women as a whole. At one point, she makes reference to Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, stating that the status of the colonizer did not concern Memmi, while that of the colonized applied only partially. This, in fact, runs opposite to what Memmi himself wrote: If I was undeniably a native, as one used to say, as close as possible to a Muslim . . . I passionately tried to identify myself as French. In the great fervor that I had for the West, which seemed to me the paragon of all civilization and all true culture, at first I happily turned my back on the East, choosing the French language, dressing in Italian clothes, and delightedly adopting even the tics of the Europeans.1

314 

Book Reviews

This particular essay would have benefited from the research done by Piera Rossetto and Barbara Spadaro.2 Jewish Libya can be appreciated for its making available to a wider public the memories and personal testimonies of individuals such as David Meghnagi and Hamos Guetta. It is a pity that inaccuracies, inadequate analysis and documentation, and a lack of balance in its contents diminish the contribution made by this work. Emanuela Trevisan Semi Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice

Notes 1.  Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur (Paris: 2010), 17. 2.  Piera Rossetto, “Mémoires de diasporas, diaspora de mémoire. Juifs de Libye entre Israel et l’Italie, de 1948 à nos jours” (Ph.D. thesis, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2015); idem and Barbara Spadaro, “Across Europe and the Mediterranean: Exploring Jewish Memories from Libya,” Annali di Ca’ Foscari 50 (December 2014),  37–​52.

Maurice Samuels, The Right to  Difference:  French Universalism and the  Jews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 241 pp.

“This is not a work of intellectual history in the conventional sense,” writes Maurice Samuels in the introduction to this sophisticated, intricately argued book on French intellectuals’ ruminations about the place of Jews in France since the 18th century. A specialist in French literature at Yale, Samuels presents “a series of close readings of texts” about this issue (p. 15). What are these texts about? Part of a continuing discourse on French citizenship, they are ruminations on whether French society should define rights and obligations for individuals irrespective of their religious, ethnic, or cultural origins, or whether those particularities should govern how individuals identify and order themselves within French society. Suggesting that this Manichean view is too simple, Samuels identifies a countertradition within French universalism that embodies a more malleable approach to universal commitments. This is a timely conversation, having serious implications for high-​profile contemporary clashes over how the French should think about minorities, including those of Muslim background. As participants in these debates know, ruminating on these matters is a French specialty. Since the time of the French Revolution, theorists in France have claimed a special universalist vocation, referring to a set of ideas that have defined the country’s dominant commitment to republicanism. Particularly in moments of national crisis, such as the French Revolution of 1789, the Dreyfus affair, Vichy, or conflicts over immigration in France, questions of universalism versus particularism have punctuated public discourse. Today, against the background of antisemitic and

History, Biography, and Social Science

315

terrorist outrages, some have claimed that France is in the midst of a national crisis over these matters. In this book, Samuels makes a case that French universalism not only has entailed a variegated set of ideas, but that these deserve to be considered in present-​day debates. Tracking the history of French universalist thought from its origins in the French revolutionary tradition, Samuels makes a case that French universalism has persistently become entangled with notions about how Jews fit into this picture. From the days of the French Revolution, when they were only a tiny minority in France (in 1789, they numbered 40,000 in a total population of 28 million), Jews have constituted an ideal ground for theorizing about universalism, in part because they were the only non-​Christian people in France during the Enlightenment and the 19th century. Both Jews and non-​Jews, he observes, have tried to come to terms with Jewish difference and its public manifestations. The Jews stick out. Should they assimilate into French society? Should they define their Jewishness in terms of liberté, egalité, and fraternité? Should Jewishness disappear? Do Jews pose a threat to French unity? Does French identity preclude Jewish commitment? And later: How should notions about the place of Jewish difference apply to other minorities in France? Samuels’ reading of the texts produced on such questions over more than two centuries is distinctive for his claim that those with universalist commitments were sometimes “more open to difference, more pluralist, than has previously been assumed” (p.  154). This was notably the case with leading French revolutionaries such as Clermont-​Tonnerre and Robespierre. Revolutionaries spent a great deal of time insisting on the Jews’ capacity and sometimes their appetite for regeneration, for improving themselves through recourse to Enlightenment ideals. Some Jews identified such ideals and debated how to embrace universalism while maintaining their Jewish identity. French universalist traditions, nestling under the banner of laïcité, or freedom from religion, could in fact be flexible, more accommodating of Jewish difference. By the same token, later in the 19th century, in the Dreyfus period, defenders of the Jews such as Emile Zola could speak up for Jews even as they expected them to disappear as Jews. As he approaches the present, Samuels raises the possibility that the French, or at least some of them, may be ready to accommodate themselves to a right to difference, under the banner of what he calls “republican universalism.” Samuels contends that a modern-​day defender of Jews such as Jean-​Paul Sartre challenged republican universalism even as, in his Réflexions sur la question juive, he defended the Jews’ specificity and rejected calls to Jewish assimilation. In this, as in other cases, the often-​presumed conflict between particularism and universalism was not necessarily clear cut. I have one reservation about this book. For all Samuels’ copious reading of the literature on the modern history of Jews in France, historians interested in the subject may find his inquiry somewhat removed from present-​day Jewish realities. While his starting point is the minority crisis that so preoccupies the French, he never quite gets to Jews in France today or how they fit into the theoretical framework he so artfully describes. And although he is sympathetic to assertions of Jewish particularism, he is rather remote from the Jews themselves. These now number close to half a million, the majority of whom are Sephardic Jews from North Africa who came to France in the latter part of the 20th century. Their particular voices, together with those of their

316 

Book Reviews

immigrant predecessors, the large numbers of Jews of Yiddish-​speaking Jews who came in earlier decades, are not heard in Samuels’ pages—​but they certainly have had a lot to say about the issues posed in this book. Michael R. Marrus University of Toronto

Mel Scult (ed.), Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, vol. 2, 1934–​1941. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016. 470 pp. I am writing this at 12:00 midnight and am thus violating the Sabbath ordinance against writing. Although I managed to emancipate myself from the habit of conforming to that ordinance a few years ago, yet the old habit has persisted and I have not used the pen on Sabbaths. This entry from Mordecai Kaplan’s journal (p. 20), along with hundreds of others that Mel Scult includes in Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan (vol. 2), provides an invaluable glimpse into the private thoughts of an American Jewish thinker whose legacy continues to shape the landscape of Jewish thought. The carefully edited selections in this volume cover about seventy-​five percent of Kaplan’s previously unpublished journal entries from the period spanning the 1934 publication of his magnum opus, Judaism as a Civilization, until the U.S. entry into the Second World War in 1941. Scult, a scholar who has dedicated his career to exploring and transmitting Kaplan’s biographical and intellectual legacy, has contributed another important resource for specialists and lay audiences interested in exploring Kaplan’s vision of Judaism and American Jewish life. Kaplan’s day-​to-​day musings captured in the volume—​from the mundane to the philosophical—​offer a unique window into his intellectual evolution, his understanding of Zionism, and his interpersonal relationships with fellow Jewish intellectuals in New York City and Jerusalem. The journal juxtaposes offhand comments with colorful and historically significant observations about major Jewish figures and institutions. For example, we learn that Kaplan purchased 500 copies of Judaism as a Civilization at $1.65 a copy to sell for a profit. Following a conversation with Martin Buber, the author of I and Thou, he wrote: “I cannot say that we thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, but the fact that, at least, Buber behaved himself humanly, taking into consideration the interests of his colleague, pacified me somewhat” (p. 108). As revealed by some of the entries, Kaplan also faced moments of intense self-​doubt during which he felt “weighted down by a terrible sense of futility from the standpoint of alleviating the misery which human beings inflict on one another” (p. 207). Entries such as these illuminate the gaps, connections, and tensions between Kaplan’s systematic writings and his own individual feelings and experiences. As a result, they add important layers to our understanding of Kaplan as a thinker and human being. A few consistent themes across journal entries stand out as particularly rich avenues for new exploration into Kaplan’s oeuvre and historical significance. First, the

History, Biography, and Social Science

317

journal is an important reminder that for Kaplan—​as for other great intellectuals who seek ideological clarity and philosophical consistency in their published works—​key concepts had their origins in messy, contextual, and contingent experiences. As the introductory quote above indicates, Kaplan’s journal invites the reader to recognize the ambiguous and internally inconsistent nature of his philosophy of Jewish observance and belief. The journal underscores the fact that Kaplan’s famous ideas, including such “static” concepts as “Judaism as a Civilization,” reflected his own rationally unjustifiable ritual habits, heated dinnertime family disagreements, and internal conflicts on key philosophical questions. Second, this volume provides insights into Kaplan’s political thought, especially regarding Zionism and the competing political ideologies of the interwar period. Known primarily for his contributions to religious thought, Kaplan during this period demonstrates a preoccupation with global political thought. The journal covers the rise of Nazism and the increasing violence in Palestine at a time when Kaplan lived in New York City and in Jerusalem. (Indeed, one of the most important contributions of this volume is the inclusion of Scult’s translation of journal entries penned during Kaplan’s stay in Jerusalem). From these vantage points at moments of great existential risk to Jewish communities, Kaplan arrives at surprising conclusions that have long been erased from his legacy as an American Jewish Zionist thinker. An ardent Zionist and an intellectual leader of American Zionism during this period, Kaplan nonetheless confided his support for a binational state in Palestine, declared that Palestine should not function as a central state for the Jews in the diaspora, and criticized the Yishuv’s relationship with the Arabs in Palestine. Kaplan’s legacy as a thinker dedicated to American democracy belies his intense frustrations with capitalism and his serious flirtation with Communism as an ideology best suited for the realization of Jewish religious life. Third, the journals provide a less philosophical and far more experiential entry point into Kaplan’s theology, especially his ideas about God and salvation. Despite Kaplan’s expansive writings about his theology, there remains a tension in his thought between God as the sum of human creativity and goodness and God as an entity beyond the natural world. The entries do not necessarily clarify Kaplan’s position as a natural or supernatural theologian. Instead, they underscore his experimentations with navigating these two positions and articulating alternate conceptions. For example, Kaplan advises himself in 1936 that, “without in any way inferring that godhood is a force in the same sense that electricity is a force, resort to the analogy of electricity” (p. 76). Perhaps anticipating the questions of future curious readers, he feels the need to explain his theology in more concrete language. The journal becomes the place for Kaplan to try out metaphors and analogies that acknowledge the challenges of articulating the philosophical position he outlines in his published material. In addition to assembling and editing the material from Kaplan’s handwritten journals, Scult includes a short introduction, informative footnotes, and references to secondary sources for further reading. Even with this helpful scaffolding, readers ­unfamiliar with Kaplan’s work and the historical context of this period in Kaplan’s life might find it challenging to follow some of the material and to appreciate the significance of Kaplan’s private musings in relation to his published writings and actions. Nonetheless, this volume invites a much broader audience to consider Kaplan’s

318 

Book Reviews

unmediated struggle to rethink American Judaism and Zionism at a crucial time in American Jewish history. More than eight decades ago, Kaplan made a commitment to face the structural challenges of modern Jewish life with intellectual honesty, and he remains an incredibly rich and insightful thought partner for addressing many of the same issues and questions in American Jewish life. Noam Pianko University of Washington

Jeffrey Veidlinger (ed.), Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. x + 351 pp.

This remarkably cohesive volume of essays edited by Jeffrey Veidlinger is based on a conference hosted in 2013 in Bloomington, Indiana marking the 100th jubilee year of the ethnographic expedition led by Sh. An-​sky to the Russian Pale of Settlement. As in a Marc Chagall painting, An-​sky’s figure seems to hover above the book’s 17 essays, which span a century of “Jewish ethnographic impulse.” Following in An-​sky’s footsteps, Veidlinger’s opening essay contemplates the implications of both the ideal and the reality of “going to the people,” which is negotiated in different settings in the four sections of the book. Nathaniel Deutsch, like Veidlinger, identifies An-​sky as the quintessential Jewish ethnographer who lived “between two worlds”—​“being at once a native and a nonnative studying people” (pp. 37–​38). This “in-​betweeness” is highlighted in other essays, particularly those of the historical section opening the volume. Marina Mogilner, for instance, demonstrates how Arkadii El’Kind, a physical anthropologist based in Russia, negotiated between “detached” racial science in his research regarding the Jewish pure “racial type,” which he carried out in Moscow in the turn of the 20th century, and his hidden, Jewish-​national agenda. Sergei Kan’s featured subject is Lev Shternberg, whose post-​revolutionary “Jewish program” is analyzed in relation to his earlier career as one of the key anthropologists of the late Russian Empire. Elissa Bemporad explores ethnographic collection carried out in the Bolshevik Belorussian republic in the name of a new ideology “rooting” Jews in a Belorussian setting. Mikhail Krutikov follows the way in which Yiddish folklorists—​in particular, Max Wiener, in his activities in Kiev—​dealt with new interpretations of folk creativity inspired by Soviet ideology in the 1930s, contrasting these to earlier “bourgeois” folkloristic works in Yiddish, German, and even Hebrew. Deborah Yalen presents the dilemma faced by I.M. Pul’ner, who worked at the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad, where he was forced to comply with the demands of Marxist ideology. “Ultimately,” Yalen notes, “the desire to ascertain whether or not Pul’ner was tragically torn ‘between two worlds,’ those of Judaism and Marxism, may say more about post-​Cold War scholarly agendas than about the man himself” (p. 137). Sarah Ellen Zarrow positions the world of scholarship of YIVO in Vilna (and to a certain degree, also New York) in relation to the world(s) of the zamlers (collectors of folklore) who simultaneously carried out

History, Biography, and Social Science

319

their work as a “sacred duty” while also acting as agents who creatively crafted the world around them. Finally, David E. Fishman offers an account of what he calls “the last Zamlers”: Avrom Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, who smuggled material collected in occupied Vilna and the surrounding ghettos in 1944–​1945. Whereas the first section examines historical encounters in the field by ethnographers who operated before 1945, the second and third sections are written by scholars who themselves have taken part in the “Jewish ethnographic impulse.” These new encounters are set in the historical context of the break in continuity imposed on Jewish culture(s) in the course of the 20th century. Thus, essays in the second section engage worlds in which continuities and roots are replaced by routes (to paraphrase James Clifford).1 Haya Bar-​Itzhak’s fieldwork among Polish Jews who emigrated from Poland to Israel in the late 1950s shows how their “Polish” culture was transformed not only by their encounters with a different physical environment but also by their interactions with European Jews who had immigrated before them, with members of other Jewish ethnic groups, and with Israeli Arabs. This perception of the fluctuation of culture is evident as well in Alexandra Polyan’s linguistic research of Jewish communities in present-​day Bessarabia and Bukovina who form a new speech community. Veidlinger’s interviews in small towns in the Ukraine show how historical Jewish culture is depicted in nostalgic narratives that put memories of rituals and food at the center, marking both continuities and discontinuities with the past. Similarly, Sebastian Z. Schulman’s oral histories of the Ribnitser Rebbe demonstrate the ways in which a modern tzadik functions as an emblem of stability in an ever-​changing cultural setting, connecting Moldovian Jews to what they view as a living tradition. The third section, comprising three reflections on the Jewish ethnographic impulse, opens with an autoethnographic account by Larisa Fialkova and Maria Yelenevskaya on their research among “ex-​Soviet Jews” in Israel. As they explain, their research was not entirely positioned “between two worlds” since they, themselves, scholar-​ immigrants who grew up in the Soviet Union, engaged their own world. Halina Goldberg’s reflections concern an exhibit in a Lodz museum that focused specifically on her parents’ (hi)story. Asya Vaisman Schulman concludes this section with an ­account of ethnography among hasidic women in New York and the difficulties in gaining access to informants—​challenges that are rarely discussed so explicitly. The cohesiveness of the volume stems from An-​sky’s all but palpable presence; he appears to be the one “pulling the strings” of a century of Jewish ethnographic impulse. However, in positioning An-​sky in this manner, other impulses are inevitably cast in his shadow, some of which are brought to the fore in Simon J. Bronner’s concluding essay, which focuses on cultural practice in a much wider frame than the case studies presented in the volume. Indeed, I think that one can push the notion of “Jewish ethnographic impulses” (in the plural) even further. How else to account for the ethnographic impulse of the Wissenschaft des Judenthums’ folkloristic tradition (evident in Max Grunwald’s journal); Mediterranean ethnographies carried out by scholars from Paris (for instance, Nahum Sloutschz) and by Sephardic scholars (for instance, M.B. Meyuhas); and the ethnographic engagement of Israeli anthropologists, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists (such as Raphael Patai, Dov Noy, and Edith Gerson-​Kiwi) with Jewish communities from Muslim countries? Such encounters highlight a range of political and epistemological tensions.

320 

Book Reviews

Furthermore, an engagement with this impulse should accommodate Jewish ethnographers who operated within different disciplinary frameworks, negotiating their own identities even when they studied non-​Jews. Scholars such as Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, Charles Seligman, Claude Lévi-​Strauss, Isaac Schapera, Max Gluckman, Friedrich Krauss, Joseph Jacobs, and Robert Lachmann (to name but a few) demonstrate the diverse contexts of the Jewish ethnographic impulse. Non-​ Jewish ethnographers who explored Jewish subjects, such as the Baltic-​German folklorist Walter Anderson and his former student in Estonia, the linguist Paul Ariste, further complicate the matter. It seems that the premise of the volume concerning the “Jews and the ethnographic impulse” engages only Jewish ethnographers who studied Jewish subjects. However, these “two worlds” of Jews and ethnography were much more diverse. Indeed, most of the essays of the volume continually undermine such binaries in very fruitful ways. Going to the People is a wonderful contribution to an expanding library that traces the Jewish ethnographic impulse. It offers a balance between key figures and possibly less-​known ethnographers, offering new empirical evidence and much theoretical reflection on this important topic. It is particularly relevant to scholars who continue to reflect in their own work on the “ethnographic impulse” as well as historians and scholars of contemporary Jewry with a focus on East European Jewish culture. Dani Schrire The Hebrew University

Note 1. James Clifford, Routes:  Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: 1997).

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East Tal Dekel, Transnational Identities:  Women, Art, and Migration in Contemporary Israel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016. 171 pp.

Transitional Identities: Women, Art and Migration in Contemporary Israel, translated from the original Hebrew (the name of the translator is not given), focuses on the experiences of three different groups of migrant women artists living in Israel. Dekel, who herself migrated to Israel as a 12-​year-​old from the United States, is interested in the double perspective that immigrants bring to their lives in the new country: both as outsider and insider, Israeli and/​or “other.” Dekel, who lectures both in the department of art history and in the women and gender studies program at Tel Aviv University, has a particular interest in gender and transnationalism in contemporary art and visual culture. Her first book, Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory, examined the relationship between feminist theory, politics, and art, particularly in respect to the Israeli art scene. In Transnational Identities, her second book, she focuses on the stories of women who came to Israel from the 1990s onwards through an analysis of their artistic practice. Employing a transdisciplinary approach, Dekel weaves together qualitative in-​ depth interviews of the artists with contemporary theories of migration studies, Israel studies, political science, gender studies, and sociology. Her aim is to highlight these women’s experiences, to the extent possible, in their own voices. As Dekel points out, this delicate balance between the artists’ perspectives (the personal) and her own observation and analysis (the political), is beset with ethical dilemmas of power relationships. Dekel acknowledges the ethical and feminist dilemmas of “speaking in someone else’s name” and is self-​critical and reflexive in her accounts of their stories. Transnationalism, or the development and consequences of transnational processes such as mass migration, economic expansion, and the globalization of capitalism, has sparked the notion that people from diverse ethnic, religious, social, economic, or gender-​based groups can transcend national borders or nation-​states because of their social or economic interconnectivity.1 This interconnectivity or interdependence is the outcome of expanding social networks and the technological revolution of communications and transportation, as well as the transformations among many non-​Western countries in the wake of decolonization and the spread of human rights. In Dekel’s study, transnational identities are affected by the process of transnationalism; this process involves both individuals and nation-​states, and occurs in “several places at once” (p. 5). Thus, all the immigrants in Dekel’s Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Avriel Bar-Levav and Uzi Rebhun, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0044

322 

Book Reviews

study have been affected by “geopolitical changes that enabled or impelled population transfers to Israel” (p. 6). The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, for instance, created an opportunity for Jewish emigration from the Former Soviet Union (FSU). Regime changes in Ethiopia following the breakdown of Haile Selassie’s empire in the late 1970s and 1980s, and economic hardship in the wake of the collapse of Communism in 1991, accelerated the implementation of Operation Moses (1984–​ 1985) and Operation Solomon (May 1991), which brought a major portion of the Ethiopian Jewish community to Israel. Finally, the arrival of growing numbers of foreign workers from the Philippines to Israel in the 1990s was a direct consequence of geopolitical as well as political and economic changes, both in Israel and in the rest of the world. Transnational Identities is divided into three sections focusing on women belonging to these three different groups: Jewish and non-​Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia, and non-​Jewish foreign workers from the Philippines. Using the triangular analysis of race, class, and gender, Dekel shows how their artworks not only reflect their diverse migrant experiences but also demonstrate the issues of gendered power relations that come with the experiences of being uprooted and relocated in a new nation-​state. In addition, she emphasises the problems associated with Israel as an ethno-​national state where the basis for citizenship is based on ethno-​religious principles and the Law of Return, rather than place of birth. As Dekel points out, there is no scholarly work on the gendered experience of women immigrants in Israel; her three case studies make this book a significant contribution to research dealing with women’s lives, citizenship studies, and global migration, as well as Jewish and national identity in contemporary Israeli women’s art. In Chapter  1, after mentioning the dearth of exhibitions on Russian-​speaking women that draw attention to the gendered aspects of their work and life, Dekel outlines the two different waves of Russian immigration to Israel, the small influx in the 1970s and the larger influx of more than a million Soviet Jews in the 1990s. She then categorizes the artists according to themes that relate to their particular experiences: the migrant body, racist sexism, sex trafficking, employment, cultural branding and sex roles, and finally, “Who is a Jew?”—​one of the most sensitive issues regarding Israeli identity among many FSU immigrants. Dekel confronts this problematic issue by presenting Yasna Goldschmidt’s video piece, He Who Has Made Me A Non-​Jewess. In this work, Goldschmidt addresses the question of who is a Jew by telling her life story in the form of an interview (without looking directly at the camera). Her father was Jewish, and her mother was not, giving her the right to return to Israel under the Jewish law of return, but not the right under Jewish law (halakhah) to consider herself a Jew. Goldschmidt’s work highlights the emotional ambivalence many FSU immigrants experience: between the desire to belong and the experience of not belonging. Dekel clearly shows how gender plays a role in that multilayered identification process. In the video, Goldschmidt comments that for an FSU immigrant man in her position, the process of Jewish identification can be less troubling, as a non-​Jewish man who marries a Jewish woman will automatically have Jewish children. This will not be the case for her, no matter how much she identified as Jewish in the course of her growing up in the Soviet Union.

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

323

Chapter 2, dealing with Ethiopian women’s experience, analyzes similar themes of employment, education, gender, and race as reflected in artworks and handicrafts. I found particularly resonant the section titled “Skin Color and Blackness,” which considers the artworks of Esti Almo-​Wexler (b. 1980) and Smadar Elias (b. 1981). In her discussion of their work, Dekel effectively links the double oppression that Jewish Ethiopian immigrant women experience to that of other women of color, among them African American activists and theoreticians such as Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins. The last chapter considers the migrant experience of Filipina artists, the largest female migrant group of “caregivers” who work in Israeli homes, offering relief to families needing help for their aging parents. In this chapter, Dekel shows how the artworks of Patt Luluquisin, Ali Marasigan, and Jenny Cajes poignantly reflect the tensions of “outsider” and “belonging” that are part and parcel of most migrant experiences. Dekel deftly links their encounters to the feelings of “in-​betweenness” that she describes at the outset of her study. Transnational Identities seeks to give power to the voices of immigrant and migrant women artists whose experiences in an ethno-​nation state are marked by various degrees of complexity and difficulties. As such, it is a strong addition to the discussion on contemporary life in Israel today, particularly the diverse stories of women migrants and their art. If anything, the book left me wanting to discover and enjoy more artworks by these pioneering women. Lynne Swarts University of Sydney

Note 1.  Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (eds.), Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick: 2006), 4.

Michael Feige, ’Al da’at hamakom: meḥozot zikaron yisreelim (Al Da’at Ha’makom: Israeli Realms of  Memory), ed. David Ohana. Beersheba:  Ben-​ Gurion University Press, 2017. 567 pp.

David Ohana has undertaken the difficult task of compiling a collection of writings by his friend and colleague Michael Feige, who was murdered in a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv’s Sarona Market in June 2016. The result is a fascinating and lavish volume that presents us with representative works of one of Israel’s most interesting and original sociologists. Ohana has assembled essays from different periods on a variety of topics, linked together by the common theme of the interrelationship between place, memory, and nationality—​ an issue that preoccupied Feige throughout his years of research. The book comprises five sections, each of which presents a different aspect of this trio of forces.

324 

Book Reviews

The first section deals with a variety of readings of the Israeli space: both the ideal (in the sense of utopian) space of the settlers and the profane (in the sense of everyday) place of secularists. In these essays, Feige addresses the different ways in which mythic and imagined space becomes real, while what is real becomes imagined and utopic. This is the case, for instance, in his article “Our Tiny Country: Model, Utopia and Reality in Israel and Mini-​Israel,” in which he analyzes the miniaturized version of the “proper” Israel in the Mini Israel Park located outside of Jerusalem. In a critical reading of this tourist attraction, he shows how the miniature model, “intended as a secular pilgrimage site,” seeks to impart not only a tourist experience but also a “sense of pilgrimage holiness” (p. 88), allowing visitors to encounter what they experience to be authentic, ideal, and eternal Israeli nationalism. The second section consists of articles dealing with traumatic events in (Jewish) Israeli collective memory: the Yom Kippur War, the evacuation of the northern Sinai settlement of Yamit, and the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. These are formative events in the historiography of two political communities—​the settlers (mitnaḥalim) and the peace camp—​that have in a large measure determined Israeli political discourse since the 1980s. In an essay titled “The Yom Kippur War in Israeli Collective Memory: Rift Versus Continuity,” Feige shows how the great wave of protest that followed the failures of the Yom Kippur War united soldiers from Right and Left—​but for a short time only. The essentially different interpretation each political camp ascribed to the war institutionalized and deepened the ideological dispute that had begun with the occupation of territories conquered in the Six-​Day War and hastened the emergence of opposing political movements, Gush Emunim and Peace Now. The third section of the book focuses upon archeology as an arena in which different groups—​ultra-​Orthodox Jews, settlers, and secularists—​struggle to promote their identities with regard to Israeli nationality. Throughout this section Feige demonstrates how each group has appropriated archeology in its own way in order to delineate the boundaries of national space and create an affinity between past, present, and future in accordance with its own particular ideology. Commemoration in Israeli society is the theme of the fourth section, which focuses on the cultural differences between Gush Emunim and Peace Now as revealed in their construction of myths and martyrs. Feige does not confine himself to researching the topic solely in the context of these two movements, but instead extends his view to include the commemoration of Yitzhak Rabin and the victims of the 1997 military helicopter disaster, both of which he uses to illustrate changing trends within Israeli society—​in particular, the privatization processes that commemoration and bereavement have undergone. The concluding section, titled “Towers of Normality,” comprises articles that contemplate different aspects of an Israeli society in the process of divesting itself of its collective identity. Feige does this in a variety of ways: by analyzing the key word freier (“sucker”); by scrutinizing the class component and neo-​liberal ideology of the Peace Now movement; and finally, in the essay that concludes the collection (in the context of describing a project in which Israeli researchers examine what will happen in an era of peace), by ruminating on “how the Israeli society of the future will regard its past, or how the following morning will recall the previous night” (p. 496).

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

325

The book is prefaced by a learned and engrossing introduction by David Ohana in which he presents an overview of its contents and details the intimate grammar of Feige’s research enterprise. He anchors Feige’s work in its theoretical sources, in the historical context within which he operated, and in his academic biography as “a sociologist among historians and a historian among sociologists” (p. 11). It was from this position that Feige made his unique and often challenging voice heard. And, indeed, one cannot but be astonished by the clarity and sensitivity of Feige’s inspired insights with regard to deep-​seated processes within Israeli society that continue to resonate. Although he refrains from generalizations and sweeping statements, this posthumous compilation of his writings reveals how his focused observations combine to create a comprehensive statement. Persistently and consistently, Feige shows us how Israeli consciousness is the result of continuing dialectical processes: alternate appeals to past and future; the struggle between utopianism and a clinging to practicality; and constant oscillation between mythic and actual. Perusal of the book’s chapters reveals not only Feige’s sociological insights but also his unique voice as a researcher: he was notable for his patience and persevering observation of his subjects over extended timespans. His research into Gush Emunim and Peace Now began when he was still a doctoral student, and he continued to monitor the two movements over the decades that followed. From this chronological vantage point, he was able to engage in a profound contemplation of events and to adopt new theoretical approaches to processes of change and continuity. His scholarly point of view was likewise remarkable for its autonomy and refusal to fall in line with prevailing attitudes within his community. He was among the first to research the settlers (indeed, to a great extent, he remains almost alone in this scholarly pursuit) analyzing them out of a sincere desire to understand how they perceive, interpret, and act within the world, just as he sought to comprehend members of the peace camp. In his attempt to explore the meaning with which his research subjects imbue the world, Feige was an independent sociologist who remained uncommitted to any hegemonic or critical agenda. Finally, on a more personal note: while preparing this review I spent long hours with Michael Feige—​hours that provided a renewed encounter with his fascinating work and an opportunity to bid farewell to a dear colleague. Edna Lomsky-​Feder The Hebrew University

Yaron Harel, Damesek nikhbeshah zemanit:  hatziyonut beDamesek 1908–​ 1923. Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2015. 280 pp. Yaron Harel, Zionism in Damascus: Ideology and Activity in the Jewish Community at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, trans. D.  Gershon Lewental. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015.

The two volumes listed at the head of this review are essentially the same book, published during the same year both in Hebrew and in English translation. This is Yaron

326 

Book Reviews

Harel’s third work on Syrian Jewry in the modern era. Each of his previous two books on the subject received prestigious awards (the Ben-​Zvi Prize and the Shazar Prize, respectively), and for his overall work, Harel was awarded the President of the State of Israel Prize in 2010.1 This latest book maintains the same high standard of meticulous research and engaging writing, to which, in the English version, D. Gershon Lewental does due justice. Harel traces the rise of Zionist thought and activity in the Syrian capital during its brief heyday in the early 20th century. In marked contrast to many of the studies on Zionism in the Arab world that trace the movement’s genesis either to religious roots or to modernizing Haskalah tendencies, Harel points to a specific economic crisis—​ starting in 1875, it devastated Damascene Jewry—​as creating the circumstances for the flowering of Zionism. The crisis not only impoverished the small, wealthy elite of notables who had previously funded the community but, together with the structural changes of the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms and social upheavals within Jewish society, led to a loss of communal solidarity and serious class conflict. One noteworthy change in Jewish society was the increase in prostitution and the emergence of a financially successful class of Jewish courtesans who held considerable sway over the Jewish quarter and acted as intermediaries with the governing authorities up until the First World War. (How remarkably different was the situation of Jewish prostitutes of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro during this period, who were the white slaves of powerful pimps.)2 These radical economic and social upheavals were concomitant with the rise of Arab Syrian patriotism and early Arab Muslim political sentiments. The Jews of Damascus, unlike their coreligionists in Baghdad and Beirut (or Egypt, for that matter), had no inclination toward local proto-​nationalism. Moreover, unlike their coreligionists in Eastern Europe and the Maghreb, they held no romantic notions or messianic illusions about their ancestral homeland—​which, being geographically next door and easily accessible for pilgrimage, they knew to be as poor as their own country and populated by a similarly uncongenial Arab population. As Harel carefully lays out in telling detail in each of the chapters, the Jews of Damascus were continually torn between different poles, different forces, and different aspirations. Hence each of the chapters is titled “Between” this and that (for instance, “Between Universalism and Nationalism,” “Between Zionism and Arabism,” “Between France and Zion”).3 He is particularly successful in portraying key individuals and their relations with one another and with the community at large. He chronicles, for instance, the educational initiatives of Avraham Elmaleh, who established modern Hebrew education with a national agenda upon his arrival in Damascus in 1911, and the tensions between him and Isaac Nahon, the director of the local Alliance israélite universelle (AIU) school. Although such friction between Zionist educators and their AIU counterparts was not infrequent in the Islamic world, what made this instance unusual was that Nahon, like Elmaleh, had grown up in the Yishuv and was a fluent speaker of modern Hebrew. Harel also gives considerable attention to the lesser-​known figure of Barukh Pa’is, a Russian Jewish businessman in Damascus, who, though not an educator, took up the cause of Hebrew language instruction and carried on Elmaleh’s work following the latter’s sudden departure in 1913.

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

327

Eventually, there was an increased demand for modern Hebrew instruction at the AIU schools as well. This came in no small measure from the encounter “Between Exiles and Locals” (Chapter 4 in the Hebrew edition/​Chapter 3 in the English translation). The exiles from Ottoman Palestine who were sent to Damascus during the First World War included intellectuals, educators, and community leaders such as David Yellin, Joseph Joel Rivlin, Salamon Schiller, Baruch Uziel and, once again, Avraham Elmaleh. Despite the community’s initial reticence toward them and their own contempt for their Damascene coreligionists (whom they regarded as poor, primitive ignoramuses), the presence and work of the exiled members of the Yishuv finally won over the community. Initial assistance to the devastated community at the end of the war came both from the exiles and from visitors from Palestine. Zionist Hebrew teachers enthused: “Damascus has been conquered” (Damesek nikhbeshah), but the victory was short-​lived, as the Hebrew title of the book Damesek nikhbeshah zemanit (Damascus Has Been Conquered Temporarily) indicates.4 As Harel relates in the last three chapters (the last chapters and epilogue, in the English version), the general enthusiasm for Zionism soon waned as Damascus became the center for militant Arab nationalists who were increasingly hostile to the Jewish national movement and who demanded public expressions of loyalty from local Jews to the Syrian and Arab national cause. The demands for loyalty were followed by outright threats. Harel notes the sharp contrast between the menacing tone of the Arab nationalists and the generally benign attitude of King Fayṣal toward his Jewish subjects during his brief reign. Harel chronicles in considerable detail how the French takeover of Syria, which ended Fayṣal’s rule, was even more effective in dampening enthusiasm for Zionism in Damascus. In French eyes, Zionism was a political interest of their colonialist rivals, the British; consequently, French authorities put an end to free movement between Syria and Palestine. At the same time, members of the Zionist leadership and institutions in the Yishuv were coming to the conclusion that Syrian and other Middle Eastern Jewries were not a priority. Further exacerbating the situation was the continued rivalry among Zionist Hebrew educators in Damascus. This book draws upon a wealth of archival and printed primary sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and French, as well as pertinent scholarly literature. The extensive annotation often contains important commentary that would have encumbered the narrative, but which is most useful for the reader who seeks a deeper understanding. Once again, Yaron Harel has made a major contribution to the expanding historical literature on Middle Eastern Jewry in the modern era. Norman (Noam) A. Stillman University of Oklahoma The Hebrew University

Notes 1.  Be“sefinot shel esh” lama’arav:  temurot beyahadut suriyah bitkufat hareformot ha’othmaniyot 1840–​1880 (Jerusalem: 2003); Bein tekhakhim lemahapekhah: minui rabanim rashiyim vehadaḥatam bikihlot bagdad, damesek veḥaleb, 1744–​1914 (Jerusalem: 2007).

328 

Book Reviews

2.  See, for instance, Nora Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman (New York: 2000). 3.  Although the titles of the chapters are the same, the numbering differs, since the prologue (“Between Collapse and Revolution”) and the epilogue (“Between Failure and Abandonment”) are numbered in the English edition, but not in the Hebrew. 4.  Given the present state of hostility toward Israel and Zionism among many of those teaching Middle East studies in North America and Great Britain, it was a wise decision to use the subtitle rather than the primary Hebrew title for the English edition.

Dana Hercbergs, Overlooking the  Border:  Narratives of  Divided Jerusalem. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 292 pp.

Dana Hercbergs’ Overlooking the Border is a study of popular narratives on Jerusalem, based on the fieldwork she did in the city between 2007-​2008 and 2014-​2016. More precisely, she deals with stories told by contemporary Jerusalemites—​both Israeli Jews and Palestinians, who come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. Enriched with maps and photographs, the well-​written text moves between past and present as the narrators recount their everyday life experiences, inevitably touching upon the ways their lives are influenced by political and social realities. Hercbergs does not limit her sources to informants and storytellers, or to interviews, guided tours, or a visit to a family living in the Shu’afat refugee camp. She also rightly considers material expressions such as street plaques, posters, architectural projects, a permanent photography exhibit of family portraits and street scenes in West Jerusalem, and the Palestinian Heritage Museum. The border that the book discusses is multidimensional: social, physical, ethnic, and national. Chapter 1 focuses on dislocation narratives of the 1948–​1949 war, followed by a chapter dealing with the years 1949–​1967, when Jerusalem was physically divided between Jordan and Israel. The third chapter, which covers both the pre-​and post-​Six-​ Day War period, offers narratives concerning a specific neighborhood, Musrara. Prior to 1948, Musrara was a mixed Arab-​Jewish neighborhood. However, following the war, it became a border zone. On the Jordanian side were ruined houses; on the Israeli side were rundown buildings to which North African immigrants were relocated. Following the Six-​Day War, the physical border between Israeli Jews and Palestinians fell and residents on both sides of the neighborhood faced one other on a daily basis. Nevertheless, apart from a certain amount of cooperation among those engaged in criminal activities (mainly drug dealing), there was an ethno-​national division line between the two groups even before the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987. In recent years, Musrara has undergone further change as the result of gentrification, on the one hand, and the influx of ultra-​Orthodox Jews, on the other. In Chapter 4, Hercbergs presents East Jerusalem narratives on the Israeli occupation. In an interesting observation, she notes that “Palestinian Jerusalemites rarely get to practice nostalgia in public like their Israeli counterparts” (p. 151); instead, their narratives are shaped by a tension between presenting a sense of unity, or sumūd (steadfastness), on the one hand, while conveying the nuances of varying socioeconomic

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

329

and geographical perspectives, on the other. Chapter 5 presents Sephardi and Mizrahi voices. In her final chapter, Hercbergs analyzes Israeli policy in recent years, when, in her words: “The project of rebuilding Jerusalem is taking on more totalizing proportions . . . the government is pursuing a strategy of homogeneity based on an exclusionary Israeli–​Jewish identity” (p. 235). This, she terms “Davidization” after the biblical account regarding King David’s making Jerusalem the capital of the united tribes of Israel. “Throughout the city,” she writes, “the appellation ‘David’ is increasingly attached to a variety of locations and architectural schemes, while the image of the Tower of David is becoming a logo for the Jewish capital. . . . Examined together, these visual and linguistic icons and narratives present a highly selective version of Jerusalem’s history and a paternalistic vision of how we are to interpret its future prospects” (p. 236). In contrast is the iconic Palestinian image of the Dome of the Rock, found on walls throughout East Jerusalem and on numerous items sold in souvenir shops of the Old City bazaar. Hercbergs barely touches on issues relating to collective memory. Although she cites Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of historically and culturally situated “frameworks of memory” (p. xxix), she goes no further in discussing Jerusalem collective memories. Indeed, the author fails to deal properly with history. She neither compares memories and narratives with historical reality nor is her book free of historical or factual inaccuracies. For instance, between 1949–​1967, the narrow road connecting Jerusalem to Tel Aviv was not “an easy target for sniper fire originating from the Jordanian side” (p. 49); it was not only Jewish refugees who took over abandoned Palestinian houses in the southern part of Jerusalem (p. 4); Palestinian Israelis are not prevented from entering Palestinian Authority cities (p. 53). The author did not make use of Meron Benvenisti’s important study of 1976 on Jordanian Jerusalem, or of more recent studies on Jerusalem in the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods.1 Their absence matters, for instance, in Chapter 5, where Hercbergs asserts that “it is the ‘pure Sephardim’ (Samekh-​Tets) . . . who have distanced themselves from the Mizrahim’s stigma of ethnic protest and association with Arab culture” (p. 223). In fact, as shown in these studies, the Sephardim of the late 19th and early 20th century were indeed Arab Jews; together with their Palestinian counterparts, they were local patriots. In other words, the distance that Sephardim construct between themselves and Mizrahi Jews has no pre-​1948 roots, but rather originated in Israeli social realities. At the same time, the author has succeeded in providing political context to the narratives she includes in her study. She also does well in exposing the political orientation behind the tours sponsored by the Center for Jerusalem Studies at Al-​Quds University and the factual inaccuracies that are presented on these tours (pp. 154–​ 168). In sum, Overlooking the Border offers a contribution that goes beyond presenting Jerusalem’s popular narratives. It shows that the distance between ethnography and folklore and history is short. Just as political and military historians make use of state or military archives as primary sources, so too, social historians focusing on “history from below” are apt to find much of value in the kind of popular narratives found in this book. Menachem Klein Bar-​Ilan University

330 

Book Reviews

Note 1. Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem:  The Torn City (Jerusalem:  1976); Vincent Lemire, Jerusalem 1900: The Holy City in the Age of Possibilities (Chicago: 2017); Jonathan M. Gribetz, Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-​Arab Encounter (Princeton: 2016); Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor, Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine (Waltham: 2016); Menachem Klein, Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron (London: 2014).

Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor, Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in  Mandatory Palestine. Waltham:  Brandeis University Press, 2016. 269 pp.

Oriental Neighbors is a timely intervention in the study of the modern history of Israel/​Palestine, and in the debate regarding ethnic relations in Israel. Recent years have seen an invigorated discussion of late Ottoman Palestine’s Jewish communities and their place in the emergent Zionist-​Arab conflict. There is also an intensified conversation concerning the discrimination against and exclusion of Mizrahi Jews in Jewish Israeli society since 1948. This book provides a crucial link by focusing on relations between Mizrahi Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine. (In the review I will follow the authors’ use of the term Oriental Jews). Although there has been some research on Oriental-​Arab relations during the Mandate era, Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor have provided the first volume dedicated entirely to the topic. Theirs is a welcome and significant contribution. This richly detailed book covers aspects of political leadership, cultural politics, urban encounters, and the military dimension. Especially useful are the short biographies of the numerous protagonists appearing in the book. The accumulation of individual itineraries adds up to a panorama of Palestine’s Oriental Jews in all their diversity. The opening two chapters deal with the question of political representation. The Oriental elite, which had been the official leadership of Jewish communities under Ottoman rule, found itself abruptly cut off from power and influence after the British occupation of Palestine; in an aberration from its normal policy of relying on local elites, the British ignored them and liaised instead with the Zionist Organization. The Oriental leadership was thus marginalized throughout the Mandate era. The book provides a good account of Oriental perspectives on this predicament, though more could have been said on the Zionist establishment’s considerations in excluding the Oriental leadership, as well as on British policies that produced this state of affairs. More than any other topic, it was relations with Arab Palestinians that defined Oriental Jewish politics. While they affiliated with a wide spectrum of political approaches, from Brit Shalom to the Revisionists, Oriental Jews insisted that Yishuv policy on the “Arab question” was misguided; that coexistence was the only possible future; and that Orientals’ unique position as local Jews made them the perfect mediators between the Yishuv and the Arabs. Was the Oriental approach a “road not taken”? This is less clear from the book. Oriental critique of Zionist policy appears

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

331

to have been focused on style rather than substance. Much emphasis was given to the importance of cultural understanding. Without discounting the importance of a shared language, history, and habitus to facilitate political dialogue, it is clear that these are insufficient for ensuring the success of such dialogue. On the main issues of Jewish immigration and economic separatism, Jacobson and Naor argue, members of the Oriental leadership adhered to Zionist policy. They called for the integration of the Yishuv in the wider Middle East; this was not out of line with Zionist rhetoric of the 1930s—​although for some Zionist leaders this was a pragmatic necessity rather than an ideological choice. For Oriental Jews, however, integration in the region was clearly a genuine concern. Here it should be added that the Oriental role in the key matters of Zionist land-​purchasing and settlement is not discussed in this book, though the matter deserves a closer look. Oriental Neighbors identifies the cultural prejudice of establishment Zionism toward Oriental Jews, but refrains from analyzing these relations in colonial terms. In this, it misses one of the most interesting aspects of Palestine’s Oriental Jews: their ambiguous position between “natives” and “settlers.” The case of Oriental Jews is an unusual example of an indigenous population effectively transformed into settlers as they integrated into a settler society. Although Oriental Jews were well aware of their marginalization within the emerging Yishuv, they rarely challenged the foundations of this new order. In fact, many Oriental Jews adopted the colonial discourse that disenfranchised them, for instance, by redefining themselves as “pioneers.” As such, while Oriental Jewish leaders sought to portray themselves as potential “mediators,” this was never a real possibility. As Hillel Cohen has argued, by the 1930s there was no “middle ground.”1 Out of choice, necessity, and fear, Orientals aligned themselves with the “organized Yishuv” and accepted its authority. Yet they remained suspect in the eyes of the Zionist establishment, and their room to maneuver was limited. The book shows how attempts by individuals such as Yosef Chelouch (a businessman) and Eliyahu Sasson (a Zionist activist) to conduct semi-​independent talks with Arab leaders were cut short by the Zionist leadership. The final two chapters are the most fascinating and innovative sections of the book. The fourth chapter examines in detail the “frontier neighborhoods” of mixed cities, focusing on Jaffa’s Jewish neighborhoods. Cohabitation remained a defining feature of these neighborhoods, where a praxis of sharing space was all but inevitable. But the very real experience of cohabitation was insufficient to create a wider dynamic that could ease tensions or avoid conflict. The fifth chapter covers the involvement of Oriental Jews in the Yishuv’s military wings. Especially interesting is the discussion of Oriental involvement with the right-​wing groups of Irgun and Lehi. The chapter examines closely the (rarely studied) bombing campaign of 1938–​1939, which claimed the lives of nearly 200 civilians in Arab markets and public spaces. To conclude, why is this book—​and topic—​important? Not because Oriental Jews presented a viable political alternative to mainstream Zionist policy during the Mandate. They did not—​and could not, given the Yishuv’s shifting demographics and the structure of power relations vis-​à-​vis the British and the Ashkenazi Zionist establishment. But this exclusion of Orientals is in itself a significant aspect of Zionism in Mandatory Palestine. At the same time, the book demonstrates that the Orientals’ channels of contact with Arab society proved crucial for the Zionist settler society,

332 

Book Reviews

mainly in military terms. Finally, Ashkenazi–​Oriental relations during the Mandate anticipated and laid the ground for ethnic relations after 1948, when Oriental Jews made up a much larger share of Israeli society. As such it bears on a dynamic of power that continues to preoccupy Israeli society. Yair Wallach SOAS, University of London

Note 1. Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-​ Israeli Conflict:1929, trans. Haim Watzman (Waltham: 2015).

Michal Kravel-​Tovi, When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. xiii + 310 pp.

“The personal is political” is a slogan associated with mid-​20th-​century American feminism. This slogan was a challenge to conventional thinking regarding what was domestic and what was public, and what were the “proper” spheres of women and men. In somewhat analogous fashion, whereas American law and ideology assume that religion is a private matter, in Israel, Judaism has a formal public standing. At the same time, its scope and legitimate hold on individuals is continually contested. Conversion—​ whereby state-​ empowered religious authorities accept someone as Jewish—​yields a dense intertwining of individual behavior and engagement with “the political.” Michal Kravel-​Tovi’s When the State Winks admirably demonstrates this reality through an ethnographic case study of conversion that also provides an informed picture of the broader political, ideological, and bureaucratic settings within which this preparation for status transformation takes place. The case study features young individuals from immigrant families (originating in the former Soviet Union) who participated in a state-​authorized Judaism course. The scale of the phenomenon she researched is small. Although an estimated 300,000 immigrants from the FSU were not Jewish according to halakhah (as defined by Israel’s rabbinate), only a fraction of them have enrolled in such courses. Some do not care about the issue, and many view themselves as becoming Jewish through their integration into Israeli society, including their doing military service. Only a few, in a move reflecting both self-​ perceptions and the recognition of widely held sensibilities within society, seek to have their Jewishness officially confirmed; of these, young women, who as future mothers will determine the religious status of their offspring, are salient. Kravel-​ Tovi’s research vividly shows how this numerically limited scene is also a window on other central issues, such as the dilemmas confronting religious Zionism and the nature of state-​individual interchanges in Israel.

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

333

Most of the teachers involved in the program belong to the religious Zionist sector. Religious Zionism, historically, sought to forge a path between, on the one hand, Zionism’s obvious move beyond the dictates of traditional Judaism, and, on the other, the Orthodox (later designated “ultra-​Orthodox”) stance that rejected any “return to Zion” that was unbound to religious moorings. In the eyes of religious Zionists, ultra-​ Orthodoxy was sectorial—​willing to impose stringent obedience to halakhic rules on its adherents while lacking concern for the Jewish nation as a whole. Religious Zionism, in contrast, accepted the challenge of dealing with a massive number of new Israelis who had become Jewish in national terms but were “Gentiles” according to halakhah. Realizing that this situation carried the potential for turmoil with regard to marriage possibilities under Israeli/​Jewish law, it undertook the “national mission” of providing a supportive political and bureaucratic framework to enable religious conversion. However, as Kravel-​Tovi clarifies through an analysis combining history and ethnography, religious Zionism is far from homogenous. Some followers accept the importance of this national mission and participate in it in various ways. An example of an auxiliary role is that of mentor to a potential convert. A family serving as mentor will invite a potential convert to Sabbath meals in order to supplement knowledge acquired in the classroom; later, at the rabbinical court hearing, the potential convert is able to describe the extent to which Orthodox practice has become part of his or her life. Others in the religious Zionist camp, while similarly espousing nationalism, are closer in their attitudes to the halakhic strictness of ultra-​Orthodoxy and thus are indifferent to, or even suspicious of, anyone who is merely “on the way“ to a religious life but has not yet adopted—​and may never adopt—​a rigorous halakhic lifestyle. Their concern is that many people applying to convert might simply be “putting on a show”; this possibility naturally complicates the task of those engaged in realizing the national mission, among them teachers in the preparatory courses or rabbis on the bench of the conversion court. Each of the last-​mentioned roles (teachers or rabbis) is different, and Kravel-​Tovi illuminates the challenges that they face through ethnography and probing interviews. In addition to frontal teaching, the study sessions also feature open discussions in which participants, and the teachers as well, make explicit their uncertainties and anxieties, sometimes in the form of humorous ironic comments. Although a variety of styles and strategies are evident, all share the goal of making the conversion project work. Yet concrete success in “becoming Jewish” ultimately is in the hands of rabbi-​ judges who determine whether an individual is knowledgeable enough, and, concomitantly, whether he or she will “sincerely” continue to live a religious life. “Sincerity” is a central conundrum for all involved in the process, and Kravel-​Tovi points out how Protestant notions of true inward belief differ from Jewish expectations of publicly visible actions as firm signs of Orthodoxy. Sensitive to such up-​close distinctions, the book’s ethnography and analysis caution the reader to beware of simple dichotomies between what is “sincere” versus what is “merely” performed. This is where “winking” comes in. Contemporary anthropological research eschews a bifurcation of the researcher and the subject of research. The fieldworker and all the actors recognize the dilemma of determining how “real” a given conversion is. Yet there are moments when “rabbinic judges provide climactic

334 

Book Reviews

moments whose profound effect on candidates offer additional evidence of their sincerity” (p. 192). What Kravel-​Tovi terms “winking”—​a non-​verbal form of indicating “both you and I know we have to go through this state-​imposed routine even though it is partly made up”—​is part of the process, but so is “[t]‌he acceptance of commandments ritual . . . generally performed during the concluding stages of court hearings” (ibid.). As in other rituals studied by anthropologists, such structured moments of “as if ” do not permanently erase uncertainty, but rather constitute re-​energizing pauses that permit mundane life to continue thereafter: in this case, the trajectory of collaboration among diverse actors headed toward a hopefully successful conversion. This book is highly recommended. Portraying various levels of the conversion process, When the State Winks illuminates central issues in the relationship between religion and state in Israel. Kravel-​Tovi’s elaboration of this notion of “winking” aids in deciphering subtle interchanges between individuals and state bureaucracies not only in Israel but in other societies as well, moving beyond simplistic models of “the state” exercising “power” over its citizens. Harvey E. Goldberg The Hebrew University

Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-​Wing Zionism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. xii + 331 pp. Colin Shindler, The Rise of the Israeli Right: From Odessa to Hebron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xxviii + 411 pp.

It is common wisdom, both in scholarly historiography and in hagiography, that Ze’ev Jabotinsky was the founding father of the Israeli Right. In fact, as Colin Shindler’s excellent book proves, Jabotinsky adopted a right-​wing world view only in the 1920s. Prior to the First World War, while undoubtedly a Zionist, he was also a man of cosmopolitan views. It was during a sojourn in Italy that he was caught up in the spirit of nationalism; Garibaldi’s influence was prior to Herzl’s. Moreover, whereas Jabotinsky’s heirs, Menachem Begin most prominently, paid lip service to his heritage, they were not entirely his disciples. Jabotinsky’s thinking largely lost its relevance in the face of the changing historical circumstances in which Begin and others operated. And so, with the passage of years following Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, there was an ever-​ lessened sense of obligation to the leader and his legacy. Shindler skillfully depicts the multiple influences on Jabotinsky both during his time in Italy and during the era that more than any other shaped his views—​that of the First World War. Jabotinsky’s energetic efforts to establish the Jewish Legion in the framework of the British Army, and his service in the Legion during the conquest of Palestine in 1917–​1918, were the most formative experiences underlying his later political views. Not surprisingly, to the end of his life, he was convinced of the need for a Jewish army. Given Arab opposition to Zionism, he maintained,

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

335

the Jewish national movement could achieve its goals only if it erected an “iron wall” the Arabs would not be able to breach. Thus, from the outset of British rule in Palestine, Jabotinsky found himself in fierce conflict with British authorities. The dispute was rooted in his mistaken understanding of the Balfour Declaration, which he interpreted as a strategic, legal, and political commitment to the Jewish people to establish a Jewish state (rather than a “national home for the Jewish people”) in Palestine. His arrest and imprisonment for possession of arms reinforced his conviction that the Jews needed their own army to protect them. As he saw it, a Jewish battalion (under British command) would fulfill the promise that the Balfour Declaration had made to establish a Jewish state. Although Jabotinsky, quite early on, acknowledged the emergence of a Palestinian Arab national movement, he was not prepared to support the establishment of an Arab state in part of Palestine. To be sure, while serving briefly as a member of the Zionist executive, he signed his agreement to the White Paper of 1922, which specified the separation of Transjordan from Palestine. This move, however, ran contrary to his basic Zionist beliefs and led to a rift between himself and Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization. Rejecting Weizmann’s “timid” policies, Jabotinsky resigned his position and went on to establish the Revisionist Zionist Alliance, and later, in 1935, the New Zionist Organization. Shindler offers a good account of the growing polarization between the Revisionists and the Mapai (Labor) party, which reached its climax with the murder of Haim Arlosoroff, chairman of the Jewish Agency’s political department, in 1933. The polarization was exacerbated by the increasing influence of the maximalist faction within the Revisionist movement, which criticized Jabotinsky for what it regarded as his belief in diplomacy (a “bridge of paper”) rather than force (a “bridge of iron”). The three leaders of this faction, Abba Ahimeir, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and Yehoshua Heschel Yeivin, were heavily influenced by European Fascism—​in particular, that of Benito Mussolini—​and also by other authoritarian rulers such as Józef Pilsudski and Mustafa Kemal Attaturk. Ahimeir demanded that Jabotinsky take on the role of an authoritarian leader in the Mussolini mold. More disturbing, as Shindler shows, Ahimeir and his cohort defended Nazism by explaining that antisemitism was only a “shell,” whereas its “core” was an authentic nationalist movement. Although Jabotinsky initially lauded Ahimeir for his “adventurism,” he threatened to eject maximalist leaders from the movement when he learned that the maximalists’ newspaper, Ḥazit ha’am, had expressed admiration for Hitler. Shortly after the Arlosoroff murder, Ahimeir was arrested and charged with complicity in the crime. Although he was subsequently acquitted, he was rearrested shortly thereafter on charges of incitement and conspiracy. These charges were connected with the Brit Habiryonim (Band of Thugs) group that he had founded together with Greenberg and Yeivin, which aimed to transform the Revisionists into a fascist movement in the spirit of Europe’s radical Right. This was not the end of the maximalists’ struggle against Jabotinsky. A young heir to Ahimeir arose in the person of Menachem Begin, who led the Polish branch of Betar, the Revisionist youth movement. In 1935, Begin penned a paean to Ahimeir. Three years later, shortly after a member of Betar, Shlomo Ben-​Yosef, had been executed by the British for his part in an abortive ambush of an Arab bus, Begin demanded

336 

Book Reviews

a revision of the Betar oath. Jabotinsky, who wrote the original oath, had sufficed with a pledge to “raise my arms in defense,” whereas Begin demanded a more aggressive oath of a manifestly militaristic nature: “I will raise my arms for defense and conquest.” This revision, which was approved at Betar’s third convention in Warsaw in September 1938, was a turning point in Zionist Revisionist history—​no less significant than Jabotinsky’s break with the organized Zionist movement and the establishment of his New Zionist Organization, which quickly revealed itself to be an organizational and political failure. Jabotinsky was compelled, despite himself, to acknowledge that the maximalists had won; less than two years later he was dead, leaving behind a movement in their thrall. The underground Irgun Zevai Leumi, which Jabotinsky had headed, split: Avraham Stern took charge of a more militant faction that later became known as Lehi, whereas the original Irgun was now headed by David Raziel and later (after Raziel’s death) by Yaakov Meridor. Begin was not in Palestine at the time of the split. He arrived in 1942, and about two years later, he justified the rebellion against the British on the grounds that the British, by not allowing unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, had failed to save the Jews remaining in Europe. (His claim that Jabotinsky had recommended a rebellion against Britain has no documentary basis, with the exception of a doubtful proposal, made shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, for a 24-​hour rebellion; presumably this was meant to mollify Irgun hardliners). In short, Begin was in practice no less a disciple of Ahimeir than of Jabotinsky. A few years later, in June 1948, the young state of Israel seemed to be in danger of descending into civil war in the wake of the Altalena affair, in which the provisional government headed by David Ben-​Gurion ordered an attack on an Irgun ship carrying arms; 18 people, most of them Irgun fighters, were killed. Subsequently, a number of senior Irgun commanders were arrested and held in detention for several months. In January 1949, following the first Knesset elections, Begin became leader of the opposition Herut party (later, the Likud), a position he held over the course of three decades. Shindler assiduously tracks the opposition’s long years in the political wilderness, which ended only with the Likud’s victory in 1977. Begin’s successors—​ Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Binyamin Netanyahu—​made no innovations in the Right’s ideology, especially given that during their tenures the conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world grew more acute. However, Begin himself deviated from that ideology when he agreed to Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He would also become the first Israeli leader to reach a peace treaty with an Arab country, Egypt, while at the same time supporting an expansion of Israeli settlement in the territories occupied in the Six-​Day War of 1967. Shindler’s book is the most comprehensive analysis of Israel’s political Right to date, better than all its predecessors. He seeks favor neither with the Right nor the Left, adopting the method of the great historian Leopold von Ranke, whose motto was “as it really was.” This book, however, is not the last word. When, in the future, more archival material becomes available, scholars will be able to learn much more about how governments of the Right have operated. Daniel Kupfert Heller’s book focuses on Betar in Poland between the two world wars. It is the first scholarly study of this subject since the exhaustive work by

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

337

Chen-​Melech Merchavya, a former Betar member from Bialystok (who was not a neutral observer).1 Founded by Jabotinsky, Betar was intended to be a youth movement that would prepare young Polish Jews to serve as a defensive force in Palestine—​a kind of continuation of the Jewish Legion, which had been disbanded at the end of the First World War. Jabotinsky chose the name in commemoration of the last stronghold of the Bar Kokhba rebellion in the second century; the full name of the movement, Brit Trumpeldor, was an homage to Joseph Trumpeldor, who was killed in the battle of Tel Hai in 1920. (Ironically, Jabotinsky had been critical of the inadequate military action taken at Tel Hai, demanding at the time that an organized military force be sent to save the outpost.) Heller focuses on three central research questions. First, to what extent was Betar influenced by Polish nationalism? Second, how was Betar influenced by the radical Right (that is, Fascism) in Europe? And finally, what was the course of events that brought members of a youth movement—​which, to be sure, advocated an offensive rather than a defensive posture—​to engage in terrorist activities that were not initially approved by Jabotinsky? Given that the Revisionist movement had adopted all the characteristics of a political-​ideological right-​wing movement (opposition to socialism; the cult of the leader; a paramilitary youth movement; advocacy of a corporative regime like that of Mussolini), it might seem only natural that it would be influenced by Polish nationalism as well. Yet was it possible for its members to be both Jewish and Polish nationalists at the same time? Heller shows that Polish nationalism was a model for Betar, albeit not for Revisionism as a whole. In one surprising symbolic act, following Pilsudski’s death in 1935, soil from Trumpeldor’s grave was brought to Poland and placed on his grave. Moreover, the Polish government provided aid to the Irgun, offering training and weapons (nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that the goal of the Polish government was to get rid of its large Jewish population, and it hardly cared where the Jews went to, Madagascar or Palestine). Heller systematically traces Betar’s emergence from the Polish scout movement and from Zionist groups that were enlisted by the Revisionists. In addition, he recounts the movement’s rivalry with other Zionist youth groups, such as Hashomer Hatza’ir and Hehalutz. Abba Ahimeir’s enormous influence on Betar in Poland is well known. But according to Heller, there were members of Betar who viewed themselves as fascists well before Ahimeir appeared. It is unfortunate that he makes no mention of Uriel Halperin (later Yonatan Ratosh), who called for open rebellion against Britain, and whose voice was a prominent one in the Revisionist press in Poland. Heller does show how, with Ahimeir’s Brit Habiryonim leading the way, Betar metamorphosed into a youth movement preparing itself for a military struggle in Palestine. Jabotinsky himself was ambivalent about Fascism; he also spoke appreciatively of democracy, while pointing out its shortcomings. He adopted the idea of Italian corporatism, but at the same time promoted social ideals rooted in the Bible (which Heller mentions in passing), as well as arguments put forth by the Jewish-​Austrian thinker Josef Popper-​Linkeus regarding the obligation of the state to provide for its citizens’ basic needs (which is not mentioned). Two decisive events should have determined Betar’s fate:  Arlosoroff’s murder in June 1933, and Shlomo Ben-​Yosef’s hanging in June 1938. The man accused of

338 

Book Reviews

Arlosoroff’s murder was Avraham Stavksy, a member of Betar who had come to Palestine from Poland. He was convicted and sentenced to death, though his conviction was overturned by the British Mandate’s court of appeal (which nonetheless indicated its belief in Stavsky’s guilt). Both the murder and the trail sent shockwaves throughout the Yishuv; despite Stavsky’s ultimate acquittal, both the Revisionist movement as a whole and Betar in particular were placed beyond the pale. Following the hanging of Ben-​Yosef five years later, Jabotinsky’s influence declined precipitously. Betar’s increasing extremism after the hanging would transform it into an organization that prepared its members for terrorist acts, first against Arabs in response to anti-​Jewish Arab terror, and then against the British, following the torture of members of the Irgun and of Lehi. From this point on, Jabotinsky conducted a rearguard action to maintain his position in Betar and the Irgun, but in actual fact, he lost control of them. He continued to hold the three positions of president of the Revisionist New Zionist Organization, commander-​in-​chief of the Irgun, and leader of Betar, but in practice he only with difficulty held on to the first. At the beginning of the Arab Revolt in April 1936, the Irgun had already begun carrying out reprisal attacks against Arabs, yet Jabotinsky had only a vague idea of what members of the group were doing. Too late did he voice his opposition to harming women, children, or the elderly. Moreover, Jabotinsky was oblivious to Avraham Stern’s subversion of his leadership—​Stern referred to Jabotinsky as “Hindenburg”—​and was unaware that Stern and his supporters in Poland had formed “nationalist cells” within Betar chapters, in preparation for their members enlisting in the Irgun in Palestine. The Irgun split shortly before Jabotinsky’s death in August 1940, at which time Stern’s group declared war against Great Britain. It failed utterly, after a despicable attempt to make an alliance with Hitler. In short, Jabotinsky’s ambivalent leadership of Betar led not only to the Irgun’s guerrilla and terror activities, but also to Lehi’s even more extreme acts. It is unfortunate that Heller does not systematically follow individuals such as Natan Friedman-​ Yellin (Yellin-​ Mor), Israel Eldad (Sheib), and Yitzhak Shamir (Yezernitzky), who are only mentioned in passing. They would later play a central role in Lehi, which was a terrorist movement in every sense of the word. Furthermore, this otherwise diligent and precise scholar has not paid sufficient attention to Die Tat (The Deed), the journal edited by Friedman-​Yellin and Shmuel Merlin, which reflected Jabotinsky’s declining influence in Betar—​it is mentioned only twice. Nor does he mention its editors’ admiration for Irgun actions, and no less so for Fascism, with total disregard for German and Italian antisemitism. A direct line can be drawn from Ahimeir’s admiration for Hitler to Stern and Friedman-​Yellin’s abortive attempt to ally with Nazi Germany in 1940–​1941. Notwithstanding such shortcomings, Heller’s book, like that of Shindler, is characterized by exemplary archival work and objectivity. Both authors have made a real contribution to our knowledge concerning the Revisionist movement and its daughter organization, Betar. Joseph Heller The Hebrew University

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

339

Note 1.  Chen-​Melech [Ben-​Yerucham] Merchavya, Sefer Beit”ar: korot umekorot, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: 1969–​1973).

Tamar Wolf-​Monzon, Bahir vegavohah kezemer: Ya’akov Orland:  poetikah, historiyah, tarbut (Ya’acov Orland: Poetics, History, Culture). Sdeh Boker: The Ben-​Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, 2016. 512 pp. + audio disc.

Ya’acov Orland (1914–​2002), a young contemporary of the Israeli poets Avraham Shlonsky, Nathan Alterman, and Leah Goldberg, was a prolific and versatile poet, playwright, and translator, one among the first generation of creative artists whose entire output was produced in Mandatory Palestine and later, the state of Israel. Many of Orland’s highly musical poems were popular with those composers who created the magnificent repertory of popular Hebrew songs known as shirei eretz yisrael (songs of the land of Israel). Happily, this book comes with a wonderful CD containing 23 of Orland’s best and most popular songs in their original performances. Tamar Wolf-​Monzon’s comprehensive book follows the classical model of “life and works,” the promised pattern of history, poetics, and culture. She begins with Orland’s early years in the Ukraine, which were rife with pogroms—​during the course of one of them, his grandfather was murdered and his father seriously wounded. Fortunately, the family managed to escape, in 1921, to British Mandatory Palestine, where Orland’s father, Eliezer, worked as a road construction laborer. (Wolf-​Monzon justly notes that while the young Yaakov Orland portrayed himself as a “rebel,” he admired his father, a deeply religious early settler of Eretz Israel.) The young poet’s first poems, published in 1933 in the Labor movement’s biweekly Bama’aleh and the daily Davar, were ideological hymns to labor that also spotlighted Orland’s masterful control of poetic Hebrew. Some of these same poems, set to music by composer David Zehavi, quickly spread among the thousands of members of the Hano’ar Ha’oved youth movement. In 1936, Orland began his university studies in London. According to Wolf-​ Monzon, the years in London may have been the most formative period in Orland’s life. During his stay, he wrote the poems appearing in his first collection, Ilan baruaḥ (A Tree in the Wind) (1936–​1937), in which the strong influence of Nathan Alterman is felt. Wolf-​Monzon provides a detailed account of this pioneer publication, connecting her analysis to previous discussions of Orland’s poetry such as those by Avidav Lipsker and Dov Sadan.1 She illustrates the inherent musical properties of Orland’s verse in the poem “Falling Leaves,” which became one of Mordechai Zeira’s most popular songs (unfortunately, it is not included in the accompanying CD, though it can be found on a website devoted to reclaiming and regenerating the canon of pre-​ state and Israeli music).2 She also shows how the imagery appearing in the love poetry of this book is based on Orland’s memory of the vast forests of the Ukraine as well

340 

Book Reviews

as on the rich greenery of England, whereas later pieces in the book depict scenery found in the land of Israel. During his time in London, Orland had a brief romance with a young woman named Rose Kromchenko. Orland alluded to Shakespeare’s As You Like It when he referred to Rose and himself as Rosalind and Orlando; Wolf-​ Monzon also calls attention to the potent influence of English Romantic poets, especially Shelley, on Orland’s love poetry of this time. The third (and longest) chapter revolves around Orland’s participation in the British Guards Unit during the Second World War and his creative work during this period, including material written for Matate, a satirical theatrical company in Mandate Palestine. While serving in the British army, Orland collaborated with Zeira, who later became one of Israel’s most renowned composers, on a number of wartime songs—​among these was “Shir haligyionot” (Song of the Legions) which was chosen to open the daily Hebrew radio broadcasts. Despite his serving in the British army, Orland identified with the struggle against British rule in Palestine. The poem “’Im hupalnu” (If We Are Brought Down), for example, was written in response to the tragic episode connected with the Struma, a ship carrying more than 600 refugees from Nazi-​occupied Romania to Mandatory Palestine.3 Wolf-​Monzon also recounts how Orland’s private life was integrated with the stormy history of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine during the wartime years. She scrutinizes the intimate love poetry Orland produced; I  was especially intrigued by her historical account and intertextual analysis of “’Etz harimon” (The Pomegranate Tree) (pp. 120-​126). Set to an enchanting melody by Yedidia Admon-​Gorochov, “’Etz harimon” became one of the most popular songs of the shirei eretz yisrael genre—​Wolf-​Monzon points out that, at the time of writing her book, the song had been recorded 55 times. Here and elsewhere, Wolf-​Monzon follows Dan Miron in defining Orland’s shirei zemer (songs, as distinct from poems) as a central element of his artistic output. The following chapter provides a fascinating description of the key role of coffee houses in Tel Aviv of the 1930s, among them the legendary Kassit, which became a cultural and social focal point both for poets and for other writers and artists. Wolf-​ Monzon analyzes several of the poems created in the ambience of these literary cafes. She then proceeds to a history of literary periodicals in Mandatory Palestine and the varying reactions to the Second World War that were expressed by local poets and authors. Considerable attention is also paid to Orland’s close friendship with Nathan Alterman, whom Orland greatly admired. Indeed, the opening poem of Orland’s Ilan baruaḥ is a paraphrase of a poem from Alterman’s own first book, Kokhavim baḥutz (Stars Outside). Chapter 5, which considers Orland’s versatile and extensive activities as a playwright and translator, lays out a near-​complete history of theater in the early years of Israel. Wolf-​Monzon notes Orland’s empathetic response to the suffering of the Gypsies under the Nazis in his long poem Ḥanale miDorohoy and details his work on behalf of the South African Jewish community in the 1950s, which reached its apex with the monumental theatrical production of a musical titled Israel, My People. She also clarifies the complex history of a more controversial play by Orland, Ha’ir hazot (This City) (1951), dealing with Jerusalem during the 1948 War of Independence. Chapter 6 discusses several genres that Orland put to service for the good of the national cause. He published poems dealing with current events in a number of daily

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

341

newspapers (as did Alterman, who wrote a weekly column in Davar). He was also involved in the production of monumental “folk plays” (hatzagot ’amamiyot), outdoor extravaganzas that involved hundreds of actors, dancers and musicians—​one of these plays, Namal (Harbor), (1958) celebrated the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Haifa port, with real ships plying their way in the harbor. (The models for such productions were Kurt Weil’s spectacle Der Weg der Verheissung, produced in 1935 in New York as The Eternal Road, and local kibbutz folk celebrations.) In addition, as noted, Orland produced satirical material that was performed by Matate and other satirical theatrical groups such as Li La Lo and Lekhol Haruḥot. Orland’s return to lyrical poetry after a 17-​year absence is the subject of Chapter 7. Here Wolf-​Monzon discusses the tragic and dark elements in Orland’s collection of 1963, Shirim mieretz ’utz (Poems from the Land of Oz), showing how Orland derived inspiration both from the Book of Job and from Shlonsky’s collection Avnei gevil (Rough Stones). In the following chapter she looks at Orland’s emotional identification, in the wake of the Six-​Day War, with the nationalist “Greater Israel” movement—​an identification that was shared by many other poets and writers, including Alterman, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, and Haim Hazaz. During this time, Orland turned to the genre of historical and epic poetry, as exemplified by a long poem written against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest battles of the Six-​ Day War, Yom Tel Faher: baladah ’im variatziyot ’al nosim kiyumiyim (The Day of Tel Faher: A Ballad with Variations on Existential Topics). In his introduction to the poem, Orland stressed that its purpose was to express the “religious, national, and philosophical problems” raised by the battle (p. 395) rather than the battle itself. The poem was published along with illustrations by Yoram Rozov; Wolf-​Monzon’s extensive and penetrating discussion tackles the complex combination of genres and poetic techniques in the work. She then turns to a later work, a homage to Alterman titled Natan amar (Nathan Said) (1985) that includes both poems and prose recollections. Illustrating Wolf-​Monzon’s discussion are a number of images depicting handwritten drafts of some of the poems (Orland’s disordered penmanship is evidence of his highly emotional state at the time of writing.) The chapter concludes with an account of three events honoring Orland on his 80th birthday: his being awarded the Israel Prize and the Bialik prize, and the decision on the part of the Haifa municipality—​Orland became a resident of the city in 1954—​to publish a three-​volume edition of all his poems. Wolf-​Monzon, a professor in the department of literature of the Jewish people at Bar-​Ilan University, was deeply involved in the establishment of Orland’s archive at the university, which contains some 5,000 manuscripts and documents contributed by the poet. Her book is a comprehensive, well-​written, and rich study of the varied creations of one of the greatest of Israeli poets, whose life and work are closely intertwined with the stormy history of Jewish life in Mandatory Palestine and the early years of the state. Jehoash Hirshberg The Hebrew University

342 

Book Reviews

Notes 1.  See Avidav Lipsker, Moledet harimon, eretz yisrael betziur Shmuel Bone, uveshirat Ya’akov Orland (Tefen: 1999); Dov Sadan, Avnei safah (Tel Aviv: 1957). 2.  Zemereshet, a Hebrew-​language online site (zemereshet.co.il), features a 1958 recording of “Shalekhet” by Shimon Israeli. 3.  In the face of the British refusal to allow the ship to enter Palestine, the Struma was held in quarantine at the port of Istanbul. On February 23, 1942, the Turks towed the ship to the sea with a defective engine, and the next day it was torpedoed (apparently erroneously by a Soviet ship) and sank. All refugees save for one perished.

Studies in Contemporary Jewry XXXII Edited by Anat Helman Symposium  No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood Paula Fass, Introduction Nathan Abrams, Rites of Passage: Jewish Representations of Children and Childhood in Contemporary Cinema Nava Barazani, Hide-and-Seek: The Tale of Three Girls in the Giado Concentration Camp in Libya (1942–1943) Yael Darr, Divided Unity:  Jewish Writing for Children in the United States and Palestine on the Eve of the Second World War David Golinkin, The Transformation of the Bar Mitzvah Ceremony, 1800–2020 Eli Lederhendler, Children of the Great Atlantic Migration:  Narratives of Young Jewish Lives Hannah Levinsky-​Koevary, Catskills Idyll: Children of Survivors and the Bungalow Colony Experience, 1955–​1965 Amia Lieblich, The Children of Kfar Etzion: Resilience and its Causes Joana Beata Michlic, Mapping the History of Child Holocaust Survivors Uzi Rebhun, Jewish Children: The Demographic Perspective Yael Reshef, The Role of Children in the Revival of Hebrew Liat Steir-​Livny, Growing Up in the Shadow of the Past: The Childhood of Second-​ Generation Holocaust Survivors as Depicted in Israeli Documentary Films Miri Talmon, Israeli Childhood through the Lens of Israeli Television

343

Note on Editorial Policy

Studies in Contemporary Jewry is pleased to accept manuscripts on subjects generally within the contemporary Jewish sphere (from the turn of the 20th century to the present) for possible publication. Please address all inquiries to: [email protected]. Essays that are submitted undergo a review process.

345